shivering blond fringe. Preemptively, you conclude, as I would, that Rudy died that very same
day, of hypothermia. He did not. Recollections like those merely remind me that he was not
deserving of the fate that met him a little under two years later.
On many counts, taking a boy like Rudy was robbery—so much life, so much to live for—yet
somehow, I’m certain he would have loved to see the frightening rubble and the swelling of
the sky on the night he passed away. He’d have cried and turned and smiled if only he could
have seen the book thief on her hands and knees, next to his decimated body. He’d have been
glad to witness her kissing his dusty, bomb-hit lips.
Yes, I know it.
In the darkness of my dark-beating heart, I know. He’d have loved it, all right.
You see?
Even death has a heart.
THE GAMBLERS
(A SEVEN-SIDED DIE)
Of course, I’m being rude. I’m spoiling the ending, not only of the entire book, but of this
particular piece of it. I have given you two events in advance, because I don’t have much
interest in building mystery. Mystery bores me. It chores me. I know what happens and so do
you. It’s the machinations that wheel us there that aggravate, perplex, interest, and astound
me.
There are many things to think of.
There is much story.
Certainly, there’s a book called The Whistler, which we really need to discuss, along with
exactly how it came to be floating down the Amper River in the time leading up to Christmas
1941. We should deal with all of that first, don’t you think?
It’s settled, then.
We will.
It started with gambling. Roll a die by hiding a Jew and this is how you live. This is how it
looks.
The Haircut: Mid-April 1941
Life was at least starting to mimic normality with more force:
Hans and Rosa Hubermann were arguing in the living room, even if it was much quieter than
it used to be. Liesel, in typical fashion, was an onlooker.
The argument originated the previous night, in the basement, where Hans and Max were
sitting with paint cans, words, and drop sheets. Max asked if Rosa might be able to cut his
hair at some stage. “It’s getting me in the eyes,” he’d said, to which Hans had replied, “I’ll see
what I can do.”
Now Rosa was riffling through the drawers. Her words were shoved back to Papa with the
rest of the junk. “Where are those damn scissors?”
“Not in the one below?”
“I’ve been through that one already.”
“Maybe you missed them.”
“Do I look blind?” She raised her head and bellowed. “Liesel!”
“I’m right here.”
Hans cowered. “Goddamn it, woman, deafen me, why don’t you!”
“Quiet, Saukerl. ” Rosa went on riffling and addressed the girl. “Liesel, where are the
scissors?” But Liesel had no idea, either. “Saumensch, you’re useless, aren’t you?”
“Leave her out of it.”
More words were delivered back and forth, from elastic-haired woman to silver-eyed man, till
Rosa slammed the drawer. “I’ll probably make a lot of mistakes on him anyway.”
“Mistakes?” Papa looked ready to tear his own hair out by that stage, but his voice became a
barely audible whisper. “Who the hell’s going to see him?” He motioned to speak again but
was distracted by the feathery appearance of Max Vandenburg, who stood politely,
embarrassed, in the doorway. He carried his own scissors and came forward, handing them
not to Hans or Rosa but to the twelve-year-old girl. She was the calmest option. His mouth
quivered a moment before he said, “Would you?”
Liesel took the scissors and opened them. They were rusty and shiny in different areas. She
turned to Papa, and when he nodded, she followed Max down to the basement.
The Jew sat on a paint can. A small drop sheet was wrapped around his shoulders. “As many
mistakes as you want,” he told her.
Papa parked himself on the steps.
Liesel lifted the first tufts of Max Vandenburg’s hair.
As she cut the feathery strands, she wondered at the sound of scissors. Not the snipping noise,
but the grinding of each metal arm as it cropped each group of fibers.
When the job was done, a little severe in places, a little crooked in others, she walked upstairs
with the hair in her hands and fed it into the stove. She lit a match and watched as the clump
shriveled and sank, orange and red.
Again, Max was in the doorway, this time at the top of the basement steps. “Thanks, Liesel.”
His voice was tall and husky, with the sound in it of a hidden smile.
No sooner had he spoken than he disappeared again, back into the ground.
The Newspaper: Early May
“There’s a Jew in my basement.”
“There’s a Jew. In my basement.”
Sitting on the floor of the mayor’s roomful of books, Liesel Meminger heard those words. A
bag of washing was at her side and the ghostly figure of the mayor’s wife was sitting hunch-
drunk over at the desk. In front of her, Liesel read The Whistler, pages twenty-two and
twenty-three. She looked up. She imagined herself walking over, gently tearing some fluffy
hair to the side, and whispering in the woman’s ear:
“There’s a Jew in my basement.”
As the book quivered in her lap, the secret sat in her mouth. It made itself comfortable. It
crossed its legs.
“I should be getting home.” This time, she actually spoke. Her hands were shaking. Despite a
trace of sunshine in the distance, a gentle breeze rode through the open window, coupled with
rain that came in like sawdust.
When Liesel placed the book back into position, the woman’s chair stubbed the floor and she
made her way over. It was always like this at the end. The gentle rings of sorrowful wrinkles
swelled a moment as she reached across and retrieved the book.
She offered it to the girl.
Liesel shied away.
“No,” she said, “thank you. I have enough books at home. Maybe another time. I’m rereading
something else with my papa. You know, the one I stole from the fire that night.”
The mayor’s wife nodded. If there was one thing about Liesel Meminger, her thieving was not
gratuitous. She only stole books on what she felt was a need-to-have basis. Currently, she had
enough. She’d gone through The Mud Men four times now and was enjoying her
reacquaintance with The Shoulder Shrug. Also, each night before bed, she would open a fail-
safe guide to grave digging. Buried deep inside it, The Standover Man resided. She mouthed
the words and touched the birds. She turned the noisy pages, slowly.
“Goodbye, Frau Hermann.”
She exited the library, walked down the floorboard hall and out the monstrous doorway. As
was her habit, she stood for a while on the steps, looking at Molching beneath her. The town
that afternoon was covered in a yellow mist, which stroked the rooftops as if they were pets
and filled up the streets like a bath.
When she made it down to Munich Street, the book thief swerved in and out of the
umbrellaed men and women—a rain-cloaked girl who made her way without shame from one
garbage can to another. Like clockwork.
“There!”
She laughed up at the coppery clouds, celebrating, before reaching in and taking the mangled
newspaper. Although the front and back pages were streaked with black tears of print, she
folded it neatly in half and tucked it under her arm. It had been like this each Thursday for the
past few months.
Thursday was the only delivery day left for Liesel Meminger now, and it was usually able to
provide some sort of dividend. She could never dampen the feeling of victory each time she
found a Molching Express or any other publication. Finding a newspaper was a good day. If it was a paper in which the crossword wasn’t done, it was a great day. She would make her way
home, shut the door behind her, and take it down to Max Vandenburg.
“Crossword?” he would ask.
“Empty.”
“Excellent.”
The Jew would smile as he accepted the package of paper and started reading in the rationed
light of the basement. Often, Liesel would watch him as he focused on reading the paper,
completed the crossword, and then started to reread it, front to back.
With the weather warming, Max remained downstairs all the time. During the day, the
basement door was left open to allow the small bay of daylight to reach him from the
corridor. The hall itself was not exactly bathed in sunshine, but in certain situations, you take
what you can get. Dour light was better than none, and they needed to be frugal. The kerosene
had not yet approached a dangerously low level, but it was best to keep its usage to a
minimum.
Liesel would usually sit on some drop sheets. She would read while Max completed those
crosswords. They sat a few meters apart, speaking very rarely, and there was really only the
noise of turning pages. Often, she also left her books for Max to read while she was at school.
Where Hans Hubermann and Erik Vandenburg were ultimately united by music, Max and
Liesel were held together by the quiet gathering of words.
“Hi, Max.”
“Hi, Liesel.”
They would sit and read.
At times, she would watch him. She decided that he could best be summed up as a picture of
pale concentration. Beige-colored skin. A swamp in each eye. And he breathed like a fugitive.
Desperate yet soundless. It was only his chest that gave him away for something alive.
Increasingly, Liesel would close her eyes and ask Max to quiz her on the words she was
continually getting wrong, and she would swear if they still escaped her. She would then
stand and paint those words to the wall, anywhere up to a dozen times. Together, Max
Vandenburg and Liesel Meminger would take in the odor of paint fumes and cement.
“Bye, Max.”
“Bye, Liesel.”
In bed, she would lie awake, imagining him below, in the basement. In her bedtime visions,
he always slept fully clothed, shoes included, just in case he needed to flee again. He slept
with one eye open.
The Weatherman: Mid-May
Liesel opened the door and her mouth simultaneously.
On Himmel Street, her team had trounced Rudy’s 6–1, and triumphant, she burst into the
kitchen, telling Mama and Papa all about the goal she’d scored. She then rushed down to the
basement to describe it blow by blow to Max, who put down his newspaper and intently
listened and laughed with the girl.
When the story of the goal was complete, there was silence for a good few minutes, until Max
looked slowly up. “Would you do something for me, Liesel?”
Still excited by her Himmel Street goal, the girl jumped from the drop sheets. She did not say
it, but her movement clearly showed her intent to provide exactly what he wanted.
“You told me all about the goal,” he said, “but I don’t know what sort of day it is up there. I
don’t know if you scored it in the sun, or if the clouds have covered everything.” His hand
prodded at his short-cropped hair, and his swampy eyes pleaded for the simplest of simple
things. “Could you go up and tell me how the weather looks?”
Naturally, Liesel hurried up the stairs. She stood a few feet from the spit-stained door and
turned on the spot, observing the sky.
When she returned to the basement, she told him.
“The sky is blue today, Max, and there is a big long cloud, and it’s stretched out, like a rope.
At the end of it, the sun is like a yellow hole....”
Max, at that moment, knew that only a child could have given him a weather report like that.
On the wall, he painted a long, tightly knotted rope with a dripping yellow sun at the end of it,
as if you could dive right into it. On the ropy cloud, he drew two figures—a thin girl and a
withering Jew—and they were walking, arms balanced, toward that dripping sun. Beneath the
picture, he wrote the following sentence.
THE WALL-WRITTEN WORDS
OF MAX VANDENBURG
It was a Monday, and they walked
on a tightrope to the sun.
The Boxer: End of May
For Max Vandenburg, there was cool cement and plenty of time to spend with it.
The minutes were cruel.
Hours were punishing.
Standing above him at all moments of awakeness was the hand of time, and it didn’t hesitate
to wring him out. It smiled and squeezed and let him live. What great malice there could be in
allowing something to live.
At least once a day, Hans Hubermann would descend the basement steps and share a
conversation. Rosa would occasionally bring a spare crust of bread. It was when Liesel came
down, however, that Max found himself most interested in life again. Initially, he tried to
resist, but it was harder every day that the girl appeared, each time with a new weather report,
either of pure blue sky, cardboard clouds, or a sun that had broken through like God sitting
down after he’d eaten too much for his dinner.
When he was alone, his most distinct feeling was of disappearance. All of his clothes were
gray—whether they’d started out that way or not—from his pants to his woolen sweater to the
jacket that dripped from him now like water. He often checked if his skin was flaking, for it
was as if he were dissolving.
What he needed was a series of new projects. The first was exercise. He started with push-
ups, lying stomach-down on the cool basement floor, then hoisting himself up. It felt like his
arms snapped at each elbow, and he envisaged his heart seeping out of him and dropping
pathetically to the ground. As a teenager in Stuttgart, he could reach fifty push-ups at a time.
Now, at the age of twenty-four, perhaps fifteen pounds lighter than his usual weight, he could
barely make it to ten. After a week, he was completing three sets each of sixteen push-ups and
twenty-two sit-ups. When he was finished, he would sit against the basement wall with his
paint-can friends, feeling his pulse in his teeth. His muscles felt like cake.
He wondered at times if pushing himself like this was even worth it. Sometimes, though,
when his heartbeat neutralized and his body became functional again, he would turn off the
lamp and stand in the darkness of the basement.
He was twenty-four, but he could still fantasize.
“In the blue corner,” he quietly commentated, “we have the champion of the world, the Aryan
masterpiece—the F” He breathed and turned. “And in the red corner, we have the
Jewish, rat-faced challenger—Max Vandenburg.”
Around him, it all materialized.
White light lowered itself into a boxing ring and a crowd stood and murmured—that magical
sound of many people talking all at once. How could every person there have so much to say
at the same time? The ring itself was perfect. Perfect canvas, lovely ropes. Even the stray
hairs of each thickened string were flawless, gleaming in the tight white light. The room
smelled like cigarettes and beer.
Diagonally across, Adolf Hitler stood in the corner with his entourage. His legs poked out
from a red-and-white robe with a black swastika burned into its back. His mustache was
knitted to his face. Words were whispered to him from his trainer, Goebbels. He bounced foot
to foot, and he smiled. He smiled loudest when the ring announcer listed his many
achievements, which were all vociferously applauded by the adoring crowd. “Undefeated!”
the ringmaster proclaimed. “Over many a Jew, and over any other threat to the German ideal!
Herr F” he concluded, “we salute you!” The crowd: mayhem.
Next, when everyone had settled down, came the challenger.
The ringmaster swung over toward Max, who stood alone in the challenger’s corner. No robe.
No entourage. Just a lonely young Jew with dirty breath, a naked chest, and tired hands and
feet. Naturally, his shorts were gray. He too moved from foot to foot, but it was kept at a
minimum to conserve energy. He’d done a lot of sweating in the gym to make the weight.
“The challenger!” sang the ringmaster. “Of,” and he paused for effect, “Jew ish blood.” The
crowd oohed, like human ghouls. “Weighing in at...”
The rest of the speech was not heard. It was overrun with the abuse from the bleachers, and
Max watched as his opponent was derobed and came to the middle to hear the rules and shake
hands.
“Guten Tag, Herr Hitler.” Max nodded, but the F only showed him his yellow teeth, then covered them up again with his lips.
“Gentlemen,” a stout referee in black pants and a blue shirt began. A bow tie was fixed to his
throat. “First and foremost, we want a good clean fight.” He addressed only the F now.
“Unless, of course, Herr Hitler, you begin to lose. Should this occur, I will be quite willing to
turn a blind eye to any unconscionable tactics you might employ to grind this piece of Jewish
stench and filth into the canvas.” He nodded, with great courtesy. “Is that clear?”
The F spoke his first word then. “Crystal.”
To Max, the referee extended a warning. “As for you, my Jewish chum, I’d watch my step
very closely if I were you. Very closely indeed,” and they were sent back to their respective
corners.
A brief quiet ensued.
The bell.
First out was the F awkward-legged and bony, running at Max and jabbing him firmly
in the face. The crowd vibrated, the bell still in their ears, and their satisfied smiles hurdled
the ropes. The smoky breath of Hitler steamed from his mouth as his hands bucked at Max’s
face, collecting him several times, on the lips, the nose, the chin—and Max had still not
ventured out of his corner. To absorb the punishment, he held up his hands, but the F
then aimed at his ribs, his kidneys, his lungs. Oh, the eyes, the F’s eyes. They were so
deliciously brown—like Jews’ eyes—and they were so determined that even Max stood
transfixed for a moment as he caught sight of them between the healthy blur of punching
gloves.
There was only one round, and it lasted hours, and for the most part, nothing changed.
The F pounded away at the punching-bag Jew.
Jewish blood was everywhere.
Like red rain clouds on the white-sky canvas at their feet.
Eventually, Max’s knees began to buckle, his cheekbones silently moaned, and the F’s
delighted face still chipped away, chipped away, until depleted, beaten, and broken, the Jew
flopped to the floor.
First, a roar.
Then silence.
The referee counted. He had a gold tooth and a plethora of nostril hair.
Slowly, Max Vandenburg, the Jew, rose to his feet and made himself upright. His voice
wobbled. An invitation. “Come on, F” he said, and this time, when Adolf Hitler set
upon his Jewish counterpart, Max stepped aside and plunged him into the corner. He punched
him seven times, aiming on each occasion for only one thing.
The mustache.
With the seventh punch, he missed. It was the F’s chin that sustained the blow. All at
once, Hitler hit the ropes and creased forward, landing on his knees. This time, there was no
count. The referee flinched in the corner. The audience sank down, back to their beer. On his
knees, the F tested himself for blood and straightened his hair, right to left. When he
returned to his feet, much to the approval of the thousand-strong crowd, he edged forward and
did something quite strange. He turned his back on the Jew and took the gloves from his fists.
The crowd was stunned.
“He’s given up,” someone whispered, but within moments, Adolf Hitler was standing on the
ropes, and he was addressing the arena.
“My fellow Germans,” he called, “you can see something here tonight, can’t you?” Bare-
chested, victory-eyed, he pointed over at Max. “You can see that what we face is something
far more sinister and powerful than we ever imagined. Can you see that?”
They answered. “Yes, F”
“Can you see that this enemy has found its ways—its despicable ways—through our armor,
and that clearly, I cannot stand up here alone and fight him?” The words were visible. They
dropped from his mouth like jewels. “Look at him! Take a good look.” They looked. At the
bloodied Max Vandenburg. “As we speak, he is plotting his way into your neighborhood.
He’s moving in next door. He’s infesting you with his family and he’s about to take you over.
He—” Hitler glanced at him a moment, with disgust. “He will soon own you, until it is he
who stands not at the counter of your grocery shop, but sits in the back, smoking his pipe.
Before you know it, you’ll be working for him at minimum wage while he can hardly walk
from the weight in his pockets. Will you simply stand there and let him do this? Will you
stand by as your leaders did in the past, when they gave your land to everybody else, when
they sold your country for the price of a few signatures? Will you stand out there, powerless?
Or”—and now he stepped one rung higher—“will you climb up into this ring with me?”
Max shook. Horror stuttered in his stomach.
Adolf finished him. “Will you climb in here so that we can defeat this enemy together?”
In the basement of 33 Himmel Street, Max Vandenburg could feel the fists of an entire nation.
One by one they climbed into the ring and beat him down. They made him bleed. They let
him suffer. Millions of them—until one last time, when he gathered himself to his feet...
He watched the next person climb through the ropes. It was a girl, and as she slowly crossed
the canvas, he noticed a tear torn down her left cheek. In her right hand was a newspaper.
“The crossword,” she gently said, “is empty,” and she held it out to him.
Dark.
Nothing but dark now.
Just basement. Just Jew.
The New Dream: A Few Nights Later
It was afternoon. Liesel came down the basement steps. Max was halfway through his push-
ups.
She watched awhile, without his knowledge, and when she came and sat with him, he stood
up and leaned back against the wall. “Did I tell you,” he asked her, “that I’ve been having a
new dream lately?”
Liesel shifted a little, to see his face.
“But I dream this when I’m awake.” He motioned to the glowless kerosene lamp. “Sometimes
I turn out the light. Then I stand here and wait.”
“For what?”
Max corrected her. “Not for what. For whom.”
For a few moments, Liesel said nothing. It was one of those conversations that require some
time to elapse between exchanges. “Who do you wait for?”
Max did not move. “The F” He was very matter-of-fact about this. “That’s why I’m in
training.”
“The push-ups?”
“That’s right.” He walked to the concrete stairway. “Every night, I wait in the dark and the
F comes down these steps. He walks down and he and I, we fight for hours.”
Liesel was standing now. “Who wins?”
At first, he was going to answer that no one did, but then he noticed the paint cans, the drop
sheets, and the growing pile of newspapers in the periphery of his vision. He watched the
words, the long cloud, and the figures on the wall.
“I do,” he said.
It was as though he’d opened her palm, given her the words, and closed it up again.
Under the ground, in Molching, Germany, two people stood and spoke in a basement. It
sounds like the beginning of a joke:
“There’s a Jew and a German standing in a basement, right?...”
This, however, was no joke.
The Painters: Early June
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