The Book Thief Part 47

Once inside, she was taken to the kitchen, where two older women and a man sat on delicate, highly civilized chairs. The women were well dressed. The man had white hair and sideburns like hedges. Tall gla.s.ses stood on the table. They were filled with crackling liquid.

"Well," said the man, "here we go."

He took up his gla.s.s and urged the others to do the same.

The afternoon had been warm. Liesel was slightly put off by the coolness of her gla.s.s. She looked at Papa for approval. He grinned and said, "Prost, Mdel-cheers, girl." Their gla.s.ses chimed together and the moment Liesel raised it to her mouth, she was bitten by the fizzy, sickly sweet taste of champagne. 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. On the second attempt she was able to swallow it, and enjoy the taste of a glorious broken rule. It felt great. The bubbles ate her tongue. They p.r.i.c.kled her stomach. Even as they walked to the next job, she could feel the warmth of pins and needles inside her.

Dragging the cart, Papa told her that those people claimed to have no money.

"So you asked for champagne?"

"Why not?" He looked across, and never had his eyes been so silver. "I didn't want you thinking that champagne bottles are only used for rolling paint." He warned her, "Just don't tell Mama. Agreed?"

"Can I tell Max?"

"Sure, you can tell Max."

In the bas.e.m.e.nt, when she wrote about her life, 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.

It was the same with accordions.

Many times, she wanted to ask her papa if he might teach her to play, but somehow, something always stopped her. Perhaps an unknown intuition told her that she would never be able to play it like Hans Hubermann. Surely, not even the world's greatest accordionists could compare. They could never be equal to the casual concentration on Papa's face. Or there wouldn't be a paintwork-traded cigarette slouched on the player's lips. And they could never make a small mistake with a three-note laugh of hindsight. Not the way he could.

At times, in that bas.e.m.e.nt, she woke up tasting the sound of the accordion in her ears. She could feel the sweet burn of champagne on her tongue.

Sometimes she sat against the wall, longing for the warm finger of paint to wander just once more down the side of her nose, or to watch the sandpaper texture of her papa's hands.

If only she could be so oblivious again, to feel such love without knowing it, mistaking it for laughter and bread with only the scent of jam spread out on top of it.

It was the best time of her life.

But it was bombing carpet.

Make no mistake.

Bold and bright, a trilogy of happiness would continue for summer's duration and into autumn. It would then be brought abruptly to an end, for the brightness had shown suffering the way.

Hard times were coming.

Like a parade.

DUDEN DICTIONARY MEANING #1.

Zufiedenheit-Happiness:

Coming from happy -enjoying

pleasure and contentment.

Related words: joy, gladness,

feeling fortunate or prosperous.

THE TRILOGY.

While Liesel worked, Rudy ran.

He did laps of Hubert Oval, ran around the block, and raced almost everyone from the bottom of Himmel Street to Frau Diller's, giving varied head starts.

On a few occasions, when Liesel was helping Mama in the kitchen, Rosa would look out the window and say, "What's that little Saukerl up to this time? All that running out there."

Liesel would move to the window. "At least he hasn't painted himself black again."

"Well, that's something, isn't it?"

RUDY'S REASONS

In the middle of August, a Hitler Youth

carnival was being held, and Rudy was

intent on winning four events: the 1500,

400, 200, and of course, the 100. He liked

his new Hitler Youth leaders and wanted to

please them, and he wanted to show his old

friend Franz Deutscher a thing or two.

"Four gold medals," he said to Liesel one afternoon when she did laps with him at Hubert Oval. "Like Jesse Owens back in 36."

"You're not still obsessed with him, are you?"

Rudy's feet rhymed with his breathing. "Not really, but it would be nice, wouldn't it? It would show all those b.a.s.t.a.r.ds who said I was crazy. They'd see that I wasn't so stupid after all."

"But can you really win all four events?"

They slowed to a stop at the end of the track, and Rudy placed his hands on his hips. "I have to."

For six weeks, he trained, and when the day of the carnival arrived in mid-August, the sky was hot-sunned and cloudless. The gra.s.s was overrun with Hitler Youths, parents, and a glut of brown-shirted leaders. Rudy Steiner was in peak condition.

"Look," he pointed out. "There's Deutscher."

Through the cl.u.s.ters of crowd, the blond epitome of Hitler Youth standards was giving instructions to two members of his division. They were nodding and occasionally stretching. One of them shielded his eyes from the sun like a salute.

"You want to say h.e.l.lo?" Liesel asked.

"No thanks. I'll do that later."

When I've won.

The words were not spoken, but they were definitely there, somewhere between Rudy's blue eyes and Deutscher's advisory hands.

There was the obligatory march around the grounds.

The anthem.

Heil Hitler.

Only then could they begin.

When Rudy's age group was called for the 1500, Liesel wished him luck in a typically German manner.

"Hals und Beinbruch, Saukerl."

She'd told him to break his neck and leg.

Boys collected themselves on the far side of the circular field. Some stretched, some focused, and the rest were there because they had to be.

Next to Liesel, Rudy's mother, Barbara, sat with her youngest children. A thin blanket was br.i.m.m.i.n.g with kids and loosened gra.s.s. "Can you see Rudy?" she asked them. "He's the one on the far left." Barbara Steiner was a kind woman whose hair always looked recently combed.

"Where?" said one of the girls. Probably Bettina, the youngest. "I can't see him at all."

"That last one. No, not there. There."

They were still in the identification process when the starter's gun gave off its smoke and sound. The small Steiners rushed to the fence.

For the first lap, a group of seven boys led the field. On the second, it dropped to five, and on the next lap, four. Rudy was the fourth runner on every lap until the last. A man on the right was saying that the boy coming second looked the best. He was the tallest. "You wait," he told his nonplussed wife. "With two hundred left, he'll break away." The man was wrong.