Why ‘Not Leaving’ is the Greatest Act of Love a Child Can Receive

Those first few months were definitely the hardest.
Every night, Liesel would nightmare.
Her brother’s face.
Staring at the floor.
She would wake up swimming in her bed, screaming, and drowning
in the flood of sheets. On the other side of the room, the bed that was
meant for her brother floated boatlike in the darkness. Slowly, with
the arrival of consciousness, it sank, seemingly into the floor. This
vision didn’t help matters, and it would usually be quite a while
before the screaming stopped.
Possibly the only good to come out of these nightmares was that it
brought Hans Hubermann, her new papa, into the room, to soothe
her, to love her.
He came in every night and sat with her. The first couple of times,
he simply stayed—a stranger to kill the aloneness. A few nights after
that, he whispered, “Shhh, I’m here, it’s all right.” After three weeks,
he held her. Trust was accumulated quickly, due primarily to the
brute strength of the man’s gentleness, his thereness. The girl knew
from the outset that Hans Hubermann would always appear
midscream, and he would not leave.
A DEFINITION NOT FOUND
IN THE DICTIONARY
Not leaving: an act of trust and love, often deciphered by
children
Hans Hubermann sat sleepy-eyed on the bed and Liesel would cry into his sleeves and breathe him in. Every morning, just after two
o’clock, she fell asleep again to the smell of him. It was a mixture of
dead cigarettes, decades of paint, and human skin. At first, she sucked
it all in, then breathed it, until she drifted back down. Each morning,
he was a few feet away from her, crumpled, almost halved, in the
chair. He never used the other bed. Liesel would climb out and
cautiously kiss his cheek and he would wake up and smile.
Some days Papa told her to get back into bed and wait a minute, and
he would return with his accordion and play for her. Liesel would sit
up and hum, her cold toes clenched with excitement. No one had ever
given her music before. She would grin herself stupid, watching the
lines drawing themselves down his face and the soft metal of his eyes
—until the swearing arrived from the kitchen.
“STOP THAT NOISE, SAUKERL!”
Papa would play a little longer.
He would wink at the girl, and clumsily, she’d wink back.
A few times, purely to incense Mama a little further, he also brought
the instrument to the kitchen and played through breakfast.
Papa’s bread and jam would be half eaten on his plate, curled into
the shape of bite marks, and the music would look Liesel in the face. I
know it sounds strange, but that’s how it felt to her. Papa’s right hand
strolled the tooth-colored keys. His left hit the buttons. (She
especially loved to see him hit the silver, sparkled button—the C
major.) The accordion’s scratched yet shiny black exterior came back
and forth as his arms squeezed the dusty bellows, making it suck in
the air and throw it back out. In the kitchen on those mornings, Papa
made the accordion live. I guess it makes sense, when you really
think about it.
How do you tell if something’s alive?
You check for breathing.The sound of the accordion was, in fact, also the announcement of
safety. Daylight. During the day, it was impossible to dream of her
brother. She would miss him and frequently cry in the tiny washroom
as quietly as possible, but she was still glad to be awake. On her first
night with the Hubermanns, she had hidden her last link to him—The
Grave Digger’s Handbook—under her mattress, and occasionally she
would pull it out and hold it. Staring at the letters on the cover and
touching the print inside, she had no idea what any of it was saying.
The point is, it didn’t really matter what that book was about. It was
what it meant that was more important.
THE BOOK’S MEANING
1. The last time she saw her brother.
2. The last time she saw her mother.
Sometimes she would whisper the word Mama and see her mother’s
face a hundred times in a single afternoon. But those were small
miseries compared to the terror of her dreams. At those times, in the
enormous mileage of sleep, she had never felt so completely alone.
As I’m sure you’ve already noticed, there were no other children in
the house.
The Hubermanns had two of their own, but they were older and
had moved out. Hans Junior worked in the center of Munich, and
Trudy held a job as a housemaid and child minder. Soon, they would
both be in the war. One would be making bullets. The other would be
shooting them.
School, as you might imagine, was a terrific failure.
Although it was state-run, there was a heavy Catholic influence,
and Liesel was Lutheran. Not the most auspicious start. Then they
discovered she couldn’t read or write.
Humiliatingly, she was cast down with the younger kids, who were only just learning the alphabet. Even though she was thin-boned and
pale, she felt gigantic among the midget children, and she often
wished she was pale enough to disappear altogether.
Even at home, there wasn’t much room for guidance.
“Don’t ask him for help,” Mama pointed out. “That Saukerl.” Papa
was staring out the window, as was often his habit. “He left school in
fourth grade.”
Without turning around, Papa answered calmly, but with venom,
“Well, don’t ask her, either.” He dropped some ash outside. “She left
school in third grade.”
There were no books in the house (apart from the one she had
secreted under her mattress), and the best Liesel could do was speak
the alphabet under her breath before she was told in no uncertain
terms to keep quiet. All that mumbling. It wasn’t until later, when
there was a bed-wetting incident midnightmare, that an extra reading
education began. Unofficially, it was called the midnight class, even
though it usually commenced at around two in the morning. More of
that soon.
• • •
In mid-February, when she turned ten, Liesel was given a used doll
that had a missing leg and yellow hair.
“It was the best we could do,” Papa apologized.
“What are you talking about? She’s lucky to have that much,”
Mama corrected him.
Hans continued his examination of the remaining leg while Liesel
tried on her new uniform. Ten years old meant Hitler Youth. Hitler
Youth meant a small brown uniform. Being female, Liesel was
enrolled into what was called the BDM. The first thing they did there was make sure your “heil Hitler” was
working properly. Then you were taught to march straight, roll
bandages, and sew up clothes. You were also taken hiking and on
other such activities. Wednesday and Saturday were the designated
meeting days, from three in the afternoon until five.
Each Wednesday and Saturday, Papa would walk Liesel there and
pick her up two hours later. They never spoke about it much. They
just held hands and listened to their feet, and Papa had a cigarette or
two.
The only anxiety Papa brought her was the fact that he was
constantly leaving. Many evenings, he would walk into the living
room (which doubled as the Hubermanns’ bedroom), pull the
accordion from the old cupboard, and squeeze past in the kitchen to
the front door.
As he walked up Himmel Street, Mama would open the window
and cry out, “Don’t be home too late!”
“Not so loud,” he would turn and call back.
“Saukerl! Lick my ass! I’ll speak as loud as I want!”
The echo of her swearing followed him up the street. He never
looked back, or at least, not until he was sure his wife was gone. On
those evenings, at the end of the street, accordion case in hand, he
would turn around, just before Frau Diller’s corner shop, and see the
figure who had replaced his wife in the window. Briefly, his long,
ghostly hand would rise before he turned again and walked slowly
on. The next time Liesel saw him would be at two in the morning,
when he dragged her gently from her nightmare.