Fic: A Changing of Hands [The Book Thief][2/2]

[antistar_e]

<-- return to previous part

As the snow melts into dirty grey ridges along the sides of the roads, Papa adds to the errand list that Max and Paula run in the mornings.

"We're not quite there yet," he tells them. "But soon people will be throwing open their shutters and realizing just how dull the winter has made their houses. We need to stock up on these color bricks," the list exchanges hands; Paula leans over Max's shoulder, brows hunkering together like they, too, need to put their heads together to scrutinize the words. "And later, I will show you how to mix paint, ja? It's never a bad idea to be prepared."

Outside the shop where Hans Hubermann gets his paints, they spot Bettina Steiner and Kristina Muller across the street.

Both are definitely supposed to be in school.

They see each other in the same moment, and, clearly caught, Rudy and Tommy's younger sisters pause in order to whisper urgently to each other, cupping their hands around the other's ear. They clearly choose flight over confrontation, because when Max and Paula look back, both girls have vanished.

Liesel hears about this later, while she and Max are pumping water for Mama's washing, to be done in the morning while she has "some blessed peace and quiet, for a change." They are counting the stars; Max from one end of the sky, Liesel to the other, racing to see who can reach the middle first, a point designated by the scaffolding at the top of the hill that will be the new church steeple.

"Do you think they all have names?" he asks her in wonder.

"How can they?" Who could possibly name all the stars in the sky?

A noise, a scuffing of loose shoes on cobblestone distracts them, and Bettina appears. Kristina's with her, carrying a pot against her hip.

"Are you going to tell?" comes immediately out of the Steiner girl without any preamble whatsoever, flung to the ground between them.

Max lets go of the handle, and the gush of water gulps back to a trickle.

"Tell what?"

"Tell our parents! That -- you know --" her eyes dart towards Liesel, and she hisses the rest of her sentence, "That we weren't in school."

Liesel hikes her eyebrows up. "You little saumensch!" she exclaims in surprise. "What were you skipping school for?"

"None of your business!" She draws herself up, scowling the scowl of best friend's little sisters everywhere. "Well? Aren't you?"

Max looks amused. "Why would I do that?"

The girls exchange glances. They're almost twelve. Their jumpers come short at the wrists, and they aren't quite growing yet, but there's a longness to their faces that suggests they're thinking about it. They're inseparable. Kristina's braid is long and brown and skinny as a rat's tail, her hairline marching high along her forehead, and Bettina has Rudy's hair, lemon-blonde.

Liesel tightens her arms around herself. The sky above them is scattered by sugar-colored pinpricks of light; there is very little streetlight in the poor sector of Molching to block them out.

"Where did you come from, anyway?" Bettina wants to know, surprising them both. Nobody's ever actually asked before. Kristina edges around them, saying, excuse me, Liesel, so that she can pump water into her pot. "Rudy says that you're one of the Hubermanns and that we should be nice to you, but that's all he says."

"I used to live with them."

"When?"

"Not too long ago. I had to hide in their basement."

This gets their attention.

Kristina cranes her head around, frowning. "Why?"

Max fishes for an answer, murkily scanning the ground like perhaps he's dropped it. "The same reason Rudy was never allowed to paint himself black," is what he finally goes with. "I couldn't go out like I was, either, but unlike Rudy, I couldn't wash it off, so I had to hide, instead, so that nobody saw me. The Hubermanns kept me safe."

Bettina nods, because that makes perfect sense to her.

"What did you do during air raids?" she asks, and then, seemingly not needing the answer spelled out for her, "Did Liesel come and read to you? She read to us. That kept us safe."

"Bettina." Liesel is splashed with surprise, droplets clinging warmly to her skin. She hadn't thought about how it might look from a child's point of view: Liesel Meminger read in the shelter, nobody panicked, and when the bombs fell, they always fell elsewhere. The one time they didn't make it to the shelter in time, the bombs obliterated parts of Molching. Cause, effect.

Beside her, Max says something.

It sounds a lot like, "What a word-shaker, ja?"

That summer, while there's no school, Liesel goes with her mother and Max and Papa up and down the streets of Molching, painting. She and Paula push the paint cart, Papa and Max carry the ladder, and Paula, it turns out, is very good at it. (Not as good as Hans Hubermann, of course, but they agree in a completely unbiased way that few are.) Liesel doesn't have much of an eye for straight lines, and Max is more of a menace than anything, always getting distracted by painting the sky as it looks that day, jaundiced yellow eye watching their progress against a blue-white smeary backdrop, and Paula comes and paints it thickly over in whatever color they're supposed to be using. He takes a painter's pencil and chases her down and tries to mark her face with something, which means Liesel has to declare war on him as a matter of course. They all come home very dirty.

"I did not think I was hiring children to help me," Papa complains, very fondly.

One bright yellow morning, while they're touching up the trim around the cobbler's window and Papa is showing Paula how to stencil letters for a sign, Rudy comes running up to them.

Without slowing, he picks up his holler of a greeting and hurtles it at the back of Liesel's head. "Hey, ass-scratcher!"

Liesel wheels around, already slinging back: "you filthy pig!" and "Rudy Steiner, you saukerl," and "what do you want?" volleys out of her without pause.

Rudy comes to a panting stop next to them on the sidewalk. He looks excited. He looks faultlessly, flawlessly German.

"Haven't you heard?" he says with great relish, because of course it's obvious that they haven't heard: he's the one carrying the newspaper. "They arrested the old mayor for war crimes!"

All work ceases.

Liesel: "They what?"

He thrusts the newspaper at her.

She spreads it out on top of the paint cans and tarps, and he crowds in next to her like he's going to read it with her, even though he should already know what it says, since he brought it. He bends at the shoulder in order to reach her. Her skin crawls with awareness, attention leaping away from the pages in front of her, and she wants him to move away. At the same time, she wants everyone to see, because if there's anyone entitled to stand this close to Rudy Steiner, with his wide shoulders and teddy bear eyes, it's her, his best friend.

He's the oldest Steiner child still living on Himmel Street. The elder siblings, Kurt and Agnes, both found work at a hospital up north, outside of Cologne and close to the border.

Technically, Kurt is still destined to inherit the Schneidermeister when their father retires, but in practice, it's the middle children who show the most proclivity for it. Rudy is a natural salesman, all ragged charm familiar to everybody up and down Munich Street, and his two younger brothers are the cleverest in their respective classes when it comes to maths. They will be good at business, in time.

Bettina and the baby are too young to have any clear idea of what awaits them besides more hand-me-down clothes and more hand-me-down sighs from Sister Maria, "Not another Steiner."

And the youngest that Barbara Steiner still carries on her hips, the shape of it plain underneath her clothes, is a complete mystery.

What is that woman thinking, having more children at her age? Mama mutters, but not very loudly. She remembers when the newlywed Steiners first moved in next door. Her own children had been fairly young then, and now Hans Jr. is a newlywed himself. Time does that, and it's only the young who ever move away.

"But why would they arrest the mayor?" she asks presently, thinking of the man in uniform at the bonfire, slapping down fat, inflammatory words to a roaring German grandstand.

"They're arresting everybody they think had something to do with --"

He stops, his eyes flicking up. Liesel's mother watches him back, and Max stays perched on top of the ladder like a feathery brown owl.

"-- well, with the war."

"Molching's old mayor? Really? The only thing he's guilty of doing is nothing." He let the parades happen. He let Dachau sit like a malignant, bleeding lump outside of town. Complicit, yes. Guilty? Unless there's something that never came to light, she isn't so sure.

She thinks, belatedly, about the mayor's wife.

The thought, at first distant and detached through the lens of years, suddenly rushes at her. She has not seen Ilsa Hermann since that visit to Himmel Street, when she gave her a small, blank black book and told her to write. She's not been driven to go see her, and so hasn't. How could three years pass like that, without much thought to the people it leaves behind?

She steps back. Rudy, still standing too close, catches her with his hands, steadying her before she can trip on the pavement.

They execute the former mayor of Molching.

They don't give much explanation. When they are the victors of a war, and you are the losers, they feel like they don't need to.

It's a cool autumn day, and the sky is the color of freshly-fallen snow. Death takes the mayor's soul and falls upward into that white, white, whiteness without looking at a single face.

Liesel Meminger won't know it, not for many years yet, but after her husband's execution, Ilsa Hermann will gather her accounts and her solicitor and she will write a new will. She'll sign it in tandem with the cold wind at her back, coming in through the open window. It leaves her house, her books, and all of her money not to grasping relatives, but to Liesel Meminger, who had something of Johann in her.

When the news does reach her after the old widow's death, Liesel will sit at her kitchen table for a very long time.

When she stands, she'll faint.

But we haven't gotten to that point yet.

We're not done with 1946.

There's more good news, and it's on its way.

It's July, and there's a visitor disembarking off the train in Pasing. He carries no map with him, no directions. Knowledge of where he's going is seared onto him, papering the inside of his chest the way a freezing man will stuff the insides of his coat with newspaper for insulation. And while there are some men who go their entire lives without every once bothering to look at what's written, large and plain, on each ventricle of their hearts, for fear of what it might be, he is not one of them.

Himmel Street 33
Molching

A knock fires against the Hubermann's door.

Not Rudy -- they all know the sound of his knuckles by then -- and not Frau Holtzapfel, taking advantage of Max's absence from the front steps to come complain about something, for the same reason. Could it be Frau Koffman, come to ask Paula Meminger to mind her kids at some future date? Could it be bad news -- about Hans Jr. and his wife, about Trudy?

Papa, who is closest to the door, gets up.

There is a man outside, with a soldier's posture and a soldier's haircut. He is the kind of man Frau Diller would be pleased to see salute in her shop.

The first question:

"Hans Hubermann?"

The answer, handed back to him across the threshold:

"Yes?"

For Papa doesn't recognize him, though something in his memory tells him that he should, faded like the afterimage of a flashbulb.

The second question:

"Do you still play the accordion?"

And then, from inside the house, a cry leaps outwards:

"Walter!"

Many years from now, when most of the buildings on Himmel Street are condemned due to structural insecurity and torn down, including number 33, there will be no one left here who remembers what happened here on the steps one swampy July evening, 1946. Nobody and nothing except for the dirt and the stones in the road, and then, eventually, not even them.

There should be a memorial plaque. There is, in a way, except it exists inside the people who were there, who saw.

It happens with a shout on the steps of 33 Himmel Street; a Nazi soldier and a concentration camp survivor embrace like young boys.

For Christmas that year, though money is still tight and Mama makes a show of pursing her lips and tsking over the small amount of coin they collect between them ("it's those damn Americans," she's quick to insist, whenever Liesel or Papa remind her that it's the best they can do, Mama, please, "oh, fine, or the British or the French or whoever, always extracting every pfennig from us all to pay for the privilege of bombing our cities, if they'd just let us recover in peace, we might have some actual money around here!" And that was Economics 101, by Rosa Hubermann,) Liesel's surprised with a gift of not one, not two --

But five books.

"Well, it's not like we don't all know what to get you, saumensch!" Rudy Steiner laughs when she expresses her surprise. He looks very pleased with himself.

His gift had been a play called The Curse of the Mediterranean, which he'd clearly gotten from his American coworkers and was now expediently gifting on to her, because it's all in English and contains photographs of American actors from the corresponding moving picture of the same name. She doesn't know what came first, if the play was written about the picture or if the picture was adapted from the play, but it promises high-seas adventures and a dashing pirate. It's a very Rudy thing, she decides.

From Papa and Mama, she gets a romance that the shopkeeper at the bookshop by Papa's office in Munich suggested would be suitable for "a young woman."

"I told him you'd never met a book you didn't like," Hans explains when she gives them a questioning look. "But who knows, this might be the first."

"Thank you, Papa. Thank you, Mama."

(Liesel does not hate the book.)

From her mother -- Liesel calls both Rosa and Paula "Mama," and when she needs to differentiate, it's usually either "the nice one, which Mama do you think I'm talking about" or "my mother." She never calls Paula "my real mother," because that's not fair -- she gets a botanical kind of book. It's very short and comes with beautiful illustrations.

"Perhaps we can read it together?" Paula offers shyly.

"You won't need my help," Liesel takes the confidence of that statement and kisses it against her mother's cheek.

Herr and Frau Hubermann Jr., who come for brunch, bring with them a tin of biscuits and a collection of fairytales for Liesel. There's a translator's note on the very first page, stating that no fairy tale survives translation entirely intact, and that these are best enjoyed in their original Russian.

Startled, Liesel looks up, because surely Hans Jr., who dearly loved the Fuhrer and fought the Russians, wouldn't give her Russian childrens' stories?

Hans Jr.'s wife catches her eye. She winks.

The last book to join Liesel's collection that day comes on the evening train and traipses itself to her door through a late, mushy rainfall. At first, through the preoccupation of dinnertime conversation, she mistakes the rap at the front door to be something the wind threw up against it, until the rap becomes a fist, banged hard into the wood.

Walter Kugler, of course, is the one who pounds on the door like a Nazi, with Max behind him, beaming.

"But it's not your religion!" is Liesel's surprised comment, after all the shouting and embracing has been done and a present finds its way into her hands, wrapped with newspaper and stuck with a bow.

Max draws her into another hug like he's been starved for it, kissing the top of her head and saying, "And since when do I need the excuse of a religion to bring you a gift, hmm?"

"If it bothers you," Walter suggests. His voice is slow, deep, and thoughtful, and it meanders ponderously over their shoulders to settle in their ears. "We'll say it's from me."

She pulls them inside so the production of hugging and boisterous greetings can be repeated with the Hubermanns -- well, a lot of embracing on Max's part, at any rate. Nobody quite knows Walter well enough to embrace him yet, and in fact, Paula puts her back up against a wall whenever he's near; a lifelong distrust of Nazis, and the corresponding arrival of Walter and departure of Max did that to her.

She and Max get tangled by the stove and hold each other tight for a very long moment, until Mama bustles them out of the way so she can offer the men some soup.

"Nonsense!" she declares, when they, in tandem, insist they couldn't possibly. "Paula did the cooking."

"Oh, well, in that case," and Max makes a show of pulling out a chair, and Rosa turns on him with a menacing shake of her wooden spoon and threatens, "Don't think you're not too old yet for a watchen, Herr Vandenburg," and laughter shakes its way across the table.

"Hold on," Max says, catching Liesel as she slips around him. "Wat ist los?"

He touches the corner of her mouth.

His thumb, when he holds it up to the light for inspection, comes away smeared with red paint.

Liesel rolls her eyes as hard as possible. "It's make-up," she points out, and resigns herself to enduring ceaseless teasing for the rest of the night. The lipstick, in its burnished golden-colored tube, had been a gift from Bettina and Kristina -- she hadn't asked where the money for it had come from. Criminal activity runs in the Steiner family, coupled as it always is with a giving streak.

"Are you meeting the young Herr Steiner later?" asks Walter Kugler slyly.

"Jesus, Mary, and Joseph."

It's only after the late supper, the catching up, and blankets have been procured for Walter and Max to sleep in front of the fire (there is, of course, no talk of them finding other lodgings for the night, because everyone knows they'll just go back to the train station and sleep there,) does Liesel get a chance to open the present.

It's a book, of course. She and Max are in the kitchen, underneath the window, which warms their back with the friendly weight of starlight, and Liesel's breath catches when she feels it in her hands; loose pages, loose binding.

It's another book made by hand.

He turns away to give her the privacy of opening it for the first time.

The Paintbrush
for Liesel Meminger
from Max Vandenburg

She leans against the sill, lifting each page slowly and letting it fall against the previous.

There are very few words in this one; it introduces a girl and a paintbrush and then lets the illustrations tell the rest. At first, the girl uses her paintbrush to write in straight lines up and down each page, drawing letters that become words that become a dictionary. And then she discovers that she doesn't have to keep to one page: she starts climbing them, pulling the paintbrush behind her. Her monochrome world gains color as she hauls herself up through it, drawing the stairs in front of her for her to climb, then adding trees and buildings and yellow-haired boys. It ends with her standing at the top of the second-to-last page, surveying her handiwork; below her, the sky is gorgeous and blue, marked with skidding white clouds and tightrope beams of light that fade as they progress upward, into the inkiness of a night sky.

On the last page, there's nothing but her shoe and a trail of dripping paint, disappearing upward.

"Oh, Max," she says, looking up to find him watching her with swampy eyes. "Thank you." And, "My mother would be able to read this."

He nods. Perhaps that's why there were so few words in it, she thinks.

Suddenly, she has an idea.

"Wait here."

She runs upstairs to her room, careful not to wake Paula Meminger, lifting her new books off her bedside table until she gets her hands on the one she wants.

"I meant to give this to you on the day you left," she tells him when she rejoins him in the kitchen. "But that felt too much like …"

She doesn't finish the thought.

As always, Max does not need help understanding Liesel Meminger.

"But you would rather give it to me only if I came back."

They look at the book. It's small in Liesel's hands. The cover is black and there are no words on it.

Somehow, it doesn't hurt at all, handing over The Book Thief to Max Vandenburg.

This brings Liesel Meminger's total number of books to 23, and looking at the stacks of them pushed up around her bed prompts Papa into building her a shelf. He hangs it on the wall in her and Paula's room.

They use paint cans as bookends, and Liesel starts with those that are oldest and most important; The Gravedigger's Handbook, The Standover Man, The Word-Shaker, the water-swollen Whistler, and ending on the other end with the newest, The Painbrush tightly secured between the hard covers of the others.

Look at that, Liesel thinks. The book thief has a bookshelf.

A meteor shower slashes across the sky of a place called Sikhote-Alin in February of the following year.

The impact crater found in the woods afterwards is the only thing Rudy wants to talk about. The Americans at his work have him convinced it's aliens.

"You ass-scratcher," Liesel informs him with all the put-upon wisdom of her eighteen years. "The Soviets have bigger things to worry about than covering up the arrival of aliens from outer space."

"Yes, but," Rudy dismisses the logic of this with an eager, many-toothed grin. "What if?"

His job, most days, takes him into Munich. He even rides the train with Papa sometimes, but comes back much later in the evening and has too much time to kill in the meantime. The Americans occupying there spotted him at an athletics evaluation two years previous, and asked him if he'd like to come work for them. This time, Alex and Barbara Steiner were not there to say no for him, which is how Rudy became the perfect German poster child for postwar propaganda.

Of course, that's not what they were calling it then. Later, Rudy and Liesel will identify it for what it was, but at the time, it's just a job that allows Rudy to go to Munich to read speeches at rallies that are handed to him and get his photograph taken. It pays handsomely.

"It's all gone to his head," she complains to her mother one morning, as Paula Meminger brushes out the snarls from her hair. "He thinks he's so handsome."

There's no mirror in their room, so she can't see the way her mother smiles indulgently at the top of her head.

After the fall of Poland to communism, and on the same day that the American President Harry S. Truman announces his plan to fight that spreading communist plague by signing a congressional act known as the Truman Doctrine, Tommy Muller marries his sweetheart.

It's a warm, sunny May day, and Karsa's hands tremble so badly when she addresses the guests that Tommy has to tap her and ask her to repeat herself so that he can translate.

Is it possible, she signs, slower this time. To die of happiness?

"Well, please don't do it now," Rudy calls over from Tommy's other side, and Karsa's laugh smears out of her, watery.

She's originally from Zurich; she's completely deaf and she talks with her hands, something the hearing-impaired Tommy Muller didn't even know existed until he saw her communicating with her parents outside Frau Diller's on a colorless Tuesday the year he turned sixteen. They'll say, later, that they both knew it in that moment: that something in Karsa and something in Tommy sat up straight during that introduction and said, This. This is the kind of person I could marry.

Rudy, of course, is best man, and afterward, he leads everybody in a round of exceptionally hard stamping and clapping, so that Tommy and his new wife can feel it, shuddering into them through the floors and shaking up the air.

"You're going to dance with me later, right, saumensch?" he yells in Liesel's ear during the processional out.

"Stick your dance!" she yells back.

On the steps of the church, he grabs her hand and spins her around and, caught off-guard by it, she twirls. Her hair scatters around her face.

"There," he says, triumphant. "A dance!"

"Saukerl," she retorts. He doesn't let go of her hand.

She thinks, right then, of how Karsa had told her once that her favorite thing were the days she came running down Himmel Street to Tommy Muller's apartment block and found that Max Vandenburg was playing the accordion on the front steps of number 33. It didn't matter to her that he played more wrong notes at first than right, because what did she care? She couldn't hear it.

I cannot miss music because I don't know what music is, she'd explained to Liesel, in that happy way she does everything. It's no loss for me. I just loved watching it breathe in his hands.

Liesel runs down the steps in the courtyard with the wind at her back. There's a coolness to it that sticks its fingers down the back of her blouse.

Someone calls out to her from one of the windows. It's the kind of thing that's meant to make her swerve; a great, fat shout dropped down from above to splatter against the pavement.

She doesn't slow down. She's already late.

In the office, her lowly position in the pecking order means that she's relegated to the corner desk, where there's a gap in the baseboard where the walls don't meet up quite right. It lets in a draft on cold days that leaves Liesel's ankles feeling frosted over and stiff. She's taken to wearing two pairs of stockings to work, and in her last letter from Molching, Bettina suggested she use nail lacquer on the base of a laddering tear to keep it from widening.

It's perhaps because of this that Liesel feels no guilt about wearing boots when she's not at the office: they're much easier to run in, at any rate.

Rudy lives with four of his teammates in a ground-level room, right before the courtyard widens where it meets the road. Liesel dodges around a group of young men jogging mechanically in the other direction, and cuts across the grass.

Eduard Pflavelbergen answers to her knocking, a towel slung over his bare shoulders and a toothbrush making a pouch out of his cheek. Liesel registers all of that exposed boy muscle and her attention skitters back and forth in a mad dash like a rabbit caught in a beam of light.

"There you are!" Rudy levers his shoulder against Eduard's side and manhandles him out of the way. "What kind of hour do you call this!"

"Shut up and let's go, you ass-licking swine," Liesel answers, breathlessly and with great affection.

Rudy exits onto the front step, pulling the door shut behind him and not letting it rebound on the volley of catcalls and jeers that try to stick their feet into the gap. Outside, they share a commiserating, scornful look. Liesel has not set foot inside that dormitory and she has no intention to until somebody fumigates. It's overinfested with adolescent males.

"I can't believe they're trying to turn you into Olympic hopefuls," she says for what has to be the hundredth time.

"They're not so bad," Rudy deliberately sidesteps her friendly barb. "Besides, nothing's set yet. We have to qualify first."

They're quiet for a beat, imagining -- also for the hundredth time -- what awaits them if they do qualify. Helsinki, for the Olympic Games of 1952! Rudy Steiner has not traveled more than thirty miles from the spot where he was born. The thought of traveling to Finland vibrates through him. Liesel isn't sure Rudy could find Finland on a map, to be honest; he spent most of those lessons in Sister Maria's class folding miniature paper airplanes to throw at the back of Tommy Muller's head.

Gallantly, he offers her his arm as they walk back through the courtyard, and she knocks it away.

She catches him looking at her boots, which are crusted over with mud and bits of grass, and knows she doesn't have to explain where she'd been, or why she's late. Self-consciously, she touches her hair, and picks bits of dried thistle off her skirt.

Sure enough, after a beat, Rudy ventures, "So how are Max and Walter?"

"Fine," she matches his casual tone. "And so are the bees, before you ask. We went up and opened up the hives -- to see which ones survived the winter, see?" It was the first time Liesel had done such a thing; standing by and watching the sleepy bees cluster across Walter's big, gloved hands, Max behind her with the smoker and grinning through the mesh of his mask. She's still so glad they decided to move closer; Stuttgart was too far away for everyone involved. "They'll harvest the honey later in the summer."

"Is there any profit in the honey business?" Rudy folds his hands behind his back, adopting a serious look.

"Enough."

The silence lasts until they've left the grounds behind, and then Rudy sidles in close, making a dig for her ribs with his elbow.

"Come off it, saumensch, I know when something's bothering you. What is it?"

"Nothing, it's stupid," she shakes her head and he waits her out -- her best and longest friend, Rudy Steiner, who spent most of their childhood avoiding making her angry because he'd seen the bloody mess she'd made of Ludwig Schmiekl and had no desire to match him. Liesel Meminger has taken her fists to Rudy Steiner exactly once: it was a beautiful day, a parade day, and he had her pinned to the road. She beat him bloody. "It's just -- Walter keeps calling me 'Frau Steiner' and he won't let it go."

Rudy is unsympathetic.

"Well, whose fault is that!" he demands, and turns around as they walk to face her, his hands on his hips. "Marry me already, and then it won't be a problem anymore."

They cross the road.

"Seriously," Rudy jumps up onto the curb on the other side. "Why haven't we done this?"

Liesel makes an indignant noise. "Because you haven't asked me yet, you saukerl!"

"Well. I'm asking. When are we getting married, saumensch?"

She thinks about it, positioning the words behind her teeth and lining them up to fire at him in just the right way to make him trip.

"How about summer?"

He stumbles, right on cue.

"Late summer."

He sees where she's going with that, and bares his white-picket teeth at her. "When the apples are coming in?"

She smiles back.

"Shall we steal them, then?"

"No." It comes out of him with no hesitation. This time, when he offers her his arm, she tucks her hand into his elbow and lets herself be drawn into his side. He hasn't been climbing hills all day to disturb beehives; his hair is neat and his collar's straight, and he still smiles at her like it's something he'll give her every time she asks. Her, Liesel Meminger, the girl he's going to marry.

Her heart feels strange, pulpy, and overlarge for her chest.

"No," Rudy Steiner says again, with confidence. "I don't think we'll have to steal anything ever again."

-
fin