But Liesel did not come.
She looked to where the man was taking the accordion and followed him. With the red sky still showering its beautiful ash, she stopped the tall LSE worker and said, “I’ll take that if you like—it’s my papa’s.” Softly, she took it from the man’s hand and began carrying it off. It was right about then that she saw the first body.
The accordion case fell from her grip. The sound of an explosion.
Frau Holtzapfel was scissored on the ground.
THE NEXT DOZEN SECONDS
OF LIESEL MEMINGER’S LIFE
She turns on her heel and looks as far
as she can down this ruined canal
that was once Himmel Street. She sees two
men carrying a body and she follows them.
When she saw the rest of them, Liesel coughed. She listened momentarily as a man told the others that they had found one of the bodies in pieces, in one of the maple trees.
There were shocked pajamas and torn faces. It was the boy’s hair she saw first.
Rudy?
She did more than mouth the word now. “Rudy?”
He lay with yellow hair and closed eyes, and the book thief ran toward him and fell down. She dropped the black book. “Rudy,” she sobbed, “wake up ….” She grabbed him by his shirt and gave him just the slightest disbelieving shake. “Wake up, Rudy,” and now, as the sky went on heating and showering ash, Liesel was holding Rudy Steiner’s shirt by the front. “Rudy, please.” The tears grappled with her face. “Rudy, please, wake up, Goddamn it, wake up, I love you. Come on, Rudy, come on, Jesse Owens, don’t you know I love you, wake up, wake up, wake up ….”
But nothing cared.
The rubble just climbed higher. Concrete hills with caps of red. A beautiful, tear-stomped girl, shaking the dead.
“Come on, Jesse Owens—”
But the boy did not wake.
In disbelief, Liesel buried her head into Rudy’s chest. She held his limp body, trying to keep him from lolling back, until she needed to return him to the butchered ground. She did it gently.
Slow. Slow.
“God, Rudy …”
She leaned down and looked at his lifeless face and Liesel kissed her best friend, Rudy Steiner, soft and true on his lips. He tasted dusty and sweet. He tasted like regret in the shadows of trees and in the glow of the anarchist’s suit collection. She kissed him long and soft, and when she pulled herself away, she touched his mouth with her fingers. Her hands were trembling, her lips were fleshy, and she leaned in once more, this time losing control and misjudging it. Their teeth collided on the demolished world of Himmel Street.
She did not say goodbye. She was incapable, and after a few more minutes at his side, she was able to tear herself from the ground. It amazes me what humans can do, even when streams are flowing down their faces and they stagger on, coughing and searching, and finding.
THE NEXT DISCOVERY
The bodies of Mama and Papa,
; both lying tangled in the gravel
bedsheet of Himmel Street
Liesel did not run or walk or move at all. Her eyes had scoured the humans and stopped hazily when she noticed the tall man and the short, wardrobe woman. That’s my mama. That’s my papa. The words were stapled to her.