The Book Thief Read Online Free PDF Page A

given her music before. She would grin herself
stupid, watching the lines drawing themselves down his face and the soft metal
of his eyes—until the swearing arrived from the kitchen.
    “STOPTHATNOISE,
SAUKERL!”
    Papa would play
a little longer.
    He would wink at
the girl, and clumsily, she’d wink back.
    A few times,
purely to incense Mama a little further, he also brought the instrument to the
kitchen and played through breakfast.
    Papa’s bread and
jam would be half eaten on his plate, curled into the shape of bite marks, and
the music would look Liesel in the face. I know it sounds strange, but that’s
how it felt to her. Papa’s right hand strolled the tooth-colored keys. His left
hit the buttons. (She especially loved to see him hit the silver, sparkled
button—the C major.) The accordion’s scratched yet shiny black exterior came
back and forth as his arms squeezed the dusty bellows, making it suck in the
air and throw it back out. In the kitchen on those mornings, Papa made the
accordion live. I guess it makes sense, when you really think about it.
    How do you tell
if something’s alive?
    You check for
breathing. The sound of the accordion was, in fact, also the announcement of
safety. Daylight. During the day, it was impossible to dream of her brother.
She would miss him and frequently cry in the tiny washroom as quietly as
possible, but she was still glad to be awake. On her first night with the
Hubermanns, she had hidden her last link to him—
The Grave
Digger’s
Handbook
—under her mattress, and occasionally she would pull it out and
hold it. Staring at the letters on the cover and touching the print inside, she
had no idea what any of it was saying. The point is, it didn’t really matter
what that book was about. It was what it meant that was more important.
    THE
BOOK’S MEANING
    1. The last time she saw her brother.
    2. The last time she saw her mother.
    Sometimes she
would whisper the word
Mama
and see her mother’s face a hundred times in
a single afternoon. But those were small miseries compared to the terror of her
dreams. At those times, in the enormous mileage of sleep, she had never felt so
completely alone.
    As I’m sure
you’ve already noticed, there were no other children in the house.
    The Hubermanns
had two of their own, but they were older and had moved out. Hans Junior worked
in the center of Munich, and Trudy held a job as a housemaid and child minder.
Soon, they would both be in the war. One would be making bullets. The other
would be shooting them.
    School, as you
might imagine, was a terrific failure.
    Although it was
state-run, there was a heavy Catholic influence, and Liesel was Lutheran. Not
the most auspicious start. Then they discovered she couldn’t read or write.
    Humiliatingly,
she was cast down with the younger kids, who were only just learning the
alphabet. Even though she was thin-boned and pale, she felt gigantic among the
midget children, and she often wished she was pale enough to disappear
altogether.
    Even at home,
there wasn’t much room for guidance.
    “Don’t ask
him
for help,” Mama pointed out. “That
Saukerl.
” Papa was staring out
the window, as was often his habit. “He left school in fourth grade.”
    Without turning
around, Papa answered calmly, but with venom, “Well, don’t ask her, either.” He
dropped some ash outside. “She left school in
third
grade.”
    There were no
books in the house (apart from the one she had secreted under her mattress),
and the best Liesel could do was speak the alphabet under her breath before she
was told in no uncertain terms to keep quiet. All that mumbling. It wasn’t
until later, when there was a bed-wetting incident midnightmare, that an extra
reading education began. Unofficially, it was called the midnight class, even
though it usually commenced at around two in the morning. More of that soon. In
mid-February, when she turned ten, Liesel was