The Book Thief (56 page)

“Schreibe,”
she instructed
herself. “Write.”

After more than
two hours, Liesel Meminger started writing, not knowing how she was ever going
to get this right. How could she ever know that someone would pick her story up
and carry it with him everywhere?

No one expects
these things.

They don’t plan
them.

She used a small
paint can for a seat, a large one as a table, and Liesel stuck the pencil onto
the first page. In the middle, she wrote the following.

THE RIB-CAGE PLANES

Her hand was
sore by page three.

Words are so
heavy, she thought, but as the night wore on, she was able to complete eleven
pages.

She fell asleep
down there, on a bed of drop sheets, with the paper curling at the edges, up on
the taller paint can. In the morning, Mama stood above her, her chlorinated
eyes questioning.

“Liesel,” she
said, “what on earth are you doing down here?”

“I’m writing,
Mama.”

“Jesus, Mary,
and Joseph.” Rosa stomped back up the steps. “Be back up in five minutes or you
get the bucket treatment. Verstehst?”

“I understand.”

Every night,
Liesel made her way down to the basement. She kept the book with her at all
times. For hours, she wrote, attempting each night to complete ten pages of her
life. There was so much to consider, so many things in danger of being left
out. Just be patient, she told herself, and with the mounting pages, the
strength of her writing fist grew.

Sometimes she
wrote about what was happening in the basement at the time of writing. She had
just finished the moment when Papa had slapped her on the church steps and how
they’d “
heil
Hitlered” together. Looking across, Hans Hubermann was
packing the accordion away. He’d just played for half an hour as Liesel wrote.

After ten nights
of writing, Munich was bombed again. Liesel was up to page 102 and was asleep
in the basement. She did not hear the cuckoo or the sirens, and she was holding
the book in her sleep when Papa came to wake her. “Liesel, come.” She took
The
Book Thief
and each of her other books, and they fetched Frau Holtzapfel.

By the next
raid, on October 2, she was finished. Only a few dozen pages remained blank and
the book thief was already starting to read over what she’d written. The book
was divided into ten parts, all of which were given the title of books or stories
and described how each affected her life.

Often, I wonder
what page she was up to when I walked down Himmel Street in the dripping-tap
rain, five nights later. I wonder what she was reading when the first bomb
dropped from the rib cage of a plane.

Personally, I
like to imagine her looking briefly at the wall, at Max Vandenburg’s tightrope
cloud, his dripping sun, and the figures walking toward it. Then she looks at
the agonizing attempts of her paint-written spelling. I see the
Führer
coming
down the basement steps with his tied-together boxing gloves hanging casually
around his neck. And the book thief reads, rereads, and rereads her last
sentence, for many hours.

Outside, the
world whistled. The rain was stained.

THE
END OF THE WORLD (Part II)

Almost all the
words are fading now. The black book is disintegrating under the weight of my
travels. That’s another reason for telling this story. What did we say earlier?
Say something enough times and you never forget it. Also, I can tell you what
happened after the book thief’s words had stopped, and how I came to know her
story in the first place. Like this.

Picture yourself
walking down Himmel Street in the dark. Your hair is getting wet and the air
pressure is on the verge of drastic change. The first bomb hits Tommy Müller’s
apartment block. His face twitches innocently in his sleep and I kneel at his
bed. Next, his sister. Kristina’s feet are sticking out from under the blanket.
They match the hopscotch footprints on the street. Her little toes. Their
mother sleeps a few feet away. Four cigarettes sit disfigured in her ashtray,
and the roofless ceiling is hot plate red. Himmel Street is burning.

The sirens began
to howl.

“Too late
now,
”
I whispered, “for that little exercise,” because everyone had been fooled, and
fooled again. First up, the Allies had feigned a raid on Munich in order to
strike at Stuttgart. But next, ten planes had remained. Oh, there were
warnings, all right. In Molching, they came with the bombs.

In the space of
a few minutes, all of them were gone.

A church was chopped
down.

Earth was
destroyed where Max Vandenburg had stayed on his feet.

At 31 Himmel
Street, Frau Holtzapfel appeared to be waiting for me in the kitchen. A broken
cup was in front of her and in a last moment of awakeness, her face seemed to
ask just what in the hell had taken me so long.

By contrast,
Frau Diller was fast asleep. Her bulletproof glasses were shattered next to the
bed. Her shop was obliterated, the counter landing across the road, and her
framed photo of Hitler was taken from the wall and thrown to the floor. The man
was positively mugged and beaten to a glass-shattering pulp. I stepped on him
on my way out.

The Fiedlers
were well organized, all in bed, all covered. Pfiffikus was hidden up to his
nose.

At the
Steiners’, I ran my fingers through Barbara’s lovely combed hair, I took the
serious look from Kurt’s serious sleeping face, and one by one, I kissed the
smaller ones good night.

Then Rudy.

Oh, crucified
Christ, Rudy . . .

He lay in bed
with one of his sisters. She must have kicked him or muscled her way into the
majority of the bed space because he was on the very edge with his arm around
her. The boy slept. His candlelit hair ignited the bed, and I picked both him
and Bettina up with their souls still in the blanket. If nothing else, they
died fast and they were warm. The boy from the plane, I thought. The one with
the teddy bear. Where was Rudy’s comfort? Where was someone to alleviate this
robbery of his life? Who was there to soothe him as life’s rug was snatched
from under his sleeping feet?

No one.

There was only
me.

And I’m not too
great at that sort of comforting thing, especially when my hands are cold and
the bed is warm. I carried him softly through the broken street, with one salty
eye and a heavy, deathly heart. With him, I tried a little harder. I watched
the contents of his soul for a moment and saw a black-painted boy calling the
name Jesse Owens as he ran through an imaginary tape. I saw him hip-deep in
some icy water, chasing a book, and I saw a boy lying in bed, imagining how a
kiss would taste from his glorious next-door neighbor. He does something to me,
that boy. Every time. It’s his only detriment. He steps on my heart. He makes
me cry.

Lastly, the
Hubermanns.

Hans.

Papa.

He was tall in
the bed and I could see the silver through his eyelids. His soul sat up. It met
me. Those kinds of souls always do—the best ones. The ones who rise up and say,
“I know who you are and I am ready. Not that I want to go, of course, but I
will come.” Those souls are always light because more of them have been put
out. More of them have already found their way to other places. This one was
sent out by the breath of an accordion, the odd taste of champagne in summer,
and the art of promise-keeping. He lay in my arms and rested. There was an
itchy lung for a last cigarette and an immense, magnetic pull toward the
basement, for the girl who was his daughter and was writing a book down there
that he hoped to read one day.

Liesel.

His soul
whispered it as I carried him. But there was no Liesel in that house. Not for
me, anyway.

For me, there
was only a Rosa, and yes, I truly think I picked her up midsnore, for her mouth
was open and her papery pink lips were still in the act of moving. If she’d
seen me, I’m sure she would have called me a
Saukerl,
though I would not
have taken it badly. After reading
The Book Thief,
I discovered that she
called everyone that.
Saukerl. Saumensch.
Especially the people she
loved. Her elastic hair was out. It rubbed against the pillow and her wardrobe
body had risen with the beating of her heart. Make no mistake, the woman
had
a heart. She had a bigger one than people would think. There was a lot in
it, stored up, high in miles of hidden shelving. Remember that she was the
woman with the instrument strapped to her body in the long, moon-slit night.
She was a Jew feeder without a question in the world on a man’s first night in
Molching. And she was an arm reacher, deep into a mattress, to deliver a
sketchbook to a teenage girl.

He couldn’t hold
out inside the collapsed house, and I was carrying his soul up Himmel Street
when I noticed the LSE shouting and laughing.

There was a
small valley in the mountain range of rubble.

The hot sky was
red and turning. Pepper streaks were starting to swirl and I became curious.
Yes, yes, I know what I told you at the beginning. Usually my curiosity leads
to the dreaded witnessing of some kind of human outcry, but on this occasion, I
have to say that although it broke my heart, I was, and still am, glad I was
there.

When they pulled
her out, it’s true that she started to wail and scream for Hans Hubermann. The
men of the LSE attempted to keep her in their powdery arms, but the book thief
managed to break away. Desperate humans often seem able to do this.

She did not know
where she was running, for Himmel Street no longer existed. Everything was new
and apocalyptic. Why was the sky red? How could it be snowing? And why did the
snowflakes burn her arms?

Liesel slowed to
a staggering walk and concentrated up ahead.

Where’s Frau
Diller’s? she thought. Where’s—

She wandered a
short while longer until the man who found her took her arm and kept talking.
“You’re just in shock, my girl. It’s just shock; you’re going to be fine.”

“What’s
happened?” Liesel asked. “Is this still Himmel Street?”

“Yes.” The man
had disappointed eyes. What had he seen these past few years? “This is Himmel.
You got bombed, my girl.
Es tut mir
leid, Schatzi.
I’m sorry,
darling.”

The girl’s mouth
wandered on, even if her body was now still. She had forgotten her previous
wails for Hans Hubermann. That was years ago—a bombing will do that. She said,
“We have to get my papa, my mama. We have to get Max out of the basement. If
he’s not there, he’s in the hallway, looking out the window. He does that
sometimes when there’s a raid—he doesn’t get to look much at the sky, you see.
I have to tell him how the weather looks now. He’ll never believe me. . . .”