I decided not to interfere further. I did not know the first thing about crime scene investigation, evidently. My wife proved to be more astute. They listened to her. She said there had been two of them, a man and a woman. Outside beneath the window, we found plastic bottles, obviously the forsaken dumpster harvest of the thief, and in the bedroom, amongst the rummaged clothes, we found a baseball cap with the borders and the brim greasy with sweat and grime, makes you sick. But the most intriguing discovery was in the bathroom. A man will steal leftover perfumes, perhaps, but he was not likely to steal used and leftover lipstick, nail polish, foundation, mascara, eyeliner… that could only seem important to a female thief. It is not exactly clear to me as to what is what when it comes to make-up. I don’t think the inspectors knew neither. In this case, the loot was intended for sale and for use.
The scene investigation came to an end. We cleaned up, sobbing a little, swearing, whining, putting everything in the washing machine. Our sleep had been stolen too.
The next day I went under the Kale and looked around the trash there. Squalor and mayhem. There you could find everything that was considered dross even in people’s basements. There everyone looked as if someone had stolen something of theirs. Nothing.
And every day, for months, all three of us went out with fear and every day an unsettling feeling came to me, the helplessness, and the little one would often say “What if a thief got in again?” The little one had his bike stolen from our balcony too, a couple of months later. Despair and weeping. And I would be overcome by rage and every day I imagined myself catching the thief and beating him, stomping him, then flinching, then beating him less, the beating him just a tiny bit, just so that I “brought him to a state of obedience” and I imagined myself calling the police and watching them take him away cruelly and hating him and looking into his insolent eyes, or, if I was lucky, vengefully into his weeping face.