The Book Thief (29 page)

She didn’t need an answer.

Everything was good.

But it was awful, too.

Max Vandenburg slept for three days.

In certain excerpts of that sleep, Liesel watched him. You might say that by the third day it became an obsession, to check on him, to see if he was still breathing. She could now interpret his signs of life, from the movement of his lips, his gathering beard, and the twigs of hair that moved ever so slightly when his head twitched in the dream state.

Often, when she stood over him, there was the mortifying thought that he had just woken up, his eyes splitting open to view her—to watch her watching. The idea of being caught out plagued and enthused her at the same time. She dreaded it. She invited it. Only when Mama called out to her could she drag herself away, simultaneously soothed and disappointed that she might not be there when he woke.

Sometimes, close to the end of the marathon of sleep, he spoke.

There was a recital of murmured names. A checklist.

Isaac. Aunt Ruth. Sarah. Mama. Walter. Hitler.

Family, friend, enemy.

They were all under the covers with him, and at one point, he
appeared to be struggling with himself.
“Nein,”
he whispered. It was repeated seven times. “No.”

Liesel, in the act of watching, was already noticing the similarities between this stranger and herself. They both arrived in a state of agitation on Himmel Street. They both nightmared.

When the time came, he awoke with the nasty thrill of disorientation. His mouth opened a moment after his eyes and he sat up, right-angled.

“Ay!”

A patch of voice escaped his mouth.

When he saw the upside-down face of a girl above him, there was the fretful moment of unfamiliarity and the grasp for recollection—to decode exactly where and when he was currently sitting. After a few seconds, he managed to scratch his head (the rustle of kindling) and he looked at her. His movements were fragmented, and now that they were open, his eyes were swampy and brown. Thick and heavy.

As a reflex action, Liesel backed away.

She was too slow.

The stranger reached out, his bed-warmed hand taking her by the forearm.

“Please.”

His voice also held on, as if possessing fingernails. He pressed it into her flesh. “Papa!” Loud.

“Please!” Soft.

It was late afternoon, gray and gleaming, but it was only dirty-colored light that was permitted entrance into the room. It was all the fabric of the curtains allowed. If you’re optimistic, think of it as bronze.

When Papa came in, he first stood in the doorway and witnessed Max Vandenburg’s gripping fingers and his desperate face. Both held on to Liesel’s arm. “I see you two have met,” he said.

Max’s fingers started cooling.

Max Vandenburg promised that he would never sleep in Liesel’s room again. What was he thinking that first night? The very idea of it mortified him.

He rationalized that he was so bewildered upon his arrival that he allowed such a thing. The basement was the only place for him as far as he was concerned. Forget the cold and the loneliness. He was a Jew, and if there was one place he was destined to exist, it was a basement or any other such hidden venue of survival.

“I’m sorry,” he confessed to Hans and Rosa on the basement steps. “From now on I will stay down here. You will not hear from me. I will not make a sound.”

Hans and Rosa, both steeped in the despair of the predicament, made no argument, not even in regard to the cold. They heaved blankets down and topped up the kerosene lamp. Rosa admitted that there could not be much food, to which Max fervently asked her to bring only scraps, and only when they were not wanted by anyone else.

“Na, na,” Rosa assured him. “You will be fed, as best I can.”

They also took the mattress down, from the spare bed in Liesel’s room, replacing it with drop sheets—an excellent trade.

•   •   •

Downstairs, Hans and Max placed the mattress beneath the steps and built a wall of drop sheets at the side. The sheets were high enough to cover the whole triangular entrance, and if nothing else, they were easily moved if Max was in dire need of extra air.

Papa apologized. “It’s quite pathetic. I realize that.”

“Better than nothing,” Max assured him. “Better than I deserve—thank you.”

With some well-positioned paint cans, Hans actually conceded that it did simply look like a collection of junk gathered sloppily in the corner, out of the way. The one problem was that a person needed only to shift a few cans and remove a drop sheet or two to smell out the Jew.

“Let’s just hope it’s good enough,” he said.

“It has to be.” Max crawled in. Again, he said it. “Thank you.”

Thank you
.

For Max Vandenburg, those were the two most pitiful words he could possibly say, rivaled only by
I’m sorry
. There was a constant urge to speak both expressions, spurred on by the affliction of guilt.

How many times in those first few hours of awakeness did he feel like walking out of that basement and leaving the house altogether? It must have been hundreds.

Each time, though, it was only a twinge.

Which made it even worse.

He wanted to walk out—Lord, how he wanted to (or at least he
wanted
to want to)—but he knew he wouldn’t. It was much the same as the way he left his family in Stuttgart, under a veil of fabricated loyalty.

To live.

Living was living.

The price was guilt and shame.

•   •   •

For his first few days in the basement, Liesel had nothing to do with him. She denied his existence. His rustling hair, his cold, slippery fingers.

His tortured presence.

Mama and Papa.

There was such gravity between them, and a lot of failed decision-making.

They considered whether they could move him.

“But where?”

No reply.

In this situation, they were friendless and paralyzed. There was nowhere else for Max Vandenburg to go. It was them. Hans and Rosa Hubermann. Liesel had never seen them look at each other so much, or with such solemnity.

It was they who took the food down and organized an empty paint can for Max’s excrement. The contents would be disposed of by Hans as prudently as possible. Rosa also took him some buckets of hot water to wash himself. The Jew was filthy.

Outside, a mountain of cold November air was waiting at the front door each time Liesel left the house.

Drizzle came down in spades.

Dead leaves were slumped on the road.

Soon enough, it was the book thief’s turn to visit the basement. They made her.

She walked tentatively down the steps, knowing that no words were required. The scuffing of her feet was enough to rouse him.

In the middle of the basement, she stood and waited, feeling
more like she was standing in the center of a great dusky field. The sun was setting behind a crop of harvested drop sheets.

When Max came out, he was holding
Mein Kampf
. Upon his arrival, he’d offered it back to Hans Hubermann but was told he could keep it.

Naturally, Liesel, while holding the dinner, couldn’t take her eyes off it. It was a book she had seen a few times at the BDM, but it hadn’t been read or used directly in their activities. There were occasional references to its greatness, as well as promises that the opportunity to study it would come in later years, as they progressed into the more senior Hitler Youth division.

Max, following her attention, also examined the book.

“Is?” she whispered.

There was a queer strand in her voice, planed off and curly in her mouth.

The Jew moved only his head a little closer.
“Bitte?
Excuse me?” She handed him the pea soup and returned upstairs, red, rushed, and foolish.

“Is it a good book?”

She practiced what she’d wanted to say in the washroom, in the small mirror. The smell of urine was still about her, as Max had just used the paint can before she’d come down.
So ein G’schtank
, she thought. What a stink.

No one’s urine smells as good as your own.

The days hobbled on.

Each night, before the descent into sleep, she would hear Mama and Papa in the kitchen, discussing what had been done, what they were doing now, and what needed to happen next. All the while, an image of Max hovered next to her. It was always the injured, thankful expression on his face and the swamp-filled eyes.

Only once was there an outburst in the kitchen.

Papa.

“I know!”

His voice was abrasive, but he brought it back to a muffled whisper in a hurry.

“I have to keep going, though, at least a few times a week. I can’t be here all the time. We need the money, and if I quit playing there, they’ll get suspicious. They might wonder why I’ve stopped. I told them you were sick last week, but now we have to do everything like we always have.”

Therein lay the problem.

Life had altered in the wildest possible way, but it was imperative that they act as if nothing at all had happened.

Imagine smiling after a slap in the face. Then think of doing it twenty-four hours a day.

That was the business of hiding a Jew.

As days turned into weeks, there was now, if nothing else, a beleaguered acceptance of what had transpired—all the result of war, a promise keeper, and one piano accordion. Also, in the space of just over half a year, the Hubermanns had lost a son and gained a replacement of epically dangerous proportions.

What shocked Liesel most was the change in her mama. Whether it was the calculated way in which she divided the food, or the considerable muzzling of her notorious mouth, or even the gentler expression on her cardboard face, one thing was becoming clear.

Even when the arthritic Helena Schmidt canceled the washing and ironing service, a month after Max’s debut on Himmel Street, she
simply sat at the table and brought the bowl toward her. “Good soup tonight.”

The soup was terrible.

Every morning when Liesel left for school, or on the days she ventured out to play soccer or complete what was left of the washing round, Rosa would speak quietly to the girl. “And remember, Liesel …” She would point to her mouth and that was all. When Liesel nodded, she would say, “Good girl,
Saumensch
. Now get going.”

True to Papa’s words, and even Mama’s now, she was a good girl. She kept her mouth shut everywhere she went. The secret was buried deep.

She town-walked with Rudy as she always did, listening to his jabbering. Sometimes they compared notes from their Hitler Youth divisions, Rudy mentioning for the first time a sadistic young leader named Franz Deutscher. If Rudy wasn’t talking about Deutscher’s intense ways, he was playing his usual broken record, providing renditions and re-creations of the last goal he scored in the Himmel Street soccer stadium.

“I
know,”
Liesel would assure him. “I was
there.”

“So what?”

“So I saw it,
Saukerl.”

“How do I know that? For all I know, you were probably on the ground somewhere, licking up the mud I left behind when I scored.”

Perhaps it was Rudy who kept her sane, with the stupidity of his talk, his lemon-soaked hair, and his cockiness.

He seemed to resonate with a kind of confidence that life was still nothing but a joke—an endless succession of soccer goals, trickery, and a constant repertoire of meaningless chatter.

Also, there was the mayor’s wife, and reading in her husband’s library. It was cold in there now, colder with every visit, but still Liesel could
not stay away. She would choose a handful of books and read small segments of each, until one afternoon, she found one she could not put down. It was called
The Whistler
. She was originally drawn to it because of her sporadic sightings of the whistler of Himmel Street—Pfiffikus. There was the memory of him bent over in his coat and his appearance at the bonfire on the
Führer
’s birthday.