The Book Thief Part 10

"Rosa," Hans said to her at one point. Quietly, his words cut through one of her sentences. "Could you do me a favor?"

She looked up from the stove. "What?"

"I'm asking you, I'm begging you, could you please shut your mouth for just five minutes?"

You can imagine the reaction.

They ended up in the bas.e.m.e.nt.

There was no lighting there, so they took a kerosene lamp, and slowly, between school and home, from the river to the bas.e.m.e.nt, from the good days to the bad, Liesel was learning to read and write.

"Soon," Papa told her, "you'll be able to read that awful graves book with your eyes closed."

"And I can get out of that midget cla.s.s."

She spoke those words with a grim kind of owners.h.i.+p.

In one of their bas.e.m.e.nt sessions, Papa dispensed with the sandpaper (it was running out fast) and pulled out a brush. There were few luxuries in the Hubermann household, but there was an oversupply of paint, and it became more than useful for Liesel's learning. Papa would say a word and the girl would have to spell it aloud and then paint it on the wall, as long as she got it right. After a month, the wall was recoated. A fresh cement page.

Some nights, after working in the bas.e.m.e.nt, Liesel would sit crouched in the bath and hear the same utterances from the kitchen.

"You stink," Mama would say to Hans. "Like cigarettes and kerosene."

Sitting in the water, she imagined the smell of it, mapped out on her papa's clothes. More than anything, it was the smell of friends.h.i.+p, and she could find it on herself, too. Liesel loved that smell. She would sniff her arm and smile as the water cooled around her.

THE HEAVYWEIGHT CHAMPION OF THE SCHOOL-YARD.

The summer of 39 was in a hurry, or perhaps Liesel was. She spent her time playing soccer with Rudy and the other kids on Himmel Street (a year-round pastime), taking ironing around town with Mama, and learning words. It felt like it was over a few days after it began.

In the latter part of the year, two things happened.

SEPTEMBER-NOVEMBER 1939.

1. World War Two begins.

2. Liesel Meminger becomes the heavyweight champion of the school yard.

The beginning of September.

It was a cool day in Molching when the war began and my workload increased.

The world talked it over.

Newspaper headlines reveled in it.

The Fhrer's voice roared from German radios. We will not give up. We will not rest. We will be victorious. Our time has come.

The German invasion of Poland had begun and people were gathered everywhere, listening to the news of it. Munich Street, like every other main street in Germany, was alive with war. The smell, the voice. Rationing had begun a few days earlier-the writing on the wall-and now it was official. England and France had made their declaration on Germany. To steal a phrase from Hans Hubermann: The fun begins.

The day of the announcement, Papa was lucky enough to have some work. On his way home, he picked up a discarded newspaper, and rather than stopping to shove it between paint cans in his cart, he folded it up and slipped it beneath his s.h.i.+rt. By the time he made it home and removed it, his sweat had drawn the ink onto his skin. The paper landed on the table, but the news was stapled to his chest. A tattoo. Holding the s.h.i.+rt open, he looked down in the unsure kitchen light.

"What does it say?" Liesel asked him. She was looking back and forth, from the black outlines on his skin to the paper.

"'Hitler takes Poland,'" he answered, and Hans Hubermann slumped into a chair. "Deutschland ber Alles," he whispered, and his voice was not remotely patriotic.

The face was there again-his accordion face.

That was one war started.

Liesel would soon be in another.

Nearly a month after school resumed, she was moved up to her rightful year level. You might think this was due to her improved reading, but it wasn't. Despite the advancement, she still read with great difficulty. Sentences were strewn everywhere. Words fooled her. The reason she was elevated had more to do with the fact that she became disruptive in the younger cla.s.s. She answered questions directed to other children and called out. A few times, she was given what was known as a Watschen (p.r.o.nounced "varchen") in the corridor.

A DEFINITION.

Watschen = a good hiding

She was taken up, put in a chair at the side, and told to keep her mouth shut by the teacher, who also happened to be a nun. At the other end of the cla.s.sroom, Rudy looked across and waved. Liesel waved back and tried not to smile.

At home, she was well into reading The Grave Digger's Handbook with Papa. They would circle the words she couldn't understand and take them down to the bas.e.m.e.nt the next day. She thought it was enough. It was not enough.

Somewhere at the start of November, there were some progress tests at school. One of them was for reading. Every child was made to stand at the front of the room and read from a pa.s.sage the teacher gave them. It was a frosty morning but bright with sun. Children scrunched their eyes. A halo surrounded the grim reaper nun, Sister Maria. (By the way-I like this human idea of the grim reaper. I like the scythe. It amuses me.) In the sun-heavy cla.s.sroom, names were rattled off at random.

"Waldenheim, Lehmann, Steiner."

They all stood up and did a reading, all at different levels of capability. Rudy was surprisingly good.

Throughout the test, Liesel sat with a mixture of hot antic.i.p.ation and excruciating fear. She wanted desperately to measure herself, to find out once and for all how her learning was advancing. Was she up to it? Could she even come close to Rudy and the rest of them?

Each time Sister Maria looked at her list, a string of nerves tightened in Liesel's ribs. It started in her stomach but had worked its way up. Soon, it would be around her neck, thick as rope.

When Tommy Mller finished his mediocre attempt, she looked around the room. Everyone had read. She was the only one left.

"Very good." Sister Maria nodded, perusing the list. "That's everyone."

What?

"No!"

A voice practically appeared on the other side of the room. Attached to it was a lemon-haired boy whose bony knees knocked in his pants under the desk. He stretched his hand up and said, "Sister Maria, I think you forgot Liesel."

Sister Maria.

Was not impressed.

She plonked her folder on the table in front of her and inspected Rudy with sighing disapproval. It was almost melancholic. Why, she lamented, did she have to put up with Rudy Steiner? He simply couldn't keep his mouth shut. Why, G.o.d, why?

"No," she said, with finality. Her small belly leaned forward with the rest of her. "I'm afraid Liesel cannot do it, Rudy." The teacher looked across, for confirmation. "She will read for me later."

The girl cleared her throat and spoke with quiet defiance. "I can do it now, Sister." The majority of other kids watched in silence. A few of them performed the beautiful childhood art of snickering.

The sister had had enough. "No, you cannot! ... What are you doing?"

-For Liesel was out of her chair and walking slowly, stiffly toward the front of the room. She picked up the book and opened it to a random page.

"All right, then," said Sister Maria. "You want to do it? Do it."

"Yes, Sister." After a quick glance at Rudy, Liesel lowered her eyes and examined the page.

When she looked up again, the room was pulled apart, then squashed back together. All the kids were mashed, right before her eyes, and in a moment of brilliance, she imagined herself reading the entire page in faultless, fluency-filled triumph.

A KEY WORD.

Imagined

"Come on, Liesel!"

Rudy broke the silence.

The book thief looked down again, at the words.

Come on. Rudy mouthed it this time. Come on, Liesel.

Her blood loudened. The sentences blurred.

The white page was suddenly written in another tongue, and it didn't help that tears were now forming in her eyes. She couldn't even see the words anymore.

And the sun. That awful sun. It burst through the window-the gla.s.s was everywhere-and shone directly onto the useless girl. It shouted in her face. "You can steal a book, but you can't read one!"

It came to her. A solution.

Breathing, breathing, she started to read, but not from the book in front of her. It was something from The Grave Digger's Handbook. Chapter three: "In the Event of Snow." She'd memorized it from her papa's voice.

"In the event of snow," she spoke, "you must make sure you use a good shovel. You must dig deep; you cannot be lazy. You cannot cut corners." Again, she sucked in a large clump of air. "Of course, it is easier to wait for the warmest part of the day, when-"

It ended.

The book was s.n.a.t.c.hed from her grasp and she was told. "Liesel-the corridor."

As she was given a small Watschen, she could hear them all laughing in the cla.s.sroom, between Sister Maria's striking hand. She saw them. All those mashed children. Grinning and laughing. Bathed in suns.h.i.+ne. Everyone laughing but Rudy.

In the break, she was taunted. A boy named Ludwig Schmeikl came up to her with a book. "Hey, Liesel," he said to her, "I'm having trouble with this word. Could you read it for me?" He laughed-a ten-year-old, smugness laughter. "You Dummkopf-you idiot."

Clouds were filing in now, big and clumsy, and more kids were calling out to her, watching her seethe.

"Don't listen to them," Rudy advised.

"Easy for you to say. You're not the stupid one."

Nearing the end of the break, the tally of comments stood at nineteen. By the twentieth, she snapped. It was Schmeikl, back for more. "Come on, Liesel." He stuck the book under her nose. "Help me out, will you?"

Liesel helped him out, all right.

She stood up and took the book from him, and as he smiled over his shoulder at some other kids, she threw it away and kicked him as hard as she could in the vicinity of the groin.

Well, as you might imagine, Ludwig Schmeikl certainly buckled, and on the way down, he was punched in the ear. When he landed, he was set upon. When he was set upon, he was slapped and clawed and obliterated by a girl who was utterly consumed with rage. His skin was so warm and soft. Her knuckles and fingernails were so frighteningly tough, despite their smallness. "You Saukerl." Her voice, too, was able to scratch him. "You Arschloch. Can you spell Arschloch for me?"

Oh, how the clouds stumbled in and a.s.sembled stupidly in the sky.