The Book Thief (39 page)

“Where?” said
one of the girls. Probably Bettina, the youngest. “I can’t see him at all.”

“That last one.
No, not there.
There.
”

They were still
in the identification process when the starter’s gun gave off its smoke and
sound. The small Steiners rushed to the fence.

For the first
lap, a group of seven boys led the field. On the second, it dropped to five,
and on the next lap, four. Rudy was the fourth runner on every lap until the
last. A man on the right was saying that the boy coming second looked the best.
He was the tallest. “You wait,” he told his nonplussed wife. “With two hundred
left, he’ll break away.” The man was wrong.

A gargantuan
brown-shirted official informed the group that there was one lap to go. He
certainly wasn’t suffering under the ration system. He called out as the lead
pack crossed the line, and it was not the second boy who accelerated, but the
fourth. And he was two hundred meters early.

Rudy ran.

He did not look
back at any stage.

Like an elastic
rope, he lengthened his lead until any thought of someone else winning snapped
altogether. He took himself around the track as the three runners behind him
fought each other for the scraps. In the homestretch, there was nothing but
blond hair and space, and when he crossed the line, he didn’t stop. He didn’t
raise his arm. There wasn’t even a bent-over relief. He simply walked another
twenty meters and eventually looked over his shoulder to watch the others cross
the line.

On the way back
to his family, he met first with his leaders and then with Franz Deutscher.
They both nodded.

“Steiner.”

“Deutscher.”

“Looks like all
those laps I gave you paid off, huh?”

“Looks like it.”

He would not
smile until he’d won all four.

For Liesel,
there was the 400. She finished seventh, then fourth in her heat of the 200.
All she could see up ahead were the hamstrings and bobbing ponytails of the
girls in front. In the long jump, she enjoyed the sand packed around her feet
more than any distance, and the shot put wasn’t her greatest moment, either.
This day, she realized, was Rudy’s.

In the 400
final, he led from the backstretch to the end, and he won the 200 only
narrowly.

“You getting
tired?” Liesel asked him. It was early afternoon by then.

“Of course not.”
He was breathing heavily and stretching his calves. “What are you talking
about,
Saumensch
? What the hell would you know?”

When the heats
of the 100 were called, he rose slowly to his feet and followed the trail of
adolescents toward the track. Liesel went after him. “Hey, Rudy.” She pulled at
his shirtsleeve. “Good luck.”

“I’m not tired,”
he said.

“I know.”

He winked at
her.

He was tired.

In his heat,
Rudy slowed to finish second, and after ten minutes of other races, the final
was called. Two other boys had looked formidable, and Liesel had a feeling in
her stomach that Rudy could not win this one. Tommy Müller, who’d finished
second to last in his heat, stood with her at the fence. “He’ll win it,” he
informed her.

“I know.”

No, he won’t.

When the
finalists reached the starting line, Rudy dropped to his knees and began
digging starting holes with his hands. A balding brownshirt wasted no time in
walking over and telling him to cut it out. Liesel watched the adult finger,
pointing, and she could see the dirt falling to the ground as Rudy brushed his
hands together.

When they were
called forward, Liesel tightened her grip on the fence. One of the boys
false-started; the gun was shot twice. It was Rudy. Again, the official had
words with him and the boy nodded. Once more and he was out.

Set for the
second time, Liesel watched with concentration, and for the first few seconds,
she could not believe what she was seeing. Another false start was recorded and
it was the same athlete who had done it. In front of her, she created a perfect
race, in which Rudy trailed but came home to win in the last ten meters. What
she actually saw, however, was Rudy’s disqualification. He was escorted to the
side of the track and was made to stand there, alone, as the remainder of boys
stepped forward.

They lined up
and raced.

A boy with rusty
brown hair and a big stride won by at least five meters.

Rudy remained.

Later, when the
day was complete and the sun was taken from Himmel Street, Liesel sat with her
friend on the footpath.

They talked
about everything else, from Franz Deutscher’s face after the 1500 to one of the
eleven-year-old girls having a tantrum after losing the discus.

Before they
proceeded to their respective homes, Rudy’s voice reached over and handed Liesel
the truth. For a while, it sat on her shoulder, but a few thoughts later, it
made its way to her ear.

RUDY’S
VOICE

When the
confession registered, Liesel asked the only question available. “But why,
Rudy? Why did you do it?”

He was standing
with a hand on his hip, and he did not answer. There was nothing but a knowing
smile and a slow walk that lolled him home. They never talked about it again.

For Liesel’s
part, she often wondered what Rudy’s answer might have been had she pushed him.
Perhaps three medals had shown what he’d wanted to show, or he was afraid to
lose that final race. In the end, the only explanation she allowed herself to
hear was an inner teenage voice.

“Because he
isn’t Jesse Owens.”

Only when she
got up to leave did she notice the three imitation-gold medals sitting next to
her. She knocked on the Steiners’ door and held them out to him. “You forgot
these.”

“No, I didn’t.”
He closed the door and Liesel took the medals home. She walked with them down
to the basement and told Max about her friend Rudy Steiner.

“He truly is
stupid,” she concluded.

“Clearly,” Max
agreed, but I doubt he was fooled.

They both
started work then, Max on his sketchbook, Liesel on
The Dream Carrier
.
She was in the latter stages of the novel, where the young priest was doubting
his faith after meeting a strange and elegant woman.

When she placed
it facedown on her lap, Max asked when she thought she’d finish it.

“A few days at
the most.”

“Then a new
one?”

The book thief
looked at the basement ceiling. “Maybe, Max.” She closed the book and leaned
back. “If I’m lucky.”

No, the
dictionary comes at the end of this small trilogy, and this is only the second
installment. This is the part where Liesel finishes
The Dream
Carrier
and steals a story called
A Song in the Dark.
As always, it was
taken from the mayor’s house. The only difference was that she made her way to
the upper part of town alone. There was no Rudy that day.

It was a morning
rich with both sun and frothy clouds.

Liesel stood in
the mayor’s library with greed in her fingers and book titles at her lips. She
was comfortable enough on this occasion to run her fingers along the shelves—a
short replay of her original visit to the room—and she whispered many of the
titles as she made her way along.

Typically, many
of the titles tempted her, but after a good minute or two in the room, she
settled for
A Song in the Dark,
most likely because the book was green,
and she did not yet own a book of that color. The engraved writing on the cover
was white, and there was a small insignia of a flute between the title and the
name of the author. She climbed with it from the window, saying thanks on her
way out.

Without Rudy,
she felt a good degree of absence, but on that particular morning, for some
reason, the book thief was happiest alone. She went about her work and read the
book next to the Amper River, far enough away from the occasional headquarters
of Viktor Chemmel and the previous gang of Arthur Berg. No one came, no one
interrupted, and Liesel read four of the very short chapters of
A Song in
the
Dark,
and she was happy.

It was the
pleasure and satisfaction.

Of good stealing.

A week later,
the trilogy of happiness was completed.

In the last days
of August, a gift arrived, or in fact, was noticed.

It was late
afternoon. Liesel was watching Kristina Müller jumping rope on Himmel Street.
Rudy Steiner skidded to a stop in front of her on his brother’s bike. “Do you
have some time?” he asked.

She shrugged.
“For what?”

“I think you’d
better come.” He dumped the bike and went to collect the other one from home.
In front of her, Liesel watched the pedal spin.

They rode up to
Grande Strasse, where Rudy stopped and waited.

“Well,” Liesel
asked, “what is it?”

Rudy pointed.
“Look closer.”

Gradually, they
rode to a better position, behind a blue spruce tree. Through the prickly
branches, Liesel noticed the closed window, and then the object leaning on the
glass.

“Is that . . .
?”

Rudy nodded.

They debated the
issue for many minutes before they agreed it needed to be done. It had
obviously been placed there intentionally, and if it was a trap, it was worth
it.

Among the
powdery blue branches, Liesel said, “A book thief would do it.”

She dropped the
bike, observed the street, and crossed the yard. The shadows of clouds were
buried among the dusky grass. Were they holes for falling into, or patches of
extra darkness for hiding in? Her imagination sent her sliding down one of
those holes into the evil clutches of the mayor himself. If nothing else, those
thoughts distracted her and she was at the window even quicker than she’d
hoped.

It was like
The
Whistler
all over again.

Her nerves licked
her palms.

Small streams of
sweat rippled under her arms.

When she raised
her head, she could read the title.
The Complete Duden Dictionary and
Thesaurus.
Briefly, she turned to Rudy and mouthed the words,
It’s a
dictionary.
He shrugged and held out his arms.

She worked
methodically, sliding the window upward, wondering how all of this would look
from inside the house. She envisioned the sight of her thieving hand reaching
up, making the window rise until the book was felled. It seemed to surrender
slowly, like a falling tree.

Got it.

There was barely
a disturbance or sound.

The book simply
tilted toward her and she took it with her free hand. She even closed the
window, nice and smooth, then turned and walked back across the potholes of
clouds.

“Nice,” Rudy
said as he gave her the bike.

“Thank you.”

They rode toward
the corner, where the day’s importance reached them. Liesel knew. It was that
feeling again, of being watched. A voice pedaled inside her. Two laps.

Look at the
window. Look at the window.

She was
compelled.

Like an itch
that demands a fingernail, she felt an intense desire to stop.

She placed her
feet on the ground and turned to face the mayor’s house and the library window,
and she saw. Certainly, she should have known this might happen, but she could
not hide the shock that loitered inside when she witnessed the mayor’s wife,
standing behind the glass. She was transparent, but she was there. Her fluffy
hair was as it always was, and her wounded eyes and mouth and expression held
themselves up, for viewing.

Very slowly, she
lifted her hand to the book thief on the street. A motionless wave.

In her state of
shock, Liesel said nothing, to Rudy or herself. She only steadied herself and
raised her hand to acknowledge the mayor’s wife, in the window.

On the way home,
they stopped at the bridge and inspected the heavy black book. As Rudy flipped
through the pages, he arrived at a letter. He picked it up and looked slowly
toward the book thief. “It’s got your name on it.”

The river ran.

Liesel took hold
of the paper.