The Book Thief (55 page)

On Munich
Street, a boy and girl were entwined.

They were
twisted and comfortless on the road.

Together, they
watched the humans disappear. They watched them dissolve, like moving tablets
in the humid air.

CONFESSIONS

When the Jews
were gone, Rudy and Liesel untangled and the book thief did not speak. There
were no answers to Rudy’s questions.

Liesel did not
go home, either. She walked forlornly to the train station and waited for her
papa for hours. Rudy stood with her for the first twenty minutes, but since it
was a good half day till Hans was due home, he fetched Rosa. On the way back,
he told her what had happened, and when Rosa arrived, she asked nothing of the
girl. She had already assembled the puzzle and merely stood beside her and
eventually convinced her to sit down. They waited together.

When Papa found
out, he dropped his bag, he kicked the
Bahnhof
air.

None of them ate
that night. Papa’s fingers desecrated the accordion, murdering song after song,
no matter how hard he tried. Everything no longer worked.

For three days,
the book thief stayed in bed.

Every morning
and afternoon, Rudy Steiner knocked on the door and asked if she was still
sick. The girl was not sick.

On the fourth
day, Liesel walked to her neighbor’s front door and asked if he might go back
to the trees with her, where they’d distributed the bread the previous year.

“I should have
told you earlier,” she said.

As promised,
they walked far down the road toward Dachau. They stood in the trees. There
were long shapes of light and shade. Pinecones were scattered like cookies.

Thank you, Rudy.

For everything.
For helping me off the road, for stopping me . . .

She said none of
it.

Her hand leaned
on a flaking branch at her side. “Rudy, if I tell you something, will you
promise not to say a word to anyone?”

“Of course.” He
could sense the seriousness in the girl’s face, and the heaviness in her voice.
He leaned on the tree next to hers. “What is it?”

“Promise.”

“I did already.”

“Do it again.
You can’t tell your mother, your brother, or Tommy Müller. Nobody.”

“I promise.”

Leaning.

Looking at the
ground.

She attempted
several times to find the right place to start, reading sentences at her feet,
joining words to the pinecones and the scraps of broken branches.

“Remember when I
was injured playing soccer,” she said, “out on the street?”

It took
approximately three-quarters of an hour to explain two wars, an accordion, a
Jewish fist fighter, and a basement. Not forgetting what had happened four days
earlier on Munich Street.

“That’s why you
went for a closer look,” Rudy said, “with the bread that day. To see if he was
there.”

“Yes.”

“Crucified
Christ.”

“Yes.”

The trees were
tall and triangular. They were quiet.

Liesel pulled
The
Word Shaker
from her bag and showed Rudy one of the pages. On it was a boy
with three medals hanging around his throat.

“ ‘Hair the
color of lemons,’ ” Rudy read. His fingers touched the words. “You told him
about me?”

At first, Liesel
could not talk. Perhaps it was the sudden bumpiness of love she felt for him.
Or had she always loved him? It’s likely. Restricted as she was from speaking,
she wanted him to kiss her. She wanted him to drag her hand across and pull her
over. It didn’t matter where. Her mouth, her neck, her cheek. Her skin was
empty for it, waiting.

Years ago, when
they’d raced on a muddy field, Rudy was a hastily assembled set of bones, with
a jagged, rocky smile. In the trees this afternoon, he was a giver of bread and
teddy bears. He was a triple Hitler Youth athletics champion. He was her best
friend. And he was a month from his death.

“Of course I
told him about you,” Liesel said.

She was saying
goodbye and she didn’t even know it.

ILSA
HERMANN’S LITTLE BLACK BOOK

In mid-August,
she thought she was going to 8 Grande Strasse for the same old remedy.

To cheer herself
up.

That was what
she thought.

The day had been
hot, but showers were predicted for the evening. In
The Last Human Stranger,
there was a quote near the end. Liesel was reminded of it as she walked
past Frau Diller’s.

At the time,
Liesel only thought of it because the day was so warm.

On Munich
Street, she remembered the events of the previous week there. She saw the Jews
coming down the road, their streams and numbers and pain. She decided there was
a word missing from her quote.

The world is an
ugly
stew, she thought.

It’s so ugly I
can’t stand it.

Liesel crossed
the bridge over the Amper River. The water was glorious and emerald and rich.
She could see the stones at the bottom and hear the familiar song of water. The
world did not deserve such a river.

She scaled the
hill up to Grande Strasse. The houses were lovely and loathsome. She enjoyed
the small ache in her legs and lungs. Walk harder, she thought, and she started
rising, like a monster out of the sand. She smelled the neighborhood grass. It
was fresh and sweet, green and yellow-tipped. She crossed the yard without a
single turn of the head or the slightest pause of paranoia.

The window.

Hands on the
frame, scissor of the legs.

Landing feet.

Books and pages
and a happy place.

She slid a book
from the shelf and sat with it on the floor.

Is she home? she
wondered, but she did not care if Ilsa Hermann was slicing potatoes in the
kitchen or lining up in the post office. Or standing ghost-like over the top of
her, examining what the girl was reading.

The girl simply
didn’t care anymore.

For a long time,
she sat and saw.

She had seen her
brother die with one eye open, one still in a dream. She had said goodbye to
her mother and imagined her lonely wait for a train back home to oblivion. A
woman of wire had laid herself down, her scream traveling the street, till it
fell sideways like a rolling coin starved of momentum. A young man was hung by
a rope made of Stalingrad snow. She had watched a bomber pilot die in a metal
case. She had seen a Jewish man who had twice given her the most beautiful
pages of her life marched to a concentration camp. And at the center of all of
it, she saw the
Führer
shouting his words and passing them around.

Those images
were the world, and it stewed in her as she sat with the lovely books and their
manicured titles. It brewed in her as she eyed the pages full to the brims of
their bellies with paragraphs and words.

You bastards,
she thought.

You lovely
bastards.

Don’t make me
happy. Please, don’t fill me up and let me think that something good can come
of any of this. Look at my bruises. Look at this graze. Do you see the graze
inside me? Do you see it growing before your very eyes, eroding me? I don’t
want to hope for anything anymore. I don’t want to pray that Max is alive and
safe. Or Alex Steiner.

Because the
world does not deserve them.

She tore a page
from the book and ripped it in half.

Then a chapter.

Soon, there was
nothing but scraps of words littered between her legs and all around her. The
words. Why did they have to exist? Without them, there wouldn’t be any of this.
Without words, the
Führer
was nothing. There would be no limping
prisoners, no need for consolation or wordly tricks to make us feel better.

What good were
the words?

She said it
audibly now, to the orange-lit room. “What good are the words?”

The book thief
stood and walked carefully to the library door. Its protest was small and
halfhearted. The airy hallway was steeped in wooden emptiness.

“Frau Hermann?”

The question
came back at her and tried for another surge to the front door. It made it only
halfway, landing weakly on a couple of fat floorboards.

“Frau Hermann?”

The calls were
greeted with nothing but silence, and she was tempted to seek out the kitchen,
for Rudy. She refrained. It wouldn’t have felt right to steal food from a woman
who had left her a dictionary against a windowpane. That, and she had also just
destroyed one of her books, page by page, chapter by chapter. She’d done enough
damage as it was.

Liesel returned
to the library and opened one of the desk drawers. She sat down.

She left the
note on the desk and gave the room a last goodbye, doing three laps and running
her hands over the titles. As much as she hated them, she couldn’t resist.
Flakes of torn-up paper were strewn around a book called
The Rules of Tommy
Ho fmann.
In the breeze from the window, a few of its shreds rose and fell.

The light was
still orange, but it was not as lustrous as earlier. Her hands felt their final
grip of the wooden window frame, and there was the last rush of a plunging
stomach, and the pang of pain in her feet when she landed.

By the time she
made it down the hill and across the bridge, the orange light had vanished.
Clouds were mopping up.

When she walked
down Himmel Street, she could already feel the first drops of rain. I will
never see Ilsa Hermann again, she thought, but the book thief was better at
reading and ruining books than making assumptions.

It was strange
for Liesel to see her without the bathrobe. The summer dress was yellow with
red trim. There was a pocket with a small flower on it. No swastikas. Black
shoes. Never before had she noticed Ilsa Hermann’s shins. She had porcelain
legs.

“Frau Hermann,
I’m sorry—for what I did the last time in the library.”

The woman
quieted her. She reached into her bag and pulled out a small black book. Inside
was not a story, but lined paper. “I thought if you’re not going to read any
more of my books, you might like to write one instead. Your letter, it was . .
.” She handed the book to Liesel with both hands. “You can certainly write. You
write well.” The book was heavy, the cover matted like
The Shoulder
Shrug.
“And please,” Ilsa Hermann advised her, “don’t punish yourself, like you
said you would. Don’t be like me, Liesel.”

The girl opened
the book and touched the paper. “
Danke schön,
Frau Hermann. I can make
you some coffee, if you like. Would you come in? I’m home alone. My mama’s next
door, with Frau Holtzapfel.”

“Shall we use
the door or the window?”

Liesel suspected
it was the broadest smile Ilsa Hermann had allowed herself in years. “I think
we’ll use the door. It’s easier.”

They sat in the
kitchen.

Coffee mugs and
bread with jam. They struggled to speak and Liesel could hear Ilsa Hermann
swallow, but somehow, it was not uncomfortable. It was even nice to see the
woman gently blow across the coffee to cool it.

“If I ever write
something and finish it,” Liesel said, “I’ll show you.”

“That would be
nice.”

When the mayor’s
wife left, Liesel watched her walk up Himmel Street. She watched her yellow
dress and her black shoes and her porcelain legs.

At the mailbox,
Rudy asked, “Was that who I think it was?”

“Yes.”

“You’re joking.”

“She gave me a
present.”

As it turned
out, Ilsa Hermann not only gave Liesel Meminger a book that day. She also gave
her a reason to spend time in the basement—her favorite place, first with Papa,
then Max. She gave her a reason to write her own words, to see that words had
also brought her to life.

“Don’t punish
yourself,” she heard her say again, but there would be punishment and pain, and
there would be happiness, too. That was writing.

In the night,
when Mama and Papa were asleep, Liesel crept down to the basement and turned on
the kerosene lamp. For the first hour, she only watched the pencil and paper.
She made herself remember, and as was her habit, she did not look away.