Not many people who came from his neighborhood were fighters, and if they were, they didn’t do it with their fists. In those days, they said the Jews preferred to simply stand and take things. Take the abuse quietly and then work their way back to the top. Obviously, every Jew is not the same.
He was nearly two years old when his father died, shot to pieces on a grassy hill.
When he was nine, his mother was completely broke. She sold the music studio that doubled as their apartment and they moved to his uncle’s house. There he grew up with six cousins who battered, annoyed, and loved him. Fighting with the oldest one, Isaac, was the training ground for his fist fighting. He was trounced almost every night.
At thirteen, tragedy struck again when his uncle died.
As percentages would suggest, his uncle was not a hothead like Max. He was the type of person who worked quietly away for very little reward. He kept to himself and sacrificed everything for his family—and he died of something growing in his stomach. Something akin to a poison bowling ball.
As is often the case, the family surrounded the bed and watched him capitulate.
Somehow, between the sadness and loss, Max Vandenburg, who was now a teenager with hard hands, blackened eyes, and a sore tooth, was also a little disappointed. Even disgruntled. As he watched his uncle sink slowly into the bed, he decided that he would never allow himself to die like that.
The man’s face was so accepting.
So yellow and tranquil, despite the violent architecture of his skull—the endless jawline, stretching for miles; the pop-up cheek-bones; and the pothole eyes. So calm it made the boy want to ask something.
Where’s the fight? he wondered.
Where’s the will to hold on?
Of course, at thirteen, he was a little excessive in his harshness. He had not looked something like me in the face. Not yet.
With the rest of them, he stood around the bed and watched the man die—a safe merge, from life to death. The light in the window was gray and orange, the color of summer’s skin, and his uncle appeared relieved when his breathing disappeared completely.
“When death captures me,” the boy vowed, “he will feel my fist on his face.”
Personally, I quite like that. Such stupid gallantry.
Yes.
I like that a lot.
From that moment on, he started to fight with greater regularity. A group of die-hard friends and enemies would gather down at a small reserve on Steber Street, and they would fight in the dying light. Archetypal Germans, the odd Jew, the boys from the east. It didn’t matter. There was nothing like a good fight to expel the teenage energy. Even the enemies were an inch away from friendship.
He enjoyed the tight circles and the unknown.
The bittersweetness of uncertainty:
To win or to lose.
It was a feeling in the stomach that would be stirred around until he thought he could no longer tolerate it. The only remedy was to move forward and throw punches. Max was not the type of boy to die thinking about it.
• • •
His favorite fight, now that he looked back, was Fight Number Five against a tall, tough, rangy kid named Walter Kugler. They were fifteen. Walter had won all four of their previous encounters, but this time, Max could feel something different. There was new blood in him—the blood of victory—and it had the capability to both frighten and excite.
As always, there was a tight circle crowded around them. There was grubby ground. There were smiles practically wrapped around the onlooking faces. Money was clutched in filthy fingers, and the calls and cries were filled with such vitality that there was nothing else but this.
God, there was such joy and fear there, such brilliant commotion.
The two fighters were clenched with the intensity of the moment, their faces loaded up with expression, exaggerated with the stress of it. The wide-eyed concentration.
After a minute or so of testing each other out, they began moving closer and taking more risks. It was a street fight after all, not an hour-long title fight. They didn’t have all day.
“Come on, Max!” one of his friends was calling out. There was no breath between any of the words. “Come on, Maxi Taxi, you’ve got him now, you’ve got him, Jew boy, you’ve got him, you’ve got him!”
A small kid with soft tufts of hair, a beaten nose, and swampy eyes, Max was a good head shorter than his opposition. His fighting style was utterly graceless, all bent over, nudging forward, throwing fast punches at the face of Kugler. The other boy, clearly stronger and more skillful, remained upright, throwing jabs that constantly landed on Max’s cheeks and chin.