“Say ‘heil’ when
you go in there,” he warned her stiffly. “Unless you want to walk a little
farther.” Even when they were well past the shop, Liesel looked back and the
magnified eyes were still there, fastened to the window.
Around the
corner, Munich Street (the main road in and out of Molching) was strewn with
slosh.
As was often the
case, a few rows of troops in training came marching past. Their uniforms
walked upright and their black boots further polluted the snow. Their faces
were fixed ahead in concentration.
Once they’d
watched the soldiers disappear, the group of Steiners and Liesel walked past
some shop windows and the imposing town hall, which in later years would be
chopped off at the knees and buried. A few of the shops were abandoned and
still labeled with yellow stars and anti-Jewish slurs. Farther down, the church
aimed itself at the sky, its rooftop a study of collaborated tiles. The street,
overall, was a lengthy tube of gray—a corridor of dampness, people stooped in
the cold, and the splashed sound of watery footsteps.
At one stage,
Rudy rushed ahead, dragging Liesel with him.
He knocked on
the window of a tailor’s shop.
Had she been
able to read the sign, she would have noticed that it belonged to Rudy’s
father. The shop was not yet open, but inside, a man was preparing articles of
clothing behind the counter. He looked up and waved.
“My papa,” Rudy
informed her, and they were soon among a crowd of various-sized Steiners, each
waving or blowing kisses at their father or simply standing and nodding hello
(in the case of the oldest ones), then moving on, toward the final landmark
before school.
THE
LAST STOP
The road of yellow stars
It was a place
nobody wanted to stay and look at, but almost everyone did. Shaped like a long,
broken arm, the road contained several houses with lacerated windows and
bruised walls. The Star of David was painted on their doors. Those houses were
almost like lepers. At the very least, they were infected sores on the injured
German terrain.
“Schiller
Strasse,” Rudy said. “The road of yellow stars.”
At the bottom,
some people were moving around. The drizzle made them look like ghosts. Not
humans, but shapes, moving about beneath the lead-colored clouds.
“Come on, you
two,” Kurt (the oldest of the Steiner children) called back, and Rudy and
Liesel walked quickly toward him.
At school, Rudy
made a special point of seeking Liesel out during the breaks. He didn’t care
that others made noises about the new girl’s stupidity. He was there for her at
the beginning, and he would be there later on, when Liesel’s frustration boiled
over. But he wouldn’t do it for free.
THE
ONLY THING WORSE THAN
A BOY WHO HATES YOU
A boy who loves you.
In late April,
when they’d returned from school for the day, Rudy and Liesel waited on Himmel
Street for the usual game of soccer. They were slightly early, and no other
kids had turned up yet. The one person they saw was the gutter-mouthed
Pfiffikus.
“Look there.”
Rudy pointed.
A
PORTRAIT OF PFIFFIKUS
He was a delicate frame.
He was white hair.
He was a black raincoat, brown pants, decomposing shoes, and
a mouth—and what a mouth it was.
“Hey,
Pfiffikus!”
As the distant
figure turned, Rudy started whistling.
The old man
simultaneously straightened and proceeded to swear with a ferocity that can
only be described as a talent. No one seemed to know the real name that
belonged to him, or at least if they did, they never used it. He was only
called Pfiffikus because you give that name to someone who likes to whistle,
which Pfiffikus most definitely did. He was constantly whistling a tune called
the Radetzky March, and all the kids in town would call out to him and
duplicate that tune. At that precise moment, Pfiffikus would abandon his usual
walking style (bent forward, taking large, lanky steps, arms behind his
raincoated back) and erect himself to deliver abuse. It was then that any
impression of serenity was violently interrupted, for his voice was brimming
with rage.
On this
occasion, Liesel followed Rudy’s taunt almost as a reflex action.
“Pfiffikus!” she
echoed, quickly adopting the appropriate cruelty that childhood seems to
require. Her whistling was awful, but there was no time to perfect it.
He chased them,
calling out. It started with
“Geh’ scheissen!”
and deteriorated rapidly
from there. At first, he leveled his abuse only at the boy, but soon enough, it
was Liesel’s turn.
“You little
slut!” he roared at her. The words clobbered her in the back. “I’ve never seen
you before!” Fancy calling a ten-year-old girl a slut. That was Pfiffikus. It
was widely agreed that he and Frau Holtzapfel would have made a lovely couple.
“Get back here!” were the last words Liesel and Rudy heard as they continued
running. They ran until they were on Munich Street.
“Come on,” Rudy
said, once they’d recovered their breath. “Just down here a little.”
He took her to
Hubert Oval, the scene of the Jesse Owens incident, where they stood, hands in
pockets. The track was stretched out in front of them. Only one thing could
happen. Rudy started it. “Hundred meters,” he goaded her. “I bet you can’t beat
me.”
Liesel wasn’t
taking any of that. “I bet you I can.”
“What do you
bet, you little
Saumensch
? Have you got any money?”
“Of course not.
Do you?”
“No.” But Rudy
had an idea. It was the lover boy coming out of him. “If I beat you, I get to
kiss you.” He crouched down and began rolling up his trousers.
Liesel was
alarmed, to put it mildly. “What do you want to kiss
me
for? I’m
filthy.”
“So am I.” Rudy
clearly saw no reason why a bit of filth should get in the way of things. It
had been a while between baths for both of them.
She thought
about it while examining the weedy legs of her opposition. They were about
equal with her own. There’s no way he can beat me, she thought. She nodded
seriously. This was business. “You can kiss me if you win. But if
I
win,
I get out of being goalie at soccer.”
Rudy considered
it. “Fair enough,” and they shook on it.
All was
dark-skied and hazy, and small chips of rain were starting to fall.
The track was
muddier than it looked.
Both competitors
were set.
Rudy threw a
rock in the air as the starting pistol. When it hit the ground, they could
start running.
“I can’t even
see the finish line,” Liesel complained.
“And
I
can?”
The rock wedged
itself into the earth.
They ran next to
each other, elbowing and trying to get in front. The slippery ground slurped at
their feet and brought them down perhaps twenty meters from the end.
“Jesus, Mary,
and Joseph!” yelped Rudy. “I’m covered in shit!”
“It’s not shit,”
Liesel corrected him, “it’s mud,” although she had her doubts. They’d slid
another five meters toward the finish. “Do we call it a draw, then?”
Rudy looked
over, all sharp teeth and gangly blue eyes. Half his face was painted with mud.
“If it’s a draw, do I still get my kiss?”
“Not in a
million years.” Liesel stood up and flicked some mud off her jacket.
“I’ll get you
out of goalie.”
“Stick your
goalie.”
As they walked
back to Himmel Street, Rudy forewarned her. “One day, Liesel,” he said, “you’ll
be dying to kiss me.”
But Liesel knew.
She vowed.
As long as both
she and Rudy Steiner lived, she would never kiss that miserable, filthy
Saukerl,
especially not
this
day. There were more important matters to attend
to. She looked down at her suit of mud and stated the obvious.
“She’s going to
kill me.”
She, of course,
was Rosa Hubermann, also known as Mama, and she very nearly did kill her. The
word
Saumensch
featured heavily in the administration of punishment. She
made mincemeat out of her.
THE JESSE OWENS INCIDENT
As we both know,
Liesel wasn’t on hand on Himmel Street when Rudy performed his act of childhood
infamy. When she looked back, though, it felt like she’d actually been there.
In her memory, she had somehow become a member of Rudy’s imaginary audience.
Nobody else mentioned it, but Rudy certainly made up for that, so much that
when Liesel came to recollect her story, the Jesse Owens incident was as much a
part of it as everything she witnessed firsthand.
It was 1936. The
Olympics. Hitler’s games.
Jesse Owens had
just completed the 4 × 100m relay and won his fourth gold medal. Talk that he
was subhuman because he was black and Hitler’s refusal to shake his hand were
touted around the world. Even the most racist Germans were amazed with the
efforts of Owens, and word of his feat slipped through the cracks. No one was
more impressed than Rudy Steiner.
Everyone in his
family was crowded together in their family room when he slipped out and made
his way to the kitchen. He pulled some charcoal from the stove and gripped it
in the smallness of his hands. “Now.” There was a smile. He was ready.
He smeared the
charcoal on, nice and thick, till he was covered in black. Even his hair
received a once-over.
In the window,
the boy grinned almost maniacally at his reflection, and in his shorts and tank
top, he quietly abducted his older brother’s bike and pedaled it up the street,
heading for Hubert Oval. In one of his pockets, he’d hidden a few pieces of
extra charcoal, in case some of it wore off later.
In Liesel’s
mind, the moon was sewn into the sky that night. Clouds were stitched around
it.
The rusty bike
crumbled to a halt at the Hubert Oval fence line and Rudy climbed over. He
landed on the other side and trotted weedily up toward the beginning of the
hundred. Enthusiastically, he conducted an awkward regimen of stretches. He dug
starting holes into the dirt.
Waiting for his
moment, he paced around, gathering concentration under the darkness sky, with
the moon and the clouds watching, tightly.
“Owens is
looking good,” he began to commentate. “This could be his greatest victory
ever. . . .”
He shook the imaginary
hands of the other athletes and wished them luck, even though he knew. They
didn’t have a chance.
The starter
signaled them forward. A crowd materialized around every square inch of Hubert
Oval’s circumference. They were all calling out one thing. They were chanting
Rudy Steiner’s name—and his name was Jesse Owens.
All fell silent.
His bare feet
gripped the soil. He could feel it holding on between his toes.
At the request
of the starter, he raised to crouching position—and the gun clipped a hole in
the night.
For the first
third of the race, it was pretty even, but it was only a matter of time before
the charcoaled Owens drew clear and streaked away.
“Owens in
front,” the boy’s shrill voice cried as he ran down the empty track, straight
toward the uproarious applause of Olympic glory. He could even feel the tape
break in two across his chest as he burst through it in first place. The
fastest man alive.
It was only on
his victory lap that things turned sour. Among the crowd, his father was
standing at the finish line like the bogeyman. Or at least, the bogeyman in a
suit. (As previously mentioned, Rudy’s father was a tailor. He was rarely seen
on the street without a suit and tie. On this occasion, it was only the suit
and a disheveled shirt.)
“Was ist los?”
he said to his
son when he showed up in all his charcoal glory. “What the hell is going on
here?” The crowd vanished. A breeze sprang up. “I was asleep in my chair when
Kurt noticed you were gone. Everyone’s out looking for you.”
Mr. Steiner was
a remarkably polite man under normal circumstances. Discovering one of his
children smeared charcoal black on a summer evening was not what he considered
normal circumstances. “The boy is crazy,” he muttered, although he conceded
that with six kids, something like this was bound to happen. At least one of
them had to be a bad egg. Right now, he was looking at it, waiting for an
explanation. “Well?”
Rudy panted,
bending down and placing his hands on his knees. “I was being Jesse Owens.” He
answered as though it was the most natural thing on earth to be doing. There
was even something implicit in his tone that suggested something along the
lines of, “What the hell does it look like?” The tone vanished, however, when
he saw the sleep deprivation whittled under his father’s eyes.
“Jesse Owens?”
Mr. Steiner was the type of man who was very wooden. His voice was angular and
true. His body was tall and heavy, like oak. His hair was like splinters. “What
about him?”
“You know, Papa,
the Black Magic one.”
“I’ll give
you
black magic.” He caught his son’s ear between his thumb and forefinger.
Rudy winced.
“Ow, that really hurts.”
“Does it?” His
father was more concerned with the clammy texture of charcoal contaminating his
fingers. He covered everything, didn’t he? he thought. It’s even in his ears,
for God’s sake. “Come on.”