The Book Thief (45 page)

“Wake up,” she said.

Max did not wake up.

For eight more days.

At school, there was a rapping of knuckles on the door.

“Come in,” called Frau Olendrich.

The door opened and the entire classroom of children looked on
in surprise as Rosa Hubermann stood in the doorway. One or two gasped at the sight—a small wardrobe of a woman with a lipstick sneer and chlorine eyes. This. Was the legend. She was wearing her best clothes, but her hair was a mess, and it
was
a towel of elastic gray strands.

The teacher was obviously afraid. “Frau Hubermann …” Her movements were cluttered. She searched through the class. “Liesel?”

Liesel looked at Rudy, stood, and walked quickly toward the door to end the embarrassment as fast as possible. It shut behind her, and now she was alone, in the corridor, with Rosa.

Rosa faced the other way.

“What, Mama?”

She turned. “Don’t you ‘what Mama’ me, you little
Saumensch!”
Liesel was gored by the speed of it. “My hairbrush!” A trickle of laughter rolled from under the door, but it was drawn instantly back.

“Mama?”

Her face was severe, but it was smiling. “What the hell did you do with my hairbrush, you stupid
Saumensch
, you little thief? I’ve told you a hundred times to leave that thing alone, but do you listen? Of course not!”

The tirade went on for perhaps another minute, with Liesel making a desperate suggestion or two about the possible location of the said brush. It ended abruptly, with Rosa pulling Liesel close, just for a few seconds. Her whisper was almost impossible to hear, even at such close proximity. “You told me to yell at you. You said they’d all believe it.” She looked left and right, her voice like needle and thread. “He woke up, Liesel. He’s awake.” From her pocket, she pulled out the toy soldier with the scratched exterior. “He said to give you this. It was his favorite.” She handed it over, held her arms tightly, and smiled. Before Liesel had a chance to answer, she finished it off. “Well? Answer me! Do you have any other idea where you might have left it?”

He’s alive, Liesel thought. “… No, Mama. I’m sorry, Mama, I—”

“Well, what good are you, then?” She let go, nodded, and walked away.

For a few moments, Liesel stood. The corridor was huge. She examined the soldier in her palm. Instinct told her to run home immediately, but common sense did not allow it. Instead, she placed the ragged soldier in her pocket and returned to the classroom.

Everyone waited.

“Stupid cow,” she whispered under her breath.

Again, kids laughed. Frau Olendrich did not.

“What was that?”

Liesel was on such a high that she felt indestructible. “I said,” she beamed, “stupid cow,” and she didn’t have to wait a single moment for the teacher’s hand to slap her.

“Don’t speak about your mother like that,” she said, but it had little effect. The girl merely stood there and attempted to hold off the grin. After all, she could take a
Watschen
with the best of them. “Now get to your seat.”

“Yes, Frau Olendrich.”

Next to her, Rudy dared to speak.

“Jesus, Mary, and Joseph,” he whispered, “I can see her hand on your face. A big red hand. Five fingers!”

“Good,” said Liesel, because Max was alive.

When she made it home that afternoon, he was sitting up in bed with the deflated soccer ball on his lap. His beard itched him and his swampy eyes fought to stay open. An empty bowl of soup was next to the gifts.

They did not say hello.

It was more like edges.

The door creaked, the girl came in, and she stood before him, looking at the bowl. “Is Mama forcing it down your throat?”

He nodded, content, fatigued. “It was very good, though.”

“Mama’s soup? Really?”

It was not a smile he gave her. “Thank you for the presents.” More just a slight tear of the mouth. “Thank you for the cloud. Your papa explained that one a little further.”

After an hour, Liesel also made an attempt on the truth. “We didn’t know what we’d do if you’d died, Max. We—”

It didn’t take him long. “You mean, how to get rid of me?”

“I’m sorry.”

“No.” He was not offended. “You were right.” He played weakly with the ball. “You were right to think that way. In your situation, a dead Jew is just as dangerous as a live one, if not worse.”

“I also dreamed.” In detail, she explained it, with the soldier in her grip. She was on the verge of apologizing again when Max intervened.

“Liesel.” He made her look at him. “Don’t ever apologize to me. It should be me who apologizes to you.” He looked at everything she’d brought him. “Look at all this. These gifts.” He held the button in his hand. “And Rosa said you read to me twice every day, sometimes three times.” Now he looked at the curtains as if he could see out of them. He sat up a little higher and paused for a dozen silent sentences. Trepidation found its way onto his face and he made a confession to the girl. “Liesel?” He moved slightly to the right. “I’m afraid,” he said, “of falling asleep again.”

Liesel was resolute. “Then I’ll read to you. And I’ll slap your face if you start dozing off. I’ll close the book and shake you till you wake up.”

That afternoon, and well into the night, Liesel read to Max Vandenburg. He sat in bed and absorbed the words, awake this time, until just after ten o’clock. When Liesel took a quick rest from
The Dream Carrier
, she looked over the book and Max was asleep. Nervously, she nudged him with it. He awoke.

Another three times, he fell asleep. Twice more, she woke him.

For the next four days, he woke up every morning in Liesel’s bed, then next to the fireplace, and eventually, by mid-April, in the basement. His health had improved, the beard was gone, and small scraps of weight had returned.

In Liesel’s inside world, there was great relief in that time. Outside, things were starting to look shaky. Late in March, a place called Lübeck was hailed with bombs. Next in line would be Cologne, and soon enough, many more German cities, including Munich.

Yes, the boss was at my shoulder.

“Get it done, get it done.”

The bombs were coming—and so was I.

The fallen hours of May 30.

I’m sure Liesel Meminger was fast asleep when more than a thousand bomber planes flew toward a place known as Köln. For me, the result was five hundred people or thereabouts. Fifty thousand others ambled homelessly around the ghostly piles of rubble, trying to work out which way was which, and which slabs of broken home belonged to whom.

Five hundred souls.

I carried them in my fingers, like suitcases. Or I’d throw them over my shoulder. It was only the children I carried in my arms.

By the time I was finished, the sky was yellow, like burning newspaper. If I looked closely, I could see the words, reporting headlines, commentating on the progress of the war and so forth. How I’d have loved to pull it all down, to screw up the newspaper sky and toss it away. My arms ached and I couldn’t afford to burn my fingers. There was still so much work to be done.

As you might expect, many people died instantly. Others took a while longer. There were several more places to go, skies to meet and souls
to collect, and when I came back to Cologne later on, not long after the final planes, I managed to notice a most unique thing.

I was carrying the charred soul of a teenager when I looked gravely up at what was now a sulfuric sky. A group of ten-year-old girls was close by. One of them called out.

“What’s that?”

Her arm extended and her finger pointed out the black, slow object, falling from above. It began as a black feather, lilting, floating. Or a piece of ash. Then it grew larger. The same girl—a redhead with period freckles—spoke once again, this time more emphatically. “What
is
that?”

“It’s a body,” another girl suggested. Black hair, pigtails, and a crooked part down the center.

“It’s another bomb!”

It was too slow to be a bomb.

With the adolescent spirit still burning lightly in my arms, I walked a few hundred meters with the rest of them. Like the girls, I remained focused on the sky. The last thing I wanted was to look down at the stranded face of my teenager. A pretty girl. Her whole death was now ahead of her.

Like the rest of them, I was taken aback when a voice lunged out. It was a disgruntled father, ordering his kids inside. The redhead reacted. Her freckles lengthened into commas. “But, Papa, look.”

The man took several small steps and soon figured out what it was. “It’s the fuel,” he said.

“What do you mean?”

“The fuel,” he repeated. “The tank.” He was a bald man in disrupted bedclothes. “They used up all their fuel in that one and got rid of the empty container. Look, there’s another one over there.”

“And there!”

Kids being kids, they all searched frantically at that point, trying to find an empty fuel container floating to the ground.

The first one landed with a hollow thud.

“Can we keep it, Papa?”

“No.” He was bombed and shocked, this papa, and clearly not in the mood. “We cannot keep it.”

“Why not?”

“I’m going to ask my papa if
I
can have it,” said another of the girls.

“Me too.”

Just past the rubble of Cologne, a group of kids collected empty fuel containers, dropped by their enemies. As usual, I collected humans. I was tired. And the year wasn’t even halfway over yet.

A new ball had been found for Himmel Street soccer. That was the good news. The somewhat unsettling news was that a division of the NSDAP was heading toward them.

They’d progressed all the way through Molching, street by street, house by house, and now they stood at Frau Diller’s shop, having a quick smoke before they continued with their business.

There was already a smattering of air-raid shelters in Molching, but it was decided soon after the bombing of Cologne that a few more certainly wouldn’t hurt. The NSDAP was inspecting each and every house in order to see if its basement was a good enough candidate.

From afar, the children watched.

They could see the smoke rising out of the pack.

Liesel had only just come out and she’d walked over to Rudy and Tommy. Harald Mollenhauer was retrieving the ball. “What’s going on up there?”

Rudy put his hands in his pockets. “The party.” He inspected his friend’s progress with the ball in Frau Holtzapfel’s front hedge. “They’re checking all the houses and apartment blocks.”

Instant dryness seized the interior of Liesel’s mouth. “For what?”

“Don’t you know anything? Tell her, Tommy.”

Tommy was perplexed. “Well,
I
don’t know.”

“You’re hopeless, the pair of you. They need more air-raid shelters.”

“What—basements?”

“No, attics. Of course basements. Jesus, Liesel, you really are thick, aren’t you?”

The ball was back.

“Rudy!”

He played onto it and Liesel was still standing. How could she get back inside without looking too suspicious? The smoke up at Frau Diller’s was disappearing and the small crowd of men was starting to disperse. Panic generated in that awful way. Throat and mouth. Air became sand. Think, she thought. Come on, Liesel, think, think.

Rudy scored.

Faraway voices congratulated him.

Think, Liesel—

She had it.

That’s it, she decided, but I have to make it real.

As the Nazis progressed down the street, painting the letters LSR on some of the doors, the ball was passed through the air to one of the bigger kids, Klaus Behrig.

The boy turned with the ball just as Liesel arrived, and they collided with such force that the game stopped automatically. As the ball rolled off, players ran in. Liesel held her grazed knee with one hand
and her head with the other. Klaus Behrig only held his right shin, grimacing and cursing. “Where is she?” he spat. “I’m going to kill her!”