The book thief lay in bed that night, and the boy only came before she closed her eyes. He was one member of a cast, for Liesel was always visited in that room. Her papa stood and called her half a woman. Max was writing The Word Shaker in the corner. Rudy was naked by the door. Occasionally her mother stood on a bedside train platform. And far away, in the room that stretched like a bridge to a nameless town, her brother, Werner, played in the cemetery snow.
From down the hall, like a metronome for the visions, Rosa snored, and Liesel lay awake surrounded, but also remembering a quote from her most recent book.
THE LAST HUMAN STRANGER, PAGE 38
There were people everywhere on the city
street, but the stranger could not have
been more alone if it were empty.
• • •
When morning came, the visions were gone and she could hear the quiet recital of words in the living room. Rosa was sitting with the accordion, praying.
“Make them come back alive,” she repeated. “Please, Lord, please. All of them.” Even the wrinkles around her eyes were joining hands.
The accordion must have ached her, but she remained.
Rosa would never tell Hans about these moments, but Liesel believed that it must have been those prayers that helped Papa survive the LSE’s accident in Essen. If they didn’t help, they certainly can’t have hurt.
THE ACCIDENT
It was a surprisingly clear afternoon and the men were climbing into the truck. Hans Hubermann had just sat down in his appointed seat. Reinhold Zucker was standing above him.
“Move it,” he said.
“Bitte? Excuse me?”
Zucker was hunched beneath the vehicle’s ceiling. “I said move it, Arschloch.” The greasy jungle of his fringe fell in clumps onto his forehead. “I’m swapping seats with you.”
Hans was confused. The backseat was probably the most uncomfortable of the lot. It was the draftiest, the coldest. “Why?”
“Does it matter?” Zucker was losing patience. “Maybe I want to get off first to use the shit house.”
Hans was quickly aware that the rest of the unit was already watching this pitiful struggle between two supposed grown men. He didn’t want to lose, but he didn’t want to be petty, either. Also, they’d just finished a tiring shift and he didn’t have the energy to go on with it. Bent-backed, he made his way forward to the vacant seat in the middle of the truck.
“Why did you give in to that Scheisskopf?” the man next to him asked.
Hans lit a match and offered a share of the cigarette. “The draft back there goes straight through my ears.”
The olive green truck was on its way toward the camp, maybe ten miles away. Brunnenweg was telling a joke about a French waitress when the left front wheel was punctured and the driver lost control. The vehicle rolled many times and the men swore as they tumbled with the air, the light, the trash, and the tobacco. Outside, the blue sky changed from ceiling to floor as they clambered for something to hold.
When it stopped, they were all crowded onto the right-hand wall of the truck, their faces wedged against the filthy uniform next to them. Questions of health were passed around until one of the men, Eddie Alma, started shouting, “Get this bastard off me!” He said it three times, fast. He was staring into Reinhold Zucker’s blinkless eyes.
THE DAMAGE, ESSEN
Six men burned by cigarettes.
Two broken hands.
Several broken fingers.
A broken leg for Hans Hubermann.
A broken neck for Reinhold
Zucker, snapped almost in line