Hidden Doorways

photo by frogmuseum2

After he bought a 1920’s Cape Code style home, he felt impelled to install hidden doors, miniature windows looking onto bonsai gardens, figurines of elves and gnomes perched in the many nooks and crannies particular to older homes. Things fantastical, mythical, or just a little kooky. He remembered a visit to his aunt’s house once as a child, with overgrown apple trees crowding the windows with their limbs. Looking out the kitchen window, he could see a wiry bird’s nest on the crook of a branch, with a half eggshell and a rubbery looking chick popping its head out. He stared and stared, but the chick never moved. “It’s fake, isn’t it?” he asked doubtfully. “Oh no,” his aunt said. “It’s real. See, he just blinked.” His older cousins backed up her story. “Oh, it’s real alright,” they snickered. He checked on the baby chick every morning to see if it had moved yet, until finally his brother said “Don’t be a dumbass, its rubber. Can’t you see that?” But his aunt immediately came to his defense, “Oh no. It’s real. See, it moved its wing,” and she winked at him, as though the fact that it was real was their little secret.

On the last day of their visit, he was watching the chick from the window and said to his aunt, “The momma bird never shows up to feed it. It’s going to die.” She sat him on her lap and said, “I’m sorry, honey, but it’s not real. It’s a tree ornament that I put up there in the Spring.” It wasn’t until after she fessed up that he finally saw it move. Everybody laughed at him.

He wanted to put something at the base of the giant elm tree by his driveway. Maybe a tiny wooden door in the trunk, and a white picket fence. He wanted to plant ivy at the side of the house so that it would crawl up the chimney brick, and he could lodge elves in the brambles, peeking their heads out of the leaves. Maybe in the guestroom, in that little cupboard door cut into the outer wall to get at the insulation, he could place a hand-bound journal written by a made-up child that lived in the room twenty years ago, documenting all of the weird creatures that come out of hiding during the night. Now, all he needed was a nephew or niece to make it real.

"The Book Thief," by Markus Zusak

I finished “The Book Thief,” by Markus Zusak, and immediately started reading it again. When I come across a book that achieves something unusual, I like to read it twice: once as a reader, and second as a writer. That second reading allows me to try to see how he does it, not that this will reveal all of the young Aussie’s tricks.

What is unusual about this book? The first thing: you wouldn’t expect a book narrated by Death himself, about Nazi Germany and a foster girl’s family hiding a Jew in their basement, to capture so much beauty. The dichotomy of humankind, the capability for both brute ferocity and tenderness all within one species, in one country, in one city during an infamous moment of time…well, it even makes Death take notice: “I am constantly overestimating and underestimating the human race—that rarely do I ever simply estimate it. I wanted to ask her how the same thing could be so ugly and so glorious, and its words and stories so damning and brilliant.”

Zusak sums up what the book will be about on the fifth page:
“It’s just a small story really, about, among other things:
* A girl
* Some words
* An accordionist
* Some fanatical Germans
*A Jewish fist fighter
*And quite a lot of thievery”

The girl is a nine-year-old foster child named Liesel, given up by her Communist mother to stay with a couple in a small town outside Munich. Her younger brother dies on the train, and it is during her brother’s burial that she steals her first book, “The Grave Digger’s Handbook.” She doesn't even know how to read yet, but she senses the power of books and how they will hold the key to what is happening to her.

Her foster mother is a squat, harsh woman with a penchant for swearing, who holds within her a combination of both cruelty and love, in keeping with the book’s theme. Her foster father, however, is all kindness, spreading a quiet calm around him. “When he turned the light on in the small, callous washroom that night, Liesel observed the strangeness of her foster father’s eyes. They were made of kindness, and silver. Like soft silver, melting. Liesel, upon seeing those eyes, understood that Hans Hubermann was worth a lot.”

He sits up with her after she awakens from nightmares, and at her request, teaches her to read with her first stolen book, “The Gravediggers Handbook.” With her faithful friend Rudy—a boy that always tries to negotiate a kiss from her—she goes on to steal several other books from the unlikely sanctuary of the Mayor’s personal library. It is not until after her foster parents hide a runaway Jew in their basement that words break free from their books and become a tool in her hands for capturing and understanding the world around her.

She tries to bring to him the beauty of the outside world. “The sky is blue today, Max, and there is a big long cloud, and it’s stretched out, like a rope. At the end of it, the sun is like a yellow hole…” As Death describes it, “The words were on their way, and when they arrived, Liesel would hold them in her hands like the clouds, and she would wring them out like the rain.”

The aware reader will also notice the concentric circles of what is going on here, the matryoshka dolls each tucked one within the other. While Leisel is discovering the power of words, so too is the author, in this rare experience of writing a book that would soon capture the world’s attention. Zusak’s short, staccato rhythm of words might first distract the reader, but after about ten pages, I began feeling the effect. Short blasts, like gunshots, but impactful:

“That last time.
That red sky…
How does a book thief end up kneeling and howling and flanked by a man-made heap of ridiculous, greasy, cooked up rubble?
Years earlier, the start was snow.
The time had come. For one.
***A SPECTACULARLY TRAGIC MOMENT***
A train was moving quickly.
It was packed with humans.
A six-year-old boy died in the third carriage.”

It was during my second reading of the book that I could truly appreciate the care with which Zusak rewrote the later drafts of his novel, with that omniscient knowledge of all that would come later and weaving it into the story. He excuses this prescience with the vehicle of Death as narrator. For many readers, this broken timeline may be confusing and frustrating, but for others it will add another layer of meaning to the text. Poignant, bitter sweet scenes colored with the knowledge of what will come.

Before each part or chapter, it is like Zusak shares with us his outline:
“PART EIGHT
The word shaker
Featuring:
dominos and darkness—the thought of
rudy naked—punishment—a promise keeper’s
wife—a collector—the bread eaters—
a candle in the trees—a hidden sketchbook—
and the anarchist’s suite collection”

Humans are capable of great beauty and brutality. So too are words. On one hand, words are used by Hitler’s “Mein Kampf” to spread the Nazi propaganda, while on the other, Liesel’s stolen books provide her with grateful escape. In the Mayor’s library, she sits among a pile of “the lovely books and their manicured titles. It brewed in her as she eyed the pages full to the brim of their bellies with paragraphs and words.
You bastards, she thought.
You lovely bastards.
Don’t make me happy. Please, don’t fill me up and let me think that something good can come of any of this.”

She comes to learn, as she starts to write down her own experience in a notebook that she will title “The Book Thief,” that words are not meant to make the world beautiful or ugly. “I have hated the words and I have loved them, and I hope I have made them right.”

Those are Liesel’s words, but they are also Zusak’s. In an interview with the author, he explains how the book is about trying to find beautiful moments in an ugly time. Inspired by a family story about a German boy giving a piece of bread to an old Jew being marched through the town, he explains, “On one hand, you've got pure beauty, which is the boy giving the bread, and on the other you've got pure destruction, which is the soldier whipping the old man for taking the bread. You put those two things together, and you've got humans."

Eleven Years Ago Today

photo by moonjazz.

Every now and then, I’ll think I’ll post a past entry from my journals – one, five, ten years ago to the day. Like this entry, March 11th, 1999:

I am so good at deleting, better than at writing. I just wrote several lines about a coworker, then turned back and deleted them because it was so much telling. I realized that a true writer would have painted a picture of this person and let the reader make judgments like "he was awkward in social situations." Why not write the scene of him standing at the foot of my cube, looking over my papers, standing with that poker face of his, not revealing a thought or expression, just a stone wall face with the sharp cut of his nose and standing there like a guard before the gate.

Where's the creativity, hiding back there in the shack at the far end of a field gone fallow? Back when I was ten or twelve, my friend and I would run out across the tall grass to a wooden shack. Pull dead weeds and sticks and stuff them into a coffee can, then strike a match and watch it burn. The smell of burning grass, the sudden crackle of the flames, the smoke chugging out of the can like the smoke stack from a steam engine. In the shack we would find wrinkled clippings of naked women from Playboy magazine, the clippings handled so many times by grubby adolescent fingers that it'd grown soft, almost like cloth. Out there we also stashed away the compass and hunting knife that I stole from my dad’s top dresser drawer.

I pause, stare into the art prints on the walls of my den, music softly playing, the flickering of the candle on the desk, staring off into space and realizing that theme and meaning in a story must be drawn between the actions, must be plucked from the observances and the events, and I look off into all the shapes around me and try to depict the patterns, and wonder if any can really be drawn, wonder what truths I can really claim to see. I realize after a while that it is a waste of time. Why try to write, when I know that I don't have any truths for my readers. Perhaps that's why I don't have any readers. The act of writing has become merely masturbation, a self-absorbed indulgence of my sensibilities.

Bang! The starting pistol goes off and I launch myself out across the field, past the shack and over the smooth waters of the pond and up into the air above the woods. Then dive down into the dirt and the grubs and the Indian burial stones trod on by the tennis shoes of boys out to find beer cans in the weeds. I drank beer out in the woods until I was thrilled with liquor and stars, wavering in the rings of friends, crushing cans and tossing them away and grabbing another. Then off into the night in our cars, creeping down quiet suburban streets, past the darkened houses where the girls we loved slept.

I pause. When I write, I write for myself. My children play outside the door to the den, trying to draw me out to play, but I am playing here, in the space just above the keyboard, where my fingers dip and weave through the air like a dressmaker or a potter or the baker kneading his dough. It was something in the beauty of the words all scattered across the screen, forming shapes by the paragraph breaks and the curve of the letter "c". The languor of the dipping letters and the crossed T’s like a lifeline on the palm of one who had died too young.