The Book Thief – by Markus Zusak

 

PART NINE

the last human stranger

featuring:

the next temptation—a cardplayer—

the snows of stalingrad—an ageless

brother—an accident—the bitter taste

of questions—a toolbox, a bleeder,

a bear—a broken plane—

and a homecoming

 

 

THE NEXT TEMPTATION

This time, there were cookies.

But they were stale.

They were Kipferl left over from Christmas, and they'd been sitting on the desk for at least two weeks. Like miniature horseshoes with a layer of icing sugar, the ones on the bottom were bolted to the plate. The rest were piled on top, forming a chewy mound. She could already smell them when her fingers tightened on the window ledge. The room tasted like sugar and dough, and thousands of pages.

There was no note, but it didn't take Liesel long to realize that Ilsa Hermann had been at it again, and she certainly wasn't taking the chance that the cookies might not be for her. She made her way back to the window and passed a whisper through the gap. The whisper's name was Rudy.

They'd gone on foot that day because the road was too slippery for bikes. The boy was beneath the window, standing watch. When she called out, his face appeared, and she presented him with the plate. He didn't need much convincing to take it.

His eyes feasted on the cookies and he asked a few questions.

"Anything else? Any milk?"

"What?"

"Milk," he repeated, a little louder this time. If he'd recognized the offended tone in Liesel's voice, he certainly wasn't showing it.

The book thief's face appeared above him again. "Are you stupid? Can I just steal the book?"

"Of course. All I'm saying is . . ."

Liesel moved toward the far shelf, behind the desk. She found some paper and a pen in the top drawer and wrote Thank you, leaving the note on top.

To her right, a book protruded like a bone. Its paleness was almost scarred by the dark lettering of the title. Die Letzte Menschliche Fremde—The Last Human Stranger. It whispered softly as she removed it from the shelf. Some dust showered down.

At the window, just as she was about to make her way out, the library door creaked apart.

Her knee was up and her book-stealing hand was poised against the window frame. When she faced the noise, she found the mayor's wife in a brand-new bathrobe and slippers. On the breast pocket of the robe sat an embroidered swastika. Propaganda even reached the bathroom.

They watched each other.

Liesel looked at Ilsa Hermann's breast and raised her arm. " Heil Hitler."

She was just about to leave when a realization struck her.

The cookies.

They'd been there for weeks.

That meant that if the mayor himself used the library, he must have seen them. He must have asked why they were there. Or—and as soon as Liesel felt this thought, it filled her with a strange optimism—perhaps it wasn't the mayor's library at all; it was hers. Ilsa Hermann's.

She didn't know why it was so important, but she enjoyed the fact that the roomful of books belonged to the woman. It was she who introduced her to the library in the first place and gave her the initial, even literal, window of opportunity. This way was better. It all seemed to fit.

Just as she began to move again, she propped everything and asked, "This is your room, isn't it?"

The mayor's wife tightened. "I used to read in here, with my son. But then . . ."

Liesel's hand touched the air behind her. She saw a mother reading on the floor with a young boy pointing at the pictures and the words. Then she saw a war at the window. "I know."

An exclamation entered from outside.

"What did you say?!"

Liesel spoke in a harsh whisper, behind her. "Keep quiet, Saukerl, and watch the street." To Ilsa Hermann, she handed the words slowly across. "So all these books . . ."

"They're mostly mine. Some are my husband's, some were my son's, as you know."

There was embarrassment now on Liesel's behalf. Her cheeks were set alight. "I always thought this was the mayor's room."

"Why?" The woman seemed amused.

Liesel noticed that there were also swastikas on the toes of her slippers. "He's the mayor. I thought he'd read a lot."

The mayor's wife placed her hands in her side pockets. "Lately, it's you who gets the most use out of this room."

"Have you read this one?" Liesel held up The Last Human Stranger.

Ilsa looked more closely at the title. "I have, yes."

"Any good?"

"Not bad."

There was an itch to leave then, but also a peculiar obligation to stay. She moved to speak, but the available words were too many and too fast. There were several attempts to snatch at them, but it was the mayor's wife who took the initiative.

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.

SOME FACTS ABOUT

REINHOLD ZUCKER

He was twenty-four. When he won a round

of cards, he gloated—he would hold the

thin cylinders of tobacco to his nose and

breathe them in. "The smell of victory,"

he would say. Oh, and one more thing.

He would die with his mouth open.

 

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.

A SMALL WAR STORY

His legs were blown off at the

shins and he died with his

brother watching in a cold,

stench-filled hospital.

 

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.

As she crossed the river, a rumor of sunshine stood behind the clouds.

At 8 Grande Strasse, she walked up the steps, left the plate by the front door, and knocked, and by the time the door was opened, the girl was around the corner. Liesel did not look back, but she knew that if she did, she'd have found her brother at the bottom of the steps again, his knee completely healed. She could even hear his voice.

"That's better, Liesel."

It was with great sadness that she realized that her brother would be six forever, but when she held that thought, she also made an effort to smile.

She remained at the Amper River, at the bridge, where Papa used to stand and lean.

She smiled and smiled, and when it all came out, she walked home and her brother never climbed into her sleep again. In many ways, she would miss him, but she could never miss his deadly eyes on the floor of the train or the sound of a cough that killed.

The book thief lay in bed that night, and the boy only came before she closed her eyes. He was one member of a cast, for Liesel was always visited in that room. Her papa stood and called her half a woman. Max was writing The Word Shaker in the corner. Rudy was naked by the door. Occasionally her mother stood on a bedside train platform. And far away, in the room that stretched like a bridge to a nameless town, her brother, Werner, played in the cemetery snow.

From down the hall, like a metronome for the visions, Rosa snored, and Liesel lay awake surrounded, but also remembering a quote from her most recent book.

THE LAST HUMAN STRANGER, PAGE 38

There were people everywhere on the city

street, but the stranger could not have

been more alone if it were empty.

 

When morning came, the visions were gone and she could hear the quiet recital of words in the living room. Rosa was sitting with the accordion, praying.

"Make them come back alive," she repeated. "Please, Lord, please. All of them." Even the wrinkles around her eyes were joining hands.

The accordion must have ached her, but she remained.

Rosa would never tell Hans about these moments, but Liesel believed that it must have been those prayers that helped Papa survive the LSE's accident in Essen. If they didn't help, they certainly can't have hurt.

 

 

THE ACCIDENT

It was a surprisingly clear afternoon and the men were climbing into the truck. Hans Hubermann had just sat down in his appointed seat. Reinhold Zucker was standing above him.

"Move it," he said.

"Bitte? Excuse me?"

Zucker was hunched beneath the vehicle's ceiling. "I said move it, Arschloch." The greasy jungle of his fringe fell in clumps onto his forehead. "I'm swapping seats with you."

Hans was confused. The backseat was probably the most uncomfortable of the lot. It was the draftiest, the coldest. "Why?"

"Does it matter?" Zucker was losing patience. "Maybe I want to get off first to use the shit house."

Hans was quickly aware that the rest of the unit was already watching this pitiful struggle between two supposed grown men. He didn't want to lose, but he didn't want to be petty, either. Also, they'd just finished a tiring shift and he didn't have the energy to go on with it. Bent-backed, he made his way forward to the vacant seat in the middle of the truck.

"Why did you give in to that Scheisskopf ?" the man next to him asked.

Hans lit a match and offered a share of the cigarette. "The draft back there goes straight through my ears."

The olive green truck was on its way toward the camp, maybe ten miles away. Brunnenweg was telling a joke about a French waitress when the left front wheel was punctured and the driver lost control. The vehicle rolled many times and the men swore as they tumbled with the air, the light, the trash, and the tobacco. Outside, the blue sky changed from ceiling to floor as they clambered for something to hold.

When it stopped, they were all crowded onto the right-hand wall of the truck, their faces wedged against the filthy uniform next to them. Questions of health were passed around until one of the men, Eddie Alma, started shouting, "Get this bastard off me!" He said it three times, fast. He was staring into Reinhold Zucker's blinkless eyes.

THE DAMAGE, ESSEN

Six men burned by cigarettes.

Two broken hands.

Several broken fingers.

A broken leg for Hans Hubermann.

A broken neck for Reinhold

Zucker, snapped almost in line

with his earlobes.

 

They dragged each other out until only the corpse was left in the truck.

The driver, Helmut Brohmann, was sitting on the ground, scratching his head. "The tire," he explained, "it just blew." Some of the men sat with him and echoed that it wasn't his fault. Others walked around smoking, asking each other if they thought their injuries were bad enough to be relieved of duty. Another small group gathered at the back of the truck and viewed the body.

Over by a tree, a thin strip of intense pain was still opening in Hans Hubermann's leg. "It should have been me," he said.

"What?" the sergeant called over from the truck.

"He was sitting in my seat."

Helmut Brohmann regained his senses and climbed back into the driver's compartment. Sideways, he tried to start the engine, but there was no kicking it over. Another truck was sent for, as was an ambulance. The ambulance didn't come.

"You know what that means, don't you?" said Boris Schipper. They did.

When they resumed the trip back to camp, each man tried not to look down at Reinhold Zucker's openmouthed sneer. "I told you we should have turned him facedown," someone mentioned. A few times, some of them simply forgot and rested their feet on the body. Once they arrived, they all tried to avoid the task of pulling him out. When the job was done, Hans Hubermann took a few abbreviated steps before the pain fractured in his leg and brought him down.

An hour later, when the doctor examined him, he was told it was definitely broken. The sergeant was on hand and stood with half a grin.

"Well, Hubermann. Looks like you've got away with it, doesn't it?" He was shaking his round face, smoking, and he provided a list of what would happen next. "You'll rest up. They'll ask me what we should do with you. I'll tell them you did a great job." He blew some more smoke. "And I think I'll tell them you're not fit for the LSE anymore and you should be sent back to Munich to work in an office or do whatever cleaning up needs doing there. How does that sound?"

Unable to resist a laugh within the grimace of pain, Hans replied, "It sounds good, Sergeant."

Boris Schipper finished his cigarette. "Damn right it sounds good. You're lucky I like you, Hubermann. You're lucky you're a good man, and generous with the cigarettes."

In the next room, they were making up the plaster.