The Book Thief Part 6

"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 a.s.sure 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.

"h.e.l.lo, 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 Mller-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, friends.h.i.+ps 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 Mller 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 Mller 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 Mller 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 s...o...b..ll smas.h.i.+ng 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 s...o...b..ll in the face is surely the perfect beginning to a lasting friends.h.i.+p.

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 s...o...b..ll. 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 s...o...b..ll). In fact, Rudy Steiner was one of those audacious little b.a.s.t.a.r.ds 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 s.e.x, 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 Mller 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 gla.s.ses 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 s.h.i.+vered with a little more severity than the other buildings on Himmel Street. Frau Diller administered this feeling, dis.h.i.+ng 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 n.a.z.i Party. On the wall behind her usual sitting position was a framed photo of the Fhrer. 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 h.e.l.lo (in the case of the oldest ones), then moving on, toward the final landmark before school.

THE LAST STOP.

The road of yellow stars