The Book Thief (52 page)

His socks grew
cold and wet.

“Lucky there’s
another pair in the toolbox,” Liesel suggested, and she could see him trying
not to laugh, despite himself.

Rudy moved
across and faced the other way, and there was room for Liesel now as well.

The book thief
and her best friend sat back to back on a patchy red toolbox in the middle of
the street. Each facing a different way, they remained for quite a while. When
they stood up and went home, Rudy changed his socks and left the previous ones
on the road. A gift, he decided, for Gelb Strasse.

A few weeks
later, the toolbox ended up being good for at least something. Rudy cleared it
of screwdrivers and hammers and chose instead to store in it many of the
Steiners’ valuables for the next air raid. The only item that remained was the
teddy bear.

On March 9, Rudy
exited the house with it when the sirens made their presence felt again in
Molching.

While the
Steiners rushed down Himmel Street, Michael Holtzapfel was knocking furiously
at Rosa Hubermann’s door. When she and Liesel came out, he handed them his
problem. “My mother,” he said, and the plums of blood were still on his
bandage. “She won’t come out. She’s sitting at the kitchen table.”

As the weeks had
worn on, Frau Holtzapfel had not yet begun to recover. When Liesel came to
read, the woman spent most of the time staring at the window. Her words were
quiet, close to motionless. All brutality and reprimand were wrested from her
face. It was usually Michael who said goodbye to Liesel or gave her the coffee
and thanked her. Now this.

Rosa moved into
action.

She waddled
swiftly through the gate and stood in the open doorway. “Holtzapfel!” There was
nothing but sirens and Rosa. “Holtzapfel, get out here, you miserable old
swine!” Tact had never been Rosa Hubermann’s strong point. “If you don’t come
out, we’re all going to die here on the street!” She turned and viewed the
helpless figures on the footpath. A siren had just finished wailing. “What
now?”

Michael
shrugged, disoriented, perplexed. Liesel dropped her bag of books and faced
him. She shouted at the commencement of the next siren. “Can I go in?” But she
didn’t wait for the answer. She ran the short distance of the path and shoved
past Mama.

Frau Holtzapfel
was unmoved at the table.

What do I say?
Liesel thought.

How do I get her
to move?

When the sirens
took another breath, she heard Rosa calling out. “Just leave her, Liesel, we
have to go! If she wants to die, that’s her business,” but then the sirens
resumed. They reached down and tossed the voice away.

Now it was only
noise and girl and wiry woman.

“Frau
Holtzapfel, please!”

Much like her
conversation with Ilsa Hermann on the day of the cookies, a multitude of words
and sentences were at her fingertips. The difference was that today there were
bombs. Today it was slightly more urgent.

THE OPTIONS

•
“Frau Holtzapfel, we have to go.”

•
“Frau Holtzapfel, we’ll die if we stay here.”

•
“You still have one son left.”

•
“Everyone’s waiting for you.”

•
“The bombs will blow your head off.”

•
“If you don’t come, I’ll stop coming to read to you, and that means
you’ve
lost your only friend.”

She went with
the last sentence, calling the words directly through the sirens. Her hands
were planted on the table.

The woman looked
up and made her decision. She didn’t move.

Liesel left. She
withdrew herself from the table and rushed from the house.

Rosa held open
the gate and they started running to number forty-five. Michael Holtzapfel
remained stranded on Himmel Street.

“Come on!” Rosa
implored him, but the returned soldier hesitated. He was just about to make his
way back inside when something turned him around. His mutilated hand was the
only thing attached to the gate, and shamefully, he dragged it free and
followed.

They all looked
back several times, but there was still no Frau Holtzapfel.

The road seemed
so wide, and when the final siren evaporated into the air, the last three
people on Himmel Street made their way into the Fiedlers’ basement.

“What took you
so long?” Rudy asked. He was holding the toolbox.

Liesel placed
her bag of books on the ground and sat on them. “We were trying to get Frau
Holtzapfel.”

Rudy looked
around. “Where is she?”

“At home. In the
kitchen.”

In the far
corner of the shelter, Michael was cramped and shivery. “I should have stayed,”
he said, “I should have stayed, I should have stayed. . . .” His voice was close
to noiseless, but his eyes were louder than ever. They beat furiously in their
sockets as he squeezed his injured hand and the blood rose through the bandage.

It was Rosa who
stopped him.

“Please,
Michael, it’s not your fault.”

But the young
man with only a few remaining fingers on his right hand was inconsolable. He
crouched in Rosa’s eyes.

“Tell me
something,” he said, “because I don’t understand. . . .” He fell back and sat
against the wall. “Tell me, Rosa, how she can sit there ready to die while I
still want to live.” The blood thickened. “Why do I want to live? I shouldn’t
want to, but I do.”

The young man
wept uncontrollably with Rosa’s hand on his shoulder for many minutes. The rest
of the people watched. He could not make himself stop even when the basement
door opened and shut and Frau Holtzapfel entered the shelter.

Her son looked
up.

Rosa stepped
away.

When they came
together, Michael apologized. “Mama, I’m sorry, I should have stayed with you.”

Frau Holtzapfel
didn’t hear. She only sat with her son and lifted his bandaged hand. “You’re
bleeding again,” she said, and with everyone else, they sat and waited.

Liesel reached
into her bag and rummaged through the books.

The majority of
children slept and didn’t hear the sirens of renewed safety. Their parents woke
them or carried them up the basement steps, into the world of darkness.

Far away, fires
were burning and I had picked up just over two hundred murdered souls.

I was on my way
to Molching for one more.

Himmel Street
was clear.

The sirens had
been held off for many hours, just in case there was another threat and to
allow the smoke to make its way into the atmosphere.

It was Bettina
Steiner who noticed the small fire and the sliver of smoke farther down, close
to the Amper River. It trailed into the sky and the girl held up her finger.
“Look.”

The girl might
have seen it first, but it was Rudy who reacted. In his haste, he did not
relinquish his grip on the toolbox as he sprinted to the bottom of Himmel
Street, took a few side roads, and entered the trees. Liesel was next (having
surrendered her books to a heavily protesting Rosa), and then a smattering of
people from several shelters along the way.

“Rudy, wait!”

Rudy did not
wait.

Liesel could
only see the toolbox in certain gaps in the trees as he made his way through to
the dying glow and the misty plane. It sat smoking in the clearing by the
river. The pilot had tried to land there.

Within twenty
meters, Rudy stopped.

Just as I
arrived myself, I noticed him standing there, recovering his breath.

The limbs of
trees were scattered in the dark.

There were twigs
and needles littered around the plane like fire fuel. To their left, three
gashes were burned into the earth. The runaway ticktock of cooling metal sped
up the minutes and seconds till they were standing there for what felt like
hours. The growing crowd was assembling behind them, their breath and sentences
sticking to Liesel’s back.

“Well,” said
Rudy, “should we take a look?”

He stepped
through the remainder of trees to where the body of the plane was fixed to the
ground. Its nose was in the running water and the wings were left crookedly
behind.

Rudy circled
slowly, from the tail and around to the right.

“There’s glass,”
he said. “The windshield is everywhere.”

Then he saw the
body.

Rudy Steiner had
never seen a face so pale.

“Don’t come,
Liesel.” But Liesel came.

She could see
the barely conscious face of the enemy pilot as the tall trees watched and the
river ran. The plane let out a few more coughs and the head inside tilted from
left to right. He said something they obviously could not understand.

“Jesus, Mary,
and Joseph,” Rudy whispered. “He’s alive.”

The toolbox
bumped the side of the plane and brought with it the sound of more human voices
and feet.

The glow of fire
was gone and the morning was still and black. Only the smoke was in its way,
but it, too, would soon be exhausted.

The wall of
trees kept the color of a burning Munich at bay. By now, the boy’s eyes had
adjusted not only to the darkness, but to the face of the pilot. The eyes were
like coffee stains, and gashes were ruled across his cheeks and chin. A ruffled
uniform sat, unruly, across his chest.

Despite Rudy’s
advice, Liesel came even closer, and I can promise you that we recognized each
other at that exact moment.

I know you, I
thought.

There was a
train and a coughing boy. There was snow and a distraught girl.

You’ve grown, I
thought, but I recognize you.

She did not back
away or try to fight me, but I know that something told the girl I was there.
Could she smell my breath? Could she hear my cursed circular heartbeat,
revolving like the crime it is in my deathly chest? I don’t know, but she knew
me and she looked me in my face and she did not look away.

As the sky began
to charcoal toward light, we both moved on. We both observed the boy as he
reached into his toolbox again and searched through some picture frames to pull
out a small, stuffed yellow toy.

Carefully, he
climbed to the dying man.

He placed the
smiling teddy bear cautiously onto the pilot’s shoulder. The tip of its ear
touched his throat.

The dying man
breathed it in. He spoke. In English, he said, “Thank you.” His straight-line
cuts opened as he spoke, and a small drop of blood rolled crookedly down his
throat.

“What?” Rudy
asked him.
“Was hast du gesagt?
What did you say?”

Unfortunately, I
beat him to the answer. The time was there and I was reaching into the cockpit.
I slowly extracted the pilot’s soul from his ruffled uniform and rescued him
from the broken plane. The crowd played with the silence as I made my way
through. I jostled free.

Above me, the
sky eclipsed—just a last moment of darkness— and I swear I could see a black
signature in the shape of a swastika. It loitered untidily above.

“
Heil
Hitler,”
I said, but I was well into the trees by then. Behind me, a teddy bear rested
on the shoulder of a corpse. A lemon candle stood below the branches. The
pilot’s soul was in my arms.

It’s probably
fair to say that in all the years of Hitler’s reign, no person was able to
serve the
Führer
as loyally as me. A human doesn’t have a heart like
mine. The human heart is a line, whereas my own is a circle, and I have the
endless ability to be in the right place at the right time. The consequence of
this is that I’m always finding humans at their best and worst. I see their
ugly and their beauty, and I wonder how the same thing can be both. Still, they
have one thing I envy. Humans, if nothing else, have the good sense to die.

HOMECOMING

It was a time of
bleeders and broken planes and teddy bears, but the first quarter of 1943 was
to finish on a positive note for the book thief.

At the beginning
of April, Hans Hubermann’s plaster was trimmed to the knee and he boarded a
train for Munich. He would be given a week of rest and recreation at home
before joining the ranks of army pen pushers in the city. He would help with
the paperwork on the cleanup of Munich’s factories, houses, churches, and
hospitals. Time would tell if he would be sent out to do the repair work. That
all depended on his leg and the state of the city.

It was dark when
he arrived home. It was a day later than expected, as the train was delayed due
to an air-raid scare. He stood at the door of 33 Himmel Street and made a fist.

Four years
earlier, Liesel Meminger was coaxed through that doorway when she showed up for
the first time. Max Vandenburg had stood there with a key biting into his hand.
Now it was Hans Hubermann’s turn. He knocked four times and the book thief
answered.

“Papa, Papa.”