The Berlin Boxing Club Read online

  “Gott sei Dank!” she said. “You’re here.”

  “What’s going on?”

  “The kitchen,” she said. “I’ll take Hildy.”

  She plucked Hildy out of my father’s arms and carried her to her room. My father and I continued down the hallway. As we entered the kitchen, I was shocked to be confronted by Uncle Jakob bending over the sink with his bare ass hanging in the air. A small dark bloody hole had punctured his left buttock, which my mother was probing with a long tweezers. A bottle of my father’s brandy sat open beside Jakob, and he clutched a glass of the brown liquid in one hand.

  “Scheisse!” he gasped as she moved the tweezers.

  “I said hold still.”

  “What are you using?” he said. “A soup ladle?”

  “What the hell is this?” my father demanded.

  “Oh, I thought I’d just stop by and say hello, Sig.” Uncle Jakob quipped through gritted teeth. “It’s been a long time since my sister poked me in the ass with a sharp object. Agh!” he screamed. Even in intense pain, Uncle Jakob could make me laugh.

  Before I’d met Max Schmeling, Uncle Jakob had been the person I most admired. In his late twenties, Uncle Jakob was confident, funny, and rebellious, and he always sparred with my father about everything from sports to politics, even the weather. We shared a love of American cowboy movies, and he would often pepper his speech with western slang and call me buckaroo. Tall and lean like me, he had bright red hair and pale gray eyes.

  The older sibling by four years, my mother was the more serious and studious of the two. She stood five feet eight, tall for a woman, and she wore her hair pulled back in a modest bun that fully revealed her pretty features and smooth skin that reminded me of a porcelain doll. She rarely used any makeup, save for some lipstick. Her one indulgence was an expensive face cream in a large white glass tub with a silver top, which she spread on herself every evening.

  People who knew her superficially would’ve said that she was quiet and almost submissive. But I understood that her quietness was really a pensive quality. She was prone to blue periods that my father described as “one of her moods,” though this phrase seemed far too lighthearted to describe these deep bouts of depression. When a mood came on, my mother would take on a glassy-eyed expression and retreat to her bed for hours and sometimes days, sleeping up to twenty hours at a stretch, emerging only to use the toilet and retrieve a glass of water or piece of bread. Other times she would soak in a hot tub for hours.

  “She needs rest and quiet,” my father would say. “That’s all. She’ll be back on her feet in no time.”

  And usually he was right. She would suddenly emerge from her slumber as if nothing had happened, as if someone had lifted a lead cloak off her body and she could finally move again. These episodes were scary and painful, but they did not affect our day-to-day life much because Frau Kressel was always there to cook, clean, and take care of our needs.

  I rarely saw my mother cross or question my father about anything. Tonight was a rare exception.

  “Shhhhh!” my father hissed. “The neighbors.”

  “Put the towel back in your mouth and bite,” she told Jakob.

  “I told you I’m not hungry, dear sister.”

  “Do it!” she said. He dutifully stuck a wadded-up towel into his mouth.

  “Hold still!” she said. “I think I got it.”

  Uncle Jakob bit down on the towel, muting his deepest grunt yet.

  “There,” my mother said, slowly extracting a small black bloody pebble from inside him. She placed it in a ceramic mixing bowl with a sharp wet clink. Frau Kressel entered, and my mother handed her a towel.

  “Hold this against the wound while I get some thread.”

  Frau Kressel pressed the towel against the wound, sending a small trickle of blood coursing down the back of his leg.

  “Why, Kressel, we hardly know each other,” Jakob joked.

  “Stillschweigen!” she said, and pressed a bit harder to shut him up.

  My mother finally broke her concentration and turned to look at us, her eyes bulging as they fell on me.

  “What happened to you?”

  “Him?” my father gasped. “He’ll be fine. Now what the hell is going on here?”

  My mother ignored him and came toward me, still holding the bloody tweezers. She lightly caressed the uninjured side of my face.

  “Are you okay?” she asked.

  “Yes.” I nodded. “I tripped down some stairs.”

  “Hope you gave the stairs a good licking, buckaroo,” Uncle Jakob cracked. “Looks like you got smacked by a whole house.”

  “Will one of you please explain?” my father demanded.

  My mother turned to her sewing kit and retrieved a needle and thread.

  “We were having a meeting,” Jakob started. “A simple meeting—”

  “Wait,” my father interrupted. “Karl, go to your room.”

  “What?” I whined. “I’m old enough—”

  “No,” my father said.

  “Sig, he’s fourteen,” Jakob countered.

  “You, say nothing,” my father said, pointing an angry finger at him. “This is my house.”

  “He should know what’s happening—”

  “He knows enough,” my father said. “You’re already putting us in danger just being here.”

  “We’re all in danger, Sig.”

  “I decide what’s right for my—”

  “Enough,” my mother interrupted. “Karl, go to bed.”

  “Mama . . .”

  I looked at my mother, but she just came over and gave me a light kiss on the forehead, careful to avoid the bruised areas.

  “Just go,” she said. “It’s been a long night. You need rest. We all do.”

  I hesitated and looked at Uncle Jakob in the hope that he’d fight for me to stay. He just winked at me.

  “One of my girlfriends found out about one of my other girlfriends, and the next thing I knew I had a hole in my Hintern. I bet that’s what happened to you too, and you’re just too embarrassed to say in front of your mother, right, buckaroo?”

  Reluctantly I turned and retreated down the hall to my room.

  Drawing In on Max

  I LAY AWAKE IN BED, TRYING TO EAVESDROP, BUT FROM my room, I couldn’t hear a thing that was going on in the kitchen. I already suspected exactly what had happened. From whispered conversations I had overheard in the past, I knew Uncle Jakob was a member of an underground Communist group that was trying to organize against the Nazis. I assumed he was part of a secret meeting that had been broken up by the Gestapo and that he’d gotten shot while he fled the scene. My father hated politics and always shouted Jakob down whenever he tried to talk about his “group.”

  “I learned everything I needed to know about politics and religion during the war,” my father said. “They’re all worthless.”

  About an hour after I had retreated to my room, I heard Jakob leave.

  My own fantasies far overpowered everything else that night, even the fact of my uncle’s getting shot. I kept replaying the events of the evening over in my head and felt a strange rush of excitement as I remembered every detail of my encounter with Max. After Adolf Hitler, he was probably the most admired man in Germany. He had been the first German to capture the world heavyweight title in 1930, after beating Jack Sharkey. Even though two years later Max lost the title in a rematch with Sharkey, he was still considered one of the best fighters in the world. In his book Mein Kampf, Hitler specifically advocated for boxing to be part of the standard physical fitness program for all German boys. Propaganda Minister Goebbels used Max in the Nazi press as an example of the ideal German man for boys to emulate.

  My parents’ bedroom was next to my own, so later, when they got into bed, I leaned my head against the wall behind my bed to better hear the sound vibrating from their room. They were no longer arguing about Jakob. My father talked about the disappointing sales at the gallery, despite Max’s
and Anny’s appearance, and finally the bargain for my boxing lessons.

  “Boxing lessons?” My mother reacted with as much dismay as my father had when he’d first heard the idea. “He’ll get hurt. Sig, you shouldn’t have let it happen.”

  “You think I’m happy about it? We could’ve used that money.”

  “Just tell Max that Karl changed his mind and doesn’t want the lessons,” my mother countered. “I’m sure he’ll pay you something for the painting.”

  My entire body tensed. I had already started to imagine myself as Max’s protégé and becoming a warrior, the envy of every boy in Germany. Now she threatened to end my dream before it began. I held my breath.

  “It’s too awkward, Rebecca,” my father said. “We shook on it. A deal’s a deal.”

  “Why can’t you just tell him Karl doesn’t want to do it?”

  “But he does want to do it,” my father said.

  “How do you know?”

  “What boy in his right mind wouldn’t want boxing lessons from Max Schmeling?” My father continued: “And just look at him. He’s a piece of straw. He walks around as if a breeze might knock him over. He needs to be able to defend himself.”

  As much as it hurt to hear my father’s unflattering evaluation of my stature, I knew he was right.

  “What happened to my pacifist husband?”

  “Did you see his face tonight?”

  “He said he fell down some stairs—”

  “Perhaps he did, but only after he was beaten and pushed,” my father said. My mouth fell open in surprise that he had known the truth all along.

  “Who?” my mother gasped.

  “I don’t know,” my father said. “Maybe the Hellendorf kid. His father’s one of them. He’s got some new job working with the government. With the way things are right now, it couldn’t hurt for Karl to learn how to use his fists.”

  “But our son wants to be an artist. He has my father’s gift.”

  Although he died before I was born, I knew my grandfather had been a well-known artist. He was even commissioned to paint a portrait of the kaiser that hung in his private home for years. As a young woman my mother had also been a gifted painter. She was studying at the art institute at the time she met my father, who picked her up at a student exhibition by offering to represent her. They married while my mother was still a student, and she dropped out of the institute to make a home for our family. After that, she didn’t pick up a brush again. Whenever it came up, she’d simply say she’d “lost interest.” When I asked my father, he replied that she “didn’t have the temperament to be a painter.”

  Art had always come naturally to me. Since I was ten years old, I had kept a sketchbook journal in which I recorded little illustrations and cartoons of what was going on around me or inside my head. My parents hoped I’d become a painter or perhaps an architect. But I was mad for the newspaper comic strips that were becoming popular and dreamed of working as a newspaper cartoonist or illustrator. My father hated cartoons and thought they were lowbrow and beneath me. This was a constant source of friction between us.

  “Why would you want to waste your talent on cheap laughs about mice and children?” he’d say dismissively. “Art should elevate humanity. It should be more than just pie-in-the-face nonsense.”

  Despite his disapproval, I loyally practiced my cartooning and held on to the fantasy of working for a big newspaper one day.

  I couldn’t get to sleep that night. So to relax myself, I found a photograph of Max in a book of great German sports heroes I had and sketched a caricature of him into my journal. As I drew the deep manly lines and shadows of his face, something became clear to me: Max did not fit the stereotype of a blond, blue-eyed Aryan superman. He had dark hair and eyes, thick eyebrows, and a wide nose. He also tended to grow a heavy five-o’clock shadow. He resembled a Jew more closely than any Nordic hero. This made me feel closer to Max and his world. As the picture came together, a new dream formed in my head as I imagined myself transforming into a champion boxer.

  I put down my pen and pad and held up my arms in the darkness and looked at the thin silhouettes of my fingers. Then I curled them into fists and was pleased by the transformation as each delicate finger disappeared into a small, blunt shadow. Max had praised my reach. So I extended my arms in front of me and out to the side and for the first time noticed how long they were, as if I were a bird opening its full wingspan. Perhaps I really was the mighty Spatz, like Hildy imagined.

  I picked up the small rubber ball Max had given me from my night table and gave it a series of squeezes, one hundred with each hand. I vowed to follow every piece of advice Max gave me to the letter, thinking that if I did, I would be transformed into something more like him.

  My parents finally drifted into silence in the next room, and I set the ball back on my night table. In my half-awake dreams I saw myself in a boxing ring, squaring off against the Wolf Pack. I fought them one at a time, dancing around the ring and dispatching them with an expert series of blows. I moved with ease, as if I were spinning around them on ice skates, moving in to punch and then gliding back. First Franz fell, then Julius, and finally Gertz also collapsed in a heap. I stood above their prone bodies and heard the crowds cheering wildly. I raised my long arms over my head in victory. They seemed to reach all the way to the clouds.

  Greta

  AT FIVE-THIRTY THE NEXT MORNING MY ALARM CLOCK jolted me awake. I typically slept until at least seven, and at first I was so foggy, I couldn’t remember why I had set the alarm in the first place. Then I felt my bruised face throb as I shifted my head against the pillow, and the events of the previous day came rushing back to me: my beating at the hands of the Wolf Pack, meeting Max Schmeling, and the barter. And I sprang up out of bed determined to fulfill Max’s training regimen to the letter, including the daily three hundred. When he called for my first lesson, I would be ready. I vowed that every morning I would do sit-ups and push-ups as soon as I got out of bed; then I would run to the park near my house, which had a chin-up bar. The run to the park and back would equal about fifty minutes of roadwork. It sounded simple. Yet when I got out of bed and tried to do the push-ups, I barely hit ten before my arms started to wobble. By the fifteenth, I could feel my chest and shoulder muscles shake, and by number seventeen I had collapsed. I was able to complete eighty sit-ups, just twenty shy of my goal.

  I quickly got dressed in lightweight pants and a blue sweatshirt and ran to the park. The sky was just beginning to lighten, and the streets were relatively empty and quiet at that hour. As I passed the newsstand on our corner, a deliveryman unloaded bound stacks of morning papers onto the sidewalk. He nodded to me as I passed and watched me run by with a look that I took to be respect. I nodded back, straightened my posture, and ran a little faster. Along my route, I passed a milkman in a donkey cart making deliveries, a shabby old street sweeper pushing a rusted dustbin on wheels, even a weary prostitute walking home from a long night. I felt a satisfying surge of adrenaline at being the only person out there in training, seeing a side of the world I had never seen before. I was already someone different, someone special. The run to the park left me winded but still standing.

  I stood in front of the bar, examining it. I had never tried to do chin-ups before. But how difficult could they be? I reached for the bar, which was cold and unforgiving. I pulled mightily, and my arms shook with the effort. I just barely got my chin over the bar once when my muscles gave out and I swung back down. I dangled from the bar for a few seconds, trying to find the strength for another pull, before falling to the ground, feeling utterly defeated. All of my energy from the run drained away as I picked myself up off the dirt and cursed my weakness. I might have good reach, but I was no athlete. I ran home, determined at least to fulfill the running portion of the three hundred.

  Unfortunately, I ran out of steam and had to walk the last five minutes of the trip back to the apartment, leaving me with a total of 45 minutes of roadwork, 1 chin-up, 17 pus
h-ups, and 80 sit-ups, for a grand total of 143. Not even half of the coveted 300. I sketched diagrams of the basic exercises into my journal, careful to capture what I thought was the perfect technique. Then I dutifully recorded my workout totals, disappointed at my poor results but determined to shovel the coal so at least I would have succeeded at one of my tasks.

  Next I went to the basement to see our building superintendent, Herr Koplek, who lived in a small room adjacent to the furnace room. He was also an avowed fan of Hitler and kept a Nazi flag pinned to the outside of his door. He loyally read the Nazi tabloid, Der Stürmer, which featured the most virulent anti-Semitic articles and cartoons. I secretly swiped Herr Koplek’s old copies of Der Stürmer and kept them under my mattress, but because of the pinups, not because of the Nazi propaganda.

  My mother and father thought Herr Koplek an imbecile. When he first hung the Nazi flag on his door, my father said, “Koplek is just the kind of idiot who falls for that kind of sword rattling and chest pounding.”

  I hesitated for a moment but then took a deep breath and knocked on the door in the center of the swastika flag.

  “Ja?” a gruff voice called from inside.

  “It’s Karl Stern, Herr Koplek.”

  I heard rustling from inside and then the door swung open, revealing Herr Koplek, a squat man with a thick red neck and a bristly gray brush cut, standing in his undershirt, looking annoyed.

  “Well?” he asked impatiently.

  “I wanted to see if you you’d allow me to shovel the morning coal for you?”

  “Shovel the coal?” His eyes narrowed.

  “Yes . . .”

  “I’ll not have you stealing from the building’s supply for your stove,” he said, shutting the door.

  “No, Herr Koplek,” I said, grabbing the door before it could close. “I’m in training.”

  “Training?” He paused. “Training for what?”

  “To be a boxer.”

  He laughed. “A skinny thing like you would get snapped in half.”