The Book Thief (36 page)

In her hand,
The Whistler
tightened.

“So you give me the book,” the girl said, “for pity—to make yourself feel better ….” The fact that she’d also been offered the book prior to that day mattered little.

She turned as she had once before and marched back to 8 Grande Strasse. The temptation to run was immense, but she refrained so that she’d have enough in reserve for the words.

When she arrived, she was disappointed that the mayor himself was not there. No car was slotted nicely on the side of the road, which was perhaps a good thing. Had it been there, there was no telling what she might have done to it in this moment of rich versus poor.

Two steps at a time, she reached the door and banged it hard enough to hurt. She enjoyed the small fragments of pain.

Evidently, the mayor’s wife was shocked when she saw her again. Her fluffy hair was slightly wet and her wrinkles widened when she noticed the obvious fury on Liesel’s usually pallid face. She opened her mouth, but nothing came out, which was handy, really, for it was Liesel who possessed the talking.

“You think,” she said, “you can buy me off with this book?” Her voice, though shaken, hooked at the woman’s throat. The glittering anger was thick and unnerving, but she toiled through it. She worked herself up even further, to the point where she needed to wipe the tears from her eyes. “You give me this
Saumensch
of a book and think it’ll make everything good when I go and tell my mama that we’ve just lost our last one? While you sit here in your mansion?”

The mayor’s wife’s arms.

They hung.

Her face slipped.

Liesel, however, did not buckle. She sprayed her words directly into the woman’s eyes.

“You and your husband. Sitting up here.” Now she became spiteful. More spiteful and evil than she thought herself capable.

The injury of words.

Yes, the brutality of words.

She summoned them from someplace she only now recognized and hurled them at Ilsa Hermann. “It’s about time,” she informed her, “that you do your own stinking washing anyway. It’s about time you faced the fact that your son is dead. He got killed! He got strangled and cut up more than twenty years ago! Or did he freeze to death? Either way, he’s dead! He’s dead and it’s pathetic that you sit here shivering in your own house to suffer for it. You think you’re the only one?”

Immediately.

Her brother was next to her.

He whispered for her to stop, but he, too, was dead, and not worth listening to.

He died in a train.

They buried him in the snow.

Liesel glanced at him, but she could not make herself stop. Not yet.

“This book,” she went on. She shoved the boy down the steps, making him fall. “I don’t want it.” The words were quieter now, but still just as hot. She threw
The Whistler
at the woman’s slippered feet, hearing the clack of it as it landed on the cement. “I don’t want your miserable book ….”

Now she managed it. She fell silent.

Her throat was barren now. No words for miles.

Her brother, holding his knee, disappeared.

After a miscarriaged pause, the mayor’s wife edged forward and picked up the book. She was battered and beaten up, and not from smiling this time. Liesel could see it on her face. Blood leaked from her nose and licked at her lips. Her eyes had blackened. Cuts had opened up and a series of wounds were rising to the surface of her skin. All from the words. From Liesel’s words.

Book in hand, and straightening from a crouch to a standing hunch, Ilsa Hermann began the process again of saying sorry, but the sentence did not make it out.

Slap me, Liesel thought. Come on, slap me.

Ilsa Hermann didn’t slap her. She merely retreated backward, into the ugly air of her beautiful house, and Liesel, once again, was left alone, clutching at the steps. She was afraid to turn around because she knew that when she did, the glass casing of Molching had now been shattered, and she’d be glad of it.

As her last orders of business, she read the letter one more time, and when she was close to the gate, she screwed it up as tightly as
she could and threw it at the door, as if it were a rock. I have no idea what the book thief expected, but the ball of paper hit the mighty sheet of wood and twittered back down the steps. It landed at her feet.

“Typical,” she stated, kicking it onto the grass. “Useless.”

On the way home this time, she imagined the fate of that paper the next time it rained, when the mended glass house of Molching was turned upside down. She could already see the words dissolving letter by letter, till there was nothing left. Just paper. Just earth.

At home, as luck would have it, when Liesel walked through the door, Rosa was in the kitchen. “And?” she asked. “Where’s the washing?”

“No washing today,” Liesel told her.

Rosa came and sat down at the kitchen table. She knew. Suddenly, she appeared much older. Liesel imagined what she’d look like if she untied her bun, to let it fall out onto her shoulders. A gray towel of elastic hair.

“What did you do there, you little
Saumensch?”
The sentence was numb. She could not muster her usual venom.

“It was my fault,” Liesel answered. “Completely. I insulted the mayor’s wife and told her to stop crying over her dead son. I called her pathetic. That was when they fired you. Here.” She walked to the wooden spoons, grabbed a handful, and placed them in front of her. “Take your pick.”

Rosa touched one and picked it up, but she did not wield it. “I don’t believe you.”

Liesel was torn between distress and total mystification. The one time she desperately wanted a
Watschen
and she couldn’t get one! “It’s my fault.”

“It’s not your fault,” Mama said, and she even stood and stroked Liesel’s waxy, unwashed hair. “I know you wouldn’t say those things.”

“I said them!”

“All right, you said them.”

As Liesel left the room, she could hear the wooden spoons clicking back into position in the metal jar that held them. By the time she reached her bedroom, the whole lot of them, the jar included, were thrown to the floor.

Later, she walked down to the basement, where Max was standing in the dark, most likely boxing with the
Führer
.

“Max?” The light dimmed on—a red coin, floating in the corner. “Can you teach me how to do the push-ups?”

Max showed her and occasionally lifted her torso to help, but despite her bony appearance, Liesel was strong and could hold her body weight nicely. She didn’t count how many she could do, but that night, in the glow of the basement, the book thief completed enough pushups to make her hurt for several days. Even when Max advised her that she’d already done too many, she continued.

In bed, she read with Papa, who could tell something was wrong. It was the first time in a month that he’d come in and sat with her, and she was comforted, if only slightly. Somehow, Hans Hubermann always knew what to say, when to stay, and when to leave her be. Perhaps Liesel was the one thing he was a true expert at.

“Is it the washing?” he asked.

Liesel shook her head.

Papa hadn’t shaved for a few days and he rubbed the scratchy whiskers every two or three minutes. His silver eyes were flat and calm, slightly warm, as they always were when it came to Liesel.

When the reading petered out, Papa fell asleep. It was then that Liesel spoke what she’d wanted to say all along.

“Papa,” she whispered, “I think I’m going to hell.”

Her legs were warm. Her knees were cold.

She remembered the nights when she’d wet the bed and Papa had washed the sheets and taught her the letters of the alphabet. Now his breathing blew across the blanket and she kissed his scratchy cheek.

“You need a shave,” she said.

“You’re not going to hell,” Papa replied.

For a few moments, she watched his face. Then she lay back down, leaned on him, and together, they slept, very much in Munich, but somewhere on the seventh side of Germany’s die.

In the end, she had to give it to him.

He knew how to perform.

He stood a few meters from the step and spoke with great conviction, great joy.

“Alles ist Scheisse,”
he announced.

All is shit.

In the first half of 1941, while Liesel went about the business of concealing Max Vandenburg, stealing newspapers, and telling off mayors’
wives, Rudy was enduring a new life of his own, at the Hitler Youth. Since early February, he’d been returning from the meetings in a considerably worse state than he’d left in. On many of those return trips, Tommy Müller was by his side, in the same condition. The trouble had three elements to it.

If only Tommy Müller hadn’t disappeared for seven hours on one of the coldest days in Munich’s history, six years earlier. His ear infections and nerve damage were still contorting the marching pattern at the Hitler Youth, which, I can assure you, was not a positive thing.

To begin with, the downward slide of momentum was gradual, but as the months progressed, Tommy was consistently gathering the ire of the Hitler Youth leaders, especially when it came to the marching. Remember Hitler’s birthday the previous year? For some time, the ear infections were getting worse. They had reached the point where Tommy had genuine problems hearing. He could not make out the commands that were shouted at the group as they marched in line. It didn’t matter if it was in the hall or outside, in the snow or the mud or the slits of rain.

The goal was always to have everyone stop at the same time.