He looked over his shoulder. “Well, if you put it like that.” There was a Schmunzel. “You can stick your washing.” He ran off and wasted no time joining a team. When Liesel made it to the top of Himmel Street, she looked back just in time to see him standing in front of the nearest makeshift goals. He was waving.
“Saukerl,” she laughed, and as she held up her hand, she knew completely that he was simultaneously calling her a Saumensch. I think that’s as close to love as eleven-year-olds can get.
She started to run, to Grande Strasse and the mayor’s house.
Certainly, there was sweat, and the wrinkled pants of breath, stretching out in front of her.
But she was reading.
The mayor’s wife, having let the girl in for the fourth time, was sitting at the desk, simply watching the books. On the second visit, she had given permission for Liesel to pull one out and go through it, which led to another and another, until up to half a dozen books were stuck to her, either clutched beneath her arm or among the pile that was climbing higher in her remaining hand.
On this occasion, as Liesel stood in the cool surrounds of the room, her stomach growled, but no reaction was forthcoming from the mute, damaged woman. She was in her bathrobe again, and although she observed the girl several times, it was never for very long. She usually paid more attention to what was next to her, to something missing. The window was opened wide, a square cool mouth, with occasional gusty surges.
Liesel sat on the floor. The books were scattered around her.
After forty minutes, she left. Every title was returned to its place.
“Goodbye, Frau Hermann.” The words always came as a shock. “Thank you.” After which the woman paid her and she left. Every movement was accounted for, and the book thief ran home.
As summer set in, the roomful of books became warmer, and with every pickup or delivery day the floor was not as painful. Liesel would sit with a small pile of books next to her, and she’d read a few paragraphs of each, trying to memorize the words she didn’t know, to ask Papa when she made it home. Later on, as an adolescent, when Liesel wrote about those books, she no longer remembered the titles. Not one. Perhaps had she stolen them, she would have been better equipped.
What she did remember was that one of the picture books had a name written clumsily on the inside cover:
THE NAME OF A BOY
Johann Hermann
Liesel bit down on her lip, but she could not resist it for long. From the floor, she turned and looked up at the bathrobed woman and made an inquiry. “Johann Hermann,” she said. “Who is that?”
The woman looked beside her, somewhere next to the girl’s knees.
Liesel apologized. “I’m sorry. I shouldn’t be asking such things ….” She let the sentence die its own death.
The woman’s face did not alter, yet somehow she managed to speak. “He is nothing now in this world,” she explained. “He was my …”
THE FILES OF RECOLLECTION
Oh, yes, I definitely remember him.
The sky was murky and deep like quicksand.
There was a young man parceled up in barbed wire, like a giant crown of thorns. I untangled him and carried him out. High above the earth, we sank together, to our knees. It was just another day, 1918.
• • •
“Apart from everything else,” she said, “he froze to death.” For a moment, she played with her hands, and she said it again. “He froze to death, I’m sure of it.”
The mayor’s wife was just one of a worldwide brigade. You have seen her before, I’m certain. In your stories, your poems, the screens you like to watch. They’re everywhere, so why not here? Why not on a shapely hill in a small German town? It’s as good a place to suffer as any.
The point is, Ilsa Hermann had decided to make suffering her triumph. When it refused to let go of her, she succumbed to it. She embraced it.
She could have shot herself, scratched herself, or indulged in other forms of self-mutilation, but she chose what she probably felt was the weakest option—to at least endure the discomfort of the weather. For all Liesel knew, she prayed for summer days that were cold and wet. For the most part, she lived in the right place.
When Liesel left that day, she said something with great uneasiness. In translation, two giant words were struggled with, carried on her shoulder, and dropped as a bungling pair at Ilsa Hermann’s feet. They fell off sideways as the girl veered with them and could no longer sustain their weight. Together, they sat on the floor, large and loud and clumsy.
TWO GIANT WORDS