“Papa!” she
whispered. “I have no eyes!”
He patted the
girl’s hair. She’d fallen into his trap. “With a smile like that,” Hans
Hubermann said, “you don’t need eyes.” He hugged her and then looked again at
the picture, with a face of warm silver. “Now for
T.
”
With the
alphabet completed and studied a dozen times, Papa leaned over and said,
“Enough for tonight?”
“A few more
words?”
He was definite.
“Enough. When you wake up, I’ll play accordion for you.”
“Thanks, Papa.”
“Good night.” A
quiet, one-syllable laugh. “Good night,
Saumensch.
”
“Good night,
Papa.”
He switched off
the light, came back, and sat in the chair. In the darkness, Liesel kept her
eyes open. She was watching the words.
THE SMELL OF FRIENDSHIP
It continued.
Over the next
few weeks and into summer, the midnight class began at the end of each
nightmare. There were two more bed-wetting occurrences, but Hans Hubermann
merely repeated his previous cleanup heroics and got down to the task of
reading, sketching, and reciting. In the morning’s early hours, quiet voices
were loud.
On a Thursday,
just after 3 p.m., Mama told Liesel to get ready to come with her and deliver
some ironing. Papa had other ideas.
He walked into
the kitchen and said, “Sorry, Mama, she’s not going with you today.”
Mama didn’t even
bother looking up from the washing bag. “Who asked you,
Arschloch
? Come
on, Liesel.”
“She’s reading,”
he said. Papa handed Liesel a steadfast smile and a wink. “With me. I’m
teaching her. We’re going to the Amper— upstream, where I used to practice the
accordion.”
Now he had her
attention.
Mama placed the
washing on the table and eagerly worked herself up to the appropriate level of
cynicism. “What did you say?”
“I think you
heard me, Rosa.”
Mama laughed.
“What the hell could
you
teach her?” A cardboard grin. Uppercut words.
“Like you could read so much, you
Saukerl.
”
The kitchen
waited. Papa counterpunched. “We’ll take your ironing for you.”
“You filthy—”
She stopped. The words propped in her mouth as she considered it. “Be back
before dark.”
“We can’t read
in the dark, Mama,” Liesel said.
“What was that,
Saumensch
?”
“Nothing, Mama.”
Papa grinned and
pointed at the girl. “Book, sandpaper, pencil,” he ordered her, “and
accordion!” once she was already gone. Soon, they were on Himmel Street,
carrying the words, the music, the washing.
As they walked
toward Frau Diller’s, they turned around a few times to see if Mama was still
at the gate, checking on them. She was. At one point, she called out, “Liesel,
hold that ironing straight! Don’t crease it!”
“Yes, Mama!”
A few steps
later: “Liesel, are you dressed warm enough?!”
“What did you
say?”
“
Saumensch
dreckiges,
you never hear anything! Are you dressed warm enough? It might
get cold later!”
Around the
corner, Papa bent down to do up a shoelace. “Liesel,” he said, “could you roll
me a cigarette?”
Nothing would
give her greater pleasure.
Once the ironing
was delivered, they made their way back to the Amper River, which flanked the
town. It worked its way past, pointing in the direction of Dachau, the
concentration camp.
There was a
wooden-planked bridge.
They sat maybe
thirty meters down from it, in the grass, writing the words and reading them
aloud, and when darkness was near, Hans pulled out the accordion. Liesel looked
at him and listened, though she did not immediately notice the perplexed
expression on her papa’s face that evening as he played.
PAPA’S
FACE
It traveled and wondered,
but it disclosed no answers.
Not yet.
There had been a
change in him. A slight shift.
She saw it but
didn’t realize until later, when all the stories came together. She didn’t see
him watching as he played, having no idea that Hans Hubermann’s accordion was a
story. In the times ahead, that story would arrive at 33 Himmel Street in the
early hours of morning, wearing ruffled shoulders and a shivering jacket. It
would carry a suitcase, a book, and two questions. A story. Story after story.
Story
within
story.
For now, there
was only the one as far as Liesel was concerned, and she was enjoying it.
She settled into
the long arms of grass, lying back.
She closed her
eyes and her ears held the notes.
There were, of
course, some problems as well. A few times, Papa nearly yelled at her. “Come
on, Liesel,” he’d say. “You know this word; you know it!” Just when progress
seemed to be flowing well, somehow things would become lodged.
When the weather
was good, they’d go to the Amper in the afternoon. In bad weather, it was the
basement. This was mainly on account of Mama. At first, they tried in the
kitchen, but there was no way.
“Rosa,” Hans
said to her at one point. Quietly, his words cut through one of her sentences.
“Could you do me a favor?”
She looked up
from the stove. “What?”
“I’m asking you,
I’m
begging
you, could you please shut your mouth for just five
minutes?”
You can imagine
the reaction.
They ended up in
the basement.
There was no
lighting there, so they took a kerosene lamp, and slowly, between school and
home, from the river to the basement, from the good days to the bad, Liesel was
learning to read and write.
“Soon,” Papa
told her, “you’ll be able to read that awful graves book with your eyes closed.”
“And I can get
out of that midget class.”
She spoke those
words with a grim kind of ownership.
In one of their
basement sessions, Papa dispensed with the sandpaper (it was running out fast)
and pulled out a brush. There were few luxuries in the Hubermann household, but
there was an oversupply of paint, and it became more than useful for Liesel’s
learning. Papa would say a word and the girl would have to spell it aloud and
then paint it on the wall, as long as she got it right. After a month, the wall
was recoated. A fresh cement page.
Some nights,
after working in the basement, Liesel would sit crouched in the bath and hear
the same utterances from the kitchen.
“You stink,”
Mama would say to Hans. “Like cigarettes and kerosene.”
Sitting in the
water, she imagined the smell of it, mapped out on her papa’s clothes. More
than anything, it was the smell of friendship, and she could find it on
herself, too. Liesel loved that smell. She would sniff her arm and smile as the
water cooled around her.
THE HEAVY
WEIGHT CHAMPION OF
THE
SCHOOL-YARD
The summer of
’39 was in a hurry, or perhaps Liesel was. She spent her time playing soccer
with Rudy and the other kids on Himmel Street (a year-round pastime), taking
ironing around town with Mama, and learning words. It felt like it was over a
few days after it began.
In the latter
part of the year, two things happened.
SEPTEMBER–NOVEMBER
1939
1.
World War Two begins.
1.
Liesel Meminger becomes the heavyweight champion of the school yard.
The beginning of
September.
It was a cool
day in Molching when the war began and my workload increased.
The world talked
it over.
Newspaper
headlines reveled in it.
The
Führer
’s
voice roared from German radios. We will not give up. We will not rest. We will
be victorious. Our time has come.
The German
invasion of Poland had begun and people were gathered everywhere, listening to
the news of it. Munich Street, like every other main street in Germany, was
alive with war. The smell, the voice. Rationing had begun a few days earlier—the
writing on the wall—and now it was official. England and France had made their
declaration on Germany. To steal a phrase from Hans Hubermann:
The fun begins.
The day of the
announcement, Papa was lucky enough to have some work. On his way home, he
picked up a discarded newspaper, and rather than stopping to shove it between
paint cans in his cart, he folded it up and slipped it beneath his shirt. By
the time he made it home and removed it, his sweat had drawn the ink onto his
skin. The paper landed on the table, but the news was stapled to his chest. A
tattoo. Holding the shirt open, he looked down in the unsure kitchen light.
“What does it
say?” Liesel asked him. She was looking back and forth, from the black outlines
on his skin to the paper.
“ ‘Hitler takes
Poland,’ ” he answered, and Hans Hubermann slumped into a chair.
“Deutschland
über Alles,”
he whispered, and his voice was not remotely patriotic.
The face was
there again—his accordion face.
That was one war
started.
Liesel would
soon be in another.
Nearly a month
after school resumed, she was moved up to her rightful year level. You might
think this was due to her improved reading, but it wasn’t. Despite the
advancement, she still read with great difficulty. Sentences were strewn
everywhere. Words fooled her. The reason she was elevated had more to do with
the fact that she became disruptive in the younger class. She answered
questions directed to other children and called out. A few times, she was given
what was known as a
Watschen
(pronounced “varchen”) in the corridor.
A
DEFINITION
Watschen
= a good hiding
She was taken
up, put in a chair at the side, and told to keep her mouth shut by the teacher,
who also happened to be a nun. At the other end of the classroom, Rudy looked
across and waved. Liesel waved back and tried not to smile.
At home, she was
well into reading
The Grave Digger’s Handbook
with Papa. They would
circle the words she couldn’t understand and take them down to the basement the
next day. She thought it was enough. It was not enough.
Somewhere at the
start of November, there were some progress tests at school. One of them was
for reading. Every child was made to stand at the front of the room and read
from a passage the teacher gave them. It was a frosty morning but bright with
sun. Children scrunched their eyes. A halo surrounded the grim reaper nun,
Sister Maria. (By the way—I like this human idea of the grim reaper. I like the
scythe. It amuses me.)
In the sun-heavy
classroom, names were rattled off at random.
“Waldenheim,
Lehmann, Steiner.”
They all stood
up and did a reading, all at different levels of capability. Rudy was
surprisingly good.
Throughout the
test, Liesel sat with a mixture of hot anticipation and excruciating fear. She
wanted desperately to measure herself, to find out once and for all how her
learning was advancing. Was she up to it? Could she even come close to Rudy and
the rest of them?
Each time Sister
Maria looked at her list, a string of nerves tightened in Liesel’s ribs. It
started in her stomach but had worked its way up. Soon, it would be around her
neck, thick as rope.
When Tommy
Müller finished his mediocre attempt, she looked around the room. Everyone had
read. She was the only one left.
“Very good.”
Sister Maria nodded, perusing the list. “That’s everyone.”
What?
“No!”
A voice
practically appeared on the other side of the room. Attached to it was a
lemon-haired boy whose bony knees knocked in his pants under the desk. He
stretched his hand up and said, “Sister Maria, I think you forgot Liesel.”
Sister Maria.
Was not
impressed.
She plonked her
folder on the table in front of her and inspected Rudy with sighing
disapproval. It was almost melancholic. Why, she lamented, did she have to put
up with Rudy Steiner? He simply couldn’t keep his mouth shut. Why, God, why?
“No,” she said,
with finality. Her small belly leaned forward with the rest of her. “I’m afraid
Liesel cannot do it, Rudy.” The teacher looked across, for confirmation. “She
will read for me later.”
The girl cleared
her throat and spoke with quiet defiance. “I can do it now, Sister.” The
majority of other kids watched in silence. A few of them performed the
beautiful childhood art of snickering.
The sister had
had enough. “No, you cannot! . . . What are you doing?”
—For Liesel was
out of her chair and walking slowly, stiffly toward the front of the room. She
picked up the book and opened it to a random page.
“All right,
then,” said Sister Maria. “You want to do it? Do it.”
“Yes, Sister.”
After a quick glance at Rudy, Liesel lowered her eyes and examined the page.
When she looked
up again, the room was pulled apart, then squashed back together. All the kids
were mashed, right before her eyes, and in a moment of brilliance, she imagined
herself reading the entire page in faultless, fluency-filled triumph.