The Book Thief (46 page)

There were many
questions when they arrived, mainly of the “Just where in the hell have you two
been?” nature, but the anger quickly gave way to relief.

It was Barbara
who pursued the answers. “Well, Rudy?”

Liesel answered
for him. “He was killing the
Führer,
” she said, and Rudy looked genuinely
happy for a long enough moment to please her.

“Bye, Liesel.”

Several hours
later, there was a noise in the living room. It stretched toward Liesel in bed.
She awoke and remained still, thinking ghosts and Papa and intruders and Max.
There was the sound of opening and dragging, and then the fuzzy silence who
followed. The silence was always the greatest temptation.

Don’t move.

She thought that
thought many times, but she didn’t think it enough.

Her feet scolded
the floor.

Air breathed up
her pajama sleeves.

She walked
through the corridor darkness in the direction of silence that had once been
noisy, toward the thread of moonlight standing in the living room. She stopped,
feeling the bareness of her ankles and toes. She watched.

It took longer
than she expected for her eyes to adjust, and when they did, there was no
denying the fact that Rosa Hubermann was sitting on the edge of the bed with
her husband’s accordion tied to her chest. Her fingers hovered above the keys.
She did not move. She didn’t even appear to be breathing.

The sight of it
propelled itself to the girl in the hallway.

5’1’’
×
Instrument
×
Silence.

Liesel stayed
and watched.

Many minutes
dripped past. The book thief’s desire to hear a note was exhausting, and still,
it would not come. The keys were not struck. The bellows didn’t breathe. There
was only the moonlight, like a long strand of hair in the curtain, and there
was Rosa.

The accordion
remained strapped to her chest. When she bowed her head, it sank to her lap.
Liesel watched. She knew that for the next few days, Mama would be walking
around with the imprint of an accordion on her body. There was also an
acknowledgment that there was great beauty in what she was currently witnessing,
and she chose not to disturb it.

She returned to
bed and fell asleep to the vision of Mama and the silent music. Later, when she
woke up from her usual dream and crept again to the hallway, Rosa was still
there, as was the accordion.

Like an anchor,
it pulled her forward. Her body was sinking. She appeared dead.

She can’t
possibly be breathing in that position, Liesel thought, but when she made her
way closer, she could hear it.

Mama was snoring
again.

Who needs
bellows, she thought, when you’ve got a pair of lungs like that?

Eventually, when
Liesel returned to bed, the image of Rosa Hubermann and the accordion would not
leave her. The book thief ’s eyes remained open. She waited for the suffocation
of sleep.

THE COLLECTOR

Neither Hans
Hubermann nor Alex Steiner was sent to fight. Alex was sent to Austria, to an
army hospital outside Vienna. Given his expertise in tailoring, he was given a
job that at least resembled his profession. Cartloads of uniforms and socks and
shirts would come in every week and he would mend what needed mending, even if
they could only be used as underclothes for the suffering soldiers in Russia.

Hans was sent
first, quite ironically, to Stuttgart, and later, to Essen. He was given one of
the most undesirable positions on the home front. The LSE.

The job of the
LSE was to remain aboveground during air raids and put out fires, prop up the
walls of buildings, and rescue anyone who had been trapped during the raid. As
Hans soon discovered, there was also an alternative definition for the acronym.
The men in the unit would explain to him on his first day that it really stood
for
Leichensammler Einheit
—Dead Body Collectors.

When he arrived,
Hans could only guess what those men had done to deserve such a task, and in
turn, they wondered the same of him. Their leader, Sergeant Boris Schipper,
asked him straight out. When Hans explained the bread, the Jews, and the whip,
the round-faced sergeant gave out a short spurt of laughter. “You’re lucky to
be alive.” His eyes were also round and he was constantly wiping them. They
were either tired or itchy or full of smoke and dust. “Just remember that the
enemy here is not in front of you.”

Hans was about
to ask the obvious question when a voice arrived from behind. Attached to it
was the slender face of a young man with a smile like a sneer. Reinhold Zucker.
“With us,” he said, “the enemy isn’t over the hill or in any specific
direction. It’s all around.” He returned his focus to the letter he was
writing. “You’ll see.”

In the messy
space of a few months, Reinhold Zucker would be dead. He would be killed by
Hans Hubermann’s seat.

As the war flew
into Germany with more intensity, Hans would learn that every one of his shifts
started in the same fashion. The men would gather at the truck to be briefed on
what had been hit during their break, what was most likely to be hit next, and
who was working with whom.

Even when no
raids were in operation, there would still be a great deal of work to be done.
They would drive through broken towns, cleaning up. In the truck, there were
twelve slouched men, all rising and falling with the various inconsistencies in
the road.

From the
beginning, it was clear that they all owned a seat.

Reinhold
Zucker’s was in the middle of the left row.

Hans Hubermann’s
was at the very back, where the daylight stretched itself out. He learned
quickly to be on the lookout for any rubbish that might be thrown from anywhere
in the truck’s interior. Hans reserved a special respect for cigarette butts,
still burning as they whistled by.

In late
November, he had his first smoky taste of an actual raid. The truck was mobbed
by rubble and there was much running and shouting. Fires were burning and the
ruined cases of buildings were piled up in mounds. Framework leaned. The smoke
bombs stood like matchsticks in the ground, filling the city’s lungs.

Hans Hubermann
was in a group of four. They formed a line. Sergeant Boris Schipper was at the
front, his arms disappearing into the smoke. Behind him was Kessler, then
Brunnenweg, then Hubermann. As the sergeant hosed the fire, the other two men
hosed the sergeant, and just to make sure, Hubermann hosed all three of them.

Behind him, a
building groaned and tripped.

It fell
face-first, stopping a few meters from his heels. The concrete smelled
brand-new, and the wall of powder rushed at them.

“
Gottverdammt,
Hubermann!” The voice struggled out of the flames. It was followed
immediately by three men. Their throats were filled with particles of ash. Even
when they made it around the corner, away from the center of the wreckage, the
haze of the collapsed building attempted to follow. It was white and warm, and
it crept behind them.

Slumped in
temporary safety, there was much coughing and swearing. The sergeant repeated
his earlier sentiments. “Goddamn it, Hubermann.” He scraped at his lips to
loosen them. “What the hell was that?”

“It just
collapsed, right behind us.”

“That much I
know already. The question is, how big was it? It must have been ten stories
high.”

“No, sir, just
two, I think.”

“Jesus.” A
coughing fit. “Mary and Joseph.” Now he yanked at the paste of sweat and powder
in his eye sockets. “Not much you could do about that.”

One of the other
men wiped his face and said, “Just once I want to be there when they hit a pub,
for Christ’s sake. I’m dying for a beer.”

Each man leaned
back.

They could all
taste it, putting out the fires in their throats and softening the smoke. It
was a nice dream, and an impossible one. They were all aware that any beer that
flowed in these streets would not be beer at all, but a kind of milk shake or
porridge.

All four men
were plastered with the gray-and-white conglomeration of dust. When they stood
up fully, to resume work, only small cracks of their uniform could be seen.

The sergeant
walked to Brunnenweg. He brushed heavily at his chest. Several smacks. “That’s
better. You had some dust on there, my friend.” As Brunnenweg laughed, the
sergeant turned to his newest recruit. “You first this time, Hubermann.”

They put the
fires out for several hours, and they found anything they could to convince a
building to remain standing. In some cases, where the sides were damaged, the
remaining edges poked out like elbows. This was Hans Hubermann’s strong point.
He almost came to enjoy finding a smoldering rafter or disheveled slab of
concrete to prop those elbows up, to give them something to rest on.

His hands were
packed tightly with splinters, and his teeth were caked with residue from the
fallout. Both lips were set with moist dust that had hardened, and there wasn’t
a pocket, a thread, or a hidden crease in his uniform that wasn’t covered in a
film left by the loaded air.

The worst part
of the job was the people.

Once in a while
there was a person roaming doggedly through the fog, mostly single-worded. They
always shouted a name.

Sometimes it was
Wolfgang.

“Have you seen
my Wolfgang?”

Their handprints
would remain on his jacket.

“Stephanie!”

“Hansi!”

“Gustel! Gustel
Stoboi!”

As the density
subsided, the roll call of names limped through the ruptured streets, sometimes
ending with an ash-filled embrace or a knelt-down howl of grief. They accumulated,
hour by hour, like sweet and sour dreams, waiting to happen.

The dangers
merged into one. Powder and smoke and the gusty flames. The damaged people.
Like the rest of the men in the unit, Hans would need to perfect the art of
forgetting.

“How are you,
Hubermann?” the sergeant asked at one point. Fire was at his shoulder.

Hans nodded,
uneasily, at the pair of them.

Midway through
the shift, there was an old man who staggered defenselessly through the
streets. As Hans finished stabilizing a building, he turned to find him at his
back, waiting calmly for his turn. A blood-stain was signed across his face. It
trailed off down his throat and neck. He was wearing a white shirt with a dark
red collar and he held his leg as if it was next to him. “Could you prop
me
up
now, young man?”

Hans picked him
up and carried him out of the haze.

It wasn’t until
he placed him down on a patch of concrete-coated grass that Hans noticed.

“What is it?”
one of the other men asked.

Hans could only
point.

“Oh.” A hand
pulled him away. “Get used to it, Hubermann.”

For the rest of
the shift, he threw himself into duty. He tried to ignore the distant echoes of
calling people.

After perhaps
two hours, he rushed from a building with the sergeant and two other men. He
didn’t watch the ground and tripped. Only when he returned to his haunches and
saw the others looking in distress at the obstacle did he realize.

The corpse was
facedown.

It lay in a
blanket of powder and dust, and it was holding its ears.

It was a boy.

Perhaps eleven
or twelve years old.

Not far away, as
they progressed along the street, they found a woman calling the name Rudolf.
She was drawn to the four men and met them in the mist. Her body was frail and
bent with worry.

“Have you seen
my boy?”

“How old is he?”
the sergeant asked.

“Twelve.”

Oh, Christ. Oh,
crucified Christ.

They all thought
it, but the sergeant could not bring himself to tell her or point the way.

As the woman
tried to push past, Boris Schipper held her back. “We’ve just come from that
street,” he assured her. “You won’t find him down there.”

The bent woman
still clung to hope. She called over her shoulder as she half walked, half ran.
“Rudy!”

Hans Hubermann
thought of another Rudy then. The Himmel Street variety. Please, he asked into
a sky he couldn’t see, let Rudy be safe. His thoughts naturally progressed to
Liesel and Rosa and the Steiners, and Max.

When they made
it to the rest of the men, he dropped down and lay on his back.