The Book Thief (16 page)

In the early
part of summer in Molching, as Liesel and Papa made their way through the book,
this man was traveling to Amsterdam on business, and the snow was shivering
outside. The girl loved that— the shivering snow. “That’s exactly what it does
when it comes down,” she told Hans Hubermann. They sat together on the bed,
Papa half asleep and the girl wide awake.

Sometimes she
watched Papa as he slept, knowing both more and less about him than either of
them realized. She often heard him and Mama discussing his lack of work or
talking despondently about Hans going to see their son, only to discover that
the young man had left his lodging and was most likely already on his way to
war.

“
Schlaf gut,
Papa,”
the girl said at those times. “Sleep well,” and she slipped around him, out of
bed, to turn off the light.

The next
attribute, as I’ve mentioned, was the mayor’s library.

To exemplify
that particular situation, we can look to a cool day in late June. Rudy, to put
it mildly, was incensed.

Who did Liesel
Meminger think she was, telling him she had to take the washing and ironing
alone today? Wasn’t he good enough to walk the streets with her?

“Stop
complaining,
Saukerl,
” she reprimanded him. “I just feel bad. You’re
missing the game.”

He looked over
his shoulder. “Well, if you put it like that.” There was a
Schmunzel.
“You
can stick your washing.” He ran off and wasted no time joining a team. When
Liesel made it to the top of Himmel Street, she looked back just in time to see
him standing in front of the nearest makeshift goals. He was waving.

“Saukerl,”
she laughed, and
as she held up her hand, she knew completely that he was simultaneously calling
her a
Saumensch.
I think that’s as close to love as eleven-year-olds can
get.

She started to
run, to Grande Strasse and the mayor’s house.

Certainly, there
was sweat, and the wrinkled pants of breath, stretching out in front of her.

But she was
reading.

The mayor’s
wife, having let the girl in for the fourth time, was sitting at the desk,
simply watching the books. On the second visit, she had given permission for
Liesel to pull one out and go through it, which led to another and another,
until up to half a dozen books were stuck to her, either clutched beneath her
arm or among the pile that was climbing higher in her remaining hand.

On this
occasion, as Liesel stood in the cool surrounds of the room, her stomach
growled, but no reaction was forthcoming from the mute, damaged woman. She was
in her bathrobe again, and although she observed the girl several times, it was
never for very long. She usually paid more attention to what was next to her,
to something missing. The window was opened wide, a square cool mouth, with
occasional gusty surges.

Liesel sat on
the floor. The books were scattered around her.

After forty
minutes, she left. Every title was returned to its place.

“Goodbye, Frau
Hermann.” The words always came as a shock. “Thank you.” After which the woman
paid her and she left. Every movement was accounted for, and the book thief ran
home.

As summer set
in, the roomful of books became warmer, and with every pickup or delivery day
the floor was not as painful. Liesel would sit with a small pile of books next
to her, and she’d read a few paragraphs of each, trying to memorize the words
she didn’t know, to ask Papa when she made it home. Later on, as an adolescent,
when Liesel wrote about those books, she no longer remembered the titles. Not
one. Perhaps had she stolen them, she would have been better equipped.

What she did
remember was that one of the picture books had a name written clumsily on the
inside cover:

Liesel bit down
on her lip, but she could not resist it for long. From the floor, she turned
and looked up at the bathrobed woman and made an inquiry. “Johann Hermann,” she
said. “Who is that?”

The woman looked
beside her, somewhere next to the girl’s knees.

Liesel
apologized. “I’m sorry. I shouldn’t be asking such things. . . .” She let the
sentence die its own death.

The woman’s face
did not alter, yet somehow she managed to speak. “He is nothing now in this
world,” she explained. “He was my . . .”

“Apart from
everything else,” she said, “he froze to death.” For a moment, she played with
her hands, and she said it again. “He froze to death, I’m sure of it.”

The mayor’s wife
was just one of a worldwide brigade. You have seen her before, I’m certain. In
your stories, your poems, the screens you like to watch. They’re everywhere, so
why not here? Why not on a shapely hill in a small German town? It’s as good a
place to suffer as any.

The point is,
Ilsa Hermann had decided to make suffering her triumph. When it refused to let
go of her, she succumbed to it. She embraced it.

She could have
shot herself, scratched herself, or indulged in other forms of self-mutilation,
but she chose what she probably felt was the weakest option—to at least endure
the discomfort of the weather. For all Liesel knew, she prayed for summer days
that were cold and wet. For the most part, she lived in the right place.

When Liesel left
that day, she said something with great uneasiness. In translation, two giant
words were struggled with, carried on her shoulder, and dropped as a bungling
pair at Ilsa Hermann’s feet. They fell off sideways as the girl veered with
them and could no longer sustain their weight. Together, they sat on the floor,
large and loud and clumsy.

TWO
GIANTWORDS

Again, the
mayor’s wife watched the space next to her. A blank-page face.

“For what?” she
asked, but time had elapsed by then. The girl was already well out of the room.
She was nearly at the front door. When she heard it, Liesel stopped, but she
chose not to go back, preferring to make her way noiselessly from the house and
down the steps. She took in the view of Molching before disappearing down into
it, and she pitied the mayor’s wife for quite a while.

At times, Liesel
wondered if she should simply leave the woman alone, but Ilsa Hermann was too
interesting, and the pull of the books was too strong. Once, words had rendered
Liesel useless, but now, when she sat on the floor, with the mayor’s wife at
her husband’s desk, she felt an innate sense of power. It happened every time
she deciphered a new word or pieced together a sentence.

She was a girl.

In Nazi Germany.

How fitting that
she was discovering the power of words.

And how awful
(and yet exhilarating!) it would feel many months later, when she would unleash
the power of this newfound discovery the very moment the mayor’s wife let her
down. How quickly the pity would leave her, and how quickly it would spill over
into something else completely. . . .

Now, though, in
the summer of 1940, she could not see what lay ahead, in more ways than one.
She was witness only to a sorrowful woman with a roomful of books whom she
enjoyed visiting. That was all. It was part two of her existence that summer.

Part three,
thank God, was a little more lighthearted—Himmel Street soccer.

Allow me to play
you a picture:

Feet scuffing
road.

The rush of
boyish breath.

Shouted words:
“Here! This way! Scheisse!”

The coarse
bounce of ball on road.

All were present
on Himmel Street, as well as the sound of apologies, as summer further
intensified.

The apologies
belonged to Liesel Meminger.

They were
directed at Tommy Müller.

By the start of
July, she finally managed to convince him that she wasn’t going to kill him.
Since the beating she’d handed him the previous November, Tommy was still
frightened to be around her. In the soccer meetings on Himmel Street, he kept
well clear. “You never know when she might snap,” he’d confided in Rudy, half
twitching, half speaking.

In Liesel’s
defense, she never gave up on trying to put him at ease. It disappointed her
that she’d successfully made peace with Ludwig Schmeikl and not with the
innocent Tommy Müller. He still cowered slightly whenever he saw her.

“How could I
know you were smiling
for
me that day?” she asked him repeatedly.

She’d even put
in a few stints as goalie for him, until everyone else on the team begged him
to go back in.

“Get back in
there!” a boy named Harald Mollenhauer finally ordered him. “You’re useless.”
This was after Tommy tripped him up as he was about to score. He would have
awarded himself a penalty but for the fact that they were on the same side.

Liesel came back
out and would somehow always end up opposing Rudy. They would tackle and trip
each other, call each other names. Rudy would commentate: “She can’t get around
him
this
time, the stupid
Saumensch Arschgrobbler.
She hasn’t got
a hope.” He seemed to enjoy calling Liesel an ass scratcher. It was one of the
joys of childhood.

Another of the
joys, of course, was stealing. Part four, summer 1940.

In fairness,
there were many things that brought Rudy and Liesel together, but it was the
stealing that cemented their friendship completely. It was brought about by one
opportunity, and it was driven by one inescapable force—Rudy’s hunger. The boy
was permanently dying for something to eat.

On top of the
rationing situation, his father’s business wasn’t doing so well of late (the
threat of Jewish competition was taken away, but so were the Jewish customers).
The Steiners were scratching things together to get by. Like many other people
on the Himmel Street side of town, they needed to trade. Liesel would have
given him some food from her place, but there wasn’t an abundance of it there,
either. Mama usually made pea soup. On Sunday nights she cooked it—and not just
enough for one or two repeat performances. She made enough pea soup to last
until the following Saturday. Then on Sunday, she’d cook another one. Pea soup,
bread, sometimes a small portion of potatoes or meat. You ate it up and you
didn’t ask for more, and you didn’t complain.

At first, they
did things to try to forget about it.

Rudy wouldn’t be
hungry if they played soccer on the street. Or if they took bikes from his
brother and sister and rode to Alex Steiner’s shop or visited Liesel’s papa, if
he was working that particular day. Hans Hubermann would sit with them and tell
jokes in the last light of afternoon.

With the arrival
of a few hot days, another distraction was learning to swim in the Amper River.
The water was still a little too cold, but they went anyway.

“Come on,” Rudy
coaxed her in. “Just here. It isn’t so deep here.” She couldn’t see the giant
hole she was walking into and sank straight to the bottom. Dog-paddling saved
her life, despite nearly choking on the swollen intake of water.

“You
Saukerl,
”
she accused him when she collapsed onto the riverbank.

Rudy made
certain to keep well away. He’d seen what she did to Ludwig Schmeikl. “You can
swim now, can’t you?”

Which didn’t particularly
cheer her up as she marched away. Her hair was pasted to the side of her face
and snot was flowing from her nose.

He called after
her. “Does this mean I don’t get a kiss for teaching you?”

The nerve of
him!

It was
inevitable.

The depressing
pea soup and Rudy’s hunger finally drove them to thievery. It inspired their
attachment to an older group of kids who stole from the farmers. Fruit
stealers. After a game of soccer, both Liesel and Rudy learned the benefits of
keeping their eyes open. Sitting on Rudy’s front step, they noticed Fritz
Hammer—one of their older counterparts—eating an apple. It was of the
Klar
variety—
ripening in July and August—and it looked magnificent in his hand. Three or
four more of them clearly bulged in his jacket pockets. They wandered closer.

“Where did you
get those?” Rudy asked.

The boy only
grinned at first. “Shhh,” and he stopped. He then proceeded to pull an apple
from his pocket and toss it over. “Just look at it,” he warned them. “Don’t eat
it.”

The next time
they saw the same boy wearing the same jacket, on a day that was too warm for
it, they followed him. He led them toward the upstream section of the Amper
River. It was close to where Liesel sometimes read with her papa when she was
first learning.

A group of five
boys, some lanky, a few short and lean, stood waiting.

There were a few
such groups in Molching at the time, some with members as young as six. The
leader of this particular outfit was an agreeable fifteen-year-old criminal
named Arthur Berg. He looked around and saw the two eleven-year-olds dangling
off the back.
“Und?”
he asked. “And?”