The Book Thief – by Markus Zusak

 

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.

A DEFINITION NOT FOUND

IN THE DICTIONARY

Not leaving: an act of trust and love,

often deciphered by children

 

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.

EXPLANATION OF THE

ABBREVIATION

It stood for Bund Deutscher Mädchen—

Band of German Girls.

 

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.

Evenings in the small kitchen were raucous, without fail. Rosa Hubermann was always talking, and when she was talking, it took the form of schimpfen. She was constantly arguing and complaining. There was no one to really argue with, but Mama managed it expertly every chance she had. She could argue with the entire world in that kitchen, and almost every evening, she did. Once they had eaten and Papa was gone, Liesel and Rosa would usually remain there, and Rosa would do the ironing.

A few times a week, Liesel would come home from school and walk the streets of Molching with her mama, picking up and delivering washing and ironing from the wealthier parts of town. Knaupt Strasse, Heide Strasse. A few others. Mama would deliver the ironing or pick up the washing with a dutiful smile, but as soon as the door was shut and she walked away, she would curse these rich people, with all their money and laziness.

"Too g'schtinkerdt to wash their own clothes," she would say, despite her dependence on them.

"Him," she accused Herr Vogel from Heide Strasse. "Made all his money from his father. He throws it away on women and drink. And washing and ironing, of course."

It was like a roll call of scorn.

Herr Vogel, Herr and Frau Pfaffelhürver, Helena Schmidt, the Weingartners. They were all guilty of something.

Apart from his drunkenness and expensive lechery, Ernst Vogel, according to Rosa, was constantly scratching his louse-ridden hair, licking his fingers, and then handing over the money. "I should wash it before I come home," was her summation.

The Pfaffelhürvers scrutinized the results. " 'Not one crease in these shirts, please,' " Rosa imitated them. " 'Not one wrinkle in this suit.' And then they stand there and inspect it all, right in front of me. Right under my nose! What a G'sindel—what trash."

The Weingartners were apparently stupid people with a constantly molting Saumensch of a cat. "Do you know how long it takes me to get rid of all that fur? It's everywhere!"

Helena Schmidt was a rich widow. "That old cripple—sitting there just wasting away. She's never had to do a day's work in all her life."

Rosa's greatest disdain, however, was reserved for 8 Grande Strasse. A large house, high on a hill, in the upper part of Molching.

"This one," she'd pointed out to Liesel the first time they went there, "is the mayor's house. That crook. His wife sits at home all day, too mean to light a fire—it's always freezing in there. She's crazy." She punctuated the words. "Absolutely. Crazy." At the gate, she motioned to the girl. "You go."

Liesel was horrified. A giant brown door with a brass knocker stood atop a small flight of steps. "What?"

Mama shoved her. "Don't you 'what' me, Saumensch. Move it."

Liesel moved it. She walked the path, climbed the steps, hesitated, and knocked.

A bathrobe answered the door.

Inside it, a woman with startled eyes, hair like fluff, and the posture of defeat stood in front of her. She saw Mama at the gate and handed the girl a bag of washing. "Thank you," Liesel said, but there was no reply. Only the door. It closed.

"You see?" said Mama when she returned to the gate. "This is what I have to put up with. These rich bastards, these lazy swine . . ."

Holding the washing as they walked away, Liesel looked back. The brass knocker eyed her from the door.

When she finished berating the people she worked for, Rosa Hubermann would usually move on to her other favorite theme of abuse. Her husband. Looking at the bag of washing and the hunched houses, she would talk, and talk, and talk. "If your papa was any good," she informed Liesel every time they walked through Molching, "I wouldn't have to do this." She sniffed with derision. "A painter! Why marry that Arschloch ? That's what they told me—my family, that is." Their footsteps crunched along the path. "And here I am, walking the streets and slaving in my kitchen because that Saukerl never has any work. No real work, anyway. Just that pathetic accordion in those dirt holes every night."

"Yes, Mama."

"Is that all you've got to say?" Mama's eyes were like pale blue cutouts, pasted to her face.

They'd walk on.

With Liesel carrying the sack.

At home, it was washed in a boiler next to the stove, hung up by the fireplace in the living room, and then ironed in the kitchen. The kitchen was where the action was.

"Did you hear that?" Mama asked her nearly every night. The iron was in her fist, heated from the stove. Light was dull all through the house, and Liesel, sitting at the kitchen table, would be staring at the gaps of fire in front of her.

"What?" she'd reply. "What is it?"

"That was that Holtzapfel." Mama was already out of her seat. "That Saumensch just spat on our door again."

It was a tradition for Frau Holtzapfel, one of their neighbors, to spit on the Hubermanns' door every time she walked past. The front door was only meters from the gate, and let's just say that Frau Holtzapfel had the distance—and the accuracy.

The spitting was due to the fact that she and Rosa Hubermann were engaged in some kind of decade-long verbal war. No one knew the origin of this hostility. They'd probably forgotten it themselves.

Frau Holtzapfel was a wiry woman and quite obviously spiteful. She'd never married but had two sons, a few years older than the Hubermann offspring. Both were in the army and both will make cameo appearances by the time we're finished here, I assure you.

In the spiteful stakes, I should also say that Frau Holtzapfel was thorough with her spitting, too. She never neglected to spuck on the door of number thirty-three and say, "Schweine!" each time she walked past. One thing I've noticed about the Germans:

They seem very fond of pigs.

A SMALL QUESTION AND

ITS ANSWER

And who do you think was made to

clean the spit off the door each night?

Yes—you got it.

 

When a woman with an iron fist tells you to get out there and clean spit off the door, you do it. Especially when the iron's hot.

It was all just part of the routine, really.

Each night, Liesel would step outside, wipe the door, and watch the sky. Usually it was like spillage—cold and heavy, slippery and gray—but once in a while some stars had the nerve to rise and float, if only for a few minutes. On those nights, she would stay a little longer and wait.

"Hello, stars."

Waiting.

For the voice from the kitchen.

Or till the stars were dragged down again, into the waters of the German sky.

 

 

THE KISS

(A Childhood Decision Maker)

As with most small towns, Molching was filled with characters. A handful of them lived on Himmel Street. Frau Holtzapfel was only one cast member.

The others included the likes of these:

• Rudy Steiner—the boy next door who was obsessed with the black American athlete Jesse Owens.

• Frau Diller—the staunch Aryan corner-shop owner.

• Tommy Müller—a kid whose chronic ear infections had resulted in several operations, a pink river of skin painted across his face, and a tendency to twitch.

• A man known primarily as "Pfiffikus"—whose vulgarity made Rosa Hubermann look like a wordsmith and a saint.

On the whole, it was a street filled with relatively poor people, despite the apparent rise of Germany's economy under Hitler. Poor sides of town still existed.

As mentioned already, the house next door to the Hubermanns was rented by a family called Steiner. The Steiners had six children. One of them, the infamous Rudy, would soon become Liesel's best friend, and later, her partner and sometime catalyst in crime. She met him on the street.

A few days after Liesel's first bath, Mama allowed her out, to play with the other kids. On Himmel Street, friendships were made outside, no matter the weather. The children rarely visited each other's homes, for they were small and there was usually very little in them. Also, they conducted their favorite pastime, like professionals, on the street. Soccer. Teams were well set. Garbage cans were used to mark out the goals.

Being the new kid in town, Liesel was immediately shoved between one pair of those cans. (Tommy Müller was finally set free, despite being the most useless soccer player Himmel Street had ever seen.)

It all went nicely for a while, until the fateful moment when Rudy Steiner was upended in the snow by a Tommy Müller foul of frustration.

"What?!" Tommy shouted. His face twitched in desperation. "What did I do?!"

A penalty was awarded by everyone on Rudy's team, and now it was Rudy Steiner against the new kid, Liesel Meminger.

He placed the ball on a grubby mound of snow, confident of the usual outcome. After all, Rudy hadn't missed a penalty in eighteen shots, even when the opposition made a point of booting Tommy Müller out of goal. No matter whom they replaced him with, Rudy would score.

On this occasion, they tried to force Liesel out. As you might imagine, she protested, and Rudy agreed.

"No, no." He smiled. "Let her stay." He was rubbing his hands together.

Snow had stopped falling on the filthy street now, and the muddy footprints were gathered between them. Rudy shuffled in, fired the shot, and Liesel dived and somehow deflected it with her elbow. She stood up grinning, but the first thing she saw was a snowball smashing into her face. Half of it was mud. It stung like crazy.

"How do you like that?" The boy grinned, and he ran off in pursuit of the ball.

"Saukerl," Liesel whispered. The vocabulary of her new home was catching on fast.

SOME FACTS ABOUT RUDY STEINER

He was eight months older than Liesel and had

bony legs, sharp teeth, gangly blue eyes,

and hair the color of a lemon.

One of six Steiner children, he was

permanently hungry.

 

On Himmel Street, he was considered a little crazy. This was on account of an event that was rarely spoken about but widely regarded as "The Jesse Owens Incident," in which he painted himself charcoal black and ran the 100 meters at the local playing field one night.

Insane or not, Rudy was always destined to be Liesel's best friend. A snowball in the face is surely the perfect beginning to a lasting friendship.

A few days after Liesel started school, she went along with the Steiners. Rudy's mother, Barbara, made him promise to walk with the new girl, mainly because she'd heard about the snowball. To Rudy's credit, he was happy enough to comply. He was not the junior misogynistic type of boy at all. He liked girls a lot, and he liked Liesel (hence, the snowball). In fact, Rudy Steiner was one of those audacious little bastards who actually fancied himself with the ladies. Every childhood seems to have exactly such a juvenile in its midst and mists. He's the boy who refuses to fear the opposite sex, purely because everyone else embraces that particular fear, and he's the type who is unafraid to make a decision. In this case, Rudy had already made up his mind about Liesel Meminger.

On the way to school, he tried to point out certain landmarks in the town, or at least, he managed to slip it all in, somewhere between telling his younger siblings to shut their faces and the older ones telling him to shut his. His first point of interest was a small window on the second floor of an apartment block.

"That's where Tommy Müller lives." He realized that Liesel didn't remember him. "The twitcher? When he was five years old, he got lost at the markets on the coldest day of the year. Three hours later, when they found him, he was frozen solid and had an awful earache from the cold. After a while, his ears were all infected inside and he had three or four operations and the doctors wrecked his nerves. So now he twitches."

Liesel chimed in, "And he's bad at soccer."

"The worst."

Next was the corner shop at the end of Himmel Street. Frau Diller's.

AN IMPORTANT NOTE

ABOUT FRAU DILLER

She had one golden rule.

 

Frau Diller was a sharp-edged woman with fat glasses and a nefarious glare. She developed this evil look to discourage the very idea of stealing from her shop, which she occupied with soldierlike posture, a refrigerated voice, and even breath that smelled like "heil Hitler." The shop itself was white and cold, and completely bloodless. The small house compressed beside it shivered with a little more severity than the other buildings on Himmel Street. Frau Diller administered this feeling, dishing it out as the only free item from her premises. She lived for her shop and her shop lived for the Third Reich. Even when rationing started later in the year, she was known to sell certain hard-to-get items under the counter and donate the money to the Nazi Party. On the wall behind her usual sitting position was a framed photo of the Führer. If you walked into her shop and didn't say "heil Hitler," you wouldn't be served. As they walked by, Rudy drew Liesel's attention to the bulletproof eyes leering from the shop window.

"Say 'heil' when you go in there," he warned her stiffly. "Unless you want to walk a little farther." Even when they were well past the shop, Liesel looked back and the magnified eyes were still there, fastened to the window.

Around the corner, Munich Street (the main road in and out of Molching) was strewn with slosh.

As was often the case, a few rows of troops in training came marching past. Their uniforms walked upright and their black boots further polluted the snow. Their faces were fixed ahead in concentration.

Once they'd watched the soldiers disappear, the group of Steiners and Liesel walked past some shop windows and the imposing town hall, which in later years would be chopped off at the knees and buried. A few of the shops were abandoned and still labeled with yellow stars and anti-Jewish slurs. Farther down, the church aimed itself at the sky, its rooftop a study of collaborated tiles. The street, overall, was a lengthy tube of gray—a corridor of dampness, people stooped in the cold, and the splashed sound of watery footsteps.

At one stage, Rudy rushed ahead, dragging Liesel with him.

He knocked on the window of a tailor's shop.

Had she been able to read the sign, she would have noticed that it belonged to Rudy's father. The shop was not yet open, but inside, a man was preparing articles of clothing behind the counter. He looked up and waved.

"My papa," Rudy informed her, and they were soon among a crowd of various-sized Steiners, each waving or blowing kisses at their father or simply standing and nodding hello (in the case of the oldest ones), then moving on, toward the final landmark before school.

THE LAST STOP

The road of yellow stars

 

It was a place nobody wanted to stay and look at, but almost everyone did. Shaped like a long, broken arm, the road contained several houses with lacerated windows and bruised walls. The Star of David was painted on their doors. Those houses were almost like lepers. At the very least, they were infected sores on the injured German terrain.

"Schiller Strasse," Rudy said. "The road of yellow stars."

At the bottom, some people were moving around. The drizzle made them look like ghosts. Not humans, but shapes, moving about beneath the lead-colored clouds.

"Come on, you two," Kurt (the oldest of the Steiner children) called back, and Rudy and Liesel walked quickly toward him.

At school, Rudy made a special point of seeking Liesel out during the breaks. He didn't care that others made noises about the new girl's stupidity. He was there for her at the beginning, and he would be there later on, when Liesel's frustration boiled over. But he wouldn't do it for free.

THE ONLY THING WORSE THAN

A BOY WHO HATES YOU

A boy who loves you.

 

In late April, when they'd returned from school for the day, Rudy and Liesel waited on Himmel Street for the usual game of soccer. They were slightly early, and no other kids had turned up yet. The one person they saw was the gutter-mouthed Pfiffikus.

"Look there." Rudy pointed.

A PORTRAIT OF PFIFFIKUS

He was a delicate frame.

He was white hair.

He was a black raincoat, brown pants, decomposing shoes, and

a mouth—and what a mouth it was.

 

"Hey, Pfiffikus!"

As the distant figure turned, Rudy started whistling.

The old man simultaneously straightened and proceeded to swear with a ferocity that can only be described as a talent. No one seemed to know the real name that belonged to him, or at least if they did, they never used it. He was only called Pfiffikus because you give that name to someone who likes to whistle, which Pfiffikus most definitely did. He was constantly whistling a tune called the Radetzky March, and all the kids in town would call out to him and duplicate that tune. At that precise moment, Pfiffikus would abandon his usual walking style (bent forward, taking large, lanky steps, arms behind his raincoated back) and erect himself to deliver abuse. It was then that any impression of serenity was violently interrupted, for his voice was brimming with rage.

On this occasion, Liesel followed Rudy's taunt almost as a reflex action.

"Pfiffikus!" she echoed, quickly adopting the appropriate cruelty that childhood seems to require. Her whistling was awful, but there was no time to perfect it.

He chased them, calling out. It started with "Geh' scheissen!" and deteriorated rapidly from there. At first, he leveled his abuse only at the boy, but soon enough, it was Liesel's turn.

"You little slut!" he roared at her. The words clobbered her in the back. "I've never seen you before!" Fancy calling a ten-year-old girl a slut. That was Pfiffikus. It was widely agreed that he and Frau Holtzapfel would have made a lovely couple. "Get back here!" were the last words Liesel and Rudy heard as they continued running. They ran until they were on Munich Street.

"Come on," Rudy said, once they'd recovered their breath. "Just down here a little."

He took her to Hubert Oval, the scene of the Jesse Owens incident, where they stood, hands in pockets. The track was stretched out in front of them. Only one thing could happen. Rudy started it. "Hundred meters," he goaded her. "I bet you can't beat me."

Liesel wasn't taking any of that. "I bet you I can."

"What do you bet, you little Saumensch? Have you got any money?"

"Of course not. Do you?"

"No." But Rudy had an idea. It was the lover boy coming out of him. "If I beat you, I get to kiss you." He crouched down and began rolling up his trousers.

Liesel was alarmed, to put it mildly. "What do you want to kiss me for? I'm filthy."

"So am I." Rudy clearly saw no reason why a bit of filth should get in the way of things. It had been a while between baths for both of them.

She thought about it while examining the weedy legs of her opposition. They were about equal with her own. There's no way he can beat me, she thought. She nodded seriously. This was business. "You can kiss me if you win. But if I win, I get out of being goalie at soccer."

Rudy considered it. "Fair enough," and they shook on it.

All was dark-skied and hazy, and small chips of rain were starting to fall.

The track was muddier than it looked.

Both competitors were set.

Rudy threw a rock in the air as the starting pistol. When it hit the ground, they could start running.

"I can't even see the finish line," Liesel complained.

"And I can?"

The rock wedged itself into the earth.

They ran next to each other, elbowing and trying to get in front. The slippery ground slurped at their feet and brought them down perhaps twenty meters from the end.

"Jesus, Mary, and Joseph!" yelped Rudy. "I'm covered in shit!"

"It's not shit," Liesel corrected him, "it's mud," although she had her doubts. They'd slid another five meters toward the finish. "Do we call it a draw, then?"

Rudy looked over, all sharp teeth and gangly blue eyes. Half his face was painted with mud. "If it's a draw, do I still get my kiss?"

"Not in a million years." Liesel stood up and flicked some mud off her jacket.

"I'll get you out of goalie."

"Stick your goalie."

As they walked back to Himmel Street, Rudy forewarned her. "One day, Liesel," he said, "you'll be dying to kiss me."

But Liesel knew.

She vowed.

As long as both she and Rudy Steiner lived, she would never kiss that miserable, filthy Saukerl, especially not this day. There were more important matters to attend to. She looked down at her suit of mud and stated the obvious.

"She's going to kill me."

She, of course, was Rosa Hubermann, also known as Mama, and she very nearly did kill her. The word Saumensch featured heavily in the administration of punishment. She made mincemeat out of her.