The Book Thief (12 page)

That was when a
great shiver arrived.

It waltzed
through the window with the draft. Perhaps it was the breeze of the Third
Reich, gathering even greater strength. Or maybe it was just Europe again,
breathing. Either way, it fell across them as their metallic eyes clashed like
tin cans in the kitchen.

“You’ve never
cared about this country,” said Hans Junior. “Not enough, anyway.”

Papa’s eyes
started corroding. It did not stop Hans Junior. He looked now for some reason
at the girl. With her three books standing upright on the table, as if in
conversation, Liesel was silently mouthing the words as she read from one of
them. “And what trash is this girl reading? She should be reading
Mein
Kampf.
”

Liesel looked
up.

“Don’t worry,
Liesel,” Papa said. “Just keep reading. He doesn’t know what he’s saying.”

But Hans Junior
wasn’t finished. He stepped closer and said, “You’re either for the
Führer
or
against him—and I can see that you’re against him. You always have been.”
Liesel watched Hans Junior in the face, fixated on the thinness of his lips and
the rocky line of his bottom teeth. “It’s pathetic—how a man can stand by and
do nothing as a whole nation cleans out the garbage and makes itself great.”

Trudy and Mama
sat silently, scaredly, as did Liesel. There was the smell of pea soup,
something burning, and confrontation.

They were all
waiting for the next words.

They came from
the son. Just two of them.

“You coward.” He
upturned them into Papa’s face, and he promptly left the kitchen, and the
house.

Ignoring
futility, Papa walked to the doorway and called out to his son. “Coward?
I’m
the coward?!” He then rushed to the gate and ran pleadingly after him. Mama
hurried to the window, ripped away the flag, and opened up. She, Trudy, and
Liesel all crowded together, watching a father catch up to his son and grab
hold of him, begging him to stop. They could hear nothing, but the manner in
which Hans Junior shrugged loose was loud enough. The sight of Papa watching
him walk away roared at them from up the street.

“Hansi!” Mama
finally cried out. Both Trudy and Liesel flinched from her voice. “Come back!”

The boy was
gone.

Yes, the boy was
gone, and I wish I could tell you that everything worked out for the younger
Hans Hubermann, but it didn’t.

When he vanished
from Himmel Street that day in the name of the
Führer,
he would hurtle
through the events of another story, each step leading tragically to Russia.

To Stalingrad.

1.
In 1942 and early ’43, in that city, the sky was bleached bedsheet-white
each morning.

2.
All day long, as I carried the souls across it, that sheet was splashed with
blood, until it was full and bulging to the earth.

3.
In the evening, it would be wrung out and bleached again,
ready for
the next dawn.

4.
And that was when the fighting was only during the day.

With his son
gone, Hans Hubermann stood for a few moments longer. The street looked so big.

When he
reappeared inside, Mama fixed her gaze on him, but no words were exchanged. She
didn’t admonish him at all, which, as you know, was highly unusual. Perhaps she
decided he was injured enough, having been labeled a coward by his only son.

For a while, he
remained silently at the table after the eating was finished. Was he really a
coward, as his son had so brutally pointed out? Certainly, in World War I, he
considered himself one. He attributed his survival to it. But then, is there
cowardice in the acknowledgment of fear? Is there cowardice in being glad that
you lived?

His thoughts
crisscrossed the table as he stared into it.

“Papa?” Liesel
asked, but he did not look at her. “What was he talking about? What did he mean
when . . .”

“Nothing,” Papa
answered. He spoke quiet and calm, to the table. “It’s nothing. Forget about
him, Liesel.” It took perhaps a minute for him to speak again. “Shouldn’t you
be getting ready?” He looked at her this time. “Don’t you have a bonfire to go
to?”

“Yes, Papa.”

The book thief
went and changed into her Hitler Youth uniform, and half an hour later, they
left, walking to the BDM headquarters. From there, the children would be taken
to the town square in their groups.

Speeches would
be made.

A fire would be
lit.

A book would be
stolen.

100 PERCENT PURE GERMAN SWEAT

People lined the
streets as the youth of Germany marched toward the town hall and the square. On
quite a few occasions Liesel forgot about her mother and any other problem of
which she currently held ownership. There was a swell in her chest as the
people clapped them on. Some kids waved to their parents, but only briefly—it
was an explicit instruction that they march straight and
don’t look or wave
to
the crowd.

When Rudy’s
group came into the square and was instructed to halt, there was a discrepancy.
Tommy Müller. The rest of the regiment stopped marching and Tommy plowed
directly into the boy in front of him.

“Dummkopf !”
the boy spat
before turning around.

“I’m sorry,”
said Tommy, arms held apologetically out. His face tripped over itself. “I
couldn’t hear.” It was only a small moment, but it was also a preview of
troubles to come. For Tommy. For Rudy.

At the end of
the marching, the Hitler Youth divisions were allowed to disperse. It would
have been near impossible to keep them all together as the bonfire burned in
their eyes and excited them. Together, they cried one united “
heil
Hitler”
and were free to wander. Liesel looked for Rudy, but once the crowd of children
scattered, she was caught inside a mess of uniforms and high-pitched words.
Kids calling out to other kids.

By four-thirty,
the air had cooled considerably.

People joked
that they needed warming up. “That’s all this trash is good for anyway.”

Carts were used
to wheel it all in. It was dumped in the middle of the town square and dowsed
with something sweet. Books and paper and other material would slide or tumble
down, only to be thrown back onto the pile. From further away, it looked like
something volcanic. Or something grotesque and alien that had somehow landed
miraculously in the middle of town and needed to be snuffed out, and fast.

The applied
smell leaned toward the crowd, who were kept at a good distance. There were
well in excess of a thousand people, on the ground, on the town hall steps, on
the rooftops that surrounded the square.

When Liesel
tried to make her way through, a crackling sound prompted her to think that the
fire had already begun. It hadn’t. The sound was kinetic humans, flowing,
charging up.

They’ve started
without me!

Although
something inside told her that this was a crime—after all, her three books were
the most precious items she owned—she was compelled to see the thing lit. She
couldn’t help it. I guess humans like to watch a little destruction. Sand
castles, houses of cards, that’s where they begin. Their great skill is their
capacity to escalate.

The thought of
missing it was eased when she found a gap in the bodies and was able to see the
mound of guilt, still intact. It was prodded and splashed, even spat on. It
reminded her of an unpopular child, forlorn and bewildered, powerless to alter
its fate. No one liked it. Head down. Hands in pockets. Forever. Amen.

Bits and pieces
continued falling to its sides as Liesel hunted for Rudy. Where is that
Saukerl?

When she looked
up, the sky was crouching.

A horizon of
Nazi flags and uniforms rose upward, crippling her view every time she
attempted to see over a smaller child’s head. It was pointless. The crowd was
itself. There was no swaying it, squeezing through, or reasoning with it. You
breathed with it and you sang its songs. You waited for its fire.

Silence was
requested by a man on a podium. His uniform was shiny brown. The iron was
practically still on it. The silence began.

His first words:
“
Heil
Hitler!”

His first
action: the salute to the
Führer.

“Today is a
beautiful day,” he continued. “Not only is it our great leader’s birthday—but
we also stop our enemies once again. We stop them reaching into our minds. . .
.”

Liesel still
attempted to fight her way through.

“We put an end
to the disease that has been spread through Germany for the last twenty years,
if not more!” He was performing now what is called a
Schreierei
—a
consummate exhibition of passionate shouting—warning the crowd to be watchful,
to be vigilant, to seek out and destroy the evil machinations plotting to
infect the mother-land with its deplorable ways. “The immoral! The Kommunisten
!” That word again. That old word. Dark rooms. Suit-wearing men. “
Die
Juden
—the
Jews!”

Halfway through
the speech, Liesel surrendered. As the word
communist
seized her, the remainder
of the Nazi recital swept by, either side, lost somewhere in the German feet
around her. Waterfalls of words. A girl treading water. She thought it again.
Kommunisten.

Up until now, at
the BDM, they had been told that Germany was the superior race, but no one else
in particular had been mentioned. Of course, everyone knew about the Jews, as
they were the main
offender
in regard to violating the German ideal. Not
once, however, had the communists been mentioned until today, regardless of the
fact that people of such political creed were also to be punished.

She had to get
out.

In front of her,
a head with parted blond hair and pigtails sat absolutely still on its
shoulders. Staring into it, Liesel revisited those dark rooms of her past and
her mother answering questions made up of one word.

She saw it all
so clearly.

Her starving
mother, her missing father.
Kommunisten.

Her dead
brother.

“And now we say
goodbye to this trash, this poison.”

Just before
Liesel Meminger pivoted with nausea to exit the crowd, the shiny, brown-shirted
creature walked from the podium. He received a torch from an accomplice and lit
the mound, which dwarfed him in all its culpability. “
Heil
Hitler!”

The audience: “
Heil
Hitler!”

A collection of
men walked from a platform and surrounded the heap, igniting it, much to the
approval of everyone. Voices climbed over shoulders and the smell of pure
German sweat struggled at first, then poured out. It rounded corner after
corner, till they were all swimming in it. The words, the sweat. And smiling.
Let’s not forget the smiling.

Many jocular
comments followed, as did another onslaught of “
heil
Hitlering.” You
know, it actually makes me wonder if anyone ever lost an eye or injured a hand
or wrist with all of that. You’d only need to be facing the wrong way at the
wrong time or stand marginally too close to another person. Perhaps people did
get injured. Personally, I can only tell you that no one died from it, or at
least, not physically. There was, of course, the matter of forty million people
I picked up by the time the whole thing was finished, but that’s getting all
metaphoric. Allow me to return us to the fire.

The orange
flames waved at the crowd as paper and print dissolved inside them. Burning
words were torn from their sentences.

On the other
side, beyond the blurry heat, it was possible to see the brownshirts and
swastikas joining hands. You didn’t see people. Only uniforms and signs.

Birds above did
laps.

They circled,
somehow attracted to the glow—until they came too close to the heat. Or was it
the humans? Certainly, the heat was nothing.

In her attempt
to escape, a voice found her.

“Liesel!”

It made its way
through and she recognized it. It was not Rudy, but she knew that voice.

She twisted free
and found the face attached to it. Oh, no. Ludwig Schmeikl. He did not, as she
expected, sneer or joke or make any conversation at all. All he was able to do
was pull her toward him and motion to his ankle. It had been crushed among the
excitement and was bleeding dark and ominous through his sock. His face wore a
helpless expression beneath his tangled blond hair. An animal. Not a deer in
lights. Nothing so typical or specific. He was just an animal, hurt among the
melee of its own kind, soon to be trampled by it.

Somehow, she
helped him up and dragged him toward the back. Fresh air.

They staggered
to the steps at the side of the church. There was some room there and they
rested, both relieved.

Breath collapsed
from Schmeikl’s mouth. It slipped down, over his throat. He managed to speak.

Sitting down, he
held his ankle and found Liesel Meminger’s face. “Thanks,” he said, to her
mouth rather than her eyes. More slabs of breath. “And . . .” They both watched
images of school-yard antics, followed by a school-yard beating. “I’m
sorry—for, you know.”

Liesel heard it
again.

She chose,
however, to focus on Ludwig Schmeikl. “Me too.”