The Book Thief (4 page)

Liesel,
naturally, was bathed in anxiety. There was no way she was getting into any
bath, or into bed for that matter. She was twisted into one corner of the
closetlike washroom, clutching for the nonexistent arms of the wall for some
level of support. There was nothing but dry paint, difficult breath, and the
deluge of abuse from Rosa.

“Leave her
alone.” Hans Hubermann entered the fray. His gentle voice made its way in, as
if slipping through a crowd. “Leave her to me.”

He moved closer
and sat on the floor, against the wall. The tiles were cold and unkind.

“You know how to
roll a cigarette?” he asked her, and for the next hour or so, they sat in the
rising pool of darkness, playing with the tobacco and the cigarette papers and
Hans Hubermann smoking them.

When the hour
was up, Liesel could roll a cigarette moderately well. She still didn’t have a
bath.

To most people,
Hans Hubermann was barely visible. An un-special person. Certainly, his
painting skills were excellent. His musical ability was better than average.
Somehow, though, and I’m sure you’ve met people like this, he was able to
appear as merely part of the background, even if he was standing at the front
of a line. He was always just
there.
Not noticeable. Not important or
particularly valuable.

The frustration
of that appearance, as you can imagine, was its complete misleadence, let’s
say. There most definitely
was
value in him, and it did not go unnoticed
by Liesel Meminger. (The human child—so much cannier at times than the
stupefyingly ponderous adult.) She saw it immediately.

His manner.

The quiet air
around him.

When he turned
the light on in the small, callous washroom that night, Liesel observed the
strangeness of her foster father’s eyes. They were made of kindness, and
silver. Like soft silver, melting. Liesel, upon seeing those eyes, understood
that Hans Hubermann was worth a lot.

When Liesel
finally had a bath, after two weeks of living on Himmel Street, Rosa gave her
an enormous, injury-inducing hug. Nearly choking her, she said, “
Saumensch,
du dreckiges
—it’s about time!”

After a few months,
they were no longer Mr. and Mrs. Hubermann. With a typical fistful of words,
Rosa said, “Now listen, Liesel—from now on you call me Mama.” She thought a
moment. “What did you call your real mother?”

Liesel answered
quietly. “
Auch Mama
—also Mama.”

“Well, I’m Mama
Number Two, then.” She looked over at her husband. “And him over there.” She
seemed to collect the words in her hand, pat them together, and hurl them
across the table. “That
Saukerl,
that filthy pig—you call him Papa,
verstehst
?
Understand?”

“Yes,” Liesel
promptly agreed. Quick answers were appreciated in this household.

“Yes,
Mama,
”
Mama corrected her. “
Saumensch.
Call me Mama when you talk to me.”

At that moment,
Hans Hubermann had just completed rolling a cigarette, having licked the paper
and joined it all up. He looked over at Liesel and winked. She would have no
trouble calling him Papa.

THE WOMAN WITH THE IRON FIST

Those first few
months were definitely the hardest.

Every night,
Liesel would nightmare.

Her brother’s
face.

Staring at the
floor.

She would wake
up swimming in her bed, screaming, and drowning in the flood of sheets. On the
other side of the room, the bed that was meant for her brother floated boatlike
in the darkness. Slowly, with the arrival of consciousness, it sank, seemingly
into the floor. This vision didn’t help matters, and it would usually be quite
a while before the screaming stopped.

Possibly the
only good to come out of these nightmares was that it brought Hans Hubermann,
her new papa, into the room, to soothe her, to love her.

He came in every
night and sat with her. The first couple of times, he simply stayed—a stranger
to kill the aloneness. A few nights after that, he whispered, “Shhh, I’m here,
it’s all right.” After three weeks, he held her. Trust was accumulated quickly,
due primarily to the brute strength of the man’s gentleness, his
thereness.
The
girl knew from the outset that Hans Hubermann would always appear midscream,
and he would not leave.

Hans Hubermann
sat sleepy-eyed on the bed and Liesel would cry into his sleeves and breathe
him in. Every morning, just after two o’clock, she fell asleep again to the
smell of him. It was a mixture of dead cigarettes, decades of paint, and human
skin. At first, she sucked it all in, then breathed it, until she drifted back
down. Each morning, he was a few feet away from her, crumpled, almost halved,
in the chair. He never used the other bed. Liesel would climb out and
cautiously kiss his cheek and he would wake up and smile.

Some days Papa
told her to get back into bed and wait a minute, and he would return with his
accordion and play for her. Liesel would sit up and hum, her cold toes clenched
with excitement. No one had ever given her music before. She would grin herself
stupid, watching the lines drawing themselves down his face and the soft metal
of his eyes—until the swearing arrived from the kitchen.

“STOPTHATNOISE,
SAUKERL!”

Papa would play
a little longer.

He would wink at
the girl, and clumsily, she’d wink back.

A few times,
purely to incense Mama a little further, he also brought the instrument to the
kitchen and played through breakfast.

Papa’s bread and
jam would be half eaten on his plate, curled into the shape of bite marks, and
the music would look Liesel in the face. I know it sounds strange, but that’s
how it felt to her. Papa’s right hand strolled the tooth-colored keys. His left
hit the buttons. (She especially loved to see him hit the silver, sparkled
button—the C major.) The accordion’s scratched yet shiny black exterior came
back and forth as his arms squeezed the dusty bellows, making it suck in the
air and throw it back out. In the kitchen on those mornings, Papa made the
accordion live. I guess it makes sense, when you really think about it.

How do you tell
if something’s alive?

You check for
breathing. The sound of the accordion was, in fact, also the announcement of
safety. Daylight. During the day, it was impossible to dream of her brother.
She would miss him and frequently cry in the tiny washroom as quietly as
possible, but she was still glad to be awake. On her first night with the
Hubermanns, she had hidden her last link to him—
The Grave
Digger’s
Handbook
—under her mattress, and occasionally she would pull it out and
hold it. Staring at the letters on the cover and touching the print inside, she
had no idea what any of it was saying. The point is, it didn’t really matter
what that book was about. It was what it meant that was more important.

THE
BOOK’S MEANING

1.
The last time she saw her brother.

2.
The last time she saw her mother.

Sometimes she
would whisper the word
Mama
and see her mother’s face a hundred times in
a single afternoon. But those were small miseries compared to the terror of her
dreams. At those times, in the enormous mileage of sleep, she had never felt so
completely alone.

As I’m sure
you’ve already noticed, there were no other children in the house.

The Hubermanns
had two of their own, but they were older and had moved out. Hans Junior worked
in the center of Munich, and Trudy held a job as a housemaid and child minder.
Soon, they would both be in the war. One would be making bullets. The other
would be shooting them.

School, as you
might imagine, was a terrific failure.

Although it was
state-run, there was a heavy Catholic influence, and Liesel was Lutheran. Not
the most auspicious start. Then they discovered she couldn’t read or write.

Humiliatingly,
she was cast down with the younger kids, who were only just learning the
alphabet. Even though she was thin-boned and pale, she felt gigantic among the
midget children, and she often wished she was pale enough to disappear
altogether.

Even at home,
there wasn’t much room for guidance.

“Don’t ask
him
for help,” Mama pointed out. “That
Saukerl.
” Papa was staring out
the window, as was often his habit. “He left school in fourth grade.”

Without turning
around, Papa answered calmly, but with venom, “Well, don’t ask her, either.” He
dropped some ash outside. “She left school in
third
grade.”

There were no
books in the house (apart from the one she had secreted under her mattress),
and the best Liesel could do was speak the alphabet under her breath before she
was told in no uncertain terms to keep quiet. All that mumbling. It wasn’t
until later, when there was a bed-wetting incident midnightmare, that an extra
reading education began. Unofficially, it was called the midnight class, even
though it usually commenced at around two in the morning. More of that soon. In
mid-February, when she turned ten, Liesel was given a used doll that had a
missing leg and yellow hair.

“It was the best
we could do,” Papa apologized.

“What are you
talking about? She’s lucky to have
that
much,” Mama corrected him.

Hans continued
his examination of the remaining leg while Liesel tried on her new uniform. Ten
years old meant Hitler Youth. Hitler Youth meant a small brown uniform. Being
female, Liesel was enrolled into what was called the BDM.

The first thing
they did there was make sure your “
heil
Hitler” was working properly.
Then you were taught to march straight, roll bandages, and sew up clothes. You
were also taken hiking and on other such activities. Wednesday and Saturday
were the designated meeting days, from three in the afternoon until five.

Each Wednesday
and Saturday, Papa would walk Liesel there and pick her up two hours later.
They never spoke about it much. They just held hands and listened to their
feet, and Papa had a cigarette or two.

The only anxiety
Papa brought her was the fact that he was constantly leaving. Many evenings, he
would walk into the living room (which doubled as the Hubermanns’ bedroom),
pull the accordion from the old cupboard, and squeeze past in the kitchen to
the front door.

As he walked up
Himmel Street, Mama would open the window and cry out, “Don’t be home too
late!”

“Not so loud,”
he would turn and call back.

“
Saukerl!
Lick
my ass! I’ll speak as loud as I want!”

The echo of her
swearing followed him up the street. He never looked back, or at least, not
until he was sure his wife was gone. On those evenings, at the end of the
street, accordion case in hand, he would turn around, just before Frau Diller’s
corner shop, and see the figure who had replaced his wife in the window.
Briefly, his long, ghostly hand would rise before he turned again and walked
slowly on. The next time Liesel saw him would be at two in the morning, when he
dragged her gently from her nightmare.