The Book Thief (50 page)

She saw Rudy’s
face in the window, or more to the point, his candlelit hair. “I think you’d
better go,” she said. “He’s waiting for you.”

On the way home,
they ate.

“Are you sure
there wasn’t anything else?” Rudy asked. “There must have been.”

“We were lucky
to get the cookies.” Liesel examined the gift in Rudy’s arms. “Now tell the
truth. Did you eat any before I came back out?”

Rudy was
indignant. “Hey, you’re the thief here, not me.”

“Don’t kid me,
Saukerl,
I could see some sugar at the side of your mouth.”

Paranoid, Rudy
took the plate in just the one hand and wiped with the other. “I didn’t eat
any, I promise.”

Half the cookies
were gone before they hit the bridge, and they shared the rest with Tommy
Müller on Himmel Street.

When they’d
finished eating, there was only one afterthought, and Rudy spoke it.

“What the hell
do we do with the plate?”

THE CARDPLAYER

Around the time
Liesel and Rudy were eating the cookies, the resting men of the LSE were
playing cards in a town not far from Essen. They’d just completed the long trip
from Stuttgart and were gambling for cigarettes. Reinhold Zucker was not a
happy man.

“He’s cheating,
I swear it,” he muttered. They were in a shed that served as their barracks and
Hans Hubermann had just won his third consecutive hand. Zucker threw his cards
down in disgust and combed his greasy hair with a threesome of dirty
fingernails.

Unlike the young
man to his left, Hans Hubermann didn’t gloat when he won. He was even generous
enough to give each colleague one of his cigarettes back and light it for him.
All but Reinhold Zucker took up the invitation. He snatched at the offering and
flung it back to the middle of the turned-over box. “I don’t need your charity,
old man.” He stood up and left.

“What’s wrong
with him?” the sergeant inquired, but no one cared enough to answer. Reinhold
Zucker was just a twenty-four-year-old boy who could not play cards to save his
life.

Had he not lost
his cigarettes to Hans Hubermann, he wouldn’t have despised him. If he hadn’t
despised him, he might not have taken his place a few weeks later on a fairly
innocuous road.

One seat, two
men, a short argument, and me.

It kills me
sometimes, how people die.

THE SNOWS OF STALINGRAD

In the middle of
January 1943, the corridor of Himmel Street was its dark, miserable self.
Liesel shut the gate and made her way to Frau Holtzapfel’s door and knocked.
She was surprised by the answerer.

Her first
thought was that the man must have been one of her sons, but he did not look
like either of the brothers in the framed photos by the door. He seemed far too
old, although it was difficult to tell. His face was dotted with whiskers and
his eyes looked painful and loud. A bandaged hand fell out of his coat sleeve
and cherries of blood were seeping through the wrapping.

“Perhaps you
should come back later.”

Liesel tried to
look past him. She was close to calling out to Frau Holtzapfel, but the man
blocked her.

“Child,” he
said. “Come back later. I’ll get you. Where are you from?”

More than three
hours later, a knock arrived at 33 Himmel Street and the man stood before her.
The cherries of blood had grown into plums.

“She’s ready for
you now.”

Outside, in the
fuzzy gray light, Liesel couldn’t help asking the man what had happened to his
hand. He blew some air from his nostrils— a single syllable—before his reply.
“Stalingrad.”

“Sorry?” He had
looked into the wind when he spoke. “I couldn’t hear you.”

He answered
again, only louder, and now, he answered the question fully. “Stalingrad
happened to my hand. I was shot in the ribs and I had three of my fingers blown
off. Does that answer your question?” He placed his uninjured hand in his
pocket and shivered with contempt for the German wind. “You think it’s cold
here?”

Liesel touched
the wall at her side. She couldn’t lie. “Yes, of course.”

The man laughed.
“This isn’t cold.” He pulled out a cigarette and placed it in his mouth.
One-handed, he tried to light a match. In the dismal weather, it would have
been difficult with both hands, but with just the one, it was impossible. He
dropped the matchbook and swore.

Liesel picked it
up.

She took his cigarette
and put it in her mouth. She, too, could not light it.

“You have to
suck on it,” the man explained. “In this weather, it only lights when you suck.
Verstehst?”

She gave it
another go, trying to remember how Papa did it. This time, her mouth filled
with smoke. It climbed her teeth and scratched her throat, but she restrained
herself from coughing.

“Well done.”
When he took the cigarette and breathed it in, he reached out his uninjured
hand, his left. “Michael Holtzapfel.”

“Liesel
Meminger.”

“You’re coming
to read to my mother?”

Rosa arrived
behind her at that point, and Liesel could feel the shock at her back.
“Michael?” she asked. “Is that you?”

Michael
Holtzapfel nodded. “
Guten Tag,
Frau Hubermann. It’s been a long time.”

“You look so . .
.”

“Old?”

Rosa was still
in shock, but she composed herself. “Would you like to come in? I see you met
my foster daughter. . . .” Her voice trailed off as she noticed the bloodied
hand.

“My brother’s
dead,” said Michael Holtzapfel, and he could not have delivered the punch any
better with his one usable fist. For Rosa staggered. Certainly, war meant
dying, but it always shifted the ground beneath a person’s feet when it was
someone who had once lived and breathed in close proximity. Rosa had watched
both of the Holtzapfel boys grow up.

The oldened
young man somehow found a way to list what happened without losing his nerve.
“I was in one of the buildings we used for a hospital when they brought him in.
It was a week before I was coming home. I spent three days of that week sitting
with him before he died. . . .”

“I’m sorry.” The
words didn’t seem to come from Rosa’s mouth. It was someone else standing
behind Liesel Meminger that evening, but she did not dare to look.

“Please.”
Michael stopped her. “Don’t say anything else. Can I take the girl to read? I
doubt my mother will hear it, but she said for her to come.”

“Yes, take her.”

They were
halfway down the path when Michael Holtzapfel remembered himself and returned.
“Rosa?” There was a moment of waiting while Mama rewidened the door. “I heard
your son was there. In Russia. I ran into someone else from Molching and they
told me. But I’m sure you knew that already.”

Rosa tried to
prevent his exit. She rushed out and held his sleeve. “No. He left here one day
and never came back. We tried to find him, but then so much happened, there was
. . .”

Michael
Holtzapfel was determined to escape. The last thing he wanted to hear was yet
another sob story. Pulling himself away, he said, “As far as I know, he’s
alive.” He joined Liesel at the gate, but the girl did not walk next door. She
watched Rosa’s face. It lifted and dropped in the same moment.

“Mama?”

Rosa raised her
hand. “Go.”

Liesel waited.

“I said go.”

When she caught
up to him, the returned soldier tried to make conversation. He must have
regretted his verbal mistake with Rosa, and he tried to bury it beneath some
other words. Holding up the bandaged hand, he said, “I still can’t get it to
stop bleeding.” Liesel was actually glad to enter the Holtzapfels’ kitchen. The
sooner she started reading, the better.

Frau Holtzapfel
sat with wet streams of wire on her face.

Her son was
dead.

But that was
only the half of it.

She would never
really know how it occurred, but I can tell you without question that one of us
here knows. I always seem to know what happened when there was snow and guns
and the various confusions of human language.

When I imagine
Frau Holtzapfel’s kitchen from the book thief’s words, I don’t see the stove or
the wooden spoons or the water pump, or anything of the sort. Not to begin
with, anyway. What I see is the Russian winter and the snow falling from the
ceiling, and the fate of Frau Holtzapfel’s second son.

His name was
Robert, and what happened to him was this.

It was Russia,
January 5, 1943, and just another icy day. Out among the city and snow, there
were dead Russians and Germans everywhere. Those who remained were firing into the
blank pages in front of them. Three languages interwove. The Russian, the
bullets, the German.

As I made my way
through the fallen souls, one of the men was saying, “My stomach is itchy.” He
said it many times over. Despite his shock, he crawled up ahead, to a dark,
disfigured figure who sat streaming on the ground. When the soldier with the
wounded stomach arrived, he could see that it was Robert Holtzapfel. His hands
were caked in blood and he was heaping snow onto the area just above his shins,
where his legs had been chopped off by the last explosion. There were hot hands
and a red scream.

Steam rose from
the ground. The sight and smell of rotting snow.

“It’s me,” the
soldier said to him. “It’s Pieter.” He dragged himself a few inches closer.

“Pieter?” Robert
asked, a vanishing voice. He must have felt me nearby.

A second time.
“Pieter?”

For some reason,
dying men always ask questions they know the answer to. Perhaps it’s so they
can die being right.

The voices
suddenly all sounded the same.

Robert Holtzapfel
collapsed to his right, onto the cold and steamy ground.

I’m sure he
expected to meet me there and then.

He didn’t.

Unfortunately
for the young German, I did not take him that afternoon. I stepped over him
with the other poor souls in my arms and made my way back to the Russians.

Back and forth,
I traveled.

Disassembled
men.

It was no ski
trip, I can tell you.

As Michael told
his mother, it was three very long days later that I finally came for the
soldier who left his feet behind in Stalingrad. I showed up very much invited
at the temporary hospital and flinched at the smell.

A man with a
bandaged hand was telling the mute, shock-faced soldier that he would survive.
“You’ll soon be going home,” he assured him.

Yes, home, I
thought. For good.

“I’ll wait for
you,” he continued. “I was going back at the end of the week, but I’ll wait.”

In the middle of
his brother’s next sentence, I gathered up the soul of Robert Holtzapfel.

Usually I need
to exert myself, to look through the ceiling when I’m inside, but I was lucky
in that particular building. A small section of the roof had been destroyed and
I could see straight up. A meter away, Michael Holtzapfel was still talking. I
tried to ignore him by watching the hole above me. The sky was white but
deteriorating fast. As always, it was becoming an enormous drop sheet. Blood
was bleeding through, and in patches, the clouds were dirty, like footprints in
melting snow.

Footprints? you
ask.

Well, I wonder
whose those could be.

In Frau
Holtzapfel’s kitchen, Liesel read. The pages waded by unheard, and for me, when
the Russian scenery fades in my eyes, the snow refuses to stop falling from the
ceiling. The kettle is covered, as is the table. The humans, too, are wearing
patches of snow on their heads and shoulders.

The brother
shivers.

The woman weeps.

And the girl
goes on reading, for that’s why she’s there, and it feels good to be good for
something in the aftermath of the snows of Stalingrad.

THE AGELESS BROTHER

Liesel Meminger
was a few weeks short of fourteen.

Her papa was
still away.

She’d completed
three more reading sessions with a devastated woman. On many nights, she’d
watched Rosa sit with the accordion and pray with her chin on top of the
bellows.

Now, she
thought, it’s time. Usually it was stealing that cheered her up, but on this
day, it was giving something back.

She reached
under her bed and removed the plate. As quickly as she could, she cleaned it in
the kitchen and made her way out. It felt nice to be walking up through
Molching. The air was sharp and flat, like the
Watschen
of a sadistic
teacher or nun. Her shoes were the only sound on Munich Street.