The Book Thief

THE MISTAKE MAKER

Once, in the tide of Dunbar past, there was a many-named woman, and what a woman she was.

First, the name she was born with: Penelope Lesciuszko.

Then the one christened at her piano: the Mistake Maker.

In transit they called her the Birthday Girl.

Her self-proclaimed nickname was the Broken-Nosed Bride.

And last, the name she died with: Penny Dunbar.

Quite fittingly, she’d travelled from a place that was best described by a phrase in the books she was raised on.

She came from a watery wilderness.

Many years ago, and like so many before her, she arrived with a suitcase and a scrunched-up stare.

She was astounded by the mauling light here.

This city.

It was so hot and wide, and white.

The sun was some sort of barbarian, a Viking in the sky.

It plundered, it pillaged.

It got its hands on everything, from the tallest stick of concrete to the smallest cap in the water.

In her former country, in the Eastern Bloc, the sun had mostly been a toy, a gizmo. There, in that far-off land, it was cloud and rain, ice and snow that wore the pants – not that funny little yellow thing that showed its face every now and again; its warmer days were rationed. Even on the boniest, barren afternoons there was a chance of moisture. Drizzle. Wet feet. It was communist Europe at its slow-descending peak.

In a lot of ways it defined her. Escaping. Alone.

Or more to the point, lonely.

She would never forget landing here in sheer terror.

From the air, in a circling plane, the city looked at the mercy of its own brand of water (the salty kind) but on the ground, it didn’t take long to feel the full force of its true oppressor; her face was dappled immediately with sweat. Outside, she stood with a flock, a herd, no – a rabble – of equally shocked and sticky people.

After a long wait, the lot of them were rounded up. They were corralled into a sort of indoor tarmac. The light globes were all fluorescent. The air was floor to ceiling heat.

‘Name?’

Nothing.

‘Passport?’

‘Przepraszam?’

‘Oh, Jesus.’ The man in uniform stood on his toes and looked above the heads and hordes of new immigrants. What a mob of sorry, sweltering faces! He found the man he wanted. ‘Hey, George! Bilski! I got one here for you!’

But now the woman who was nearly twenty-one but appeared sixteen gripped him firmly in the face. She held her grey-coloured booklet as if to strangle its edges of air. ‘Parshporrt.’

A smile, of resignation. ‘Okay, love.’ He opened it up and took a stab at the riddle of her name. ‘Leskazna-what?’

Penelope helped him out, timid but defiant. ‘Less-choosh-ko.’

She knew no-one here.

The people who’d been in camp with her for nine months in the Austrian mountains had broken away. While they were sent, family after family, west across the Atlantic, Penelope Lesciuszko would make a longer journey, and now she was here. All that remained was to get to camp, learn English better, find a job and a place to live. Then, most importantly, buy a bookshelf. And a piano.

Those few things were all she wanted from this new world laid searingly out in front of her, and as time went by, she got them. She got them all right, and a whole lot more.

I’m sure you’ve met certain people in this world and heard their stories of lucklessness, and you wonder what they did to deserve it.

Our mother, Penny Dunbar, was one of them.

The thing is, she would never have called herself unlucky; she’d have placed a blonde bunch of hair behind her ear and claimed no regrets – that she’d gained a lot more than she ever lost, and a big part of me agrees. The other part realizes that bad luck always managed to find her, most typically at various milestones:

Her mother died giving birth to her.

She broke her nose the day before her wedding day.

And then, of course, the dying.

Her dying was something to see.

When she was born, the problem was age and pressure; her parents were both quite old to be having children, and after hours of struggle and surgery, her mother’s shell was shattered and dead. Her father, Waldek Lesciuszko, was shattered and alive. He brought her up best he could. A tram driver, he had many traits and quirks, and people likened him not to Stalin himself, but a statue of him. Maybe it was the moustache. Maybe it was more. It could easily have been the stiffness of the man, or his silence, for it was a silence larger than life.

In private, though, there were other things, like he owned a grand total of thirty-nine books, and two of them he obsessed over. It’s possible it was because he’d grown up in Szczecin, near the Baltic, or that he loved the Greek mythologies. Whatever the reasons, he always came back to them – a pair of epics where the characters would plough into the sea. In the kitchen, they were stationed, mid-range, on a warped but lengthy bookshelf, filed there under H:

The Iliad. The Odyssey.

While other children went to bed with stories of puppies, kittens and ponies, Penelope grew up on the fast-running Achilles, the resourceful Odysseus, and all the other names and nicknames.

There was Zeus the cloud-compeller.

Laughter-loving Aphrodite.

Hector of the glittering helmet.

Her namesake: the patient Penelope.

The son of Penelope and Odysseus: the thoughtful Telemachus.

And always one of her favourites:

Agamemnon, king of men.

On many nights, she’d lie in bed and float out on Homer’s images, and their many repetitions. Over and over, the Greek armies would launch their vessels on to the wine-dark sea, or enter its watery wilderness. They’d sail towards the rosy-fingered dawn, and the quiet young girl was captivated; her papery face was lit. Her father’s voice came in smaller and smaller waves, till finally, she was asleep.

The Trojans could return tomorrow.

The long-haired Achaeans could launch and relaunch their ships, to take her away the following night, again.

Next to that, Waldek Lesciuszko gave his daughter one other life-affirming skill; he taught her to play the piano.

I know what you might be thinking:

Our mother was highly educated.

Greek masterpieces at bedtime?

Lessons in classical music?

But no.

These were remnants of another world, a different time. The small book collection had been handed down as nearly the sole possession of her family. The piano was won in a card game. What neither Waldek or Penelope knew just yet was that both would turn out to be crucial.

They would bring the girl ever closer to him.

Then send her away for good.

They lived in a third-floor apartment.

A block like all the others.

From a distance, they were one small light in a concrete goliath.

Up close, it was spare but closed-in.

At the window stood the upright instrument – both black and brawny, and silky smooth – and at regular times, morning and night, the old man sat with her, with a strict and steady air. His paralysed moustache was camped firmly between nose and mouth. He moved only to turn the page for her.

As for Penelope, she played and concentrated, unblinking, on the notes. In the early days it was nursery rhymes, and later, when he sent her for lessons he couldn’t afford, there was Bach, Mozart and Chopin. Often, it was only the world outside who blinked, in the time it took to practice. It would alter, from frosty to windswept, clearing to grim. The girl would smile when she started. Her father cleared his throat. The metronome went click.

Sometimes, she could hear him breathe, somewhere amongst the music. It reminded her that he was alive, and not the statue people joked about. Even when she could feel his anger rising at her newest foray of errors, her father was always trapped, somewhere between po-faced and thoroughly pissed off. Just once she’d have loved to see him erupt – to slap his thigh, or tear at his aging thicket of hair. He never did. He only brought in a branch of a spruce tree and whipped her knuckles with an economic sting, every time her hands dropped, or she made another mistake. One winter’s morning, when she was still just a pale and timid-backed child, she got it twenty-seven times, for twenty-seven musical sins. And her father gave her a nickname.

At the end of the lesson, with snow falling outside, he stopped her playing and held her hands, and they were whipped and small and warm. He clenched them, but softly, in his own obelisk fingers.

‘Juz wystavczy,’ he said, ‘dziewczyno bledow …’ which she translated, for us, as this:

‘That’s enough, mistake maker.’

That was when she was eight.

When she was eighteen, he decided to get her out.

The dilemma, of course, was the communism.

A single great idea.

A thousand limits and flaws.

Growing up, Penelope never noticed.

What child ever does?

There was nothing to compare it to.

For years, she didn’t realize what a guarded time and place it was. She didn’t see that while everyone was equal, really they were not. She never looked up at the concrete balconies, and the way the people watched.

As the politics gloomed above, the government handled everything, from your job to your wallet to all you thought and believed – or at least what you said you thought and believed; if you were even vaguely suspected of being part of Solidarnosc – the Solidarity Movement – you could count on paying the cost. As I said, the people watched.

The truth is, it had always been a hard country, and a sad one. It was a land where the invaders had come from all sorts of directions, across all sorts of centuries. If you had to choose, though, you’d say it was harder than it was sad, and the communist era was no different. It was a time, in the end, where you moved from one long queue to another, for everything from medical supplies to toilet paper, and vanishing stocks of food.

And what could people do?

They stood in line.

They waited.

The temperature fell below freezing. It changed nothing.

People stood in line.

They waited.

Because they had to.

Which brings us back to Penelope, and her father.

For the girl, none of that mattered so much, or at least it didn’t yet.

To her this was just a childhood.

It was a piano and frozen playgrounds, and Walt Disney on Saturday nights – one of the many small concessions from the world that lay wayward and west.

As for her father, he was careful.

Vigilant.

He kept his head down, and held all political ideas in the shadows of his mouth, but even that wasn’t much comfort. Keeping your nose clean while an entire system broke down around you guaranteed only that you would survive longer, not that you would survive. An endless winter would finally break, only to return in record time, and there you were again, at work:

Small, allotted hours.

Friendly without friends.

There you were at home:

Quiet but wondering.

Is there any way out at all?

The answer took shape, and form.

Definitely not for him.

Maybe, however, for the girl.

In the years between, what else can be said?

Penelope grew up.

Her father grew visibly older, his moustache the colour of ash.

To be fair, sometimes there were good times, there were great times – and old and dour as he was, Waldek surprised his daughter maybe once a year and raced her to the tramline. It was usually for one of those paid music lessons, or a recital. At home, in her early years of high school, he played stiff-and-steady partner, in the dance hall of the kitchen. Pots would clamour. A rickety stool was felled. Knives and forks would hit the floor, and the girl would laugh, the man would crack; he’d smile. The smallest dance floor in the world.

For Penelope, one of the strongest memories was her thirteenth birthday, when they came home via the playground. She felt far too grown-up for such things, but she sat on a swing there anyway. Many decades later, she would recount that memory, one more time, to the fourth of her five boys – the one who loved the stories. It was in the last few months of her life, when she was half-dreaming, half-high on morphine, on the couch.

‘Now and again,’ she’d said, ‘I still see the melting snow, the pale unfinished buildings. I hear the noisy chains. I can feel his gloves on the small of my back.’ Her smile was hoisted up by then, her face was in decay. ‘I remember screaming with that fear of going too high. I begged for him to stop, but I didn’t want him to, not really.’

And that’s what made it so hard:

The heart of colour in all that grey.

To her, in hindsight, leaving wasn’t so much a breaking free as an abandonment. Much as he loved them, she didn’t want to leave her father with only his Greek cast of seafaring friends. After all, what good was the fast-running Achilles in this land of ice and snow? He’d freeze to death eventually. And how could Odysseus be resourceful enough to give him the company required to keep him alive?

The answer was clear to her.

He couldn’t.

But then, of course, it happened.

She hit eighteen.

Her escape was set in motion.

It took him two long years.

On the surface, all was going well: she’d left school with good results and worked in a local factory, as a secretary. She took notes at all the meetings, she was responsible for every pen. She shuffled all the papers, and accounted for all the staplers. That was her position, her slot, and there were definitely many worse ones.

It was also around that time when she became more involved with various musical outfits, accompanying people here and there, and playing solo pieces as well. Waldek actively encouraged it, and soon she was travelling to perform. Restrictions had slowly become less monitored, due to general disarray, and also (more menacingly) to the knowledge that people could always leave, but had family members who stayed. Either way, sometimes Penelope was cleared to cross borders, and even once to slip through the Curtain. At no point did she ever consider that her father was planting a seed for her defection; within herself, she was happy.

But the country, by then, was on its knees.

Market aisles were closer to completely bare.

The queuing had intensified.

Many times, in ice, then sleet and rain, they’d stood together, for hours, waiting for bread, and when they got there, nothing was left – and soon he realized. He knew.

Waldek Lesciuszko.

The statue of Stalin.

It was ironic, really, for he didn’t say a word; he was deciding for her, forcing her to be free, or at least, thrusting the choice upon her.

He’d nursed his plan, day after day, and now the moment came.

He would send her to Austria, to Vienna, to play in a concert – an eisteddfod – and make it clear that she was never to return.

And that, to me, was how us Dunbar boys began.