The Book Thief (6 page)

After a few months, they were no longer Mr. and Mrs. Hubermann. With a typical fistful of words, Rosa said, “Now listen, Liesel—from now on you call me Mama.” She thought a moment. “What did you call your real mother?”

Liesel answered quietly.
“Auch Mama—also
Mama.”

“Well, I’m Mama Number Two, then.” She looked over at her husband. “And him over there.” She seemed to collect the words in her hand, pat them together, and hurl them across the table. “That
Saukerl
, that filthy pig—you call him Papa,
verstehst?
Understand?”

“Yes,” Liesel promptly agreed. Quick answers were appreciated in this household.

“Yes,
Mama,”
Mama corrected her.
“Saumensch
. Call me Mama when you talk to me.”

At that moment, Hans Hubermann had just completed rolling a cigarette, having licked the paper and joined it all up. He looked over at Liesel and winked. She would have no trouble calling him Papa.

Those first few months were definitely the hardest.

Every night, Liesel would nightmare.

Her brother’s face.

Staring at the floor.

She would wake up swimming in her bed, screaming, and drowning in the flood of sheets. On the other side of the room, the bed that was meant for her brother floated boatlike in the darkness. Slowly, with the arrival of consciousness, it sank, seemingly into the floor. This vision didn’t help matters, and it would usually be quite a while before the screaming stopped.

Possibly the only good to come out of these nightmares was that it brought Hans Hubermann, her new papa, into the room, to soothe her, to love her.

He came in every night and sat with her. The first couple of times, he simply stayed—a stranger to kill the aloneness. A few nights after that, he whispered, “Shhh, I’m here, it’s all right.” After three weeks, he held her. Trust was accumulated quickly, due primarily to the brute strength of the man’s gentleness, his
thereness
. The girl knew from the
outset that Hans Hubermann would always appear midscream, and he would not leave.

Hans Hubermann sat sleepy-eyed on the bed and Liesel would cry into his sleeves and breathe him in. Every morning, just after two o’clock, she fell asleep again to the smell of him. It was a mixture of dead cigarettes, decades of paint, and human skin. At first, she sucked it all in, then breathed it, until she drifted back down. Each morning, he was a few feet away from her, crumpled, almost halved, in the chair. He never used the other bed. Liesel would climb out and cautiously kiss his cheek and he would wake up and smile.

Some days Papa told her to get back into bed and wait a minute, and he would return with his accordion and play for her. Liesel would sit up and hum, her cold toes clenched with excitement. No one had ever given her music before. She would grin herself stupid, watching the lines drawing themselves down his face and the soft metal of his eyes—until the swearing arrived from the kitchen.

“STOP THAT NOISE,
SAUKERL!”

Papa would play a little longer.

He would wink at the girl, and clumsily, she’d wink back.

A few times, purely to incense Mama a little further, he also brought the instrument to the kitchen and played through breakfast.

Papa’s bread and jam would be half eaten on his plate, curled into the shape of bite marks, and the music would look Liesel in the face. I know it sounds strange, but that’s how it felt to her. Papa’s right hand strolled the tooth-colored keys. His left hit the buttons. (She especially loved to see him hit the silver, sparkled button—the C major.) The accordion’s scratched yet shiny black exterior came back and forth as his arms squeezed the dusty bellows, making it suck in the air and throw it back out. In the kitchen on those mornings, Papa made the accordion live. I guess it makes sense, when you really think about it.

How do you tell if something’s alive?

You check for breathing.

The sound of the accordion was, in fact, also the announcement of safety. Daylight. During the day, it was impossible to dream of her brother. She would miss him and frequently cry in the tiny washroom as quietly as possible, but she was still glad to be awake. On her first night with the Hubermanns, she had hidden her last link to him—
The Grave Digger’s Handbook—under
her mattress, and occasionally she would pull it out and hold it. Staring at the letters on the cover and touching the print inside, she had no idea what any of it was saying. The point is, it didn’t really matter what that book was about. It was what it meant that was more important.

Sometimes she would whisper the word
Mama
and see her mother’s face a hundred times in a single afternoon. But those were small miseries
compared to the terror of her dreams. At those times, in the enormous mileage of sleep, she had never felt so completely alone.

As I’m sure you’ve already noticed, there were no other children in the house.

The Hubermanns had two of their own, but they were older and had moved out. Hans Junior worked in the center of Munich, and Trudy held a job as a housemaid and child minder. Soon, they would both be in the war. One would be making bullets. The other would be shooting them.

School, as you might imagine, was a terrific failure.

Although it was state-run, there was a heavy Catholic influence, and Liesel was Lutheran. Not the most auspicious start. Then they discovered she couldn’t read or write.

Humiliatingly, she was cast down with the younger kids, who were only just learning the alphabet. Even though she was thin-boned and pale, she felt gigantic among the midget children, and she often wished she was pale enough to disappear altogether.

Even at home, there wasn’t much room for guidance.

“Don’t ask
him
for help,” Mama pointed out. “That
Saukerl.”
Papa was staring out the window, as was often his habit. “He left school in fourth grade.”

Without turning around, Papa answered calmly, but with venom, “Well, don’t ask her, either.” He dropped some ash outside. “She left school in
third
grade.”

There were no books in the house (apart from the one she had secreted under her mattress), and the best Liesel could do was speak the alphabet under her breath before she was told in no uncertain terms to keep quiet. All that mumbling. It wasn’t until later, when there was a bed-wetting incident midnightmare, that an extra reading education began. Unofficially, it was called the midnight class, even though it usually commenced at around two in the morning. More of that soon.

•   •   •

In mid-February, when she turned ten, Liesel was given a used doll that had a missing leg and yellow hair.

“It was the best we could do,” Papa apologized.

“What are you talking about? She’s lucky to have
that
much,” Mama corrected him.

Hans continued his examination of the remaining leg while Liesel tried on her new uniform. Ten years old meant Hitler Youth. Hitler Youth meant a small brown uniform. Being female, Liesel was enrolled into what was called the BDM.

The first thing they did there was make sure your
“heil
Hitler” was working properly. Then you were taught to march straight, roll bandages, and sew up clothes. You were also taken hiking and on other such activities. Wednesday and Saturday were the designated meeting days, from three in the afternoon until five.

Each Wednesday and Saturday, Papa would walk Liesel there and pick her up two hours later. They never spoke about it much. They just held hands and listened to their feet, and Papa had a cigarette or two.