The night she wrote the letter, she overheard a conversation between Hans and Rosa.
“What’s she doing writing to her mother?” Mama was saying. Her voice was surprisingly calm and caring. As you can imagine, this worried the girl a great deal. She’d have preferred to hear them arguing. Whispering adults hardly inspired confidence.
“She asked me,” Papa answered, “and I couldn’t say no. How could I?”
“Jesus, Mary, and Joseph.” Again with the whisper. “She should just forget her. Who knows where she is? Who knows what they’ve done to her?”
In bed, Liesel hugged herself tight. She balled herself up. She thought of her mother and repeated Rosa Hubermann’s questions.
Where was she?
What had they done to her?
And once and for all, who, in actual fact, were they?
DEAD LETTERS
Flash forward to the basement, September 1943.
A fourteen-year-old girl is writing in a small dark-covered book. She is bony but strong and has seen many things. Papa sits with the accordion at his feet.
He says, “You know, Liesel? I nearly wrote you a reply and signed your mother’s name.” He scratches his leg, where the plaster used to be. “But I couldn’t. I couldn’t bring myself.”
Several times, through the remainder of January and the entirety of February 1940, when Liesel searched the mailbox for a reply to her letter, it clearly broke her foster father’s heart. “I’m sorry,” he would tell her. “Not today, huh?” In hindsight, she saw that the whole exercise had been pointless. Had her mother been in a position to do so, she would have already made contact with the foster care people, or directly with the girl, or the Hubermanns. But there had been nothing.
To lend insult to injury, in mid-February, Liesel was given a letter from another ironing customer, the Pfaffelhürvers, from Heide Strasse. The pair of them stood with great tallness in the doorway, giving her a melancholic regard. “For your mama,” the man said, handing her the envelope. “Tell her we’re sorry. Tell her we’re sorry.”
That was not a good night in the Hubermann residence.
Even when Liesel retreated to the basement to write her fifth letter to her mother (all but the first one yet to be sent), she could hear Rosa swearing and carrying on about those Pfaffelhürver Arschlöcher and that lousy Ernst Vogel.
“Feuer soll’n’s brunzen für einen Monat!” she heard her call out. Translation: “They should all piss fire for a month!”
Liesel wrote.
When her birthday came around, there was no gift. There was no gift
because there was no money, and at the time, Papa was out of tobacco.
“I told you.” Mama pointed a finger at him. “I told you not to give her both books at Christmas. But no. Did you listen? Of course not!”
“I know!” He turned quietly to the girl. “I’m sorry, Liesel. We just can’t afford it.”
Liesel didn’t mind. She didn’t whine or moan or stamp her feet. She simply swallowed the disappointment and decided on one calculated risk—a present from herself. She would gather all of the accrued letters to her mother, stuff them into one envelope, and use just a tiny portion of the washing and ironing money to mail it. Then, of course, she would take the Watschen, most likely in the kitchen, and she would not make a sound.
Three days later, the plan came to fruition.
“Some of it’s missing.” Mama counted the money a fourth time, with Liesel over at the stove. It was warm there and it cooked the fast flow of her blood. “What happened, Liesel?”
She lied. “They must have given me less than usual.”
“Did you count it?”
She broke. “I spent it, Mama.”
Rosa came closer. This was not a good sign. She was very close to the wooden spoons. “You what?”
Before she could answer, the wooden spoon came down on Liesel Meminger’s body like the gait of God. Red marks like footprints, and they burned. From the floor, when it was over, the girl actually looked up and explained.