The Book Thief (28 page)

All three people
looked up and spoke.

“Hi, Liesel.”

“Here’s a brush,
Liesel.”

“About time,
Saumensch.
Where have you been so long?”

As she started
painting, Liesel thought about Max Vandenburg fighting the
Führer,
exactly
as he’d explained it.

When the visions
dissipated and she finished her first page, Papa winked at her. Mama castigated
her for hogging the paint. Max examined each and every page, perhaps watching
what he planned to produce on them. Many months later, he would also paint over
the cover of that book and give it a new title, after one of the stories he
would write and illustrate inside it.

That afternoon,
in the secret ground below 33 Himmel Street, the Hubermanns, Liesel Meminger,
and Max Vandenburg prepared the pages of
The Word Shaker.

It felt good to
be a painter.

The
Showdown: June 24

Then came the
seventh side of the die. Two days after Germany invaded Russia. Three days
before Britain and the Soviets joined forces.

Seven.

You roll and
watch it coming, realizing completely that this is no regular die. You claim it
to be bad luck, but you’ve known all along that it had to come. You brought it
into the room. The table could smell it on your breath. The Jew was sticking
out of your pocket from the outset. He’s smeared to your lapel, and the moment
you roll, you know it’s a seven—the one thing that somehow finds a way to hurt
you. It lands. It stares you in each eye, miraculous and loathsome, and you
turn away with it feeding on your chest.

Just bad luck.

That’s what you
say.

Of no
consequence.

That’s what you
make yourself believe—because deep down, you know that this small piece of
changing fortune is a signal of things to come. You hide a Jew. You pay.
Somehow or other, you must.

In hindsight,
Liesel told herself that it was not such a big deal. Perhaps it was because so
much more had happened by the time she wrote her story in the basement. In the
great scheme of things, she reasoned that Rosa being fired by the mayor and his
wife was not bad luck at all. It had nothing whatsoever to do with hiding Jews.
It had everything to do with the greater context of the war. At the time,
though, there was most definitely a feeling of punishment.

The beginning
was actually a week or so earlier than June 24. Liesel scavenged a newspaper
for Max Vandenburg as she always did. She reached into a garbage can just off
Munich Street and tucked it under her arm. Once she delivered it to Max and
he’d commenced his first reading, he glanced across at her and pointed to a picture
on the front page. “Isn’t this whose washing and ironing you deliver?”

Liesel came over
from the wall. She’d been writing the word
argument
six times, next to
Max’s picture of the ropy cloud and the dripping sun. Max handed her the paper
and she confirmed it. “That’s him.”

When she went on
to read the article, Heinz Hermann, the mayor, was quoted as saying that
although the war was progressing splendidly, the people of Molching, like all
responsible Germans, should take adequate measures and prepare for the
possibility of harder times. “You never know,” he stated, “what our enemies are
thinking, or how they will try to debilitate us.”

A week later,
the mayor’s words came to nasty fruition. Liesel, as she always did, showed up
at Grande Strasse and read from
The
Whistler
on the floor of the
mayor’s library. The mayor’s wife showed no signs of abnormality (or, let’s be
frank, no
additional
signs) until it was time to leave.

This time, when
she offered Liesel
The Whistler,
she insisted on the girl taking it.
“Please.” She almost begged. The book was held out in a tight, measured fist.
“Take it. Please, take it.”

Liesel, touched
by the strangeness of this woman, couldn’t bear to disappoint her again. The
gray-covered book with its yellowing pages found its way into her hand and she
began to walk the corridor. As she was about to ask for the washing, the
mayor’s wife gave her a final look of bathrobed sorrow. She reached into the
chest of drawers and withdrew an envelope. Her voice, lumpy from lack of use,
coughed out the words. “I’m sorry. It’s for your mama.”

Liesel stopped
breathing.

She was suddenly
aware of how empty her feet felt inside her shoes. Something ridiculed her
throat. She trembled. When finally she reached out and took possession of the
letter, she noticed the sound of the clock in the library. Grimly, she realized
that clocks don’t make a sound that even remotely resembles ticking, tocking.
It was more the sound of a hammer, upside down, hacking methodically at the
earth. It was the sound of a grave. If only mine was ready now, she
thought—because Liesel Meminger, at that moment, wanted to die. When the others
had canceled, it hadn’t hurt so much. There was always the mayor, his library,
and her connection with his wife. Also, this was the last one, the last hope,
gone. This time, it felt like the greatest betrayal.

How could she
face her mama?

For Rosa, the
few scraps of money had still helped in various alleyways. An extra handful of
flour. A piece of fat.

Ilsa Hermann was
dying now herself—to get rid of her. Liesel could see it somewhere in the way
she hugged the robe a little tighter. The clumsiness of sorrow still kept her
at close proximity, but clearly, she wanted this to be over. “Tell your mama,”
she spoke again. Her voice was adjusting now, as one sentence turned into two.
“That we’re sorry.” She started shepherding the girl toward the door.

Liesel felt it
now in the shoulders. The pain, the impact of final rejection.

That’s it? she
asked internally. You just boot me out?

Slowly, she
picked up her empty bag and edged toward the door. Once outside, she turned and
faced the mayor’s wife for the second to last time that day. She looked her in
the eyes with an almost savage brand of pride.
“Danke schön,”
she said,
and Ilsa Hermann smiled in a rather useless, beaten way.

“If you ever
want to come just to read,” the woman lied (or at least the girl, in her
shocked, saddened state, perceived it as a lie), “you’re very welcome.”

At that moment,
Liesel was amazed by the width of the doorway. There was so much space. Why did
people need so much space to get through the door? Had Rudy been there, he’d
have called her an idiot—it was to get all their stuff inside.

“Goodbye,” the
girl said, and slowly, with great morosity, the door was closed.

Liesel did not
leave.

For a long time,
she sat on the steps and watched Molching. It was neither warm nor cool and the
town was clear and still. Molching was in a jar.

She opened the
letter. In it, Mayor Heinz Hermann diplomatically outlined exactly why he had
to terminate the services of Rosa Hubermann. For the most part, he explained
that he would be a hypocrite if he maintained his own small luxuries while
advising others to
prepare for harder times.

When she
eventually stood and walked home, her moment of reaction came once again when
she saw the
STEINER-SCHNEIDERMEISTER
sign on Munich Street. Her sadness
left her and she was overwhelmed with anger. “That bastard mayor,” she
whispered. “That
pathetic
woman.” The fact that harder times were coming
was surely the best reason for keeping Rosa employed, but no, they fired her.
At any rate, she decided, they could do their own blasted washing and ironing,
like normal people. Like poor people.

In her hand,
The
Whistler
tightened.

“So you give me
the book,” the girl said, “for pity—to make yourself feel better. . . .” The
fact that she’d also been offered the book prior to that day mattered little.

She turned as
she had once before and marched back to 8 Grande Strasse. The temptation to run
was immense, but she refrained so that she’d have enough in reserve for the
words.

When she
arrived, she was disappointed that the mayor himself was not there. No car was
slotted nicely on the side of the road, which was perhaps a good thing. Had it
been there, there was no telling what she might have done to it in this moment
of rich versus poor.

Two steps at a
time, she reached the door and banged it hard enough to hurt. She enjoyed the
small fragments of pain.

Evidently, the
mayor’s wife was shocked when she saw her again. Her fluffy hair was slightly
wet and her wrinkles widened when she noticed the obvious fury on Liesel’s
usually pallid face. She opened her mouth, but nothing came out, which was
handy, really, for it was Liesel who possessed the talking.

“You think,” she
said, “you can buy me off with this book?” Her voice, though shaken, hooked at
the woman’s throat. The glittering anger was thick and unnerving, but she
toiled through it. She worked herself up even further, to the point where she
needed to wipe the tears from her eyes. “You give me this
Saumensch
of a
book and think it’ll make everything good when I go and tell my mama that we’ve
just lost our last one? While you sit here in your mansion?”

The mayor’s
wife’s arms.

They hung.

Her face
slipped.

Liesel, however,
did not buckle. She sprayed her words directly into the woman’s eyes.

“You and your
husband. Sitting up here.” Now she became spiteful. More spiteful and evil than
she thought herself capable.

The injury of
words.

Yes, the
brutality of words.

She summoned
them from someplace she only now recognized and hurled them at Ilsa Hermann.
“It’s about time,” she informed her, “that you do your own stinking washing
anyway. It’s about time you faced the fact that your son is dead. He got
killed! He got strangled and cut up more than twenty years ago! Or did he
freeze to death? Either way, he’s dead! He’s dead and it’s pathetic that you
sit here shivering in your own house to suffer for it. You think you’re the
only one?”

Immediately.

Her brother was
next to her.

He whispered for
her to stop, but he, too, was dead, and not worth listening to.

He died in a
train.

They buried him
in the snow.

Liesel glanced
at him, but she could not make herself stop. Not yet.

“This book,” she
went on. She shoved the boy down the steps, making him fall. “I don’t want it.”
The words were quieter now, but still just as hot. She threw
The Whistler
at
the woman’s slippered feet, hearing the clack of it as it landed on the cement.
“I don’t want your miserable book. . . .”

Now she managed
it. She fell silent.

Her throat was
barren now. No words for miles.

Her brother,
holding his knee, disappeared.

After a
miscarriaged pause, the mayor’s wife edged forward and picked up the book. She
was battered and beaten up, and not from smiling this time. Liesel could see it
on her face. Blood leaked from her nose and licked at her lips. Her eyes had
blackened. Cuts had opened up and a series of wounds were rising to the surface
of her skin. All from the words. From Liesel’s words.

Book in hand,
and straightening from a crouch to a standing hunch, Ilsa Hermann began the
process again of saying sorry, but the sentence did not make it out.

Slap me, Liesel
thought. Come on, slap me.

Ilsa Hermann
didn’t slap her. She merely retreated backward, into the ugly air of her
beautiful house, and Liesel, once again, was left alone, clutching at the
steps. She was afraid to turn around because she knew that when she did, the
glass casing of Molching had now been shattered, and she’d be glad of it.

As her last
orders of business, she read the letter one more time, and when she was close
to the gate, she screwed it up as tightly as she could and threw it at the
door, as if it were a rock. I have no idea what the book thief expected, but
the ball of paper hit the mighty sheet of wood and twittered back down the
steps. It landed at her feet.