The Book Thief (24 page)

“Papa!”

Liesel, at the
high end of eleven, and still rake-skinny as she sat against the wall, was
devastated. “I’ve never been in a fight!”

“Shhh,” Papa
laughed. He waved at her to keep her voice down and tilted again, this time to
the girl. “Well, what about the hiding you gave Ludwig Schmeikl, huh?”

“I never—” She
was caught. Further denial was useless. “How did you find out about that?”

“I saw his papa
at the Knoller.”

Liesel held her
face in her hands. Once uncovered again, she asked the pivotal question. “Did
you tell Mama?”

“Are you
kidding?” He winked at Max and whispered to the girl, “You’re still alive,
aren’t you?”

That night was
also the first time Papa played his accordion at home for months. It lasted
half an hour or so until he asked a question of Max.

“Did you learn?”

The face in the
corner watched the flames. “I did.” There was a considerable pause. “Until I
was nine. At that age, my mother sold the music studio and stopped teaching.
She kept only the one instrument but gave up on me not long after I resisted
the learning. I was foolish.”

“No,” Papa said.
“You were a boy.”

During the
nights, both Liesel Meminger and Max Vandenburg would go about their other
similarity. In their separate rooms, they would dream their nightmares and wake
up, one with a scream in drowning sheets, the other with a gasp for air next to
a smoking fire.

Sometimes, when
Liesel was reading with Papa close to three o’clock, they would both hear the
waking moment of Max. “He dreams like you,” Papa would say, and on one
occasion, stirred by the sound of Max’s anxiety, Liesel decided to get out of
bed. From listening to his history, she had a good idea of what he saw in those
dreams, if not the exact part of the story that paid him a visit each night.

She made her way
quietly down the hallway and into the living and bedroom.

“Max?”

The whisper was
soft, clouded in the throat of sleep.

To begin with,
there was no sound of reply, but he soon sat up and searched the darkness.

With Papa still
in her bedroom, Liesel sat on the other side of the fireplace from Max. Behind
them, Mama loudly slept. She gave the snorer on the train a good run for her
money.

The fire was
nothing now but a funeral of smoke, dead and dying, simultaneously. On this
particular morning, there were also voices.

It would be nice
to say that after this small breakthrough, neither Liesel nor Max dreamed their
bad visions again. It would be nice but untrue. The nightmares arrived like
they always did, much like the best player in the opposition when you’ve heard
rumors that he might be injured or sick—but there he is, warming up with the
rest of them, ready to take the field. Or like a timetabled train, arriving at
a nightly platform, pulling the memories behind it on a rope. A lot of
dragging. A lot of awkward bounces.

The only thing
that changed was that Liesel told her papa that she should be old enough now to
cope on her own with the dreams. For a moment, he looked a little hurt, but as
always with Papa, he gave the right thing to say his best shot.

“Well, thank
God.” He halfway grinned. “At least now I can get some proper sleep. That chair
was killing me.” He put his arm around the girl and they walked to the kitchen.

As time
progressed, a clear distinction developed between two very different worlds—the
world inside 33 Himmel Street, and the one that resided and turned outside it.
The trick was to keep them apart.

In the outside
world, Liesel was learning to find some more of its uses. One afternoon, when
she was walking home with an empty washing bag, she noticed a newspaper poking
out of a garbage can. The weekly edition of the
Molching Express.
She
lifted it out and took it home, presenting it to Max. “I thought,” she told
him, “you might like to do the crossword to pass the time.”

Max appreciated
the gesture, and to justify her bringing it home, he read the paper from cover
to cover and showed her the puzzle a few hours later, completed but for one
word.

“Damn that
seventeen down,” he said.

In February
1941, for her twelfth birthday, Liesel received another used book, and she was
grateful. It was called
The Mud Men
and was about a very strange father
and son. She hugged her mama and papa, while Max stood uncomfortably in the
corner.

“Alles Gute zum
Geburtstag.”
He
smiled weakly. “All the best for your birthday.” His hands were in his pockets.
“I didn’t know, or else I could have given you something.” A blatant lie—he had
nothing to give, except maybe
Mein Kampf,
and there was no way he’d give
such propaganda to a young German girl. That would be like the lamb handing a
knife to the butcher.

There was an
uncomfortable silence.

She had embraced
Mama and Papa.

Max looked so
alone.

Liesel
swallowed.

And she walked
over and hugged him for the first time. “Thanks, Max.”

At first, he
merely stood there, but as she held on to him, gradually his hands rose up and
gently pressed into her shoulder blades.

Only later would
she find out about the helpless expression on Max Vandenburg’s face. She would
also discover that he resolved at that moment to give her something back. I
often imagine him lying awake all that night, pondering what he could possibly
offer.

As it turned
out, the gift was delivered on paper, just over a week later.

He would bring
it to her in the early hours of morning, before retreating down the concrete
steps to what he now liked to call home.

PAGES FROM THE BASEMENT

For a week,
Liesel was kept from the basement at all cost. It was Mama and Papa who made
sure to take down Max’s food.

“No,
Saumensch,
”
Mama told her each time she volunteered. There was always a new excuse. “How
about you do something useful in
here
for a change, like finish the
ironing? You think carrying it around town is so special? Try ironing it!” You
can do all manner of underhanded nice things when you have a caustic
reputation. It worked.

During that
week, Max had cut out a collection of pages from
Mein Kampf
and painted
over them in white. He then hung them up with pegs on some string, from one end
of the basement to the other. When they were all dry, the hard part began. He
was educated well enough to get by, but he was certainly no writer, and no
artist. Despite this, he formulated the words in his head till he could recount
them without error. Only then, on the paper that had bubbled and humped under
the stress of drying paint, did he begin to write the story. It was done with a
small black paintbrush.

He calculated
that he needed thirteen pages, so he painted forty, expecting at least twice as
many slipups as successes. There were practice versions on the pages of the
Molching
Express,
improving his basic, clumsy artwork to a level he could accept. As
he worked, he heard the whispered words of a girl. “His hair,” she told him,
“is like feathers.”

When he was
finished, he used a knife to pierce the pages and tie them with string. The
result was a thirteen-page booklet that went like this: