The Book Thief (5 page)

Evenings in the
small kitchen were raucous, without fail. Rosa Hubermann was always talking,
and when she was talking, it took the form of
schimpfen.
She was
constantly arguing and complaining. There was no one to really argue with, but
Mama managed it expertly every chance she had. She could argue with the entire
world in that kitchen, and almost every evening, she did. Once they had eaten
and Papa was gone, Liesel and Rosa would usually remain there, and Rosa would
do the ironing.

A few times a
week, Liesel would come home from school and walk the streets of Molching with
her mama, picking up and delivering washing and ironing from the wealthier
parts of town. Knaupt Strasse, Heide Strasse. A few others. Mama would deliver
the ironing or pick up the washing with a dutiful smile, but as soon as the
door was shut and she walked away, she would curse these rich people, with all
their money and laziness.

“Too
g’schtinkerdt
to wash their own clothes,” she would say, despite her dependence on them.

“Him,” she
accused Herr Vogel from Heide Strasse. “Made all his money from his father. He
throws it away on women and drink. And washing and ironing, of course.”

It was like a
roll call of scorn.

Herr Vogel, Herr
and Frau Pfaffelhürver, Helena Schmidt, the Weingartners. They were all guilty
of
something.

Apart from his
drunkenness and expensive lechery, Ernst Vogel, according to Rosa, was
constantly scratching his louse-ridden hair, licking his fingers, and then
handing over the money. “I should wash it before I come home,” was her
summation.

The
Pfaffelhürvers scrutinized the results. “ ‘Not one crease in these shirts,
please,’ ” Rosa imitated them. “ ‘Not one wrinkle in this suit.’ And then they
stand there and inspect it all, right in front of me. Right under my nose! What
a
G’sindel
—what trash.”

The Weingartners
were apparently stupid people with a constantly molting
Saumensch
of a
cat. “Do you know how long it takes me to get rid of all that fur? It’s
everywhere!”

Helena Schmidt
was a rich widow. “That old cripple—sitting there just wasting away. She’s
never had to do a day’s work in all her life.”

Rosa’s greatest
disdain, however, was reserved for 8 Grande Strasse. A large house, high on a
hill, in the upper part of Molching.

“This one,”
she’d pointed out to Liesel the first time they went there, “is the mayor’s
house. That crook. His wife sits at home all day, too mean to light a fire—it’s
always freezing in there. She’s crazy.” She punctuated the words. “Absolutely.
Crazy.” At the gate, she motioned to the girl. “You go.”

Liesel was
horrified. A giant brown door with a brass knocker stood atop a small flight of
steps. “What?”

Mama shoved her.
“Don’t you ‘what’ me,
Saumensch.
Move it.”

Liesel moved it.
She walked the path, climbed the steps, hesitated, and knocked.

A bathrobe
answered the door.

Inside it, a
woman with startled eyes, hair like fluff, and the posture of defeat stood in
front of her. She saw Mama at the gate and handed the girl a bag of washing.
“Thank you,” Liesel said, but there was no reply. Only the door. It closed.

“You see?” said
Mama when she returned to the gate. “This is what I have to put up with. These
rich bastards, these lazy swine . . .”

Holding the
washing as they walked away, Liesel looked back. The brass knocker eyed her
from the door.

When she
finished berating the people she worked for, Rosa Hubermann would usually move
on to her other favorite theme of abuse. Her husband. Looking at the bag of
washing and the hunched houses, she would talk, and talk, and talk. “If your
papa was any good,” she informed Liesel
every
time they walked through
Molching, “I wouldn’t have to do this.” She sniffed with derision. “A painter!
Why marry that
Arschloch
? That’s what they told me—my family, that is.”
Their footsteps crunched along the path. “And here I am, walking the streets
and slaving in my kitchen because that
Saukerl
never has any work. No
real work, anyway. Just that pathetic accordion in those dirt holes every
night.”

“Yes, Mama.”

“Is that all
you’ve got to say?” Mama’s eyes were like pale blue cutouts, pasted to her
face.

They’d walk on.

With Liesel
carrying the sack.

At home, it was
washed in a boiler next to the stove, hung up by the fireplace in the living
room, and then ironed in the kitchen. The kitchen was where the action was.

“Did you hear that?”
Mama asked her nearly every night. The iron was in her fist, heated from the
stove. Light was dull all through the house, and Liesel, sitting at the kitchen
table, would be staring at the gaps of fire in front of her.

“What?” she’d
reply. “What is it?”

“That was that
Holtzapfel.” Mama was already out of her seat. “That
Saumensch
just spat
on our door again.”

It was a
tradition for Frau Holtzapfel, one of their neighbors, to spit on the
Hubermanns’ door every time she walked past. The front door was only meters
from the gate, and let’s just say that Frau Holtzapfel had the distance—and the
accuracy.

The spitting was
due to the fact that she and Rosa Hubermann were engaged in some kind of
decade-long verbal war. No one knew the origin of this hostility. They’d
probably forgotten it themselves.

Frau Holtzapfel
was a wiry woman and quite obviously spiteful. She’d never married but had two
sons, a few years older than the Hubermann offspring. Both were in the army and
both will make cameo appearances by the time we’re finished here, I assure you.

In the spiteful
stakes, I should also say that Frau Holtzapfel was thorough with her spitting,
too. She never neglected to
spuck
on the door of number thirty-three and
say,
“Schweine!”
each time she walked past. One thing I’ve noticed about
the Germans:

They seem very
fond of pigs.

When a woman
with an iron fist tells you to get out there and clean spit off the door, you
do it. Especially when the iron’s hot.

It was all just
part of the routine, really.

Each night,
Liesel would step outside, wipe the door, and watch the sky. Usually it was
like spillage—cold and heavy, slippery and gray—but once in a while some stars
had the nerve to rise and float, if only for a few minutes. On those nights,
she would stay a little longer and wait.

“Hello, stars.”

Waiting.

For the voice
from the kitchen.

Or till the
stars were dragged down again, into the waters of the German sky.

THE KISS

(A
Childhood Decision Maker)

As with most
small towns, Molching was filled with characters. A handful of them lived on
Himmel Street. Frau Holtzapfel was only one cast member.

The others
included the likes of these:

•
Rudy Steiner—the boy next door who was obsessed with the black American athlete
Jesse Owens.

•
Frau Diller—the staunch Aryan corner-shop owner.

•
Tommy Müller—a kid whose chronic ear infections had resulted in several
operations, a pink river of skin painted across his face, and a tendency to
twitch.

•
A man known primarily as “Pfiffikus”—whose vulgarity made Rosa Hubermann look
like a wordsmith and a saint.

On the whole, it
was a street filled with relatively poor people, despite the apparent rise of
Germany’s economy under Hitler. Poor sides of town still existed.

As mentioned
already, the house next door to the Hubermanns was rented by a family called
Steiner. The Steiners had six children. One of them, the infamous Rudy, would
soon become Liesel’s best friend, and later, her partner and sometime catalyst
in crime. She met him on the street.

A few days after
Liesel’s first bath, Mama allowed her out, to play with the other kids. On
Himmel Street, friendships were made outside, no matter the weather. The
children rarely visited each other’s homes, for they were small and there was
usually very little in them. Also, they conducted their favorite pastime, like
professionals, on the street. Soccer. Teams were well set. Garbage cans were
used to mark out the goals.

Being the new
kid in town, Liesel was immediately shoved between one pair of those cans.
(Tommy Müller was finally set free, despite being the most useless soccer
player Himmel Street had ever seen.)

It all went
nicely for a while, until the fateful moment when Rudy Steiner was upended in
the snow by a Tommy Müller foul of frustration.

“What?!” Tommy
shouted. His face twitched in desperation. “What did I do?!”

A penalty was
awarded by everyone on Rudy’s team, and now it was Rudy Steiner against the new
kid, Liesel Meminger.

He placed the
ball on a grubby mound of snow, confident of the usual outcome. After all, Rudy
hadn’t missed a penalty in eighteen shots, even when the opposition made a
point of booting Tommy Müller out of goal. No matter whom they replaced him
with, Rudy would score.

On this
occasion, they tried to force Liesel out. As you might imagine, she protested,
and Rudy agreed.

“No, no.” He
smiled. “Let her stay.” He was rubbing his hands together.

Snow had stopped
falling on the filthy street now, and the muddy footprints were gathered
between them. Rudy shuffled in, fired the shot, and Liesel dived and somehow
deflected it with her elbow. She stood up grinning, but the first thing she saw
was a snowball smashing into her face. Half of it was mud. It stung like crazy.

“How do you like
that?” The boy grinned, and he ran off in pursuit of the ball.

“Saukerl,”
Liesel
whispered. The vocabulary of her new home was catching on fast.

Insane or not,
Rudy was always destined to be Liesel’s best friend. A snowball in the face is
surely the perfect beginning to a lasting friendship.

A few days after
Liesel started school, she went along with the Steiners. Rudy’s mother,
Barbara, made him promise to walk with the new girl, mainly because she’d heard
about the snowball. To Rudy’s credit, he was happy enough to comply. He was not
the junior misogynistic type of boy at all. He liked girls a lot, and he liked
Liesel (hence, the snowball). In fact, Rudy Steiner was one of those audacious
little bastards who actually
fancied
himself with the ladies. Every
childhood seems to have exactly such a juvenile in its midst and mists. He’s
the boy who refuses to fear the opposite sex, purely because everyone else
embraces that particular fear, and he’s the type who is unafraid to make a
decision. In this case, Rudy had already made up his mind about Liesel
Meminger.

On the way to
school, he tried to point out certain landmarks in the town, or at least, he
managed to slip it all in, somewhere between telling his younger siblings to
shut their faces and the older ones telling him to shut his. His first point of
interest was a small window on the second floor of an apartment block.

“That’s where
Tommy Müller lives.” He realized that Liesel didn’t remember him. “The
twitcher? When he was five years old, he got lost at the markets on the coldest
day of the year. Three hours later, when they found him, he was frozen solid
and had an awful earache from the cold. After a while, his ears were all
infected inside and he had three or four operations and the doctors wrecked his
nerves. So now he twitches.”

Liesel chimed
in, “And he’s bad at soccer.”

“The worst.”

Next was the
corner shop at the end of Himmel Street.
Frau
Diller’s.

Frau Diller was
a sharp-edged woman with fat glasses and a nefarious glare. She developed this
evil look to discourage the very idea of stealing from her shop, which she
occupied with soldierlike posture, a refrigerated voice, and even breath that
smelled like “
heil
Hitler.” The shop itself was white and cold, and
completely bloodless. The small house compressed beside it shivered with a
little more severity than the other buildings on Himmel Street. Frau Diller
administered this feeling, dishing it out as the only free item from her
premises. She lived for her shop and her shop lived for the Third Reich. Even
when rationing started later in the year, she was known to sell certain
hard-to-get items under the counter and donate the money to the Nazi Party. On
the wall behind her usual sitting position was a framed photo of the
Führer.
If you walked into her shop and didn’t say “
heil
Hitler,” you
wouldn’t be served. As they walked by, Rudy drew Liesel’s attention to the
bulletproof eyes leering from the shop window.