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“It could be worse.” He looked his friend in his Jewish eyes. “I could be you.”
Liesel was standing now. “Who wins?” At first, he was going to answer that no one did, but then he noticed the paint cans, the drop sheets, and the growing pile of newspapers in the periphery of his vision. He watched the words, the long cloud, and the figures on the wall. “I do,” he said.
Seven. You roll and watch it coming, realizing completely that this is no regular die. You claim it to be bad luck, but you’ve known all along that it had to come. You brought it into the room. The table could smell it on your breath. The Jew was sticking out of your pocket from the outset. He’s smeared to your lapel, and the moment you roll, you know it’s a seven—the one thing that somehow finds a way to hurt you. It lands. It stares you in each eye, miraculous and loathsome, and you turn away with it feeding on your chest. Just bad luck. That’s what you say. Of no consequence. That’s what
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You think you’re the only one?” Immediately. Her brother was next to her. He whispered for her to stop, but he, too, was dead, and not worth listening to. He died in a train. They buried him in the snow. Liesel glanced at him, but she could not make herself stop. Not yet.
She was battered and beaten up, and not from smiling this time. Liesel could see it on her face. Blood leaked from her nose and licked at her lips. Her eyes had blackened. Cuts had opened up and a series of wounds were rising to the surface of her skin. All from the words. From Liesel’s words.
“You’re not going to hell,” Papa replied. For a few moments, she watched his face. Then she lay back down, leaned on him, and together, they slept, very much in Munich, but somewhere on the seventh side of Germany’s die.
For the book thief, everything was going nicely. For me, the sky was the color of Jews.
Some of them I caught when they were only halfway down. Saved you, I’d think, holding their souls in midair as the rest of their being—their physical shells—plummeted to the earth.
“But it’s not your job to understand.” That’s me who answers. God never says anything. You think you’re the only one he never answers?
that death waits for no man—and if he does, he doesn’t usually wait very long.
Please believe me when I tell you that I picked up each soul that day as if it were newly born. I even kissed a few weary, poisoned cheeks. I listened to their last, gasping cries. Their vanishing words. I watched their love visions and freed them from their fear.
“Frau Hallah, I’m sorry, I have no black paint left,” he would say, but a little farther down the road, he would always break. There was tall man and long street. “Tomorrow,” he’d promise, “first thing,” and when the next morning dawned, there he was, painting those blinds for nothing, or for a cookie or a warm cup of tea.
The paper has suffered from the friction of movement in my pocket, but still, many of her sentences have been impossible to forget.
and I know that a small piece of the summer of 1942 belonged to only one man. Who else would do some painting for the price of half a cigarette? That was Papa, that was typical, and I loved him.
She would laugh and try to return the favor, but Hans Hubermann was a hard man to catch out at work. It was there that he was most alive.
Her reflexes forced her to spit straight onto her papa’s overalls, watching it foam and dribble. A shot of laughter followed from all of them, and Hans encouraged her to give it another try.
“Can I tell Max?” “Sure, you can tell Max.”
Liesel vowed that she would never drink champagne again, for it would never taste as good as it did on that warm afternoon in July.
