Often, I wonder what page she was up to when I walked down Himmel Street in the dripping-tap rain, five nights later. I wonder what she was reading when the first bomb dropped from the rib cage of a plane.
Personally, I like to imagine her looking briefly at the wall, at Max Vandenburg’s tightrope cloud, his dripping sun, and the figures walking toward it. Then she looks at the agonizing attempts of her paint-written spelling. I see the Führer coming down the basement steps with his tied-together boxing gloves hanging casually around his neck. And the book thief reads, rereads, and rereads her last sentence, for many hours.
THE BOOK THIEF—LAST LINE
I have hated the words and
I have loved them,
and I hope I have made them right.
Outside, the world whistled. The rain was stained.
THE END OF THE WORLD (Part II)
Almost all the words are fading now. The black book is disintegrating under the weight of my travels. That’s another reason for telling this story. What did we say earlier? Say something enough times and you never forget it. Also, I can tell you what happened after the book thief’s words had stopped, and how I came to know her story in the first place. Like this.
Picture yourself walking down Himmel Street in the dark. Your hair is getting wet and the air pressure is on the verge of drastic change. The first bomb hits Tommy Müller’s apartment block. His face twitches innocently in his sleep and I kneel at his bed. Next, his sister. Kristina’s feet are sticking out from under the blanket. They match the hopscotch footprints on the street. Her little toes. Their mother sleeps a few feet away. Four cigarettes sit disfigured in her ashtray, and the roofless ceiling is hot plate red. Himmel Street is burning.
The sirens began to howl.
“Too late now,” I whispered, “for that little exercise,” because everyone had been fooled, and fooled again. First up, the Allies had feigned a raid on Munich in order to strike at Stuttgart. But next, ten planes had remained. Oh, there were warnings, all right. In Molching, they came with the bombs.
A ROLL CALL OF STREETS
Munich, Ellenberg, Johannson, Himmel.
The main street + three more,
in the poorer part of town.
In the space of a few minutes, all of them were gone.
A church was chopped down.
Earth was destroyed where Max Vandenburg had stayed on his feet.
At 31 Himmel Street, Frau Holtzapfel appeared to be waiting for me in the kitchen. A broken cup was in front of her and in a last moment of awakeness, her face seemed to ask just what in the hell had taken me so long.
By contrast, Frau Diller was fast asleep. Her bulletproof glasses were shattered next to the bed. Her shop was obliterated, the counter landing across the road, and her framed photo of Hitler was taken from the wall and thrown to the floor. The man was positively mugged and beaten to a glass-shattering pulp. I stepped on him on my way out.
The Fiedlers were well organized, all in bed, all covered. Pfiffikus was hidden up to his nose.
At the Steiners’, I ran my fingers through Barbara’s lovely combed hair, I took the serious look from Kurt’s serious sleeping face, and one by one, I kissed the smaller ones good night.
Then Rudy.
• • •
Oh, crucified Christ, Rudy …
He lay in bed with one of his sisters. She must have kicked him or muscled her way into the majority of the bed space because he was on the very edge with his arm around her. The boy slept. His candlelit hair ignited the bed, and I picked both him and Bettina up with their souls still in the blanket. If nothing else, they died fast and they were warm. The boy from the plane, I thought. The one with the teddy bear. Where was Rudy’s comfort? Where was someone to alleviate this robbery of his life? Who was there to soothe him as life’s rug was snatched from under his sleeping feet?
No one.
There was only me.
And I’m not too great at that sort of comforting thing, especially when my hands are cold and the bed is warm. I carried him softly through the broken street, with one salty eye and a heavy, deathly heart. With him, I tried a little harder. I watched the contents of his soul for a moment and saw a black-painted boy calling the name Jesse Owens as he ran through an imaginary tape. I