The Book Thief (66 page)

There were twigs and needles littered around the plane like fire fuel. To their left, three gashes were burned into the earth. The runaway ticktock of cooling metal sped up the minutes and seconds till they were standing there for what felt like hours. The growing crowd was assembling behind them, their breath and sentences sticking to Liesel’s back.

“Well,” said Rudy, “should we take a look?”

He stepped through the remainder of trees to where the body of the plane was fixed to the ground. Its nose was in the running water and the wings were left crookedly behind.

Rudy circled slowly, from the tail and around to the right.

“There’s glass,” he said. “The windshield is everywhere.”

Then he saw the body.

Rudy Steiner had never seen a face so pale.

“Don’t come, Liesel.” But Liesel came.

She could see the barely conscious face of the enemy pilot as the tall trees watched and the river ran. The plane let out a few
more coughs and the head inside tilted from left to right. He said something they obviously could not understand.

“Jesus, Mary, and Joseph,” Rudy whispered. “He’s alive.”

The toolbox bumped the side of the plane and brought with it the sound of more human voices and feet.

The glow of fire was gone and the morning was still and black. Only the smoke was in its way, but it, too, would soon be exhausted.

The wall of trees kept the color of a burning Munich at bay. By now, the boy’s eyes had adjusted not only to the darkness, but to the face of the pilot. The eyes were like coffee stains, and gashes were ruled across his cheeks and chin. A ruffled uniform sat, unruly, across his chest.

Despite Rudy’s advice, Liesel came even closer, and I can promise you that we recognized each other at that exact moment.

I know you, I thought.

There was a train and a coughing boy. There was snow and a distraught girl.

You’ve grown, I thought, but I recognize you.

She did not back away or try to fight me, but I know that something told the girl I was there. Could she smell my breath? Could she hear my cursed circular heartbeat, revolving like the crime it is in my deathly chest? I don’t know, but she knew me and she looked me in my face and she did not look away.

As the sky began to charcoal toward light, we both moved on. We both observed the boy as he reached into his toolbox again and searched through some picture frames to pull out a small, stuffed yellow toy.

Carefully, he climbed to the dying man.

He placed the smiling teddy bear cautiously onto the pilot’s shoulder. The tip of its ear touched his throat.

The dying man breathed it in. He spoke. In English, he said,
“Thank you.” His straight-line cuts opened as he spoke, and a small drop of blood rolled crookedly down his throat.

“What?” Rudy asked him.
“Was hast du gesagt?
What did you say?”

Unfortunately, I beat him to the answer. The time was there and I was reaching into the cockpit. I slowly extracted the pilot’s soul from his ruffled uniform and rescued him from the broken plane. The crowd played with the silence as I made my way through. I jostled free.

Above me, the sky eclipsed—just a last moment of darkness—and I swear I could see a black signature in the shape of a swastika. It loitered untidily above.

“Heil
Hitler,” I said, but I was well into the trees by then. Behind me, a teddy bear rested on the shoulder of a corpse. A lemon candle stood below the branches. The pilot’s soul was in my arms.

It’s probably fair to say that in all the years of Hitler’s reign, no person was able to serve the
Führer
as loyally as me. A human doesn’t have a heart like mine. The human heart is a line, whereas my own is a circle, and I have the endless ability to be in the right place at the right time. The consequence of this is that I’m always finding humans at their best and worst. I see their ugly and their beauty, and I wonder how the same thing can be both. Still, they have one thing I envy. Humans, if nothing else, have the good sense to die.

It was a time of bleeders and broken planes and teddy bears, but the first quarter of 1943 was to finish on a positive note for the book thief.

At the beginning of April, Hans Hubermann’s plaster was trimmed to the knee and he boarded a train for Munich. He would be given a week of rest and recreation at home before joining the ranks of army pen pushers in the city. He would help with the paperwork on the cleanup of Munich’s factories, houses, churches, and hospitals. Time would tell if he would be sent out to do the repair work. That all depended on his leg and the state of the city.

It was dark when he arrived home. It was a day later than expected, as the train was delayed due to an air-raid scare. He stood at the door of 33 Himmel Street and made a fist.

Four years earlier, Liesel Meminger was coaxed through that doorway when she showed up for the first time. Max Vandenburg had stood there with a key biting into his hand. Now it was Hans Hubermann’s turn. He knocked four times and the book thief answered.

“Papa, Papa.”

She must have said it a hundred times as she hugged him in the kitchen and wouldn’t let go.

Later, after they ate, they sat at the kitchen table long into the night and Hans told his wife and Liesel Meminger everything. He explained the LSE and the smoke-filled streets and the poor, lost, wandering souls. And Reinhold Zucker. Poor, stupid Reinhold Zucker. It took hours.

At 1 a.m., Liesel went to bed and Papa came in to sit with her, like he used to. She woke up several times to check that he was there, and he did not fail her.

The night was calm.

Her bed was warm and soft with contentment.

Yes, it was a great night to be Liesel Meminger, and the calm, the warm, and the soft would remain for approximately three more months.

But her story lasts for six.

the book thief

featuring:
the end of a world—the ninety-eighth day—
a war maker—way of the words—a catatonic girl—
confessions—ilsa hermann’s little black book—
some rib-cage planes—and a mountain range of rubble

Again, I offer you a glimpse of the end. Perhaps it’s to soften the blow for later, or to better prepare
myself
for the telling. Either way, I must inform you that it was raining on Himmel Street when the world ended for Liesel Meminger.

The sky was dripping.

Like a tap that a child has tried its hardest to turn off but hasn’t quite managed. The first drops were cool. I felt them on my hands as I stood outside Frau Diller’s.

Above me, I could hear them.

Through the overcast sky, I looked up and saw the tin-can planes. I watched their stomachs open and the bombs drop casually out. They were off target, of course. They were often off target.

The bombs came down, and soon, the clouds would bake and the cold raindrops would turn to ash. Hot snowflakes would shower to the ground.

In short, Himmel Street was flattened.

Houses were splashed from one side of the street to the other. A framed photo of a very serious-looking
Führer
was bashed and beaten on the shattered floor. Yet he smiled, in that serious way of his. He knew something we all didn’t know. But I knew something
he
didn’t know. All while people slept.

Rudy Steiner slept. Mama and Papa slept. Frau Holtzapfel, Frau Diller. Tommy Müller. All sleeping. All dying.

Only one person survived.

She survived because she was sitting in a basement reading through the story of her own life, checking for mistakes. Previously, the room had been declared too shallow, but on that night, October 7, it was enough. The shells of wreckage cantered down, and hours later, when the strange, unkempt silence settled itself in Molching, the local LSE could hear something. An echo. Down there, somewhere, a girl was hammering a paint can with a pencil.

They all stopped, with bent ears and bodies, and when they heard it again, they started digging.

•   •   •

They threw all of it upward.

When another piece of broken wall was removed, one of them saw the book thief’s hair.

The man had such a nice laugh. He was delivering a newborn child. “I can’t believe it—she’s alive!”

There was so much joy among the cluttering, calling men, but I could not fully share their enthusiasm.

Earlier, I’d held her papa in one arm and her mama in the other. Each soul was so soft.

Farther away, their bodies were laid out, like the rest. Papa’s lovely silver eyes were already starting to rust, and Mama’s cardboard lips were fixed half open, most likely the shape of an incomplete snore. To blaspheme like the Germans—Jesus, Mary, and Joseph.

The rescuing hands pulled Liesel out and brushed the crumbs of rubble from her clothes. “Young girl,” they said, “the sirens were too late. What were you doing in the basement? How did you know?”

What they didn’t notice was that the girl was still holding the book. She screamed her reply. A stunning scream of the living.

“Papa!”

A second time. Her face creased as she reached a higher, more panic-stricken pitch. “Papa,
Papa!”

They passed her up as she shouted, wailed, and cried. If she was injured, she did not yet know it, for she struggled free and searched and called and wailed some more.

She was still clutching the book.

She was holding desperately on to the words who had saved her life.