The Book Thief (9 page)

“Come on,
Liesel!”

Rudy broke the
silence.

The book thief
looked down again, at the words.

Come on. Rudy
mouthed it this time. Come on, Liesel.

Her blood
loudened. The sentences blurred.

The white page
was suddenly written in another tongue, and it didn’t help that tears were now
forming in her eyes. She couldn’t even see the words anymore.

And the sun.
That awful sun. It burst through the window—the glass was everywhere—and shone
directly onto the useless girl. It shouted in her face. “You can steal a book,
but you can’t read one!”

It came to her.
A solution.

Breathing,
breathing, she started to read, but not from the book in front of her. It was
something from
The Grave Digger’s Handbook.
Chapter three: “In the Event
of Snow.” She’d memorized it from her papa’s voice.

“In the event of
snow,” she spoke, “you must make sure you use a good shovel. You must dig deep;
you cannot be lazy. You cannot cut corners.” Again, she sucked in a large clump
of air. “Of course, it is easier to wait for the warmest part of the day,
when—”

It ended.

The book was
snatched from her grasp and she was told. “Liesel—the corridor.”

As she was given
a small
Watschen,
she could hear them all laughing in the classroom,
between Sister Maria’s striking hand. She saw them. All those mashed children.
Grinning and laughing. Bathed in sunshine. Everyone laughing but Rudy.

In the break,
she was taunted. A boy named Ludwig Schmeikl came up to her with a book. “Hey,
Liesel,” he said to her, “I’m having trouble with this word. Could you read it
for me?” He laughed—a ten-year-old, smugness laughter. “You
Dummkopf
—you
idiot.”

Clouds were
filing in now, big and clumsy, and more kids were calling out to her, watching
her seethe.

“Don’t listen to
them,” Rudy advised.

“Easy for you to
say. You’re not the stupid one.”

Nearing the end
of the break, the tally of comments stood at nineteen. By the twentieth, she
snapped. It was Schmeikl, back for more. “Come on, Liesel.” He stuck the book
under her nose. “Help me out, will you?”

Liesel helped
him out, all right.

She stood up and
took the book from him, and as he smiled over his shoulder at some other kids,
she threw it away and kicked him as hard as she could in the vicinity of the
groin.

Well, as you
might imagine, Ludwig Schmeikl certainly buckled, and on the way down, he was
punched in the ear. When he landed, he was set upon. When he was set upon, he
was slapped and clawed and obliterated by a girl who was utterly consumed with
rage. His skin was so warm and soft. Her knuckles and fingernails were so
frighteningly tough, despite their smallness. “You
Saukerl.
” Her voice,
too, was able to scratch him. “You
Arschloch.
Can you spell
Arschloch
for me?”

Oh, how the
clouds stumbled in and assembled stupidly in the sky.

Great obese
clouds.

Dark and plump.

Bumping into
each other. Apologizing. Moving on and finding room.

Children were
there, quick as, well, quick as kids gravitating toward a fight. A stew of arms
and legs, of shouts and cheers grew thicker around them. They were watching
Liesel Meminger give Ludwig Schmeikl the hiding of a lifetime. “Jesus, Mary,
and Joseph,” a girl commentated with a shriek, “she’s going to kill him!”

Liesel did not
kill him.

But she came
close.

In fact,
probably the only thing that stopped her was the twitchingly pathetic, grinning
face of Tommy Müller. Still crowded with adrenaline, Liesel caught sight of him
smiling with such absurdity that she dragged him down and started beating
him
up as well.

“What are you
doing?!” he wailed, and only then, after the third or fourth slap and a trickle
of bright blood from his nose, did she stop.

On her knees,
she sucked in the air and listened to the groans beneath her. She watched the
whirlpool of faces, left and right, and she announced, “I’m not stupid.”

No one argued.

It was only when
everyone moved back inside and Sister Maria saw the state of Ludwig Schmeikl
that the fight resumed. First, it was Rudy and a few others who bore the brunt
of suspicion. They were always at each other. “Hands,” each boy was ordered,
but every pair was clean.

“I don’t believe
this,” the sister muttered. “It can’t be,” because sure enough, when Liesel
stepped forward to show her hands, Ludwig Schmeikl was all over them, rusting
by the moment. “The corridor,” she stated for the second time that day. For the
second time that hour, actually.

This time, it
was not a small
Watschen.
It was not an average one. This time, it was
the mother of all corridor
Watschens,
one sting of the stick after
another, so that Liesel would barely be able to sit down for a week. And there
was no laughter from the room. More the silent fear of listening in.

At the end of
the school day, Liesel walked home with Rudy and the other Steiner children.
Nearing Himmel Street, in a hurry of thoughts, a culmination of misery swept
over her—the failed recital of
The Grave Digger’s Handbook,
the
demolition of her family, her nightmares, the humiliation of the day—and she
crouched in the gutter and wept. It all led here.

Rudy stood
there, next to her.

It began to
rain, nice and hard.

Kurt Steiner
called out, but neither of them moved. One sat painfully now, among the falling
chunks of rain, and the other stood next to her, waiting.

“Why did he have
to die?” she asked, but still, Rudy did nothing; he said nothing.

When finally she
finished and stood herself up, he put his arm around her, best-buddy style, and
they walked on. There was no request for a kiss. Nothing like that. You can
love Rudy for that, if you like.

Just don’t kick
me in the eggs.

That’s what he
was thinking, but he didn’t tell Liesel that. It was nearly four years later
that he offered that information.

For now, Rudy
and Liesel made their way onto Himmel Street in the rain.

He was the crazy
one who had painted himself black and defeated the world.

She was the book
thief without the words.

Trust me,
though, the words were on their way, and when they arrived, Liesel would hold
them in her hands like the clouds, and she would wring them out like the rain.

PART TWO

the
shoulder shrug

featuring:

a girl made of darkness—the joy of cigarettes—

a town walker—some dead letters—hitler’s birthday—

100 percent pure german sweat—the gates of thievery—

and a book of fire

A GIRL MADE OF DARKNESS

If you were
being flippant about it, you’d say that all it took was a little bit of fire,
really, and some human shouting to go with it. You’d say that was all Liesel
Meminger needed to apprehend her second stolen book, even if it smoked in her
hands. Even if it lit her ribs.

The problem,
however, is this:

This is no time
to be flippant.

It’s no time to
be half watching, turning around, or checking the stove—because when the book
thief stole her second book, not only were there many factors involved in her
hunger to do so, but the act of stealing it triggered the crux of what was to
come. It would provide her with a venue for continued book thievery. It would
inspire Hans Hubermann to come up with a plan to help the Jewish fist fighter.
And it would show
me,
once again, that one opportunity leads directly to
another, just as risk leads to more risk, life to more life, and death to more
death.

In a way, it was
destiny.

You see, people
may tell you that Nazi Germany was built on anti-Semitism, a somewhat
overzealous leader, and a nation of hate-fed bigots, but it would all have come
to nothing had the Germans not loved one particular activity:

To burn.

The Germans
loved to burn things. Shops, synagogues, Reichstags, houses, personal items,
slain people, and of course, books. They enjoyed a good book-burning, all
right—which gave people who were partial to books the opportunity to get their
hands on certain publications that they otherwise wouldn’t have. One person who
was
that way inclined, as we know, was a thin-boned girl named Liesel
Meminger. She may have waited 463 days, but it was worth it. At the end of an
afternoon that had contained much excitement, much beautiful evil, one
blood-soaked ankle, and a slap from a trusted hand, Liesel Meminger attained
her second success story.
The Shoulder Shrug.
It was a blue book with
red writing engraved on the cover, and there was a small picture of a cuckoo
bird under the title, also red. When she looked back, Liesel was not ashamed to
have stolen it. On the contrary, it was pride that more resembled that small
pool of felt
something
in her stomach. And it was anger and dark hatred
that had fueled her desire to steal it. In fact, on April 20—the
Führer
’s
birthday—when she snatched that book from beneath a steaming heap of ashes,
Liesel was a girl made of darkness.

The question, of
course, should be why?

What was there
to be angry about?

What had
happened in the past four or five months to culminate in such a feeling?

In short, the
answer traveled from Himmel Street, to the
Führer,
to the unfindable
location of her real mother, and back again.

Like most
misery, it started with apparent happiness.

THE JOY OF CIGARETTES

Toward the end
of 1939, Liesel had settled into life in Molching pretty well. She still had
nightmares about her brother and missed her mother, but there were comforts
now, too.

She loved her
papa, Hans Hubermann, and even her foster mother, despite the abusages and
verbal assaults. She loved and hated her best friend, Rudy Steiner, which was
perfectly normal. And she loved the fact that despite her failure in the
classroom, her reading and writing were definitely improving and would soon be
on the verge of something respectable. All of this resulted in at least some
form of contentment and would soon be built upon to approach the concept of
Being
Happy.

1.
Finishing
The Grave Digger’s Handbook.

2.
Escaping the ire of Sister Maria.

3.
Receiving two books for Christmas.

December 17.

She remembered
the date well, as it was exactly a week before Christmas.

As usual, her
nightly nightmare interrupted her sleep and she was woken by Hans Hubermann.
His hand held the sweaty fabric of her pajamas. “The train?” he whispered.

Liesel
confirmed. “The train.”

She gulped the
air until she was ready, and they began reading from the eleventh chapter of
The
Grave Digger’s Handbook.
Just past three o’clock, they finished it, and
only the final chapter, “Respecting the Graveyard,” remained. Papa, his silver
eyes swollen in their tiredness and his face awash with whiskers, shut the book
and expected the leftovers of his sleep. He didn’t get them.

The light was
out for barely a minute when Liesel spoke to him across the dark.

“Papa?”

He made only a
noise, somewhere in his throat.

“Are you awake,
Papa?”

“Ja.”

Up on one elbow.
“Can we finish the book, please?”

There was a long
breath, the scratchery of hand on whiskers, and then the light. He opened the
book and began. “ ‘Chapter Twelve: Respecting the Graveyard.’ ”

They read
through the early hours of morning, circling and writing the words she did not
comprehend and turning the pages toward daylight. A few times, Papa nearly
slept, succumbing to the itchy fatigue in his eyes and the wilting of his head.
Liesel caught him out on each occasion, but she had neither the selflessness to
allow him to sleep nor the hide to be offended. She was a girl with a mountain
to climb.

Eventually, as
the darkness outside began to break up a little, they finished. The last
passage looked like this:

When the book
closed, they shared a sideways glance. Papa spoke.

“We made it,
huh?”

Liesel,
half-wrapped in blanket, studied the black book in her hand and its silver
lettering. She nodded, dry-mouthed and early-morning hungry. It was one of
those moments of perfect tiredness, of having conquered not only the work at
hand, but the night who had blocked the way.