The Book Thief

THIRTEEN PRESENTS

It was Max’s arrival, revisited.

Feathers turned to twigs again. Smooth face turned to rough. The proof she needed was there. He was alive.

The first few days, she sat and talked to him. On her birthday, she told him there was an enormous cake waiting in the kitchen, if only he’d wake up.

There was no waking.

There was no cake.

A LATE NIGHT EXCERPT

On the fifth day, there was much excitement when Max opened his eyes, if only for a few moments. What he predominantly saw (and what a frightening close-up version it must have been) was Rosa Hubermann, practically slinging an armful of soup into his mouth. ‘Swallow,’ she advised him. ‘Don’t think. Just swallow.’ As soon as Mama handed back the bowl, Liesel tried to see his face again, but there was a soup-feeder’s backside in the way.

‘Is he still awake?’

When she turned, Rosa did not have to answer.

After close to a week, Max woke up a second time, on this occasion with Liesel and Papa in the room. They were both watching the body in the bed when there was a small groan. If it’s possible, Papa fell upwards, out of the chair.

‘Look,’ Liesel gasped. ‘Stay awake, Max, stay awake.’

He looked at her briefly but there was no recognition. The eyes studied her as if she were a riddle. Then gone again.

‘Papa, what happened?’

Hans dropped, back to the chair.

Later, he suggested that perhaps she should read to him. ‘Come on, Liesel, you’re such a good reader these days – even if it’s a mystery to all of us where that book came from.’

‘I told you, Papa. One of the nuns at school gave it to me.’

Papa held his hands up in mock-protest. ‘I know, I know.’ He sighed, from a height. ‘Just …’ He chose his words gradually. ‘Don’t get caught.’ This from a man who’d stolen a Jew.

From that day on, Liesel read The Whistler aloud to Max as he occupied her bed. The one frustration was that she kept having to skip whole chapters on account of many of the pages being stuck together. It had not dried well. Still, she struggled on, to the point where she was nearly three-quarters of the way through it. The book was three hundred and ninety-six pages.

In the outside world, Liesel rushed from school each day in the hope that Max was feeling better. ‘Has he woken up? Has he eaten?’

‘Go back out,’ Mama begged her. ‘You’re chewing a hole in my stomach with all this talking. Go on. Get out there and play football, for God’s sake.’

‘Yes, Mama.’ She was about to open the door. ‘But you’ll come and get me if he wakes up, won’t you? Just make something up. Scream out like I’ve done something wrong. Start swearing at me. Everyone will believe it, don’t worry.’

Even Rosa had to smile at that. She placed her knuckles on her hips and explained that Liesel wasn’t too old yet to avoid a Watschen for talking in such a way. ‘And score a goal,’ she threatened, ‘or don’t come home at all.’

‘Sure, Mama.’

‘Make that two goals, Saumensch!’

‘Yes, Mama.’

‘And stop answering back!’

Liesel considered, but she ran onto the street, to oppose Rudy on the mud-slippery road.

‘About time, arse-scratcher.’ He welcomed her in the customary way as they fought for the ball. ‘Where have you been?’

Half an hour later, when the ball was squashed by the rare passage of a car on Himmel Street, Liesel had found her first present for Max Vandenburg. After judging it irreparable, all of the kids walked home in disgust, leaving the ball twitching on the cold, blistered road. Liesel and Rudy remained stooped over the carcass. There was a gaping hole on its side, like a mouth.

‘You want it?’ Liesel asked.

Rudy shrugged. ‘What do I want with this squashed shitheap of a ball? There’s no chance of getting air into it now, is there?’

‘Do you want it or not?’

‘No thanks.’ Rudy prodded it cautiously with his foot, as if it were a dead animal. Or an animal that might be dead.

As he walked home, Liesel picked the ball up and placed it under her arm. She could hear him call out. ‘Hey, Saumensch.’ She waited. ‘SAUmensch!’

She relented. ‘What?’

‘I’ve got a bike without wheels here too if you want it.’

‘Stick your bike.’

From her position on the street, the last thing she heard was the laughter of that Saukerl, Rudy Steiner.

Inside, she made her way to the bedroom. She took the ball into Max and placed it at the end of the bed.

‘I’m sorry,’ she said, ‘it’s not much. But when you wake up, I’ll tell you all about it. I’ll tell you it was the greyest afternoon you can imagine, and this car without its lights on ran straight over the ball. Then the man got out and yelled at us. And then he asked for directions. The nerve of him …’

Wake up! she wanted to scream.

Or shake him.

She didn’t.

All Liesel could do was watch the ball and its trampled, flaking skin. It was the first gift of many.

PRESENTS #2–#5

The football had given her an idea.

Whenever she walked to and from school now, Liesel was on the lookout for discarded items that might be valuable to a dying man. She wondered at first why it mattered so much. How could something so seemingly insignificant give comfort to someone? A ribbon in a gutter. A pine cone on the street. A button leaning casually against a classroom wall. A flat round stone from the river. If nothing else, it showed that she cared, and it might give them something to talk about when Max woke up.

When she was alone, she would conduct those conversations.

‘So what’s all this?’ Max would say. ‘What’s all this junk?’

‘Junk?’ In her mind, she was sitting on the side of the bed. ‘This isn’t junk, Max. These are what made you wake up.’

PRESENTS #6–#9

The feather was lovely and trapped, in the door hinges of the church on Munich Street. It poked itself crookedly out and Liesel hurried over to rescue it. The fibres were combed flat on the left, but the right side was made of delicate edges and sections of jagged triangles. There was no other way of describing it.

The newspapers came from the cold depths of a bin (enough said), and the lolly wrapper was flat and faded. She found it near the school and held it up to the light. It contained a collage of shoe prints.

Then the cloud.

How do you give someone a piece of sky?

Late in February, she stood on Munich Street and watched a single giant cloud come over the hills like a white monster. It climbed the mountains. The sun was eclipsed, and in its place, a white beast with a grey heart watched the town.

‘Would you look at that?’ she said to Papa.

Hans cocked his head and stated what he felt was the obvious. ‘You should give it to Max, Liesel. See if you can leave it on the bedside table, like all the other things.’

Liesel watched him as if he’d gone insane. ‘How, though?’

Lightly, he tapped her skull with his knuckles. ‘Memorise it. Then write it down for him.’

‘… It was like a great white beast,’ she said at her next bedside vigil, ‘and it came from over the mountains.’

When the sentence was completed with several different adjustments and additions, Liesel felt like she’d done it. She imagined the vision of it passing from her hand to his, through the blankets, and she wrote it down on a scrap of paper, placing the stone on top of it.

PRESENTS #10–#13

The soldier was buried in the dirt, not far from Tommy Muller’s place. It was scratched and trodden, which, to Liesel, was the whole point. Even with injury, it could still stand up.

The leaf was a maple and she found it in the school broom closet, amongst the buckets and feather dusters. The door was slightly ajar. The leaf was dry and hard, like toasted bread, and there were hills and valleys all over its skin. Somehow, the leaf had made its way into the school hallway and into that closet. Like half a star with a stem. Liesel reached in and twirled it in her fingers.

Unlike the other items, she did not place the leaf on the bedside table. She pinned it to the closed curtain, just before reading the final thirty-four pages of The Whistler.

She did not have dinner that afternoon, or go to the toilet. She didn’t drink. All day at school she had promised herself that she would finish reading the book today, and Max Vandenburg was going to listen. He was going to wake up.

Papa sat on the floor, in the corner, workless as usual. Luckily, he would soon be leaving for the Knoller with his accordion. His chin resting on his knees, he listened to the girl he’d struggled to teach the alphabet. Reading proudly, she unloaded the final frightening words of the book to Max Vandenburg.

THE LAST REMNANTS OF THE WHISTLER

‘Jesus, Mary and Joseph.’ Hans couldn’t resist an incredulous tone. ‘A nun gave you that?’ He stood up and made his way over, kissing her forehead. ‘Bye, Liesel, the Knoller awaits.’

‘Bye, Papa.’

‘Liesel!’

She ignored it.

‘Come and eat something!’

This time she answered. ‘I’m coming, Mama.’ She actually spoke those words to Max as she came closer and placed the finished book on the bedside table, with everything else. As she hovered above him, she couldn’t help herself. ‘Come on, Max,’ she whispered, and even the sound of Mama’s arrival at her back did not stop her from silently crying. It didn’t stop her from pulling a lump of salt water from her eye and feeding it onto Max Vandenburg’s face.

Mama took her.

Her arms swallowed her.

‘I know,’ she said.

She knew.