The Book Thief

“Not bad.”

There was an itch to leave then, but also a peculiar obligation to stay. She moved to speak, but the available words were too many and too fast. There were several attempts to snatch at them, but it was the mayor’s wife who took the initiative.

She saw Rudy’s face in the window, or more to the point, his candlelit hair. “I think you’d better go,” she said. “He’s waiting for you.”

On the way home, they ate.

“Are you sure there wasn’t anything else?” Rudy asked. “There must have been.”

“We were lucky to get the cookies.” Liesel examined the gift in Rudy’s arms. “Now tell the truth. Did you eat any before I came back out?”

Rudy was indignant. “Hey, you’re the thief here, not me.”

“Don’t kid me, Saukerl, I could see some sugar at the side of your mouth.”

Paranoid, Rudy took the plate in just the one hand and wiped with the other. “I didn’t eat any, I promise.”

Half the cookies were gone before they hit the bridge, and they shared the rest with Tommy Müller on Himmel Street.

When they’d finished eating, there was only one afterthought, and Rudy spoke it.

“What the hell do we do with the plate?”

THE CARDPLAYER

Around the time Liesel and Rudy were eating the cookies, the resting men of the LSE were playing cards in a town not far from Essen. They’d just completed the long trip from Stuttgart and were gambling for cigarettes. Reinhold Zucker was not a happy man.

“He’s cheating, I swear it,” he muttered. They were in a shed that served as their barracks and Hans Hubermann had just won his third consecutive hand. Zucker threw his cards down in disgust and combed his greasy hair with a threesome of dirty fingernails.

SOME FACTS ABOUT

REINHOLD ZUCKER

He was twenty-four. When he won a round

of cards, he gloated—he would hold the

thin cylinders of tobacco to his nose and

breathe them in. “The smell of victory,”

he would say. Oh, and one more thing.

He would die with his mouth open.

• • •

Unlike the young man to his left, Hans Hubermann didn’t gloat when he wo

n. He was even generous enough to give each colleague one of his cigarettes back and light it for him. All but Reinhold Zucker took up the invitation. He snatched at the offering and flung it back to the middle of the turned-over box. “I don’t need your charity, old man.” He stood up and left.

“What’s wrong with him?” the sergeant inquired, but no one cared enough to answer. Reinhold Zucker was just a twenty-four-year-old boy who could not play cards to save his life.

Had he not lost his cigarettes to Hans Hubermann, he wouldn’t have despised him. If he hadn’t despised him, he might not have taken his place a few weeks later on a fairly innocuous road.

One seat, two men, a short argument, and me.

It kills me sometimes, how people die.