The Book Thief

THE CARD PLAYER

Around about the same time Liesel and Rudy were eating the biscuits, the resting men of the LSE were playing cards in a town not far from Essen. They’d just completed the long trip from Stuttgart and were gambling for cigarettes. Reinhold Zucker was not a happy man.

‘He’s cheating, I swear it,’ he muttered. They were in a shed that served as their barracks and Hans Hubermann had just won his third consecutive hand. Zucker threw his cards down in disgust and combed his greasy hair with a threesome of dirty fingernails.

SOME FACTS ABOUT REINHOLD ZUCKER

He was twenty-four. When he won a round

of cards, he gloated – he would hold the

thin cylinders of tobacco to his nose and

breathe them in. ‘The smell of victory,’

he would say. Oh, and one more thing.

He would die with his mouth open.

Unlike the young man to his left, Hans Hubermann didn’t gloat when he won. He was even generous enough to give each colleague one of his cigarettes back and light it for him. All but Reinhold Zucker took up the invitation. He snatched at the offering and flung it back to the middle of the turned-over box. ‘I don’t need your charity, old man.’ He stood up and left.

‘What’s wrong with him?’ the sergeant enquired, but no-one cared enough to answer. Reinhold Zucker was just a twenty-four-year-old boy who could not play cards to save his life.

Had he not lost his cigarettes to Hans Hubermann, he wouldn’t have despised him. If he hadn’t despised him, he might not have taken his place a few weeks later on a fairly innocuous road.

One seat, two men, a short argument and me.

It kills me sometimes, how people die.