Free The Book Thief by Markus Zusak Page A

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 informed and 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 frustrations, preferring to watch as others were marched out to the corridor and given their just rewards. The sound of