Free The Book Thief by Markus Zusak Page B

17.
    She remembered
the date well, as it was exactly a week before Christmas.
    As usual, her
nightly nightmare interrupted her sleep and she was woken by Hans Hubermann.
His hand held the sweaty fabric of her pajamas. “The train?” he whispered.
    Liesel
confirmed. “The train.”
    She gulped the
air until she was ready, and they began reading from the eleventh chapter of
The
Grave Digger’s Handbook.
Just past three o’clock, they finished it, and
only the final chapter, “Respecting the Graveyard,” remained. Papa, his silver
eyes swollen in their tiredness and his face awash with whiskers, shut the book
and expected the leftovers of his sleep. He didn’t get them.
    The light was
out for barely a minute when Liesel spoke to him across the dark.
    “Papa?”
    He made only a
noise, somewhere in his throat.
    “Are you awake,
Papa?”
    “Ja.”
    Up on one elbow.
“Can we finish the book, please?”
    There was a long
breath, the scratchery of hand on whiskers, and then the light. He opened the
book and began. “ ‘Chapter Twelve: Respecting the Graveyard.’ ”
    They read
through the early hours of morning, circling and writing the words she did not
comprehend and turning the pages toward daylight. A few times, Papa nearly
slept, succumbing to the itchy fatigue in his eyes and the wilting of his head.
Liesel caught him out on each occasion, but she had neither the selflessness to
allow him to sleep nor the hide to be offended. She was a girl with a mountain
to climb.
    Eventually, as
the darkness outside began to break up a little, they finished. The last
passage looked like this:
    We at the Bayern
Cemetery Association hope that we have informedand entertained you in the
workings, safety measures, and duties of grave digging. We wish you every
success with your career in the funerary arts and hope this book has helped in
some way.
    When the book
closed, they shared a sideways glance. Papa spoke.
    “We made it,
huh?”
    Liesel,
half-wrapped in blanket, studied the black book in her hand and its silver
lettering. She nodded, dry-mouthed and early-morning hungry. It was one of
those moments of perfect tiredness, of having conquered not only the work at
hand, but the night who had blocked the way.
    Papa stretched
with his fists closed and his eyes grinding shut, and it was a morning that
didn’t dare to be rainy. They each stood and walked to the kitchen, and through
the fog and frost of the window, they were able to see the pink bars of light
on the snowy banks of Himmel Street’s rooftops.
    “Look at the
colors,” Papa said. It’s hard not to like a man who not only notices the
colors, but speaks them.
    Liesel still
held the book. She gripped it tighter as the snow turned orange. On one of the
rooftops, she could see a small boy, sitting, looking at the sky. “His name was
Werner,” she mentioned. The words trotted out, involuntarily.
    Papa said,
“Yes.”
    At school during
that time, there had been no more reading tests, but as Liesel slowly gathered
confidence, she did pick up a stray textbook before class one morning to see if
she could read it without trouble. She could read every word, but she remained
stranded at a much slower pace than that of her classmates. It’s much easier,
she realized, to be on the verge of something than to actually be it. This
would still take time.
    One afternoon,
she was tempted to steal a book from the class bookshelf, but frankly, the
prospect of another corridor
Watschen
at the hands of Sister Maria was a
powerful enough deterrent. On top of that, there was actually no real desire in
her to take the books from school. It was most likely the intensity of her
November failure that caused this lack of interest, but Liesel wasn’t sure. She
only knew that it was there.
    In class, she
did not speak.
    She didn’t so
much as look the wrong way.
    As winter set
in, she was no longer a victim of Sister Maria’s