The Book Thief (56 page)

“The Nazi Party?” Rosa asked. “I thought they didn’t want you.”

“They didn’t.”

Papa sat down and read the letter again.

He was not being put on trial for treason or for helping Jews or anything of the sort. Hans Hubermann was being
rewarded
, at least as far as some people were concerned. How could this be possible?

“There has to be more.”

There was.

On Friday, a statement arrived to say that Hans Hubermann was to be drafted into the German army. A member of the party would be happy to play a role in the war effort, it concluded. If he wasn’t, there would certainly be consequences.

Liesel had just returned from reading with Frau Holtzapfel. The kitchen was heavy with soup steam and the vacant faces of Hans and Rosa Hubermann. Papa was seated. Mama stood above him as the soup started to burn.

“God, please don’t send me to Russia,” Papa said.

“Mama, the soup’s burning.”

“What?”

Liesel hurried across and took it from the stove. “The soup.” When she’d successfully rescued it, she turned and viewed her foster parents. Faces like ghost towns. “Papa, what’s wrong?”

He handed her the letter and her hands began to shake as she made her way through it. The words had been punched forcefully into the paper.

In truth, Liesel only saw the typewriter later, when she wrote. She wondered how many letters like that were sent out as punishment to Germany’s Hans Hubermanns and Alex Steiners—to those who helped the helpless, and those who refused to let go of their children.

It was a sign of the German army’s growing desperation.

They were losing in Russia.

Their cities were being bombed.

More people were needed, as were ways of attaining them, and in most cases, the worst possible jobs would be given to the worst possible people.

As her eyes scanned the paper, Liesel could see through the punched letter holes to the wooden table. Words like
compulsory
and
duty
were beaten into the page. Saliva was triggered. It was the urge to vomit. “What is this?”

Papa’s answer was quiet. “I thought I taught you to read, my girl.” He did not speak with anger or sarcasm. It was a voice of vacancy, to match his face.

Liesel looked now to Mama.

Rosa had a small rip beneath her right eye, and within the
minute, her cardboard face was broken. Not down the center, but to the right. It gnarled down her cheek in an arc, finishing at her chin.

Five days later, when she continued her habit of looking at the weather, she did not get a chance to see the sky.

Next door, Barbara Steiner was sitting on the front step with her neatly combed hair. She was smoking a cigarette and shivering. On her way over, Liesel was interrupted by the sight of Kurt. He came out and sat with his mother. When he saw the girl stop, he called out.

“Come on, Liesel. Rudy will be out soon.”

After a short pause, she continued walking toward the step.

Barbara smoked.

A wrinkle of ash was teetering at the end of the cigarette. Kurt took it, ashed it, inhaled, then gave it back.

When the cigarette was done, Rudy’s mother looked up. She ran a hand through her tidy lines of hair.

“Our papa’s going, too,” Kurt said.

Quietness then.

A group of kids was kicking a ball, up near Frau Diller’s.

“When they come and ask you for one of your children,” Barbara Steiner explained, to no one in particular, “you’re supposed to say yes.”

Not counting the glass of champagne the previous summer, Hans Hubermann had not consumed a drop of alcohol for a decade. Then came the night before he left for training.

He made his way to the Knoller with Alex Steiner in the afternoon and stayed well into the evening. Ignoring the warnings of their wives, both men drank themselves into oblivion. It didn’t help that the Knoller’s owner, Dieter Westheimer, gave them free drinks.

Apparently, while he was still sober, Hans was invited to the stage to play the accordion. Appropriately, he played the infamous “Gloomy Sunday”—the anthem of suicide from Hungary—and although he aroused all the sadness for which the song was renowned, he brought the house down. Liesel imagined the scene of it, and the sound. Mouths were full. Empty beer glasses were streaked with
foam. The bellows sighed and the song was over. People clapped. Their beer-filled mouths cheered him back to the bar.

When they managed to find their way home, Hans couldn’t get his key to fit the door. So he knocked. Repeatedly.

“Rosa!”

It was the wrong door.

Frau Holtzapfel was not thrilled.

“Schwein!
You’re at the wrong house.” She rammed the words through the keyhole. “Next door, you stupid
Saukerl.”

“Thanks, Frau Holtzapfel.”

“You know what you can do with your thanks, you asshole.”

“Excuse me?”

“Just go home.”

“Thanks, Frau Holtzapfel.”

“Didn’t I just tell you what you can do with your thanks?”

“Did you?”

(It’s amazing what you can piece together from a basement conversation and a reading session in a nasty old woman’s kitchen.)

“Just get lost, will you!”

When at long last he came home, Papa made his way not to bed, but to Liesel’s room. He stood drunkenly in the doorway and watched her sleep. She awoke and thought immediately that it was Max.

“Is it you?” she asked.

“No,” he said. He knew exactly what she was thinking. “It’s Papa.”

He backed out of the room and she heard his footsteps making their way down to the basement.

In the living room, Rosa was snoring with enthusiasm.

Close to nine o’clock the next morning, in the kitchen, Liesel was given an order by Rosa. “Hand me that bucket there.”

She filled it with cold water and walked with it down to the basement. Liesel followed, in a vain attempt to stop her. “Mama, you can’t!”

“Can’t I?” She faced her briefly on the steps. “Did I miss something,
Saumensch?
Do you give the orders around here now?”

Both of them were completely still.

No answer from the girl.

“I thought not.”

They continued on and found him on his back, among a bed of drop sheets. He felt he didn’t deserve Max’s mattress.

“Now, let’s see”—Rosa lifted the bucket—“if he’s alive.”

“Jesus, Mary, and Joseph!”

The watermark was oval-shaped, from halfway up his chest to his head. His hair was plastered to one side and even his eyelashes dripped. “What was that for?”

“You old drunk!”

“Jesus …”

Steam was rising weirdly from his clothes. His hangover was visible. It heaved itself to his shoulders and sat there like a bag of wet cement.

Rosa swapped the bucket from left hand to right. “It’s lucky you’re going to the war,” she said. She held her finger in the air and wasn’t afraid to wave it. “Otherwise I’d kill you myself, you know that, don’t you?”

Papa wiped a stream of water from his throat. “Did you have to do that?”

“Yes. I did.” She started up the steps. “If you’re not up there in five minutes, you get another bucketful.”