“Hi, Max.”
“Hi, Liesel.”
They would sit and read.
At times, she would watch him. She decided that he could best be summed up as a picture of pale concentration. Beige-colored skin. A swamp in each eye. And he breathed like a fugitive. Desperate yet soundless. It was only his chest that gave him away for something alive.
Increasingly, Liesel would close her eyes and ask Max to quiz her on the words she was continually getting wrong, and she would swear if they still escaped her. She would then stand and paint those words to the wall, anywhere up to a dozen times. Together, Max Vandenburg and Liesel Meminger would take in the odor of paint fumes and cement.
“Bye, Max.”
“Bye, Liesel.”
In bed, she would lie awake, imagining him below, in the basement. In her bedtime visions, he always slept fully clothed, shoes included, just in case he needed to flee again. He slept with one eye open.
The Weatherman: Mid-May
Liesel opened the door and her mouth simultaneously.
On Himmel Street, her team had trounced Rudy’s 6-1, and triumphant, she burst into the kitchen, telling Mama and Papa all about the goal she’d scored. She then rushed down to the basement to describe it blow by blow to Max, who put down his newspaper and intently listened and laughed with the girl.
When the story of the goal was complete, there was silence for a good few minutes, until Max looked slowly up. “Would you do something for me, Liesel?”
Still excited by her Himmel Street goal, the girl jumped from the drop sheets. She did not say it, but her movement clearly showed her intent to provide exactly what he wanted.
“You told me all about the goal,” he said, “but I don’t know what sort of day it is up there. I don’t know if you scored it in the sun, or if the clouds have covered everything.” His hand prodded at his short-cropped hair, and his swampy eyes pleaded for the simplest of simple things. “Could you go up and tell me how the weather looks?”
Naturally, Liesel hurried up the stairs. She stood a few feet from the spit-stained door and turned on the spot, observing the sky.
When she returned to the basement, she told him.
“The sky is blue today, Max, and there is a big long cloud, and it’s stretched out, like a rope. At the end of it, the sun is like a yellow hole ….”
Max, at that moment, knew that only a child could have given him a weather report like that. On the wall, he painted a long, tightly knotted rope with a dripping yellow sun at the end of it, as if you could dive right into it. On the ropy cloud, he drew two figures—a thin girl and a withering Jew—and they were walking, arms balanced, toward that dripping sun. Beneath the picture, he wrote the following sentence.
THE WALL-WRITTEN WORDS
OF MAX VANDENBURG
It was a Monday, and they walked
on a tightrope to the sun.
The Boxer: End of May
For Max Vandenburg, there was cool cement and plenty of time to spend with it.
The minutes were cruel.
Hours were punishing.
Standing above him at all moments of awakeness was the hand of time, and it didn’t hesitate to wring him out. It smiled and squeezed and let him live. What great malice there could be in allowing something to live.
At least once a day, Hans Hubermann would descend the basement steps and share a conversation. Rosa would occasionally bring a spare crust of bread. It was when Liesel came down, however, that Max found himself most interested in life again. Initially, he tried to resist, but it was harder every day that the girl appeared, each time with a new weather report, either of pure blue sky, cardboard clouds, or a sun that had broken through like God sitting down after he’d eaten too much for his dinner.
When he was alone, his most distinct feeling was of disappearance. All of his clothes were gray—whether they’d started out that way or not—from his pants to his woolen sweater to the jacket that dripped from him now like water. He often checked if his skin was flaking, for it was as if he were dissolving.
What he needed was a series of new projects. The first was exercise. He started with push-ups, lying stomach-down on the cool basement floor, then hoisting himself up. It felt like his arms snapped at each elbow, and he envisaged his heart seeping out of him and dropping pathetically to the ground. As a teenager in Stuttgart, he could reach fifty push-ups at a time. Now, at the age of twenty-four, perhaps fifteen pounds lighter than his usual weight, he could barely make it to ten. After a week, he was completing three sets each of sixteen push-ups and twenty-two sit-ups. When he was finished, he would sit against the basement wall with his paint-can friends, feeling his pulse in his teeth. His muscles felt like cake.