Read The Book Thief for Free Online Page B

polluted the snow. Their faces
were fixed ahead in concentration.
    Once they’d
watched the soldiers disappear, the group of Steiners and Liesel walked past
some shop windows and the imposing town hall, which in later years would be
chopped off at the knees and buried. A few of the shops were abandoned and
still labeled with yellow stars and anti-Jewish slurs. Farther down, the church
aimed itself at the sky, its rooftop a study of collaborated tiles. The street,
overall, was a lengthy tube of gray—a corridor of dampness, people stooped in
the cold, and the splashed sound of watery footsteps.
    At one stage,
Rudy rushed ahead, dragging Liesel with him.
    He knocked on
the window of a tailor’s shop.
    Had she been
able to read the sign, she would have noticed that it belonged to Rudy’s
father. The shop was not yet open, but inside, a man was preparing articles of
clothing behind the counter. He looked up and waved.
    “My papa,” Rudy
informed her, and they were soon among a crowd of various-sized Steiners, each
waving or blowing kisses at their father or simply standing and nodding hello
(in the case of the oldest ones), then moving on, toward the final landmark
before school.
    THE
LAST STOP
     
    The road of yellow stars
    It was a place
nobody wanted to stay and look at, but almost everyone did. Shaped like a long,
broken arm, the road contained several houses with lacerated windows and
bruised walls. The Star of David was painted on their doors. Those houses were
almost like lepers. At the very least, they were infected sores on the injured
German terrain.
    “Schiller
Strasse,” Rudy said. “The road of yellow stars.”
    At the bottom,
some people were moving around. The drizzle made them look like ghosts. Not
humans, but shapes, moving about beneath the lead-colored clouds.
    “Come on, you
two,” Kurt (the oldest of the Steiner children) called back, and Rudy and
Liesel walked quickly toward him.
    At school, Rudy
made a special point of seeking Liesel out during the breaks. He didn’t care
that others made noises about the new girl’s stupidity. He was there for her at
the beginning, and he would be there later on, when Liesel’s frustration boiled
over. But he wouldn’t do it for free.
    THE
ONLY THING WORSE THAN
     
    A BOY WHO HATES YOU
     
    A boy who loves you.
    In late April,
when they’d returned from school for the day, Rudy and Liesel waited on Himmel
Street for the usual game of soccer. They were slightly early, and no other
kids had turned up yet. The one person they saw was the gutter-mouthed
Pfiffikus.
    “Look there.”
Rudy pointed.
    A
PORTRAIT OF PFIFFIKUS
     
    He was a delicate frame.
     
    He was white hair.
     
    He was a black raincoat, brown pants, decomposing shoes, and
     
    a mouth—and what a mouth it was.
    “Hey,
Pfiffikus!”
    As the distant
figure turned, Rudy started whistling.
    The old man
simultaneously straightened and proceeded to swear with a ferocity that can
only be described as a talent. No one seemed to know the real name that
belonged to him, or at least if they did, they never used it. He was only
called Pfiffikus because you give that name to someone who likes to whistle,
which Pfiffikus most definitely did. He was constantly whistling a tune called
the Radetzky March, and all the kids in town would call out to him and
duplicate that tune. At that precise moment, Pfiffikus would abandon his usual
walking style (bent forward, taking large, lanky steps, arms behind his
raincoated back) and erect himself to deliver abuse. It was then that any
impression of serenity was violently interrupted, for his voice was brimming
with rage.
    On this
occasion, Liesel followed Rudy’s taunt almost as a reflex action.
    “Pfiffikus!” she
echoed, quickly adopting the appropriate cruelty that childhood seems to
require. Her whistling was awful, but there was no time to perfect it.
    He chased them,
calling out. It started with
“Geh’