“Is that what
you think?” she whispered, standing above the bed. “No.” She could not believe
it. Her answer was sustained as the numbness of the dark waned and outlined the
various shapes, big and small, on the bedside table. The presents.
“Wake up,” she
said.
Max did not wake
up.
For eight more
days.
At school, there
was a rapping of knuckles on the door.
“Come in,”
called Frau Olendrich.
The door opened
and the entire classroom of children looked on in surprise as Rosa Hubermann
stood in the doorway. One or two gasped at the sight—a small wardrobe of a
woman with a lipstick sneer and chlorine eyes. This. Was the legend. She was
wearing her best clothes, but her hair was a mess, and it
was
a towel of
elastic gray strands.
The teacher was
obviously afraid. “Frau
Hu
bermann . . .” Her movements were cluttered.
She searched through the class. “Liesel?”
Liesel looked at
Rudy, stood, and walked quickly toward the door to end the embarrassment as
fast as possible. It shut behind her, and now she was alone, in the corridor,
with Rosa.
Rosa faced the
other way.
“What, Mama?”
She turned.
“Don’t you ‘what Mama’ me, you little
Saumensch
!” Liesel was gored by
the speed of it. “My hairbrush!” A trickle of laughter rolled from under the
door, but it was drawn instantly back.
“Mama?”
Her face was
severe, but it was smiling. “What the hell did you do with my hairbrush, you
stupid Saumensch, you little thief ? I’ve told you a hundred times to leave
that thing alone, but do you listen? Of course not!”
The tirade went
on for perhaps another minute, with Liesel making a desperate suggestion or two
about the possible location of the said brush. It ended abruptly, with Rosa pulling
Liesel close, just for a few seconds. Her whisper was almost impossible to
hear, even at such close proximity. “You told me to yell at you. You said
they’d all believe it.” She looked left and right, her voice like needle and
thread. “He woke up, Liesel. He’s awake.” From her pocket, she pulled out the
toy soldier with the scratched exterior. “He said to give you this. It was his
favorite.” She handed it over, held her arms tightly, and smiled. Before Liesel
had a chance to answer, she finished it off. “Well? Answer me! Do you have any
other idea where you might have left it?”
He’s alive,
Liesel thought. “. . . No, Mama. I’m sorry, Mama, I—”
“Well, what good
are you, then?” She let go, nodded, and walked away.
For a few
moments, Liesel stood. The corridor was huge. She examined the soldier in her
palm. Instinct told her to run home immediately, but common sense did not allow
it. Instead, she placed the ragged soldier in her pocket and returned to the
classroom.
Everyone waited.
“Stupid cow,”
she whispered under her breath.
Again, kids
laughed. Frau Olendrich did not.
“What was that?”
Liesel was on
such a high that she felt indestructible. “I said,” she beamed, “stupid cow,”
and she didn’t have to wait a single moment for the teacher’s hand to slap her.
“Don’t speak
about your mother like that,” she said, but it had little effect. The girl
merely stood there and attempted to hold off the grin. After all, she could
take a
Watschen
with the best of them. “Now get to your seat.”
“Yes, Frau
Olendrich.”
Next to her,
Rudy dared to speak.
“Jesus, Mary,
and Joseph,” he whispered, “I can see her hand on your face. A big red hand.
Five fingers!”
“Good,” said
Liesel, because Max was alive.
When she made it
home that afternoon, he was sitting up in bed with the deflated soccer ball on
his lap. His beard itched him and his swampy eyes fought to stay open. An empty
bowl of soup was next to the gifts.
They did not say
hello.
It was more like
edges.
The door
creaked, the girl came in, and she stood before him, looking at the bowl. “Is
Mama forcing it down your throat?”
He nodded,
content, fatigued. “It was very good, though.”
“Mama’s soup?
Really?”
It was not a
smile he gave her. “Thank you for the presents.” More just a slight tear of the
mouth. “Thank you for the cloud. Your papa explained that one a little
further.”
After an hour,
Liesel also made an attempt on the truth. “We didn’t know what we’d do if you’d
died, Max. We—”
It didn’t take
him long. “You mean, how to get rid of me?”
“I’m sorry.”
“No.” He was not
offended. “You were right.” He played weakly with the ball. “You were right to
think that way. In your situation, a dead Jew is just as dangerous as a live
one, if not worse.”
“I also
dreamed.” In detail, she explained it, with the soldier in her grip. She was on
the verge of apologizing again when Max intervened.
“Liesel.” He
made her look at him. “Don’t ever apologize to me. It should be me who
apologizes to you.” He looked at everything she’d brought him. “Look at all
this. These gifts.” He held the button in his hand. “And Rosa said you read to
me twice every day, sometimes three times.” Now he looked at the curtains as if
he could see out of them. He sat up a little higher and paused for a dozen
silent sentences. Trepidation found its way onto his face and he made a
confession to the girl. “Liesel?” He moved slightly to the right. “I’m afraid,”
he said, “of falling asleep again.”
Liesel was
resolute. “Then I’ll read to you. And I’ll slap your face if you start dozing
off. I’ll close the book and shake you till you wake up.”
That afternoon,
and well into the night, Liesel read to Max Vandenburg. He sat in bed and
absorbed the words, awake this time, until just after ten o’clock. When Liesel
took a quick rest from
The Dream
Carrier,
she looked over the
book and Max was asleep. Nervously, she nudged him with it. He awoke.
Another three
times, he fell asleep. Twice more, she woke him.
For the next
four days, he woke up every morning in Liesel’s bed, then next to the
fireplace, and eventually, by mid-April, in the basement. His health had
improved, the beard was gone, and small scraps of weight had returned.
In Liesel’s
inside world, there was great relief in that time. Outside, things were
starting to look shaky. Late in March, a place called Lübeck was hailed with
bombs. Next in line would be Cologne, and soon enough, many more German cities,
including Munich.
Yes, the boss
was at my shoulder.
“Get it done,
get it done.”
The bombs were
coming—and so was I.
DEATH’S
DIARY: COLOGNE
The fallen hours
of May 30.
I’m sure Liesel
Meminger was fast asleep when more than a thousand bomber planes flew toward a
place known as Köln. For me, the result was five hundred people or thereabouts.
Fifty thousand others ambled homelessly around the ghostly piles of rubble,
trying to work out which way was which, and which slabs of broken home belonged
to whom.
Five hundred
souls.
I carried them
in my fingers, like suitcases. Or I’d throw them over my shoulder. It was only
the children I carried in my arms.
By the time I
was finished, the sky was yellow, like burning newspaper. If I looked closely,
I could see the words, reporting headlines, commentating on the progress of the
war and so forth. How I’d have loved to pull it all down, to screw up the
newspaper sky and toss it away. My arms ached and I couldn’t afford to burn my
fingers. There was still so much work to be done.
As you might
expect, many people died instantly. Others took a while longer. There were
several more places to go, skies to meet and souls to collect, and when I came
back to Cologne later on, not long after the final planes, I managed to notice
a most unique thing.
I was carrying
the charred soul of a teenager when I looked gravely up at what was now a
sulfuric sky. A group of ten-year-old girls was close by. One of them called
out.
“What’s that?”
Her arm extended
and her finger pointed out the black, slow object, falling from above. It began
as a black feather, lilting, floating. Or a piece of ash. Then it grew larger.
The same girl—a redhead with period freckles—spoke once again, this time more
emphatically. “What
is
that?”
“It’s a body,”
another girl suggested. Black hair, pigtails, and a crooked part down the
center.
“It’s another
bomb!”
It was too slow
to be a bomb.
With the
adolescent spirit still burning lightly in my arms, I walked a few hundred
meters with the rest of them. Like the girls, I remained focused on the sky.
The last thing I wanted was to look down at the stranded face of my teenager. A
pretty girl. Her whole death was now ahead of her.
Like the rest of
them, I was taken aback when a voice lunged out. It was a disgruntled father,
ordering his kids inside. The redhead reacted. Her freckles lengthened into
commas. “But, Papa, look.”
The man took
several small steps and soon figured out what it was. “It’s the fuel,” he said.
“What do you
mean?”
“The fuel,” he
repeated. “The tank.” He was a bald man in disrupted bedclothes. “They used up
all their fuel in that one and got rid of the empty container. Look, there’s
another one over there.”
“And there!”
Kids being kids,
they all searched frantically at that point, trying to find an empty fuel
container floating to the ground.
The first one
landed with a hollow thud.
“Can we keep it,
Papa?”
“No.” He was
bombed and shocked, this papa, and clearly not in the mood. “We cannot keep
it.”
“Why not?”
“I’m going to
ask my papa if
I
can have it,” said another of the girls.
“Me too.”
Just past the
rubble of Cologne, a group of kids collected empty fuel containers, dropped by
their enemies. As usual, I collected humans. I was tired. And the year wasn’t
even halfway over yet.
THE VISITOR
A new ball had
been found for Himmel Street soccer. That was the good news. The somewhat
unsettling news was that a division of the NSDAP was heading toward them.
They’d
progressed all the way through Molching, street by street, house by house, and
now they stood at Frau Diller’s shop, having a quick smoke before they
continued with their business.
There was
already a smattering of air-raid shelters in Molching, but it was decided soon
after the bombing of Cologne that a few more certainly wouldn’t hurt. The NSDAP
was inspecting each and every house in order to see if its basement was a good
enough candidate.
From afar, the
children watched.
They could see
the smoke rising out of the pack.
Liesel had only
just come out and she’d walked over to Rudy and Tommy. Harald Mollenhauer was
retrieving the ball. “What’s going on up there?”
Rudy put his
hands in his pockets. “The party.” He inspected his friend’s progress with the
ball in Frau Holtzapfel’s front hedge. “They’re checking all the houses and
apartment blocks.”
Instant dryness
seized the interior of Liesel’s mouth. “For what?”
“Don’t you know
anything? Tell her, Tommy.”
Tommy was
perplexed. “Well,
I
don’t know.”
“You’re
hopeless, the pair of you. They need more air-raid shelters.”
“What—basements?”
“No, attics. Of
course basements. Jesus, Liesel, you really are thick, aren’t you?”
The ball was
back.
“Rudy!”
He played onto
it and Liesel was still standing. How could she get back inside without looking
too suspicious? The smoke up at Frau Diller’s was disappearing and the small
crowd of men was starting to disperse. Panic generated in that awful way.
Throat and mouth. Air became sand. Think, she thought. Come on, Liesel, think,
think.
Rudy scored.
Faraway voices
congratulated him.
Think, Liesel—
She had it.
That’s it, she
decided, but I have to make it real.
As the Nazis
progressed down the street, painting the letters LSR on some of the doors, the
ball was passed through the air to one of the bigger kids, Klaus Behrig.
LSR
Luft Schutz Raum:
Air-Raid Shelter
The boy turned
with the ball just as Liesel arrived, and they collided with such force that
the game stopped automatically. As the ball rolled off, players ran in. Liesel
held her grazed knee with one hand and her head with the other. Klaus Behrig
only held his right shin, grimacing and cursing. “Where is she?” he spat. “I’m
going to kill her!”
There would be
no killing.
It was worse.
A kindly party
member had seen the incident and jogged dutifully down to the group. “What
happened here?” he asked.
“Well,
she’s
a
maniac.” Klaus pointed at Liesel, prompting the man to help her up. His tobacco
breath formed a smoky sandhill in front of her face.
“I don’t think
you’re in any state to keep playing, my girl,” he said. “Where do you live?”
“I’m fine,” she
answered, “really. I can make it myself.” Just get off me, get off me!
That was when
Rudy stepped in, the eternal stepper-inner. “I’ll help you home,” he said. Why
couldn’t he just mind his own business for a change?