The Book Thief (57 page)

Her body buckled
at that moment and the LSE man caught her and sat her down. “We’ll move her in
a minute,” he told his sergeant. The book thief looked at what was heavy and
hurting in her hand.

The book.

The words.

Her fingers were
bleeding, just like they had on her arrival here.

The LSE man
lifted her and started to lead her away. A wooden spoon was on fire. A man
walked past with a broken accordion case and Liesel could see the instrument
inside. She could see its white teeth and the black notes in between. They smiled
at her and triggered an alertness to her reality. We were bombed, she thought,
and now she turned to the man at her side and said, “That’s my papa’s
accordion.” Again. “That’s my papa’s accordion.”

“Don’t worry,
young girl, you’re safe; just come a little farther.”

But Liesel did
not come.

She looked to
where the man was taking the accordion and followed him. With the red sky still
showering its beautiful ash, she stopped the tall LSE worker and said, “I’ll
take that if you like—it’s my papa’s.” Softly, she took it from the man’s hand
and began carrying it off. It was right about then that she saw the first body.

The accordion
case fell from her grip. The sound of an explosion.

Frau Holtzapfel
was scissored on the ground.

OF LIESEL MEMINGER’S LIFE

When she saw the
rest of them, Liesel coughed. She listened momentarily as a man told the others
that they had found one of the bodies in pieces, in one of the maple trees.

There were
shocked pajamas and torn faces. It was the boy’s hair she saw first.

Rudy?

She did more
than mouth the word now. “Rudy?”

He lay with
yellow hair and closed eyes, and the book thief ran toward him and fell down.
She dropped the black book. “Rudy,” she sobbed, “wake up. . . .” She grabbed
him by his shirt and gave him just the slightest disbelieving shake. “Wake up,
Rudy,” and now, as the sky went on heating and showering ash, Liesel was
holding Rudy Steiner’s shirt by the front. “Rudy, please.” The tears grappled
with her face. “Rudy, please, wake up, Goddamn it, wake up, I love you. Come
on, Rudy, come on, Jesse Owens, don’t you know I love you, wake up, wake up,
wake up. . . .”

But nothing
cared.

The rubble just
climbed higher. Concrete hills with caps of red. A beautiful, tear-stomped
girl, shaking the dead.

“Come on, Jesse
Owens—”

But the boy did
not wake.

In disbelief,
Liesel buried her head into Rudy’s chest. She held his limp body, trying to
keep him from lolling back, until she needed to return him to the butchered
ground. She did it gently.

Slow. Slow.

“God, Rudy . .
.”

She leaned down
and looked at his lifeless face and Liesel kissed her best friend, Rudy
Steiner, soft and true on his lips. He tasted dusty and sweet. He tasted like
regret in the shadows of trees and in the glow of the anarchist’s suit
collection. She kissed him long and soft, and when she pulled herself away, she
touched his mouth with her fingers. Her hands were trembling, her lips were
fleshy, and she leaned in once more, this time losing control and misjudging
it. Their teeth collided on the demolished world of Himmel Street.

She did not say
goodbye. She was incapable, and after a few more minutes at his side, she was
able to tear herself from the ground. It amazes me what humans can do, even
when streams are flowing down their faces and they stagger on, coughing and
searching, and finding.

Liesel did not
run or walk or move at all. Her eyes had scoured the humans and stopped hazily
when she noticed the tall man and the short, wardrobe woman. That’s my mama.
That’s my papa. The words were stapled to her.

“They’re not
moving,” she said quietly. “They’re not moving.”

Perhaps if she
stood still long enough, it would be
they
who moved, but they remained
motionless for as long as Liesel did. I realized at that moment that she was
not wearing any shoes. What an odd thing to notice right then. Perhaps I was
trying to avoid her face, for the book thief was truly an irretrievable mess.

She took a step
and didn’t want to take any more, but she did. Slowly, Liesel walked to her
mama and papa and sat down between them. She held Mama’s hand and began
speaking to her. “Remember when I came here, Mama? I clung to the gate and
cried. Do you remember what you said to everyone on the street that day?” Her
voice wavered now. “You said, ‘What are you assholes looking at? ’ ” She took
Mama’s hand and touched her wrist. “Mama, I know that you . . . I liked when
you came to school and told me Max had woken up. Did you know I saw you with
Papa’s accordion?” She tightened her grip on the hardening hand. “I came and
watched and you were beautiful. Goddamn it, you were so beautiful, Mama.”

Papa was a man
with silver eyes, not dead ones.

Papa was an
accordion!

But his bellows
were all empty.

Nothing went in
and nothing came out.

She began to
rock back and forth. A shrill, quiet, smearing note was caught somewhere in her
mouth until she was finally able to turn.

To Papa.

At that point, I
couldn’t help it. I walked around to see her better, and from the moment I
witnessed her face again, I could tell that this was who she loved the most.
Her expression stroked the man on his face. It followed one of the lines down
his cheek. He had sat in the washroom with her and taught her how to roll a
cigarette. He gave bread to a dead man on Munich Street and told the girl to
keep reading in the bomb shelter. Perhaps if he didn’t, she might not have
ended up writing in the basement.

Papa—the
accordionist—and Himmel Street.

One could not
exist without the other, because for Liesel, both were home. Yes, that’s what
Hans Hubermann was for Liesel Meminger.

She turned
around and spoke to the LSE.

“Please,” she
said, “my papa’s accordion. Could you get it for me?”

After a few
minutes of confusion, an older member brought the eaten case and Liesel opened
it. She removed the injured instrument and laid it next to Papa’s body. “Here,
Papa.”

And I can
promise you something, because it was a thing I saw many years later—a vision
in the book thief herself—that as she knelt next to Hans Hubermann, she watched
him stand and play the accordion. He stood and strapped it on in the alps of
broken houses and played the accordion with kindness silver eyes and even a
cigarette slouched on his lips. He even made a mistake and laughed in lovely
hindsight. The bellows breathed and the tall man played for Liesel Meminger one
last time as the sky was slowly taken from the stove.

Keep playing,
Papa.

Papa stopped.

He dropped the
accordion and his silver eyes continued to rust. There was only a body now, on
the ground, and Liesel lifted him up and hugged him. She wept over the shoulder
of Hans Hubermann.

“Goodbye, Papa,
you saved me. You taught me to read. No one can play like you. I’ll never drink
champagne. No one can play like you.

Her arms held
him. She kissed his shoulder—she couldn’t bear to look at his face anymore—and
she placed him down again.

The book thief
wept till she was gently taken away.

Later, they
remembered the accordion but no one noticed the book.

There was much
work to be done, and with a collection of other materials,
The Book Thief
was
stepped on several times and eventually picked up without even a glance and
thrown aboard a garbage truck. Just before the truck left, I climbed quickly up
and took it in my hand. . . .

It’s lucky I was
there.

Then again, who
am I kidding? I’m in most places at least once, and in 1943, I was just about
everywhere.

EPILOGUE

the
last color

featuring:

death and liesel—some

wooden tears—max—

and the handover man

DEATH AND LIESEL

It has
been many years since all of that, but there is still plenty of work to do. I
can promise you that the world is a factory. The sun stirs it, the humans rule
it. And I remain. I carry them away.

As for
what’s left of this story, I will not skirt around any of it, because I’m
tired, I’m so tired, and I will tell it as straightly as I can.

Liesel
Meminger lived to a very old age, far away from Molching and the demise of
Himmel Street.

She
died in a suburb of Sydney. The house number was forty-five—the same as the
Fiedlers’ shelter—and the sky was the best blue of afternoon. Like her papa,
her soul was sitting up.

In her
final visions, she saw her three children, her grandchildren, her husband, and
the long list of lives that merged with hers. Among them, lit like lanterns,
were Hans and Rosa Hubermann, her brother, and the boy whose hair remained the
color of lemons forever.

But a
few other visions were there as well.

Come
with me and I’ll tell you a story.

I’ll
show you something.

WOOD IN THE AFTERNOON

When
Himmel Street was cleared, Liesel Meminger had nowhere to go. She was the girl
they referred to as “the one with the accordion,” and she was taken to the police,
who were in the throes of deciding what to do with her.

She sat
on a very hard chair. The accordion looked at her through the hole in the case.

It took
three hours in the police station for the mayor and a fluffy-haired woman to
show their faces. “Everyone says there’s a girl,” the lady said, “who survived
on Himmel Street.”

A
policeman pointed.

Ilsa
Hermann offered to carry the case, but Liesel held it firmly in her hand as
they walked down the police station steps. A few blocks down Munich Street, there
was a clear line separating the bombed from the fortunate.

The
mayor drove.

Ilsa
sat with her in the back.

The
girl let her hold her hand on top of the accordion case, which sat between
them.

It
would have been easy to say nothing, but Liesel had the opposite reaction to
her devastation. She sat in the exquisite spare room of the mayor’s house and
spoke and spoke—to herself—well into the night. She ate very little. The only
thing she didn’t do at all was wash.

For
four days, she carried around the remains of Himmel Street on the carpets and
floorboards of 8 Grande Strasse. She slept a lot and didn’t dream, and on most
occasions she was sorry to wake up. Everything disappeared when she was asleep.

On the
day of the funerals, she still hadn’t bathed, and Ilsa Hermann asked politely
if she’d like to. Previously, she’d only shown her the bath and given her a
towel.

People
who were at the service of Hans and Rosa Hubermann always talked about the girl
who stood there wearing a pretty dress and a layer of Himmel Street dirt. There
was also a rumor that later in the day, she walked fully clothed into the Amper
River and said something very strange.

Something
about a kiss.

Something
about a
Saumensch.

How
many times did she have to say goodbye?

After
that, there were weeks and months, and a lot of war. She remembered her books
in the moments of worst sorrow, especially the ones that were made for her and
the one that saved her life. One morning, in a renewed state of shock, she even
walked back down to Himmel Street to find them, but nothing was left. There was
no recovery from what had happened. That would take decades; it would take a
long life.

There
were two ceremonies for the Steiner family. The first was immediately upon
their burial. The second was as soon as Alex Steiner made it home, when he was
given leave after the bombing.

Since
the news had found him, Alex had been whittled away.

“Crucified
Christ,” he’d said, “if only I’d let Rudy go to that school.”

You
save someone.

You
kill them.

How was
he supposed to know?

The
only thing he truly
did
know was that he’d have done anything to have
been on Himmel Street that night so that Rudy survived rather than himself.