She must have
said it a hundred times as she hugged him in the kitchen and wouldn’t let go.
Later, after
they ate, they sat at the kitchen table long into the night and Hans told his
wife and Liesel Meminger everything. He explained the LSE and the smoke-filled
streets and the poor, lost, wandering souls. And Reinhold Zucker. Poor, stupid
Reinhold Zucker. It took hours.
At 1 a.m.,
Liesel went to bed and Papa came in to sit with her, like he used to. She woke
up several times to check that he was there, and he did not fail her.
The night was
calm.
Her bed was warm
and soft with contentment.
Yes, it was a
great night to be Liesel Meminger, and the calm, the warm, and the soft would
remain for approximately three more months.
But her story
lasts for six.
PART TEN
the
book thief
featuring:
the end of a world—the ninety-eighth day—
a war maker—way of the words—a catatonic girl—
confessions—ilsa hermann’s little black book—
some rib-cage planes—and a mountain range of rubble
THE END OF THE WORLD (Part I)
Again, I offer
you a glimpse of the end. Perhaps it’s to soften the blow for later, or to
better prepare
myself
for the telling. Either way, I must inform you
that it was raining on Himmel Street when the world ended for Liesel Meminger.
The sky was
dripping.
Like a tap that
a child has tried its hardest to turn off but hasn’t quite managed. The first
drops were cool. I felt them on my hands as I stood outside Frau Diller’s.
Above me, I
could hear them.
Through the
overcast sky, I looked up and saw the tin-can planes. I watched their stomachs
open and the bombs drop casually out. They were off target, of course. They
were often off target.
A
SMALL, SAD HOPE
No one wanted to
bomb Himmel Street.
No one would bomb a
place named after
heaven, would they?
Would they?
The bombs came
down, and soon, the clouds would bake and the cold raindrops would turn to ash.
Hot snowflakes would shower to the ground.
In short, Himmel
Street was flattened.
Houses were
splashed from one side of the street to the other. A framed photo of a very
serious-looking
Führer
was bashed and beaten on the shattered floor. Yet
he smiled, in that serious way of his. He knew something we all didn’t know.
But I knew something
he
didn’t know. All while people slept.
Rudy Steiner
slept. Mama and Papa slept. Frau Holtzapfel, Frau Diller. Tommy Müller. All
sleeping. All dying.
Only one person
survived.
She survived
because she was sitting in a basement reading through the story of her own
life, checking for mistakes. Previously, the room had been declared too
shallow, but on that night, October 7, it was enough. The shells of wreckage
cantered down, and hours later, when the strange, unkempt silence settled itself
in Molching, the local LSE could hear something. An echo. Down there,
somewhere, a girl was hammering a paint can with a pencil.
They all
stopped, with bent ears and bodies, and when they heard it again, they started
digging.
PASSED
ITEMS, HAND TO HAND
Blocks of cement and roof tiles.
A piece of wall with a dripping
sun painted on it. An unhappy-
looking accordion, peering
through its eaten case.
They threw all
of it upward.
When another
piece of broken wall was removed, one of them saw the book thief’s hair.
The man had such
a nice laugh. He was delivering a newborn child. “I can’t believe it—she’s
alive!”
There was so
much joy among the cluttering, calling men, but I could not fully share their
enthusiasm.
Earlier, I’d
held her papa in one arm and her mama in the other. Each soul was so soft.
Farther away,
their bodies were laid out, like the rest. Papa’s lovely silver eyes were
already starting to rust, and Mama’s cardboard lips were fixed half open, most
likely the shape of an incomplete snore. To blaspheme like the Germans—Jesus,
Mary, and Joseph.
The rescuing
hands pulled Liesel out and brushed the crumbs of rubble from her clothes.
“Young girl,” they said, “the sirens were too late. What were you doing in the
basement? How did you know?”
What they didn’t
notice was that the girl was still holding the book. She screamed her reply. A
stunning scream of the living.
“Papa!”
A second time.
Her face creased as she reached a higher, more panic-stricken pitch. “Papa,
Papa
!”
They passed her
up as she shouted, wailed, and cried. If she was injured, she did not yet know
it, for she struggled free and searched and called and wailed some more.
She was still
clutching the book.
She was holding
desperately on to the words who had saved her life.
THE NINETY-EIGHTH DAY
For the first
ninety-seven days after Hans Hubermann’s return in April 1943, everything was
fine. On many occasions he was pensive about the thought of his son fighting in
Stalingrad, but he hoped that some of his luck was in the boy’s blood.
On his third
night at home, he played the accordion in the kitchen. A promise was a promise.
There was music, soup, and jokes, and the laughter of a fourteen-year-old girl.
“Saumensch,”
Mama warned her,
“stop laughing so loud. His jokes aren’t
that
funny. And they’re filthy,
too. . . .”
After a week,
Hans resumed his service, traveling into the city to one of the army offices.
He said that there was a good supply of cigarettes and food there, and
sometimes he was able to bring home some cookies or extra jam. It was like the
good old days. A minor air raid in May. A “
heil
Hitler” here or there
and everything was fine.
Until the
ninety-eighth day.
A
SMALL STATEMENT
BYAN OLD WOMAN
On Munich Street, she said, “Jesus,
Mary, and Joseph, I wish they
wouldn’t bring them through. These
wretched Jews, they’re rotten luck.
They’re a bad sign. Every time I see
them, I know we’ll be ruined.”
It was the same
old lady who announced the Jews the first time Liesel saw them. On ground
level, her face was a prune. Her eyes were the dark blue of a vein. And her
prediction was accurate.
In the heart of
summer, Molching was delivered a sign of things to come. It moved into sight
like it always did. First the bobbing head of a soldier and the gun poking at
the air above him. Then the ragged chain of clinking Jews.
The only
difference this time was that they were brought from the opposite direction.
They were taken through to the neighboring town of Nebling to scrub the streets
and do the cleanup work that the army refused to do. Late in the day, they were
marched back to camp, slow and tired, defeated.
Again, Liesel
searched for Max Vandenburg, thinking that he could easily have ended up in
Dachau without being marched through Molching. He was not there. Not on this
occasion.
Just give it
time, though, for on a warm afternoon in August, Max would most certainly be
marched through town with the rest of them. Unlike the others, however, he
would not watch the road. He would not look randomly into the
Führer
’s
German grand-stand.
A
FACT REGARDING
MAX VANDENBURG
He would search the faces on Munich
Street for a book-thieving girl.
On this
occasion, in July, on what Liesel later calculated as the ninety-eighth day of
her papa’s return, she stood and studied the moving pile of mournful Jews—looking
for Max. If nothing else, it alleviated the pain of simply watching.
That’s a
horrible thought,
she
would write in her Himmel Street basement, but she knew it to be true. The pain
of watching them. What about
their
pain? The pain of stumbling shoes and
torment and the closing gates of the camp?
They came
through twice in ten days, and soon after, the anonymous, prune-faced woman on
Munich Street was proven absolutely correct. Suffering had most definitely
come, and if they could blame the Jews as a warning or prologue, they should
have blamed the
Führer
and his quest for Russia as the actual cause—for
when Himmel Street woke later in July, a returned soldier was discovered to be
dead. He was hanging from one of the rafters in a laundry up near Frau Diller’s.
Another human pendulum. Another clock, stopped.
The careless
owner had left the door open.
JULY 24, 6:03
A.M.
The laundry was warm, the rafters were firm, and Michael Holtzapfel
jumped
from the chair as if it were a cliff.
So many people
chased after me in that time, calling my name, asking me to take them with me.
Then there was the small percentage who called me casually over and whispered
with their tightened voices.
“Have me,” they
said, and there was no stopping them. They were frightened, no question, but
they were not afraid of me. It was a fear of messing up and having to face
themselves again, and facing the world, and the likes of you.
There was
nothing I could do.
They had too
many ways, they were too resourceful—and when they did it too well, whatever
their chosen method, I was in no position to refuse.
Michael
Holtzapfel knew what he was doing.
He killed
himself for wanting to live.
Of course, I did
not see Liesel Meminger at all that day. As is usually the case, I advised
myself that I was far too busy to remain on Himmel Street to listen to the
screams. It’s bad enough when people catch me red-handed, so I made the usual
decision to make my exit, into the breakfast-colored sun.
I did not hear
the detonation of an old man’s voice when he found the hanging body, nor the
sound of running feet and jaw-dropped gasps when other people arrived. I did
not hear a skinny man with a mustache mutter, “Crying shame, a
damn
shame
. . .”
I did not see
Frau Holtzapfel laid out flat on Himmel Street, her arms out wide, her
screaming face in total despair. No, I didn’t discover any of that until I came
back a few months later and read something called
The Book Thief.
It was
explained to me that in the end, Michael Holtzapfel was worn down not by his
damaged hand or any other injury, but by the guilt of living.
In the lead-up
to his death, the girl had realized that he wasn’t sleeping, that each night
was like poison. I often imagine him lying awake, sweating in sheets of snow,
or seeing visions of his brother’s severed legs. Liesel wrote that sometimes
she almost told him about her own brother, like she did with Max, but there
seemed a big difference between a long-distance cough and two obliterated legs.
How do you console a man who has seen such things? Could you tell him the
Führer
was proud of him, that the
Führer
loved him for what he did in
Stalingrad? How could you even dare? You can only let him do the talking. The
dilemma, of course, is that such people save their most important words for
after, when the surrounding humans are unlucky enough to find them. A note, a
sentence, even a question, or a letter, like on Himmel Street in July 1943.
MICHAEL
HOLTZAPFEL—
THE LAST GOODBYE
Dear Mama, Can you ever forgive me?
I just
couldn’t stand it any longer. I’m meeting Robert. I don’t care
what the
damn Catholics say about it.
There must be a place in heaven for
those
who have been where I have been.
You might think I don’t love you
because
of what I’ve done, but I do.
Your Michael
It was Hans
Hubermann who was asked to give Frau Holtzapfel the news. He stood on her
threshold and she must have seen it on his face. Two sons in six months.
The morning sky
stood blazing behind him as the wiry woman made her way past. She ran sobbing
to the gathering farther up on Himmel Street. She said the name Michael at
least two dozen times, but Michael had already answered. According to the book
thief, Frau Holtzapfel hugged the body for nearly an hour. She then returned to
the blinding sun of Himmel Street and sat herself down. She could no longer
walk.
From a distance,
people observed. Such a thing was easier from far away.
Hans Hubermann
sat with her.
He placed his
hand on hers, as she fell back to the hard ground.