The Book Thief (31 page)

His arm touched the fire and he snapped it back.

They all watched him, silent, until Papa stood and walked closer. He sat next to him.

“Did you burn your elbow?”

One evening, Hans, Max, and Liesel were sitting in front of the fire. Mama was in the kitchen. Max was reading
Mein Kampf
again.

“You know something?” Hans said. He leaned toward the fire. “Liesel’s actually a good little reader herself.” Max lowered the book. “And she has more in common with you than you might think.” Papa checked that Rosa wasn’t coming. “She likes a good fistfight, too.”

“Papa!”

Liesel, at the high end of eleven, and still rake-skinny as she sat against the wall, was devastated. “I’ve never been in a fight!”

“Shhh,” Papa laughed. He waved at her to keep her voice down and tilted again, this time to the girl. “Well, what about the hiding you gave Ludwig Schmeikl, huh?”

“I never—” She was caught. Further denial was useless. “How did you find out about that?”

“I saw his papa at the Knoller.”

Liesel held her face in her hands. Once uncovered again, she asked the pivotal question. “Did you tell Mama?”

“Are you kidding?” He winked at Max and whispered to the girl, “You’re still alive, aren’t you?”

That night was also the first time Papa played his accordion at home for months. It lasted half an hour or so until he asked a question of Max.

“Did you learn?”

The face in the corner watched the flames. “I did.” There was a considerable pause. “Until I was nine. At that age, my mother sold the music studio and stopped teaching. She kept only the one instrument but gave up on me not long after I resisted the learning. I was foolish.”

“No,” Papa said. “You were a boy.”

During the nights, both Liesel Meminger and Max Vandenburg would go about their other similarity. In their separate rooms, they would dream their nightmares and wake up, one with a scream in drowning sheets, the other with a gasp for air next to a smoking fire.

Sometimes, when Liesel was reading with Papa close to three o’clock, they would both hear the waking moment of Max. “He dreams like you,” Papa would say, and on one occasion, stirred by the sound of Max’s anxiety, Liesel decided to get out of bed. From listening to his history, she had a good idea of what he saw in those dreams, if not the exact part of the story that paid him a visit each night.

She made her way quietly down the hallway and into the living and bedroom.

“Max?”

The whisper was soft, clouded in the throat of sleep.

To begin with, there was no sound of reply, but he soon sat up and searched the darkness.

With Papa still in her bedroom, Liesel sat on the other side of the fireplace from Max. Behind them, Mama loudly slept. She gave the snorer on the train a good run for her money.

The fire was nothing now but a funeral of smoke, dead and dying, simultaneously. On this particular morning, there were also voices.

It would be nice to say that after this small breakthrough, neither Liesel nor Max dreamed their bad visions again. It would be nice but untrue. The nightmares arrived like they always did, much like the best player in the opposition when you’ve heard rumors that he might be injured or sick—but there he is, warming up with the rest of them, ready to take the field. Or like a timetabled train, arriving at a nightly platform, pulling the memories behind it on a rope. A lot of dragging. A lot of awkward bounces.

The only thing that changed was that Liesel told her papa that she should be old enough now to cope on her own with the dreams.
For a moment, he looked a little hurt, but as always with Papa, he gave the right thing to say his best shot.

“Well, thank God.” He halfway grinned. “At least now I can get some proper sleep. That chair was killing me.” He put his arm around the girl and they walked to the kitchen.

As time progressed, a clear distinction developed between two very different worlds—the world inside 33 Himmel Street, and the one that resided and turned outside it. The trick was to keep them apart.

In the outside world, Liesel was learning to find some more of its uses. One afternoon, when she was walking home with an empty washing bag, she noticed a newspaper poking out of a garbage can. The weekly edition of the
Molching Express
. She lifted it out and took it home, presenting it to Max. “I thought,” she told him, “you might like to do the crossword to pass the time.”

Max appreciated the gesture, and to justify her bringing it home, he read the paper from cover to cover and showed her the puzzle a few hours later, completed but for one word.

“Damn that seventeen down,” he said.

In February 1941, for her twelfth birthday, Liesel received another used book, and she was grateful. It was called
The Mud Men
and was about a very strange father and son. She hugged her mama and papa, while Max stood uncomfortably in the corner.

“Alles Gute zum Geburtstag.”
He smiled weakly. “All the best for your birthday.” His hands were in his pockets. “I didn’t know, or else I could have given you something.” A blatant lie—he had nothing to give, except maybe
Mein Kampf
, and there was no way he’d give such propaganda to a young German girl. That would be like the lamb handing a knife to the butcher.

There was an uncomfortable silence.

She had embraced Mama and Papa.

Max looked so alone.

Liesel swallowed.

And she walked over and hugged him for the first time. “Thanks, Max.”

At first, he merely stood there, but as she held on to him, gradually his hands rose up and gently pressed into her shoulder blades.

Only later would she find out about the helpless expression on Max Vandenburg’s face. She would also discover that he resolved at that moment to give her something back. I often imagine him lying awake all that night, pondering what he could possibly offer.

As it turned out, the gift was delivered on paper, just over a week later.

He would bring it to her in the early hours of morning, before retreating down the concrete steps to what he now liked to call home.

For a week, Liesel was kept from the basement at all cost. It was Mama and Papa who made sure to take down Max’s food.

“No,
Saumensch,”
Mama told her each time she volunteered. There was always a new excuse. “How about you do something useful in
here
for a change, like finish the ironing? You think carrying it around town is so special? Try ironing it!” You can do all manner of underhanded nice things when you have a caustic reputation. It worked.

During that week, Max had cut out a collection of pages from
Mein Kampf
and painted over them in white. He then hung them up with pegs on some string, from one end of the basement to the other. When they were all dry, the hard part began. He was educated well enough to get by, but he was certainly no writer, and no artist. Despite this, he formulated the words in his head till he could recount them without error. Only then, on the paper that had bubbled and humped under the stress of drying paint, did he begin to write the story. It was done with a small black paintbrush.

The Standover Man
.

He calculated that he needed thirteen pages, so he painted forty,
expecting at least twice as many slipups as successes. There were practice versions on the pages of the
Molching Express
, improving his basic, clumsy artwork to a level he could accept. As he worked, he heard the whispered words of a girl. “His hair,” she told him, “is like feathers.”

When he was finished, he used a knife to pierce the pages and tie them with string. The result was a thirteen-page booklet that went like this: