The Book Thief

THE JOY OF CIGARETTES

Towards the end of 1939, Liesel had settled into life in Molching pretty well. She still had nightmares about her brother and missed her mother, but there were comforts now, too.

She loved her papa, Hans Hubermann, and even her foster mother, despite the bucketings, abusages and verbal assaults. She loved and hated her best friend, Rudy Steiner, which was perfectly normal. And she loved the fact that despite her failure in the classroom, her reading and writing were definitely improving and would soon be on the verge of something respectable. All of this resulted in at least some form of contentment and would soon be built upon to approach the concept of Being Happy.

THE KEYS OF HAPPINESS

December 17.

She remembered the date well, as it was exactly a week before Christmas.

As usual, her nightly nightmare interrupted her sleep and she was woken by Hans Hubermann. His hand held the sweaty fabric of her pyjama top. ‘The train?’ he whispered.

Liesel confirmed. ‘The train.’

She gulped the air until she was ready, and they began reading from the eleventh chapter of The Gravedigger’s Handbook. Just past three o’clock, they finished it, and only the final chapter, ‘Respecting the Graveyard’, remained. Papa, his silver eyes swollen in their tiredness and his face awash with whiskers, shut the book and expected the leftovers of his sleep. He didn’t get them.

The light was out for barely a minute when Liesel spoke to him across the dark.

‘Papa?’

He made only a noise, somewhere in his throat.

‘Are you awake, Papa?’

‘Ja.’

Up on one elbow. ‘Can we finish the book, please?’

There was a long breath, the scratchery of hand on whiskers, and then the light. He opened the book and began. ‘Chapter Twelve: Respecting the Graveyard.’

They read through the early hours of morning, circling and writing the words she did not comprehend, and turning the pages towards daylight. A few times Papa nearly slept, succumbing to the itchy fatigue in his eyes and the wilting of his head. Liesel caught him out on each occasion, but she had neither the selflessness to allow him to sleep, nor the hide to be offended. She was a girl with a mountain to climb.

Eventually, as the darkness outside began to break up a little, they finished. The last passage looked like this:

When the book closed, they shared a sideways glance. Papa spoke. ‘We made it, huh?’

Liesel, half-wrapped in blanket, studied the black book in her hand, and its silver lettering. She nodded, dry-mouthed and early-morning hungry. It was one of those moments of perfect tiredness, of having conquered not only the work at hand, but the night who had blocked the way.

Papa stretched with his fists closed and his eyes grinding shut, and it was a morning that didn’t dare to be rainy. They each stood and walked to the kitchen, and through the fog and frost of the window, they were able to see the pink bars of light on the snowy banks of Himmel Street’s rooftops.

‘Look at the colours,’ Papa said. It’s hard not to like a man who not only notices the colours, but speaks them.

Liesel still held the book. She gripped it tighter as the snow turned orange. On one of the rooftops, she could see a small boy, sitting, looking at the sky. ‘His name was Werner,’ she said. The words trotted out, involuntarily.

Papa said, ‘Yes.’

At school during that time, there had been no more reading tests, but as Liesel slowly gathered confidence, she did pick up a stray textbook before class one morning, to see if she could read it without trouble. She could read every word, but she remained stranded at a much slower pace than that of her classmates. It’s a lot easier, she realised, to be on the verge of something than to actually be it. This would still take time.

One afternoon, she was tempted to steal a book from the classroom bookshelf, but frankly, the prospect of another corridor Watschen at the hands of Sister Maria was a powerful enough deterrent. On top of that, there was actually no real desire in her to take the books from school. It was most likely the intensity of her November failure that caused this lack of interest, but Liesel wasn’t sure. She only knew that it was there.

In class, she did not speak.

She didn’t so much as look the wrong way.

As winter set in, she was no longer a victim of Sister Maria’s frustrations, preferring to watch as others were marched out to the corridor and given their just rewards. The sound of another student struggling in the hallway was not particularly enjoyable, but the fact that it was someone else was, if not a true comfort, a relief.

When school broke up briefly for Weihnachten, Liesel even afforded Sister Maria a ‘Merry Christmas’ before going on her way. Knowing that the Hubermanns were essentially broke, still paying off debts and paying rent quicker than the money could come in, she was not expecting a gift of any sort. Perhaps only some better food. To her surprise, on Christmas Eve, after sitting in church at midnight with Mama, Papa, Hans Junior and Trudy, she came home to find something wrapped in newspaper under the Christmas tree.

‘From Saint Niklaus,’ Papa said, but the girl was not fooled. She hugged both her foster parents, with snow still laid across her shoulders.

Unfurling the paper, she unwrapped two small books. The first one, Faust the Dog, was written by a man named Mattheus Ottleberg. All up, she would read that book thirteen times. On Christmas Eve, she read the first twenty pages at the kitchen table while Papa and Hans Junior argued about a thing she did not understand. Something called politics.

Later, they read some more in bed, adhering to the tradition of circling the words she didn’t know and writing them down. Faust the Dog also had pictures – lovely curves and ears and caricatures of a German Shepherd with an obscene drooling problem and the ability to talk.

The second book was called The Lighthouse and was written by a woman, Ingrid Rippinstein. That particular book was a little longer, so Liesel was only able to get through it nine times, her pace increasing ever so slightly by the end of such prolific readings.

It was a few days after Christmas that she asked her papa a question regarding the books. They were all eating in the kitchen. Looking at the spoonfuls of pea soup entering Mama’s mouth, she decided to shift her focus to Papa. ‘There’s something I need to ask.’

At first, there was nothing.

‘And?’

It was Mama, her mouth still half full.

‘I just wanted to know how you found the money to buy my books.’

A short grin was smiled into Papa’s spoon. ‘You really want to know?’

‘Of course.’

From his pocket, Papa took what was left of his tobacco ration and began rolling a cigarette, at which Liesel became impatient.

‘Are you going to tell me or not?’

Papa laughed. ‘But I am telling you, child.’ He completed the production of one cigarette, flipped it on the table, and began on another. ‘Just like this.’

That was when Mama finished her soup with a clank, suppressed a burp and answered for him. ‘That Saukerl,’ she said. ‘You know what he did? He rolled up all of his filthy cigarettes, went to the market when it was in town and traded them with some gypsy.’

‘Eight cigarettes per book.’ Papa shoved one to his mouth in triumph. He lit up and took in the smoke. ‘Praise the Lord for cigarettes, huh, Mama?’

Mama only handed him one of her trademark looks of disgust, followed by the most common ration of her vocabulary. ‘Saukerl.’

Liesel swapped a wink with her papa and finished eating her soup. As always, one of her books was next to her. She could not deny that the answer to her question had been more than satisfactory. There were not many people who could say that their education had been paid for with cigarettes.

Mama, on the other hand, said that if Hans Hubermann was any good at all, he would trade some tobacco for the new dress she was in desperate need of, or some better shoes. ‘But no …’ She emptied the words out into the sink. ‘When it comes to me, you’d rather smoke a whole ration, wouldn’t you? Plus some of next door’s.’

A few nights later, however, Hans Hubermann came home with a box of eggs. ‘Sorry, Mama.’ He placed them on the table. ‘They were all out of shoes.’

Mama didn’t complain.

She even sang to herself while she cooked those eggs to the brink of burndom. It appeared that there was great joy in cigarettes, and it was a happy time in the Hubermann household.

It ended a few weeks later.