The Book Thief (26 page)

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
Boxer: End of May

For Max
Vandenburg, there was cool cement and plenty of time to spend with it.