Announcing – A Brief Intermission
Lottery
Noun.
1. any scheme for the distribution of prizes by chance.
2. an affair of chance.
Congratulations. You are the 123,456,789,876,543,210th person to die in Round 1003.
You are entitled to: one wish(es).
Terms and Conditions
One: The Dead must remain deceased.
Two: The live shall live until their time has come.
Three: And ignorant.
Four: Any winner attempting to travel back as a substantial being may only be felt and heard by the living for a period of exactly one day.
Five: There is no going back.
The sky lightened and sky darkened. Clouds came and clouds went. Shapes formed, shapes dissipated. Oh, and the colours. How the colours melted and moulded, darkened and lightened, spilt red once more no less than seventeen more times.
It's a horrible thought, but sometimes the survivors have to keep on living, no matter how hard the prospect may be.
It was the way of the world.
For Liesel Meminger, life has never seemed so dull, so unpromising. What was it ahead of her than she was living for? What was it, the Big Picture she had never grasped, even before the Incident?
The Incident
noun,
A distinct piece of action, or an episode, as in a story or play.
e.g. A world war.
Ah, the dark times. Times when everyone and everything was affected. Dark clouds lingered permanently above them, back then. The future didn't matter back then. What mattered was living through the present, one more day closer towards the finish line, be it victory or loss. In those last months, it hardly mattered.
So much had been destroyed, and so much had risen from the ashes, months and years later. The people united in their fear. Liesel was given another chance to live with such open arms.
And Himmel Street rose from the dead, something hardly alive, though not quite beyond help. Simply, it was stuck between two conflicting forces, and one final tug left it in the land of the living. Roads, unfortunately for Death, weren't on his list of collectables.
A confession
Liesel will never forget the sight of her beloved street running, seeping with blood, blood that had yet to dry, blood that, in memory, never would.
But that was all so many years ago, of course. Liesel has grown up. Liesel has witnessed Death, unforgiving Death in all his raging glory who spared no one, no one, even when she begged and begged –
A few whispered words of the past
Papa? No. No. Papa. Papa!
Oh, Rudy.
For Liesel, no matter how hard she tried to forget, there were always times in the day when boredom engulfed her and she thought about the beautiful boy with his lemon-coloured hair, the accordionist father with the amazing talent of simply blending into his surroundings, both who would have kept her entertained whenever the day passed too slowly. There were just too many gaps in between every hour, every day, and every lonely year.
A change worth mentioning
Liesel Meminger has given up on her words, now seeking solace among the company of numbers.
There was something about them, something so incredibly sensible yet dreadful about the numbers. For Liesel, they stayed the same, and as long as she paid attention and did them right, the sums would always add up. They'd make sense. When she put it down on paper, and here she needn't think much as she put it all down on paper, not like words where one had to remember the power each word held, and had to take care placing the words together, the numbers would stay on the surface of her paper, unless she willed them away.
There was nothing random, spontaneous or surreal about numbers. The wonder of mathematics was that no matter how many bombs could shower the earth in how many seconds, no matter how many minds or souls could be destroyed and how much blood a street of German civilians could lose, numbers would still remain intact, unbroken and unchanged, not even needing to brace themselves for another ambush.
Numbers couldn't abandon you when you needed them most.
At the end of the day, when there was nothing else for her, nothing else Liesel could do, the monotony of her numbers would help her survive another day, and the motion of forever adding, adding and subtracting till the ends of her days, would be enough for Liesel to quicken her pace, as if there was something else at the end of it all.
The books, however, were still there. It had broken Isla Hermann's heart to see them unattended and the books she had occasionally left for Liesel untouched. The mayor, however understood, being a man of little words when none were asked to be said.
A brief description of the important man in the shadows
The mayor's name was Heinz Hermann.
Bugermeister Heinz Hermann in public.
He was ten years older than his wife, two inches shorter and much, much wider.
He fancied himself a counter, not a reader.
Oh, yes, and he was the one who pointed to Liesel the other road.
One night, when Liesel had had enough of staying shut in her room, she'd opened her door and began exploring.
The Hermann household was large, of course. Even through strained times, it remained well-preserved, not demolished but merely subdued.
A wonderful occurrence
There was light coming from the closed door at the end of the corridor.
Being yet to shed her inquisitive skin for adulthood, Liesel edged a little closer until her ear was pressed to the cold wood. It was Herr Hermann's room, of course. Her new papa. Her breathing slowed. Her mind halted. She waited for something to happen. A sign.
There came the soft sound of a good, sharp ink tip on paper. A sound Liesel had heard, quietly, at the back of her head for months, or perhaps even years, on end. It was the sound of placing a bit of soul on paper. The sound of memories, of hope, of dreams and confessions.
It was comforting, the sound. After half an hour, Liesel finally walked back to her room in a cloud of serenity. Before long, she had made up her mind to go back to the door, tomorrow.
And so it began. The start of our heroine making her way out of despair. The second night was spent with a woolly blanket wrapped around her shoulders and a small tin of biscuits depleting in numbers. Occasionally, an accompaniment of sighing and whistling was heard on the other side.
Heinz Hermann opened the door to a sleeping girl on the sixth night. He was bewildered, but being a man of good morals and a right sense of judgement that had landed him the town mayor, he lifted the girl up – and Schleisse, was she light – then put her to bed.
The next morning, breakfast was held at the table and none of them spoke. But something had definitely changed. When Liesel saw Herr Hermann, she no longer felt shy (he was, after all, still the mayor).
The unwritten agreement
Liesel Meminger is given permission to sit at the door and listen to the music,
so long as Herr Hermann doesn't replace her papa.
After two weeks of prominent eavesdropping, Heinz Hermann invited Liesel in. "Come," he said softly, blunt brown eyes focussed on her face. "You might like this."
The mayor's office room was designed to be spacious but the architect had underestimated the mayor's capability to fill space with work. The fireplace was meant to warm up the room, but Herr Hermann's desk was placed so far away it hardly mattered if anything was alight. Heinz preferred his desk positioned close to his door. It was almost as if he couldn't be bothered walking such a distance from one end of the room to the other. Being the very opposite of Hans Hubermann, his protruding stomach and stout limbs made him impossible to miss.
What Liesel didn't count on was for Hermann to sit her down next to him and hand over a sheet of numbers and a pen.
"Get started," was all he instructed.
Question One
I have 5 siblings and a supply of 126 pieces of bread every week.
How much bread am I allowed to have every day if each of us are given the same amount?
Liesel, in return, picked up her pen and carefully wrote down her own questions.
Do I have parents?
Am I secretly housing a Jew in my basement?
And Is there nothing else to eat?
Her breath was caught when she looked at the question again. "I have 5 siblings…" Rudy Steiner had five siblings.
Heinz Hermann took one look at the paper five minutes later (What if my only brother died when I was nine? How many fathers am I allowed to have? ) and sighed. "This won't do, Liesel," he murmured, looking sadly at the sheet of questioned maths questions. "You must let go. You have to. Forget about your past and focus on the numbers."
Liesel, in an instant, cast her empty eyes on the mayor. "How? How can you stand this? How do you live?"
Heinz smiled sadly. "It still hurts Liesel. It'll always hurt when I think of him. Sometimes the pain lessens a little when I imagine him in a better place. He's happy, I know he is."
For a moment, Death turned to view the sudden appearance of Johann Hermann behind his shoulder. He paused, then decided better than to rebuke the dead. He had, after all, learnt his lesson.
"My wife retreats to her books. I am different. Numbers, Liesel, can help just as much."
It was with this reassurance that Liesel decided to give it a try. With a shaking hand, she picked up the pen again, trying to swallow down the faint memory of the last night in the basement. Then she took a deep breath, and started.
They worked in silence. An almost comfortable, but sometimes conscientious silence, of course. Heinz Hermann would never replace her papa, but the silence they shared made him more than just her benefactor. Liesel kept her head down and managed to finish three sheets of number questions before Heinz finally placed his pen down and ushered her to bed.
He smiled a little at the young woman's attempts. "It's good, isn't it? When they have left you, all of them, the numbers are here, right here. Always here. They're never gone."
And for a while, Liesel shared his pain. Johann Hermann watched silently from the sideline with so much he desperately wished to say but long understood he could not say them. He wanted to show Liesel what his death had done to his parents. He wanted to show her what they were like before all of this began, how happy they were, how bright they shone.
He wanted to hold his mother in his arms and tell her it was alright to let go and love Liesel. He wanted to touch his father's shoulder and tell them just what he thought of numbers.
But he didn't, simply because he couldn't. It was the unfairness and fairness of things. Some got a second chance because they deserved it. Some deserved a second chance but never got it. Death was never choosy, of course. Life, unfortunately, was.
A paralysing thought
Somewhere along their lives (or possibly deaths), they've wondered.
What was at the end of it all?
What were they was waiting to happen?
-----
By mid-afternoon, something was clear to Rudy – whoever had clumsily buried the remains of Himmel Street had forgotten Tommy Muller.
He stared at the assemblage of gravestones marking the rows of the dead he had never imagined could remain so silent.
There before him lay all of Himmel Street, randomly jumbled among themselves. Rudy had almost expected the families to assemble in alphabetical order, but then again, Death had caught their souls alphabetically.
Young boys, father, brothers, lovers. Bratty live blonde girls and admonishing mothers. Rudy took the time to kneel down and ponder every life that had been lost at every tiny grave. Every life that Death could have brought back, had the world been fair.
There was Liesel's mother, Frau Hubermann. It was stupid, Rudy knew, and probably extremely disrespectful, but he couldn't help laughing. They had buried Rosa Hubermann and Frau Holtzapfel side by side.
Ironic, isn't it?
Two sworn enemies, equal in scorn and blasphemy, forced to spend the rest of eternity with the other hardly an inch away. Space, after all, was limited.
For a moment Rudy paused, almost certain he had heard the familiar echo of Frau Hubermann's swears and the earth-shaking sound of Frau Holtzapfel's spitting. Even Pfiffikus - and they had buried him as Pfiffikus, for the old scoundrel who made Rosa Hubermann sound like a saint had taken his true name to his grave - even Pfiffikus' distant whistling could be heard. They were there, Rudy knew, just round the corner.
A fact to ponder
Rudy Steiner was no longer Not Alive, but that did not make him Not Dead.
And because of this minute difference between this boy and every other living, breathing boy, Rudy Steiner possessed the ability to hear things someone Not Dead would never be able to hear.
A confession of sorts
Often, humans cannot hear what they won't.
But it was there, that nagging feeling in his chest that told him perhaps Tommy Muller wasn't buried among the others because they hadn't found anything to bury.
And yet…
Rudy was certain, absolutely certain he hadn't seen Tommy among the dead that had left Himmel Street for its namesake. The crowd that did go in through the shining gates, the Hubermanns, the Steiners…none of them had the unique ability which Tommy possessed that always stood him out in a crowd. That, or his twitching.
But at the same time, Rudy was also certain Tommy had died. The boy certainly hadn't the will or stamina to survive a bombing, no matter how badly injured he could have ended up being. And Tommy, poor Tommy who was scared of the cold, the dark and the night outside couldn't have strayed from home on such a night. Most importantly, Rudy knew, Tommy Muller's house did not own a basement as Liesel's did.
So where was Tommy Muller?
The small mystery would be one to haunt Rudy more than once in the near future. He would wake up to the sound of breathing, convinced it wasn't his own, as if the fact that he could breathe still hadn't quite sunk in. The sheer stubbornness of his mind would have him searching through the phone book and visiting every Muller household in the neighbourhood.
Secretly, Death knew. Rudy, in his own way, was scared. After all, one boy had already risen from the dead. What would it mean if another one had, too?
-----
Something that had not occurred to Rudy was to search for his own grave. Unlike Tommy, the LSE workers and Liesel had all seen his disfigured body under a layer of dust. So he had to have a grave somewhere as well…
Rudy, standing up from his leaning position against the mount of Frau Diller's plaque, stretched a little then began his hunt for his tomb. He did it slowly, of course. There were some things one didn't like to face, and one of them was the idea of dying once – and possibly doing it again.
Rudy's confession
I didn't mean to lose my clothes.
Honestly.
Something inside him twanged when he came to the Steiners' graves. The first he saw was Kurt's. Then Anne-Marie's. Then Barbra Steiner…mama…
He stopped suddenly when he noticed the man crouching in front of her grave. There were flowers in his hands, pretty ones but wrapped in nothing but plastic. His hands were trembling.
"Papa…" he whispered.
Alex Steiner's face turned sharply, alarmed at the sight of the young man behind him. Years had passed since the two had last met, and prominent wrinkles traced the man's forehead and cheeks. They marked the years of the grieving old. Laughter was missing in those lines.
"Sorry?"
Rudy cleared his throat then tried to smile a little. He gestured at his mother's grave, focussing his eyes on her rather than his father's surprised eyes. "I think I knew her once."
There was a brief silence. Perhaps Alex had already dismissed the presence of a stranger for the bitterness of his sorrow. After a while, Rudy decided to sit himself down next to his father.
"You must love her," he said softly, knowing the answer already.
"Oh, very much," Herr Steiner said fiercely, eyes still on Barbra Steiner's gravestone. "So very, very much. You have no idea…"
Oh, but Rudy did. And having such an idea only did to intensify the burn at the bottom of his stomach a little more.
It hurt. That was something Rudy didn't count on. How could it hurt more to see your loved ones alive instead of dead?
Something changed in Rudy. For the first time, he was no longer viewing his father as his hero, the man who once lifted three big boxes with one hand for four minutes without dropping. He was viewing him as Alex Steiner – just another broken German who had lost all his possessions. In fact, it almost disappointed Rudy, the way white hair had broken victory over the borders of his part, the way the wrinkles were chiselled into the stringy flesh so deeply and boldly, it seemed as if Alex had spent the last few years frowning.
Oh papa…what happened to you?
There were many things Rudy Steiner had come back to do, of course. Fulfilling destiny was just one of them. For now, if he was going to try for Being Alive Again, why not start now?
"Right," he said out loud, causing Alex to give him another odd look, "well, let's polish these graves up, shall we?"
He didn't wait for Alex to begin. Rudy, being younger and fitter, did most of the work anyway. They worked hours on end, but the silence between them, which began seeming like lifetimes, slowly melted into a bittersweet understanding.
The Curious Relationship of Rudy and Alex Steiner
Today is the first day I've met you.
Yesterday was the last.
I knew you, I loved you then I died and forgot you.
Now I live and I remember.
I love you, I do.
You don't know that yet, but you knew.
Eventually, the words cleared, the ground cleared and the gravestones remained the way they were. It was pathetic, the two of them. Was it possible to spend so long on something, only to finish and realised nothing seemed done at all?
Barbra Steiner rose from behind, her faint eyes shimmering in memory. "Danke," she mouthed. "Thank you." Perhaps Alex sensed part of the woman he had loved and married for over twenty years. Perhaps, for his head tilted, ever so slightly as if he had trouble hearing what she had said, then he closed his eyes and with all the wisdom of humanity and the love of a husband, sighed.
It was a beautiful thing, Death later mused. The sky had been blue at the time. Dangerous blue, then again safe blue at the edges, streaked with the ever-present traces of orange, today a runny yolk orange. Like a spilt sun.
"I'm Rudolf," Rudy later said as the two men parted, almost bonding through the peculiar activity of grave-cleaning. "If there's anything you need…"
Alex smiled, eyes far away. "Thanks, son."
It was enough to break poor Rudy's heart.
And for an instant, he wondered who else, which other survivors of Himmel Street, had also changed.
----
Wow. And that took me, like, half a year. I'm sorry if this really disappointed a lot of people, but school seriously takes up a lot of time. I literally spend more time at school than at home. I'm not kidding. I see my parents' faces for maybe an hour, then it's bed, then it's 6.30 am in the morning and to school again. I know, I know, the whole world is under the sme pressure I'm in, and besides, this chaptor isn't even that great, but bear with me. Liesel is about to get the shock of her life...
MaskWithATruth