The Book Thief

RUDY’S YOUTH

In the end, she had to give it to him.

He knew how to perform.

A PORTRAIT OF RUDY STEINER: JULY 1941

He stood a few metres from the step and spoke with great conviction, great joy.

‘Alles ist Scheisse,’ he announced.

All is shit.

In the first half of 1941, while Liesel went about the business of concealing Max Vandenburg, stealing newspapers and telling off mayors’ wives, Rudy was enduring a new life of his own, at the Hitler Youth. Since early February, he’d been returning from the meetings in a considerably worse state than he’d left. On many of those return trips, Tommy Muller was by his side, in the same condition. The trouble had three elements to it.

A TRIPLE-TIERED PROBLEM

If only Tommy Muller hadn’t gone missing for seven hours on one of the coldest days in Munich’s history, six years earlier. His ear infections and nerve damage were still contorting the marching pattern at the Hitler Youth, which, I can assure you, was not a positive thing.

At first the downward slide of momentum was gradual, but as the months progressed, Tommy was consistently gathering the ire of the Hitler Youth leaders, especially when it came to the marching. Remember Hitler’s birthday the previous year? For some time, the ear infections had been getting worse. They had reached the point where Tommy had genuine problems hearing. He could not make out the commands that were shouted at the group as they marched in line. It didn’t matter if it was in the hall or outside, in the snow or the mud or the slits of rain.

The goal was always to have everyone stop at the same time.

‘One click!’ they were told. ‘That’s all the Führer wants to hear. Everyone united. Everyone together as one!’

Then Tommy.

It was his left ear, I think. That was the most troublesome of the two, and when the bitter cry of ‘Halt!’ wet the ears of everybody else, Tommy marched comically and obliviously on. He could transform a marching line into a dog’s breakfast in the blink of an eye.

On one particular Saturday at the beginning of July, just after three-thirty and a litany of Tommy-inspired failed marching attempts, Franz Deutscher (the ultimate name for the ultimate teenage Nazi) was completely fed up.

‘Muller du Affe!’ His thick blond hair massaged his head and his words manipulated Tommy’s face. ‘You ape – what’s wrong with you?’

Tommy slouched fearfully back, but his left cheek still managed to twitch in a manic, cheerful contortion. He appeared not only to be laughing with a triumphant smirk, but accepting the bucketing with glee. And Franz Deutscher wasn’t having any of it. His pale eyes cooked him.

‘Well?’ he asked. ‘What can you say for yourself?’

Tommy’s twitch only increased, in both speed and depth.

‘Are you mocking me?’

‘Heil,’ twitched Tommy, in a desperate attempt to buy some approval, but he did not make it to the ‘Hitler’ part.

That was when Rudy stepped forward. He faced Franz Deutscher, looking up at him. ‘He’s got a problem, sir—’

‘I can see that!’

‘With his ears,’ Rudy finished. ‘He can’t —’

‘Right, that’s it.’ Deutscher rubbed his hands together. ‘Both of you – six laps of the grounds.’ They obeyed, but not fast enough. ‘Schnell!’ his voice chased them.

When the six laps were completed, they were given some drills of the run, drop down, get up, get down again variety, and after fifteen very long minutes, they were ordered to the ground for what should have been the last time.

Rudy looked down.

A warped circle of mud grinned up at him.

What might you be looking at? it seemed to ask.

‘Down!’ Franz ordered.

Rudy naturally jumped over it and dropped to his stomach.

‘Up!’ Franz smiled. ‘One step back.’ They did it. ‘Down!’

The message was clear and this time Rudy accepted it. He dived at the mud and held his breath, and at that moment, lying ear to sodden earth, the drill ended.

‘Vielen Dank, meine Herren,’ Franz Deutscher politely said. ‘Many thanks, my gentlemen.’

Rudy climbed to his knees, did some gardening in his ear and looked across at Tommy.

Tommy closed his eyes, and he twitched.

When they returned to Himmel Street that day, Liesel was playing hopscotch with some of the younger kids, still in her BDM uniform. From the corner of her eye, she saw the two melancholic figures walking towards her. One of them called out.

They met on the front step of the Steiners’ concrete shoebox of a house, and Rudy told her all about the day’s episode.

After ten minutes, Liesel sat down.

After eleven minutes, Tommy, who was sitting next to her, said, ‘It’s all my fault,’ but Rudy waved him away, somewhere between sentence and smile, and chopping a mud-streak in half with his finger. ‘It’s my —’ Tommy tried again, but this time Rudy broke the sentence completely and pointed at him.

‘Tommy, please.’ There was a peculiar look of contentment on Rudy’s face. Liesel had never seen someone so miserable yet so wholeheartedly alive. ‘Just sit there and – twitch – or something,’ and he continued with the story.

He paced.

He wrestled his tie.

The words were flung at her, landing somewhere on the concrete step.

‘That Deutscher,’ he summed up buoyantly. ‘He got us, huh, Tommy?’

Tommy nodded, twitched and spoke, not necessarily in that order. ‘It was because of me.’

‘Tommy, what did I say?’

‘When?’

‘Now! Just keep quiet.’

‘Sure, Rudy.’

When Tommy walked forlornly home a short while later, Rudy tried what appeared to be a masterful new tactic.

Pity.

On the step, he perused the mud that had dried as a crusty sheet on his uniform, then looked Liesel hopelessly in the face. ‘What about it, Saumensch?’

‘What about what?’

‘You know …’

Liesel responded in the usual fashion.

‘Saukerl,’ she laughed, and she walked the short distance home. A disconcerting mixture of mud and pity was one thing, but kissing Rudy Steiner was something entirely different.

Smiling sadly on the step, he called out, rummaging a hand through his hair. ‘One day,’ he warned her. ‘One day, Liesel!’

In the basement, just over two years later, Liesel ached sometimes to go next door and see him, even if she was writing in the early hours of morning. She also realised it was most likely those sodden days at the Hitler Youth that had fed his, and subsequently her own, desire for crime.

After all, despite the usual bouts of rain, summer was beginning to arrive properly. The Klar apples should have been ripening. There was more stealing to be done.