The Book Thief Part 26

Max disagreed. "Yes we could. You can't marry a Jew, but there's no law against fighting one."

Walter smiled. "There's probably a law rewarding it-as long as you win."

For the next few years, they saw each other sporadically at best. Max, with the rest of the Jews, was steadily rejected and repeatedly trodden upon, while Walter disappeared inside his job. A printing firm.

If you're the type who's interested, yes, there were a few girls in those years. One named Tania, the other Hildi. Neither of them lasted. There was no time, most likely due to the uncertainty and mounting pressure. Max needed to scavenge for work. What could he offer those girls? By 1938, it was difficult to imagine that life could get any harder.

Then came November 9. Kristallnacht. The night of broken gla.s.s.

It was the very incident that destroyed so many of his fellow Jews, but it proved to be Max Vandenburg's moment of escape. He was twenty-two.

Many Jewish establishments were being surgically smashed and looted when there was a clatter of knuckles on the apartment door. With his aunt, his mother, his cousins, and their children, Max was crammed into the living room.

"Aufmachen!"

The family watched each other. There was a great temptation to scatter into the other rooms, but apprehension is the strangest thing. They couldn't move.

Again. "Open up!"

Isaac stood and walked to the door. The wood was alive, still humming from the beating it had just been given. He looked back at the faces naked with fear, turned the lock, and opened the door.

As expected, it was a n.a.z.i. In uniform.

"Never."

That was Max's first response.

He clung to his mother's hand and that of Sarah, the nearest of his cousins. "I won't leave. If we all can't go, I don't go, either."

He was lying.

When he was pushed out by the rest of his family, the relief struggled inside him like an obscenity. It was something he didn't want to feel, but nonetheless, he felt it with such gusto it made him want to throw up. How could he? How could he?

But he did.

"Bring nothing," Walter told him. "Just what you're wearing. I'll give you the rest."

"Max." It was his mother.

From a drawer, she took an old piece of paper and stuffed it in his jacket pocket. "If ever ..." She held him one last time, by the elbows. "This could be your last hope."

He looked into her aging face and kissed her, very hard, on the lips.

"Come on." Walter pulled at him as the rest of the family said their goodbyes and gave him money and a few valuables. "It's chaos out there, and chaos is what we need."

They left, without looking back.

It tortured him.

If only he'd turned for one last look at his family as he left the apartment. Perhaps then the guilt would not have been so heavy. No final goodbye.

No final grip of the eyes.

Nothing but goneness.

For the next two years, he remained in hiding, in an empty storeroom. It was in a building where Walter had worked in previous years. There was very little food. There was plenty of suspicion. The remaining Jews with money in the neighborhood were emigrating. The Jews without money were also trying, but without much success. Max's family fell into the latter category. Walter checked on them occasionally, as inconspicuously as he could. One afternoon, when he visited, someone else opened the door.

When Max heard the news, his body felt like it was being screwed up into a ball, like a page littered with mistakes. Like garbage.

Yet each day, he managed to unravel and straighten himself, disgusted and thankful. Wrecked, but somehow not torn into pieces.

Halfway through 1939, just over six months into the period of hiding, they decided that a new course of action needed to be taken. They examined the piece of paper Max was handed upon his desertion. That's right-his desertion, not only his escape. That was how he viewed it, amid the grotesquerie of his relief. We already know what was written on that piece of paper:

ONE NAME, ONE ADDRESS.

Hans Hubermann

Himmel Street 33, Molching

"It's getting worse," Walter told Max. "Anytime now, they could find us out." There was much hunching in the dark. "We don't know what might happen. I might get caught. You might need to find that place .... I'm too scared to ask anyone for help here. They might put me in." There was only one solution. "I'll go down there and find this man. If he's turned into a n.a.z.i-which is very likely-I'll just turn around. At least we know then, richtig?"

Max gave him every last pfennig to make the trip, and a few days later, when Walter returned, they embraced before he held his breath. "And?"

Walter nodded. "He's good. He still plays that accordion your mother told you about-your father's. He's not a member of the party. He gave me money." At this stage, Hans Hubermann was only a list. "He's fairly poor, he's married, and there's a kid."

This sparked Max's attention even further. "How old?"

"Ten. You can't have everything."

"Yes. Kids have big mouths."

"We're lucky as it is."

They sat in silence awhile. It was Max who disturbed it.

"He must already hate me, huh?"

"I don't think so. He gave me the money, didn't he? He said a promise is a promise."

A week later, a letter came. Hans notified Walter Kugler that he would try to send things to help whenever he could. There was a one-page map of Molching and Greater Munich, as well as a direct route from Pasing (the more reliable train station) to his front door. In his letter, the last words were obvious.

Be careful.

Midway through May 1940, Mein Kampf arrived, with a key taped to the inside cover.

The man's a genius, Max decided, but there was still a shudder when he thought about traveling to Munich. Clearly, he wished, along with the other parties involved, that the journey would not have to be made at all.

You don't always get what you wish for.

Especially in n.a.z.i Germany.

Again, time pa.s.sed.

The war expanded.

Max remained hidden from the world in another empty room.

Until the inevitable.

Walter was notified that he was being sent to Poland, to continue the a.s.sertion of Germany's authority over both the Poles and Jews alike. One was not much better than the other. The time had come.

Max made his way to Munich and Molching, and now he sat in a stranger's kitchen, asking for the help he craved and suffering the condemnation he felt he deserved.

Hans Hubermann shook his hand and introduced himself.

He made him some coffee in the dark.

The girl had been gone quite a while, but now some more footsteps had approached arrival. The wildcard.

In the darkness, all three of them were completely isolated. They all stared. Only the woman spoke.

THE WRATH OF ROSA.

Liesel had drifted back to sleep when the unmistakable voice of Rosa Hubermann entered the kitchen. It shocked her awake.

"Was ist los?"

Curiosity got the better of her then, as she imagined a tirade thrown down from the wrath of Rosa. There was definite movement and the shuffle of a chair.

After ten minutes of excruciating discipline, Liesel made her way to the corridor, and what she saw truly amazed her, because Rosa Hubermann was at Max Vandenburg's shoulder, watching him gulp down her infamous pea soup. Candlelight was standing at the table. It did not waver.

Mama was grave.

Her plump figure glowed with worry.

Somehow, though, there was also a look of triumph on her face, and it was not the triumph of having saved another human being from persecution. It was something more along the lines of, See? At least he's not complaining. She looked from the soup to the Jew to the soup.

When she spoke again, she asked only if he wanted more.

Max declined, preferring instead to rush to the sink and vomit. His back convulsed and his arms were well spread. His fingers gripped the metal.

"Jesus, Mary, and Joseph," Rosa muttered. "Another one."

Turning around, Max apologized. His words were slippery and small, quelled by the acid. "I'm sorry. I think I ate too much. My stomach, you know, it's been so long since ... I don't think it can handle such-"

"Move," Rosa ordered him. She started cleaning up.

When she was finished, she found the young man at the kitchen table, utterly morose. Hans was sitting opposite, his hands cupped above the sheet of wood.

Liesel, from the hallway, could see the drawn face of the stranger, and behind it, the worried expression scribbled like a mess onto Mama.

She looked at both her foster parents.

Who were these people?

LIESEL'S LECTURE Exactly what kind of people Hans and Rosa Hubermann were was not the easiest problem to solve. Kind people? Ridiculously ignorant people? People of questionable sanity?

What was easier to define was their predicament.

THE SITUATION OF HANS AND.

ROSA HUBERMANN.

Very sticky indeed.

In fact, frightfully sticky.