The Book Thief (20 page)

After lodging
his form at the Nazi headquarters on Munich Street, he witnessed four men throw
several bricks into a clothing store named Kleinmann’s. It was one of the few
Jewish shops that were still in operation in Molching. Inside, a small man was
stuttering about, crushing the broken glass beneath his feet as he cleaned up.
A star the color of mustard was smeared to the door. In sloppy lettering, the
words JEWISH FILTH were spilling over at their edges. The movement inside tapered
from hurried to morose, then stopped altogether.

Hans moved
closer and stuck his head inside. “Do you need some help?”

Mr. Kleinmann
looked up. A dust broom was fixed powerlessly to his hand. “No, Hans. Please.
Go away.” Hans had painted Joel Kleinmann’s house the previous year. He
remembered his three children. He could see their faces but couldn’t recall
their names.

“I will come
tomorrow,” he said, “and repaint your door.”

Which he did.

It was the
second of two mistakes.

The first
occurred immediately after the incident.

He returned to
where he’d come from and drove his fist onto the door and then the window of
the NSDAP. The glass shuddered but no one replied. Everyone had packed up and
gone home. A last member was walking in the opposite direction. When he heard
the rattle of the glass, he noticed the painter.

He came back and
asked what was wrong.

“I can no longer
join,” Hans stated.

The man was
shocked. “Why not?”

Hans looked at
the knuckles of his right hand and swallowed. He could already taste the error,
like a metal tablet in his mouth. “Forget it.” He turned and walked home.

Words followed
him.

“You just think
about it, Herr Hubermann. Let us know what you decide.”

He did not
acknowledge them.

The following
morning, as promised, he rose earlier than usual, but not early enough. The
door at Kleinmann’s Clothing was still moist with dew. Hans dried it. He
managed to match the color as close as humanly possible and gave it a good
solid coat.

Innocuously, a
man walked past.

“
Heil
Hitler,”
he said.

“
Heil
Hitler,”
Hans replied.

1.
A new slur was painted on the door
within sixteen hours.

2.
Hans Hubermann was not granted membership in the Nazi Party.

For the next
year, Hans was lucky that he didn’t revoke his membership application
officially. While many people were instantly approved, he was added to a
waiting list, regarded with suspicion. Toward the end of 1938, when the Jews
were cleared out completely after Kristallnacht, the Gestapo visited. They
searched the house, and when nothing or no one suspicious was found, Hans
Hubermann was one of the fortunate:

He was allowed
to stay.

What probably
saved him was that people knew he was at least
waiting
for his
application to be approved. For this, he was tolerated, if not endorsed as the
competent painter he was.

Then there was
his other savior.

It was the
accordion that most likely spared him from total ostracism. Painters there
were, from all over Munich, but under the brief tutorage of Erik Vandenburg and
nearly two decades of his own steady practice, there was no one in Molching who
could play exactly like him. It was a style not of perfection, but warmth. Even
mistakes had a good feeling about them.

He “
heil
Hitlered”
when it was asked of him and he flew the flag on the right days. There was no
apparent problem.

Then, on June
16, 1939 (the date was like cement now), just over six months after Liesel’s
arrival on Himmel Street, an event occurred that altered the life of Hans
Hubermann irreversibly.

It was a day in
which he had some work.

He left the
house at 7 a.m. sharp.

He towed his
paint cart behind him, oblivious to the fact that he was being followed.

When he arrived
at the work site, a young stranger walked up to him. He was blond and tall, and
serious.

The pair watched
each other.

“Would you be
Hans Hubermann?”

Hans gave him a
single nod. He was reaching for a paintbrush. “Yes, I would.”

“Do you play the
accordion, by any chance?”

This time, Hans
stopped, leaving the brush where it was. Again, he nodded.

The stranger
rubbed his jaw, looked around him, and then spoke with great quietness, yet
great clarity. “Are you a man who likes to keep a promise?”

Hans took out
two paint cans and invited him to sit down. Before he accepted the invitation,
the young man extended his hand and introduced himself. “My name’s Kugler.
Walter. I come from Stuttgart.”

They sat and
talked quietly for fifteen minutes or so, arranging a meeting for later on, in
the night.

A GOOD GIRL

In November
1940, when Max Vandenburg arrived in the kitchen of 33 Himmel Street, he was
twenty-four years old. His clothes seemed to weigh him down, and his tiredness
was such that an itch could break him in two. He stood shaking and shaken in
the doorway.

“Do you still
play the accordion?”

Of course, the
question was really, “Will you still help me?”

Liesel’s papa
walked to the front door and opened it. Cautiously, he looked outside, each
way, and returned. The verdict was “nothing.”

Max Vandenburg,
the Jew, closed his eyes and drooped a little further into safety. The very
idea of it was ludicrous, but he accepted it nonetheless.

Hans checked
that the curtains were properly closed. Not a crack could be showing. As he did
so, Max could no longer bear it. He crouched down and clasped his hands.

The darkness
stroked him.

His fingers
smelled of suitcase, metal,
Mein Kampf,
and survival.

It was only when
he lifted his head that the dim light from the hallway reached his eyes. He
noticed the pajamaed girl, standing there, in full view.

“Papa?”

Max stood up,
like a struck match. The darkness swelled now, around him.

“Everything’s
fine, Liesel,” Papa said. “Go back to bed.”

She lingered a
moment before her feet dragged from behind. When she stopped and stole one last
look at the foreigner in the kitchen, she could decipher the outline of a book
on the table.

“Don’t be
afraid,” she heard Papa whisper. “She’s a good girl.”

For the next
hour, the good girl lay wide awake in bed, listening to the quiet fumbling of
sentences in the kitchen.

One wild card
was yet to be played.

FIGHTER

Max Vandenburg
was born in 1916.

He grew up in
Stuttgart.

When he was
younger, he grew to love nothing more than a good fistfight.

He had his first
bout when he was eleven years old and skinny as a whittled broom handle.

Wenzel Gruber.

That’s who he
fought.

He had a smart
mouth, that Gruber kid, and wire-curly hair. The local playground demanded that
they fight, and neither boy was about to argue.

They fought like
champions.

For a minute.

Just when it was
getting interesting, both boys were hauled away by their collars. A watchful
parent.

A trickle of
blood was dripping from Max’s mouth.

He tasted it,
and it tasted good.

Not many people
who came from his neighborhood were fighters, and if they were, they didn’t do
it with their fists. In those days, they said the Jews preferred to simply
stand and take things. Take the abuse quietly and then work their way back to
the top. Obviously, every Jew is not the same.

He was nearly
two years old when his father died, shot to pieces on a grassy hill.

When he was
nine, his mother was completely broke. She sold the music studio that doubled
as their apartment and they moved to his uncle’s house. There he grew up with
six cousins who battered, annoyed, and loved him. Fighting with the oldest one,
Isaac, was the training ground for his fist fighting. He was trounced almost
every night.

At thirteen,
tragedy struck again when his uncle died.

As percentages
would suggest, his uncle was not a hothead like Max. He was the type of person
who worked quietly away for very little reward. He kept to himself and
sacrificed everything for his family—and he died of something growing in his stomach.
Something akin to a poison bowling ball.

As is often the
case, the family surrounded the bed and watched him capitulate.

Somehow, between
the sadness and loss, Max Vandenburg, who was now a teenager with hard hands,
blackened eyes, and a sore tooth, was also a little disappointed. Even
disgruntled. As he watched his uncle sink slowly into the bed, he decided that
he would never allow himself to die like that.

The man’s face
was so accepting.

So yellow and
tranquil, despite the violent architecture of his skull—the endless jawline,
stretching for miles; the pop-up cheekbones; and the pothole eyes. So calm it
made the boy want to ask something.

Where’s the
fight? he wondered.

Where’s the will
to hold on?

Of course, at
thirteen, he was a little excessive in his harshness. He had not looked
something like
me
in the face. Not yet.

With the rest of
them, he stood around the bed and watched the man die—a safe merge, from life
to death. The light in the window was gray and orange, the color of summer’s
skin, and his uncle appeared relieved when his breathing disappeared
completely.

“When death
captures me,” the boy vowed, “he will feel my fist on his face.”

Personally, I
quite like that. Such stupid gallantry.

Yes.

I like that a
lot.

From that moment
on, he started to fight with greater regularity. A group of die-hard friends
and enemies would gather down at a small reserve on Steber Street, and they
would fight in the dying light. Archetypal Germans, the odd Jew, the boys from
the east. It didn’t matter. There was nothing like a good fight to expel the
teenage energy. Even the enemies were an inch away from friendship.

He enjoyed the
tight circles and the unknown.

The
bittersweetness of uncertainty:

To win or to
lose.

It was a feeling
in the stomach that would be stirred around until he thought he could no longer
tolerate it. The only remedy was to move forward and throw punches. Max was not
the type of boy to die thinking about it.

His favorite
fight, now that he looked back, was Fight Number Five against a tall, tough,
rangy kid named Walter Kugler. They were fifteen. Walter had won all four of
their previous encounters, but this time, Max could feel something different.
There was new blood in him—the blood of victory—and it had the capability to
both frighten and excite.

As always, there
was a tight circle crowded around them. There was grubby ground. There were
smiles practically wrapped around the onlooking faces. Money was clutched in
filthy fingers, and the calls and cries were filled with such vitality that
there was nothing else but this.

God, there was
such joy and fear there, such brilliant commotion.

The two fighters
were clenched with the intensity of the moment, their faces loaded up with
expression, exaggerated with the stress of it. The wide-eyed concentration.

After a minute
or so of testing each other out, they began moving closer and taking more
risks. It was a street fight after all, not an hour-long title fight. They
didn’t have all day.

“Come on, Max!”
one of his friends was calling out. There was no breath between any of the
words. “Come on, Maxi Taxi, you’ve got him now, you’ve got him, Jew boy, you’ve
got him, you’ve got him!”

A small kid with
soft tufts of hair, a beaten nose, and swampy eyes, Max was a good head shorter
than his opposition. His fighting style was utterly graceless, all bent over,
nudging forward, throwing fast punches at the face of Kugler. The other boy,
clearly stronger and more skillful, remained upright, throwing jabs that
constantly landed on Max’s cheeks and chin.

Max kept coming.

Even with the
heavy absorption of punches and punishment, he continued moving forward. Blood
discolored his lips. It would soon be dried across his teeth.

There was a
great roar when he was knocked down. Money was almost exchanged.

Max stood up.

He was beaten
down one more time before he changed tactics, luring Walter Kugler a little
closer than he’d wanted to come. Once he was there, Max was able to apply a
short, sharp jab to his face. It stuck. Exactly on the nose.

Kugler, suddenly
blinded, shuffled back, and Max seized his chance. He followed him over to the
right and jabbed him once more and opened him up with a punch that reached into
his ribs. The right hand that ended him landed on his chin. Walter Kugler was
on the ground, his blond hair peppered with dirt. His legs were parted in a V.
Tears like crystal floated down his skin, despite the fact that he was not
crying. The tears had been bashed out of him.