Read Online The Book Thief by Markus Zusak - Free Book Online

It worked its way past, pointing in the direction of Dachau, the
concentration camp.
    There was a
wooden-planked bridge.
    They sat maybe
thirty meters down from it, in the grass, writing the words and reading them
aloud, and when darkness was near, Hans pulled out the accordion. Liesel looked
at him and listened, though she did not immediately notice the perplexed
expression on her papa’s face that evening as he played.
    PAPA’S
FACE
     
    It traveled and wondered,
     
    but it disclosed no answers.
     
    Not yet.
    There had been a
change in him. A slight shift.
    She saw it but
didn’t realize until later, when all the stories came together. She didn’t see
him watching as he played, having no idea that Hans Hubermann’s accordion was a
story. In the times ahead, that story would arrive at 33 Himmel Street in the
early hours of morning, wearing ruffled shoulders and a shivering jacket. It
would carry a suitcase, a book, and two questions. A story. Story after story.
Story
within
story.
    For now, there
was only the one as far as Liesel was concerned, and she was enjoying it.
    She settled into
the long arms of grass, lying back.
    She closed her
eyes and her ears held the notes.
    There were, of
course, some problems as well. A few times, Papa nearly yelled at her. “Come
on, Liesel,” he’d say. “You know this word; you know it!” Just when progress
seemed to be flowing well, somehow things would become lodged.
    When the weather
was good, they’d go to the Amper in the afternoon. In bad weather, it was the
basement. This was mainly on account of Mama. At first, they tried in the
kitchen, but there was no way.
    “Rosa,” Hans
said to her at one point. Quietly, his words cut through one of her sentences.
“Could you do me a favor?”
    She looked up
from the stove. “What?”
    “I’m asking you,
I’m
begging
you, could you please shut your mouth for just five
minutes?”
    You can imagine
the reaction.
    They ended up in
the basement.
    There was no
lighting there, so they took a kerosene lamp, and slowly, between school and
home, from the river to the basement, from the good days to the bad, Liesel was
learning to read and write.
    “Soon,” Papa
told her, “you’ll be able to read that awful graves book with your eyes closed.”
    “And I can get
out of that midget class.”
    She spoke those
words with a grim kind of ownership.
    In one of their
basement sessions, Papa dispensed with the sandpaper (it was running out fast)
and pulled out a brush. There were few luxuries in the Hubermann household, but
there was an oversupply of paint, and it became more than useful for Liesel’s
learning. Papa would say a word and the girl would have to spell it aloud and
then paint it on the wall, as long as she got it right. After a month, the wall
was recoated. A fresh cement page.
    Some nights,
after working in the basement, Liesel would sit crouched in the bath and hear
the same utterances from the kitchen.
    “You stink,”
Mama would say to Hans. “Like cigarettes and kerosene.”
    Sitting in the
water, she imagined the smell of it, mapped out on her papa’s clothes. More
than anything, it was the smell of friendship, and she could find it on
herself, too. Liesel loved that smell. She would sniff her arm and smile as the
water cooled around her.

     
     
    THE HEAVY

     

     
    WEIGHT CHAMPION OF THE
    SCHOOL-YARD
    The summer of
’39 was in a hurry, or perhaps Liesel was. She spent her time playing soccer
with Rudy and the other kids on Himmel Street (a year-round pastime), taking
ironing around town with Mama, and learning words. It felt like it was over a
few days after it began.
    In the latter
part of the year, two things happened.
    SEPTEMBER–NOVEMBER
1939
    1. World War Two begins.
    1. Liesel Meminger becomes the heavyweight champion of the school yard.
    The beginning of
September.
    It was a cool
day in Molching when the war began and my workload increased.
    The