The Book Thief (11 page)

Instead of
asking him what was wrong, Liesel began writing immediately, choosing to ignore
the sense of foreboding that was quick to accumulate inside her. It took three
hours and six drafts to perfect the letter, telling her mother all about
Molching, her papa and his accordion, the strange but true ways of Rudy
Steiner, and the exploits of Rosa Hubermann. She also explained how proud she
was that she could now read and write a little. The next day, she posted it at
Frau Diller’s with a stamp from the kitchen drawer. And she began to wait.

The night she
wrote the letter, she overheard a conversation between Hans and Rosa.

“What’s she
doing writing to her mother?” Mama was saying. Her voice was surprisingly calm
and caring. As you can imagine, this worried the girl a great deal. She’d have
preferred to hear them arguing. Whispering adults hardly inspired confidence.

“She asked me,”
Papa answered, “and I couldn’t say no. How could I?”

“Jesus, Mary,
and Joseph.” Again with the whisper. “She should just forget her. Who knows
where she is? Who knows what they’ve done to her?”

In bed, Liesel
hugged herself tight. She balled herself up.

She thought of
her mother and repeated Rosa Hubermann’s questions.

Where was she?

What had they
done to her?

And once and for
all, who, in actual fact, were
they
?

DEAD LETTERS

Flash forward to
the basement, September 1943.

A
fourteen-year-old girl is writing in a small dark-covered book. She is bony but
strong and has seen many things. Papa sits with the accordion at his feet.

He says, “You
know, Liesel? I nearly wrote you a reply and signed your mother’s name.” He
scratches his leg, where the plaster used to be. “But I couldn’t. I couldn’t
bring myself.”

Several times,
through the remainder of January and the entirety of February 1940, when Liesel
searched the mailbox for a reply to her letter, it clearly broke her foster
father’s heart. “I’m sorry,” he would tell her. “Not today, huh?” In hindsight,
she saw that the whole exercise had been pointless. Had her mother been in a
position to do so, she would have already made contact with the foster care
people, or directly with the girl, or the Hubermanns. But there had been
nothing.

To lend insult
to injury, in mid-February, Liesel was given a letter from another ironing
customer, the Pfaffelhürvers, from Heide Strasse. The pair of them stood with
great tallness in the doorway, giving her a melancholic regard. “For your
mama,” the man said, handing her the envelope. “Tell her we’re sorry. Tell her
we’re sorry.”

That was not a
good night in the Hubermann residence.

Even when Liesel
retreated to the basement to write her fifth letter to her mother (all but the
first one yet to be sent), she could hear Rosa swearing and carrying on about
those Pfaffelhürver
Arschlöcher
and that lousy Ernst Vogel.

“Feuer soll’n’s
brunzen für einen Monat!” she heard her call out. Translation: “They should all
piss fire for a month!”

Liesel wrote.

When her
birthday came around, there was no gift. There was no gift because there was no
money, and at the time, Papa was out of tobacco.

“I told you.”
Mama pointed a finger at him. “I told you not to give her both books at
Christmas. But no. Did you listen? Of
course
not!”

“I know!” He
turned quietly to the girl. “I’m sorry, Liesel. We just can’t afford it.”

Liesel didn’t
mind. She didn’t whine or moan or stamp her feet. She simply swallowed the
disappointment and decided on one calculated risk—a present from herself. She
would gather all of the accrued letters to her mother, stuff them into one
envelope, and use just a tiny portion of the washing and ironing money to mail
it. Then, of course, she would take the
Watschen,
most likely in the
kitchen, and she would not make a sound.

Three days
later, the plan came to fruition.

“Some of it’s
missing.” Mama counted the money a fourth time, with Liesel over at the stove.
It was warm there and it cooked the fast flow of her blood. “What happened,
Liesel?”

She lied. “They
must have given me less than usual.”

“Did you count
it?”

She broke. “I
spent it, Mama.”

Rosa came
closer. This was not a good sign. She was very close to the wooden spoons. “You
what?”

Before she could
answer, the wooden spoon came down on Liesel Meminger’s body like the gait of
God. Red marks like footprints, and they burned. From the floor, when it was
over, the girl actually looked up and explained.

There was pulse
and yellow light, all together. Her eyes blinked. “I mailed my letters.”

What came to her
then was the dustiness of the floor, the feeling that her clothes were more
next to her than on her, and the sudden realization that this would all be for
nothing—that her mother would never write back and she would never see her
again. The reality of this gave her a second
Watschen.
It stung her, and
it did not stop for many minutes.

Above her, Rosa
appeared to be smudged, but she soon clarified as her cardboard face loomed
closer. Dejected, she stood there in all her plumpness, holding the wooden
spoon at her side like a club. She reached down and leaked a little. “I’m
sorry, Liesel.”

Liesel knew her
well enough to understand that it was not for the hiding.

The red marks
grew larger, in patches on her skin, as she lay there, in the dust and the dirt
and the dim light. Her breathing calmed, and a stray yellow tear trickled down
her face. She could feel herself against the floor. A forearm, a knee. An
elbow. A cheek. A calf muscle.

The floor was
cold, especially against her cheek, but she was unable to move.

She would never
see her mother again.

For nearly an
hour, she remained, spread out under the kitchen table, till Papa came home and
played the accordion. Only then did she sit up and start to recover.

When she wrote
about that night, she held no animosity toward Rosa Hubermann at all, or toward
her mother for that matter. To her, they were only victims of circumstance. The
only thought that continually recurred was the yellow tear. Had it been dark,
she realized, that tear would have been black.

But it
was
dark,
she told herself.

No matter how
many times she tried to imagine that scene with the yellow light that she knew
had been there, she had to struggle to visualize it. She was beaten in the
dark, and she had remained there, on a cold, dark kitchen floor. Even Papa’s
music was the color of darkness.

Even Papa’s music.

The strange
thing was that she was vaguely comforted by that thought, rather than
distressed by it.

The dark, the
light.

What was the
difference?

Nightmares had
reinforced themselves in each, as the book thief began to truly understand how
things were and how they would always be. If nothing else, she could prepare
herself. Perhaps that’s why on the
Führer
’s birthday, when the answer
to the question of her mother’s suffering showed itself completely, she was
able to react, despite her perplexity and her rage.

Liesel Meminger
was ready.

Happy birthday,
Herr Hitler.

Many happy
returns.

HITLER’S
BIRTHDAY, 1940

Against all
hopelessness, Liesel still checked the mailbox each afternoon, throughout March
and well into April. This was despite a Hans-requested visit from Frau
Heinrich, who explained to the Hubermanns that the foster care office had lost
contact completely with Paula Meminger. Still, the girl persisted, and as you
might expect, each day, when she searched the mail, there was nothing.

Molching, like
the rest of Germany, was in the grip of preparing for Hitler’s birthday. This
particular year, with the development of the war and Hitler’s current
victorious position, the Nazi partisans of Molching wanted the celebration to
be especially befitting. There would be a parade. Marching. Music. Singing.
There would be a fire.

While Liesel
walked the streets of Molching, picking up and delivering washing and ironing,
Nazi Party members were accumulating fuel. A couple of times, Liesel was a
witness to men and women knocking on doors, asking people if they had any
material that they felt should be done away with or destroyed. Papa’s copy of
the
Molching Express
announced that there would be a celebratory fire in
the town square, which would be attended by all local Hitler Youth divisions.
It would commemorate not only the
Führer
’s birthday, but the victory
over his enemies and over the restraints that had held Germany back since the
end of World War I. “Any materials,” it requested, “from such times—newspapers,
posters, books, flags—and any found propaganda of our enemies should be brought
forward to the Nazi Party office on Munich Street.” Even Schiller Strasse—the
road of yellow stars—which was still awaiting its renovation, was ransacked one
last time, to find something, anything, to burn in the name of the
Führer
’s
glory. It would have come as no surprise if certain members of the party had
gone away and published a thousand or so books or posters of poisonous moral
matter simply to incinerate them.

Everything was
in place to make April 20 magnificent. It would be a day full of burning and
cheering.

And book
thievery.

In the Hubermann
household that morning, all was typical.

“That
Saukerl
’s looking out the window again,” cursed Rosa Hubermann. “Every
day,
”
she went on. “What are you looking at this time?”

“Ohhh,” moaned
Papa with delight. The flag cloaked his back from the top of the window. “You
should have a look at this woman I can see.” He glanced over his shoulder and
grinned at Liesel. “I might just go and run after her. She leaves you for dead,
Mama.”

“Schwein!”
She shook the
wooden spoon at him.

Papa continued
looking out the window, at an imaginary woman and a very real corridor of
German flags.

On the streets
of Molching that day, each window was decorated for the
Führer.
In some
places, like Frau Diller’s, the glass was vigorously washed, and the swastika
looked like a jewel on a red-and-white blanket. In others, the flag trundled
from the ledge like washing hung out to dry. But it was there.

Earlier, there
had been a minor calamity. The Hubermanns couldn’t find their flag.

“They’ll come
for us,” Mama warned her husband. “They’ll come and take us away.” They. “We
have to find it!” At one point, it seemed like Papa might have to go down to
the basement and paint a flag on one of his drop sheets. Thankfully, it turned
up, buried behind the accordion in the cupboard.

“That infernal
accordion, it was blocking my view!” Mama swiveled. “Liesel!”

The girl had the
honor of pinning the flag to the window frame.

Hans Junior and
Trudy came home for the afternoon eating, like they did at Christmas or Easter.
Now seems like a good time to introduce them a little more comprehensively:

Hans Junior had
the eyes of his father and the height. The silver in his eyes, however, wasn’t
warm, like Papa’s—they’d been
Führer
ed. There was more flesh on his
bones, too, and he had prickly blond hair and skin like off-white paint.

Trudy, or
Trudel, as she was often known, was only a few inches taller than Mama. She had
cloned Rosa Hubermann’s unfortunate, waddlesome walking style, but the rest of
her was much milder. Being a live-in housemaid in a wealthy part of Munich, she
was most likely bored of children, but she was always capable of at least a few
smiled words in Liesel’s direction. She had soft lips. A quiet voice.

They came home
together on the train from Munich, and it didn’t take long for old tensions to
rise up.

“So have they
let you in yet?” Hans Junior was picking up where they’d left off at Christmas.

“In what?”

“Take a
guess—the party.”

“No, I think
they’ve forgotten about me.”

“Well, have you
even tried again? You can’t just sit around waiting for the new world to take
it with you. You have to go out and be part of it—despite your past mistakes.”

Papa looked up.
“Mistakes? I’ve made many mistakes in my life, but not joining the Nazi Party
isn’t one of them. They still have my application—you know that—but I couldn’t
go back to ask. I just . . .”