The Book Thief (29 page)

“Typical,” she
stated, kicking it onto the grass. “Useless.”

On the way home
this time, she imagined the fate of that paper the next time it rained, when
the mended glass house of Molching was turned upside down. She could already
see the words dissolving letter by letter, till there was nothing left. Just
paper. Just earth.

At home, as luck
would have it, when Liesel walked through the door, Rosa was in the kitchen.
“And?” she asked. “Where’s the washing?”

“No washing
today,” Liesel told her.

Rosa came and
sat down at the kitchen table. She knew. Suddenly, she appeared much older.
Liesel imagined what she’d look like if she untied her bun, to let it fall out
onto her shoulders. A gray towel of elastic hair.

“What did you do
there, you little
Saumensch
?” The sentence was numb. She could not
muster her usual venom.

“It was my
fault,” Liesel answered. “Completely. I insulted the mayor’s wife and told her
to stop crying over her dead son. I called her pathetic. That was when they
fired you. Here.” She walked to the wooden spoons, grabbed a handful, and
placed them in front of her. “Take your pick.”

Rosa touched one
and picked it up, but she did not wield it. “I don’t believe you.”

Liesel was torn
between distress and total mystification. The one time she desperately wanted a
Watschen
and she couldn’t get one! “It’s my fault.”

“It’s not your
fault,” Mama said, and she even stood and stroked Liesel’s waxy, unwashed hair.
“I know you wouldn’t say those things.”

“I said them!”

“All right, you
said them.”

As Liesel left
the room, she could hear the wooden spoons clicking back into position in the
metal jar that held them. By the time she reached her bedroom, the whole lot of
them, the jar included, were thrown to the floor.

Later, she
walked down to the basement, where Max was standing in the dark, most likely
boxing with the
Führer.

“Max?” The light
dimmed on—a red coin, floating in the corner. “Can you teach me how to do the
push-ups?”

Max showed her
and occasionally lifted her torso to help, but despite her bony appearance,
Liesel was strong and could hold her body weight nicely. She didn’t count how
many she could do, but that night, in the glow of the basement, the book thief
completed enough push-ups to make her hurt for several days. Even when Max
advised her that she’d already done too many, she continued.

In bed, she read
with Papa, who could tell something was wrong. It was the first time in a month
that he’d come in and sat with her, and she was comforted, if only slightly.
Somehow, Hans Hubermann always knew what to say, when to stay, and when to
leave her be. Perhaps Liesel was the one thing he was a true expert at.

“Is it the
washing?” he asked.

Liesel shook her
head.

Papa hadn’t
shaved for a few days and he rubbed the scratchy whiskers every two or three
minutes. His silver eyes were flat and calm, slightly warm, as they always were
when it came to Liesel.

When the reading
petered out, Papa fell asleep. It was then that Liesel spoke what she’d wanted
to say all along.

“Papa,” she
whispered, “I think I’m going to hell.”

Her legs were
warm. Her knees were cold.

She remembered
the nights when she’d wet the bed and Papa had washed the sheets and taught her
the letters of the alphabet. Now his breathing blew across the blanket and she
kissed his scratchy cheek.

“You need a
shave,” she said.

“You’re not
going to hell,” Papa replied.

For a few
moments, she watched his face. Then she lay back down, leaned on him, and
together, they slept, very much in Munich, but somewhere on the seventh side of
Germany’s die.

RUDY’S
YOUTH

In the end, she
had to give it to him.

He knew how to
perform.

He stood a few
meters from the step and spoke with great conviction, great joy.

“Alles ist
Scheisse,”
he
announced.

All is shit.

In the first
half of 1941, while Liesel went about the business of concealing Max
Vandenburg, stealing newspapers, and telling off mayors’ wives, Rudy was
enduring a new life of his own, at the Hitler Youth. Since early February, he’d
been returning from the meetings in a considerably worse state than he’d left
in. On many of those return trips, Tommy Müller was by his side, in the same
condition. The trouble had three elements to it.

A
TRIPLE-TIERED PROBLEM

1.
Tommy Müller’s ears.

2.
Franz Deutscher—the irate Hitler Youth leader.

3.
Rudy’s inability to stay out of things.

If only Tommy
Müller hadn’t disappeared for seven hours on one of the coldest days in
Munich’s history, six years earlier. His ear infections and nerve damage were
still contorting the marching pattern at the Hitler Youth, which, I can assure
you, was not a positive thing.

To begin with,
the downward slide of momentum was gradual, but as the months progressed, Tommy
was consistently gathering the ire of the Hitler Youth leaders, especially when
it came to the marching. Remember Hitler’s birthday the previous year? For some
time, the ear infections were getting worse. They had reached the point where
Tommy had genuine problems hearing. He could not make out the commands that
were shouted at the group as they marched in line. It didn’t matter if it was
in the hall or outside, in the snow or the mud or the slits of rain.

The goal was
always to have everyone stop at the same time.

“One click!”
they were told. “That’s all the
Führer
wants to hear. Everyone united.
Everyone together as one!”

Then Tommy.

It was his left
ear, I think. That was the most troublesome of the two, and when the bitter cry
of “Halt!” wet the ears of everybody else, Tommy marched comically and
obliviously on. He could transform a marching line into a dog’s breakfast in
the blink of an eye.

On one
particular Saturday, at the beginning of July, just after three-thirty and a
litany of Tommy-inspired failed marching attempts, Franz Deutscher (the
ultimate name for the ultimate teenage Nazi) was completely fed up.

“Müller,
du A
fe
!” His thick blond hair massaged his head and his words manipulated
Tommy’s face. “You ape—what’s wrong with you?”

Tommy slouched
fearfully back, but his left cheek still managed to twitch in a manic, cheerful
contortion. He appeared not only to be laughing with a triumphant smirk, but
accepting the bucketing with glee. And Franz Deutscher wasn’t having any of it.
His pale eyes cooked him.

“Well?” he
asked. “What can you say for yourself?”

Tommy’s twitch
only increased, in both speed and depth.

“Are you mocking
me?”

“Heil,”
twitched Tommy,
in a desperate attempt to buy some approval, but he did not make it to the
“Hitler” part.

That was when
Rudy stepped forward. He faced Franz Deutscher, looking up at him. “He’s got a
problem, sir—”

“I can see
that!”

“With his ears,”
Rudy finished. “He can’t—”

“Right, that’s
it.” Deutscher rubbed his hands together. “Both of you—six laps of the
grounds.” They obeyed, but not fast enough.
“Schnell!”
His voice chased
them.

When the six
laps were completed, they were given some drills of the run–drop down–get
up–get down again variety, and after fifteen very long minutes, they were
ordered to the ground for what should have been the last time.

Rudy looked
down.

A warped circle
of mud grinned up at him.

What might you
be looking at? it seemed to ask.

“Down!” Franz
ordered.

Rudy naturally
jumped over it and dropped to his stomach.

“Up!” Franz
smiled. “One step back.” They did it. “Down!”

The message was
clear and now, Rudy accepted it. He dived at the mud and held his breath, and
at that moment, lying ear to sodden earth, the drill ended.

“Vielen Dank,
meine Herren,”
Franz
Deutscher politely said. “Many thanks, my gentlemen.”

Rudy climbed to
his knees, did some gardening in his ear, and looked across at Tommy.

Tommy closed his
eyes, and he twitched.

When they
returned to Himmel Street that day, Liesel was playing hopscotch with some of
the younger kids, still in her BDM uniform. From the corner of her eye, she saw
the two melancholic figures walking toward her. One of them called out.

They met on the front
step of the Steiners’ concrete shoe box of a house, and Rudy told her all about
the day’s episode.

After ten
minutes, Liesel sat down.

After eleven
minutes, Tommy, who was sitting next to her, said, “It’s all my fault,” but
Rudy waved him away, somewhere between sentence and smile, chopping a mud
streak in half with his finger. “It’s my—” Tommy tried again, but Rudy broke
the sentence completely and pointed at him.

“Tommy, please.”
There was a peculiar look of contentment on Rudy’s face. Liesel had never seen
someone so miserable yet so wholeheartedly alive. “Just sit there and—twitch—or
something,” and he continued with the story.

He paced.

He wrestled his
tie.

The words were
flung at her, landing somewhere on the concrete step.

“That
Deutscher,” he summed up buoyantly. “He got us, huh, Tommy?”

Tommy nodded,
twitched, and spoke, not necessarily in that order. “It was because of me.”

“Tommy, what did
I say?”

“When?”

“Now! Just keep
quiet.”

“Sure, Rudy.”

When Tommy
walked forlornly home a short while later, Rudy tried what appeared to be a
masterful new tactic.

Pity.

On the step, he
perused the mud that had dried as a crusty sheet on his uniform, then looked
Liesel hopelessly in the face. “What about it,
Saumensch
?”

“What about
what?”

“You know. . .
.”

Liesel responded
in the usual fashion.

“Saukerl,”
she laughed, and
she walked the short distance home. A disconcerting mixture of mud and pity was
one thing, but kissing Rudy Steiner was something entirely different.

Smiling sadly on
the step, he called out, rummaging a hand through his hair. “One day,” he
warned her. “One day, Liesel!”

In the basement,
just over two years later, Liesel ached sometimes to go next door and see him,
even if she was writing in the early hours of morning. She also realized it was
most likely those sodden days at the Hitler Youth that had fed his, and
subsequently her own, desire for crime.

After all,
despite the usual bouts of rain, summer was beginning to arrive properly. The
Klar
apples should have been ripening. There was more stealing to be done.

THE LOSERS

When it came to
stealing, Liesel and Rudy first stuck with the idea that there was safety in
numbers. Andy Schmeikl invited them to the river for a meeting. Among other
things, a game plan for fruit stealing would be on the agenda.

“So are you the
leader now?” Rudy had asked, but Andy shook his head, heavy with
disappointment. He clearly wished that he had what it took.

“No.” His cool
voice was unusually warm. Half-baked. “There’s someone else.”

Unlike most
people engaged in the various arts of thievery, Viktor Chemmel had it all. He
lived in the best part of Molching, high up in a villa that had been fumigated
when the Jews were driven out. He had money. He had cigarettes. What he wanted,
however, was more.

“No crime in
wanting a little more,” he claimed, lying back in the grass with a collection
of boys assembled around him. “Wanting more is our fundamental right as
Germans. What does our
Führer
say?” He answered his own rhetoric. “We
must take what is rightfully ours!”

At face value,
Viktor Chemmel was clearly your typical teenage bullshit artist. Unfortunately,
when he felt like revealing it, he also possessed a certain charisma, a kind of
follow me.

When Liesel and
Rudy approached the group by the river, she heard him ask another question. “So
where are these two deviants you’ve been bragging about? It’s ten past four
already.”

“Not by my
watch,” said Rudy.

Viktor Chemmel
propped himself up on an elbow. “You’re not wearing a watch.”

“Would I be here
if I was rich enough to own a watch?”

The new leader
sat up fully and smiled, with straight white teeth. He then turned his casual
focus onto the girl. “Who’s the little whore?” Liesel, well accustomed to
verbal abuse, simply watched the fog-ridden texture of his eyes.