The Book Thief

DEATH’S DIARY: COLOGNE

The fallen hours of May 30.

I’m sure Liesel Meminger was fast asleep when more than a thousand bomber planes flew towards a place known as Köln. For me, the result was five hundred people, or thereabouts. Fifty thousand others ambled homelessly around the ghostly piles of rubble, trying to work out which way was which, and which slabs of broken home belonged to whom.

Five hundred souls.

I carried them in my fingers, like suitcases. Or I’d throw them over my shoulder. It was only the children I carried in my arms.

By the time I was finished, the sky was yellow, like burning newspaper. If I looked closely, I could see the words, reporting headlines, commentating on the progress of the war and so forth. How I’d have loved to pull it all down, to screw up the newspaper sky and toss it away. My arms ached and I couldn’t afford to burn my fingers. There was still so much work to be done.

As you might expect, many people died instantly. Others took a while longer. There were several more places to go, skies to meet and souls to collect, and when I came back to Cologne later on, not long after the final planes, I managed to notice a most unique thing.

I was carrying the charred soul of a teenager when I looked gravely up at what was now a sulphuric sky. A group of ten-year-old girls was close by. One of them called out.

‘What’s that?’

Her arm extended and her finger pointed out the black, slow object, falling from above. It began as a black feather, lilting, floating. Or a piece of ash. Then it grew larger. The same girl – a redhead with full-stop freckles – spoke once again, this time more emphatically. ‘What is that?’

‘It’s a body,’ another girl suggested. Black hair, pigtails and a crooked part down the centre.

‘It’s another bomb!’

It was too slow to be a bomb.

With the adolescent spirit still burning lightly in my arms, I walked a few hundred metres with the rest of them. Like the girls, I remained focused on the sky. The last thing I wanted was to look down at the stranded face of my teenager. A pretty girl. Her whole death was now ahead of her.

Like the rest of them, I was taken aback when a voice lunged out. It was a disgruntled father, ordering his kids inside. The redhead reacted. Her full-stops lengthened into commas. ‘But Papa, look.’

The man took several small steps and soon figured out what it was. ‘It’s the fuel,’ he said.

‘What do you mean?’

‘The fuel,’ he repeated. ‘The tank.’ He was a bald man in a disrupted suit. ‘They used up all their fuel in that one and got rid of the empty container. Look, there’s another one over there.’

‘And there!’

Kids being kids, they all searched frantically at that point, trying to find an empty fuel container floating to the ground.

The first one landed with a hollow thud.

‘Can we keep it, Papa?’

‘No.’ He was bombed and shocked, this papa, and clearly not in the mood. ‘We cannot keep it.’

‘Why not?’

‘I’m going to ask my papa if I can have it,’ said another of the girls.

‘Me too.’

Just past the rubble of Cologne, a group of kids collected empty fuel containers, dropped by their enemies. As usual, I collected humans. I was tired. And the year wasn’t even halfway over yet.