Papa’s face was
stretched with concern. His gray eyes clanged and he picked him up on his own.
Max was light as a child. “Can’t we put him here, in our bed?”
Rosa had already
considered that. “No. We have to keep these curtains open in the day or else it
looks suspicious.”
“Good point.”
Hans carried him out.
Blankets in
hand, Liesel watched.
Limp feet and
hanging hair in the hallway. One shoe had fallen off him.
“Move.”
Mama marched in
behind them, in her waddlesome way.
Once Max was in
the bed, blankets were heaped on top and fastened around his body.
“Mama?”
Liesel couldn’t
bring herself to say anything else.
“What?” The bun
of Rosa Hubermann’s hair was wound tight enough to frighten from behind. It
seemed to tighten further when she repeated the question. “What, Liesel?”
She stepped
closer, afraid of the answer. “Is he alive?”
The bun nodded.
Rosa turned then
and said something with great assurance. “Now listen to me, Liesel. I didn’t
take this man into my house to watch him die. Understand?”
Liesel nodded.
“Now go.”
In the hall,
Papa hugged her.
She desperately
needed it.
Later on, she
heard Hans and Rosa speaking in the night. Rosa made her sleep in their room,
and she lay next to their bed, on the floor, on the mattress they’d dragged up
from the basement. (There was concern as to whether it was infected, but they
came to the conclusion that such thoughts were unfounded. This was no virus Max
was suffering from, so they carried it up and replaced the sheet.)
Imagining the
girl to be asleep, Mama voiced her opinion.
“That damn
snowman,” she whispered. “I bet it started with the snowman—fooling around with
ice and snow in the cold down there.”
Papa was more
philosophical. “Rosa, it started with Adolf.” He lifted himself. “We should
check on him.”
In the course of
the night, Max was visited seven times.
MAX
VANDENBURG’S VISITOR
SCORE SHEET
Hans Hubermann: 2
Rosa Hubermann: 2
Liesel Meminger: 3
In the morning,
Liesel brought him his sketchbook from the basement and placed it on the
bedside table. She felt awful for having looked at it the previous year, and
this time, she kept it firmly closed, out of respect.
When Papa came
in, she did not turn to face him but talked across Max Vandenburg, at the wall.
“Why did I have to bring all that snow down?” she asked. “It started all of
this, didn’t it, Papa?” She clenched her hands, as if to pray. “Why did I have
to build that snowman?”
Papa, to his
enduring credit, was adamant. “Liesel,” he said, “you had to.”
For hours, she
sat with him as he shivered and slept.
“Don’t die,” she
whispered. “Please, Max, just don’t die.”
He was the
second snowman to be melting away before her eyes, only this one was different.
It was a paradox.
The colder he
became, the more he melted.
THIRTEEN PRESENTS
It was Max’s
arrival, revisited.
Feathers turned
to twigs again. Smooth face turned to rough. The proof she needed was there. He
was alive.
The first few
days, she sat and talked to him. On her birthday, she told him there was an
enormous cake waiting in the kitchen, if only he’d wake up.
There was no
waking.
There was no
cake.
A
LATE-NIGHT EXCERPT
I realized much later that I actually visited
33 Himmel Street in that period of time.
It must have been one of the few moments when the
girl was not there with him, for all I saw was a
man in bed. I knelt. I readied myself to insert
my hands through the blankets. Then there was a
resurgence—an
immense struggle against my weight.
I withdrew, and with so much work ahead of me,
it was nice to be fought off in that dark little room.
I even managed a short, closed-eyed pause of
serenity before I made my way out.
On the fifth
day, there was much excitement when Max opened his eyes, if only for a few
moments. What he predominantly saw (and what a frightening version it must have
been close-up) was Rosa Hubermann, practically slinging an armful of soup into
his mouth. “Swallow,” she advised him. “Don’t think. Just swallow.” As soon as
Mama handed back the bowl, Liesel tried to see his face again, but there was a
soup-feeder’s backside in the way.
“Is he still
awake?”
When she turned,
Rosa did not have to answer.
After close to a
week, Max woke up a second time, on this occasion with Liesel and Papa in the
room. They were both watching the body in the bed when there was a small groan.
If it’s possible, Papa fell upward, out of the chair.
“Look,” Liesel
gasped. “Stay awake, Max, stay awake.”
He looked at her
briefly, but there was no recognition. The eyes studied her as if she were a
riddle. Then gone again.
“Papa, what
happened?”
Hans dropped,
back to the chair.
Later, he
suggested that perhaps she should read to him. “Come on, Liesel, you’re such a
good reader these days—even if it’s a mystery to all of us where that book came
from.”
“I told you,
Papa. One of the nuns at school gave it to me.”
Papa held his
hands up in mock-protest. “I know, I know.” He sighed, from a height. “Just . .
.” He chose his words gradually. “Don’t get caught.” This from a man who’d
stolen a Jew.
From that day
on, Liesel read
The Whistler
aloud to Max as he occupied her bed. The
one frustration was that she kept having to skip whole chapters on account of
many of the pages being stuck together. It had not dried well. Still, she
struggled on, to the point where she was nearly three-quarters of the way
through it. The book was 396 pages.
In the outside
world, Liesel rushed from school each day in the hope that Max was feeling
better. “Has he woken up? Has he eaten?”
“Go back out,”
Mama begged her. “You’re chewing a hole in my stomach with all this talking. Go
on. Get out there and play soccer, for God’s sake.”
“Yes, Mama.” She
was about to open the door. “But you’ll come and get me if he wakes up, won’t
you? Just make something up. Scream out like I’ve done something wrong. Start
swearing at me. Everyone will believe it, don’t worry.”
Even Rosa had to
smile at that. She placed her knuckles on her hips and explained that Liesel
wasn’t too old yet to avoid a
Watschen
for talking in such a way. “And
score a goal,” she threatened, “or don’t come home at all.”
“Sure, Mama.”
“Make that
two
goals,
Saumensch
!”
“Yes, Mama.”
“And stop answering
back!”
Liesel
considered, but she ran onto the street, to oppose Rudy on the mud-slippery
road.
“About time, ass
scratcher.” He welcomed her in the customary way as they fought for the ball.
“Where have you been?”
Half an hour
later, when the ball was squashed by the rare passage of a car on Himmel
Street, Liesel had found her first present for Max Vandenburg. After judging it
irreparable, all of the kids walked home in disgust, leaving the ball twitching
on the cold, blistered road. Liesel and Rudy remained stooped over the carcass.
There was a gaping hole on its side like a mouth.
“You want it?”
Liesel asked.
Rudy shrugged.
“What do I want with this squashed shit heap of a ball? There’s no chance of
getting air into it now, is there?”
“Do you want it or
not?”
“No thanks.”
Rudy prodded it cautiously with his foot, as if it were a dead animal. Or an
animal that
might
be dead.
As he walked
home, Liesel picked the ball up and placed it under her arm. She could hear him
call out, “Hey,
Saumensch.
” She waited.
“Saumensch!”
She relented.
“What?”
“I’ve got a bike
without wheels here, too, if you want it.”
“Stick your
bike.”
From her
position on the street, the last thing she heard was the laughter of that
Saukerl,
Rudy Steiner.
Inside, she made
her way to the bedroom. She took the ball in to Max and placed it at the end of
the bed.
“I’m sorry,” she
said, “it’s not much. But when you wake up, I’ll tell you all about it. I’ll
tell you it was the grayest afternoon you can imagine, and this car without its
lights on ran straight over the ball. Then the man got out and yelled at us.
And
then
he asked for directions. The nerve of him . . .”
Wake up! she
wanted to scream.
Or shake him.
She didn’t.
All Liesel could
do was watch the ball and its trampled, flaking skin. It was the first gift of
many.
PRESENTS
#2–#5
One ribbon, one pinecone.
One button, one stone.
The soccer ball
had given her an idea.
Whenever she
walked to and from school now, Liesel was on the lookout for discarded items
that might be valuable to a dying man. She wondered at first why it mattered so
much. How could something so seemingly insignificant give comfort to someone? A
ribbon in a gutter. A pinecone on the street. A button leaning casually against
a classroom wall. A flat round stone from the river. If nothing else, it showed
that she cared, and it might give them something to talk about when Max woke
up.
When she was
alone, she would conduct those conversations.
“So what’s all
this?” Max would say. “What’s all this junk?”
“Junk?” In her
mind, she was sitting on the side of the bed. “This isn’t junk, Max. These are
what made you wake up.”
PRESENTS
#6–#9
One feather, two newspapers.
A candy wrapper. A cloud.
The feather was
lovely and trapped, in the door hinges of the church on Munich Street. It poked
itself crookedly out and Liesel hurried over to rescue it. The fibers were
combed flat on the left, but the right side was made of delicate edges and
sections of jagged triangles. There was no other way of describing it.
The newspapers
came from the cold depths of a garbage can (enough said), and the candy wrapper
was flat and faded. She found it near the school and held it up to the light.
It contained a collage of shoe prints.
Then the cloud.
How do you give
someone a piece of sky?
Late in
February, she stood on Munich Street and watched a single giant cloud come over
the hills like a white monster. It climbed the mountains. The sun was eclipsed,
and in its place, a white beast with a gray heart watched the town.
“Would you look
at that?” she said to Papa.
Hans cocked his
head and stated what he felt was the obvious. “You should give it to Max,
Liesel. See if you can leave it on the bedside table, like all the other
things.”
Liesel watched
him as if he’d gone insane. “How, though?”
Lightly, he
tapped her skull with his knuckles. “Memorize it. Then write it down for him.”
“. . . It was
like a great white beast,” she said at her next bedside vigil, “and it came
from over the mountains.”
When the
sentence was completed with several different adjustments and additions, Liesel
felt like she’d done it. She imagined the vision of it passing from her hand to
his, through the blankets, and she wrote it down on a scrap of paper, placing
the stone on top of it.
PRESENTS
#10–#13
One toy soldier.
One miraculous leaf.
A finished whistler.
A slab of grief.
The soldier was
buried in the dirt, not far from Tommy Müller’s place. It was scratched and
trodden, which, to Liesel, was the whole point. Even with injury, it could
still stand up.
The leaf was a
maple and she found it in the school broom closet, among the buckets and
feather dusters. The door was slightly ajar. The leaf was dry and hard, like
toasted bread, and there were hills and valleys all over its skin. Somehow, the
leaf had made its way into the school hallway and into that closet. Like half a
star with a stem. Liesel reached in and twirled it in her fingers.
Unlike the other
items, she did not place the leaf on the bedside table. She pinned it to the
closed curtain, just before reading the final thirty-four pages of
The
Whistler.
She did not have
dinner that afternoon or go to the toilet. She didn’t drink. All day at school,
she had promised herself that she would finish reading the book today, and Max
Vandenburg was going to listen. He was going to wake up.