“Yes, take her.”
They were halfway down the path when Michael Holtzapfel remembered himself and returned. “Rosa?” There was a moment of waiting while Mama rewidened the door. “I heard your son was there. In Russia. I ran into someone else from Molching and they told me. But I’m sure you knew that already.”
Rosa tried to prevent his exit. She rushed out and held his sleeve. “No. He left here one day and never came back. We tried to find him, but then so much happened, there was …”
Michael Holtzapfel was determined to escape. The last thing he wanted to hear was yet another sob story. Pulling himself away, he said, “As far as I know, he’s alive.” He joined Liesel at the gate, but the girl did not walk next door. She watched Rosa’s face. It lifted and dropped in the same moment.
“Mama?”
Rosa raised her hand. “Go.”
Liesel waited.
“I said go.”
When she caught up to him, the returned soldier tried to make conversation. He must have regretted his verbal mistake with Rosa, and he tried to bury it beneath some other words. Holding up the bandaged hand, he said, “I still can’t get it to stop bleeding.” Liesel was actually glad to enter the Holtzapfels’ kitchen. The sooner she started reading, the better.
Frau Holtzapfel sat with wet streams of wire on her face.
Her son was dead.
But that was only the half of it.
She would never really know how it occurred, but I can tell you without question that one of us here knows. I always seem to know what happened when there was snow and guns and the various confusions of human language.
When I imagine Frau Holtzapfel’s kitchen from the book thief’s words, I don’t see the stove or the wooden spoons or the water pump, or anything of the sort. Not to begin with, anyway. What I see is the Russian winter and the snow falling from the ceiling, and the fate of Frau Holtzapfel’s second son.
His name was Robert, and what happened to him was this.
A SMALL WAR STORY
His legs were blown off at the
shins and he died with his
brother watching in a cold,
stench-filled hospital.
It was Russia, January 5, 1943, and just another icy day. Out among the city and snow, there were dead Russians and Germans everywhere. Those who remained were firing into the blank pages in front of them. Three languages interwove. The Russian, the bullets, the German.
As I made my way through the fallen souls, one of the men was saying, “My stomach is itchy.” He said it many times over. Despite his shock, he crawled up ahead, to a dark, disfigured figure who sat streaming on the ground. When the soldier with the wounded stomach arrived, he could see that it was Robert Holtzapfel. His hands were caked in blood and he was heaping snow onto the area just above his shins, where his legs had been chopped off by the last explosion. There were hot hands and a red scream.
Steam rose from the ground. The sight and smell of rotting snow.
“It’s me,” the soldier said to him. “It’s Pieter.” He dragged himself a few inches closer.
“Pieter?” Robert asked, a vanishing voice. He must have felt me nearby.
A second time. “Pieter?”
For some reason, dying men always ask questions they know the answer to. Perhaps it’s so they can die being right.
The voices suddenly all sounded the same.
Robert Holtzapfel collapsed to his right, onto the cold and steamy ground.
I’m sure he expected to meet me there and then.