Page 327 - The Book Thief

DEATHS DIARY: COLOGNE

The fallen hours of May 30.

Im sure Liesel Meminger was fast asleep when more than a thousand bomber
planes flew toward a place known as Kln. For me, the result was five hundred
people or thereabouts. Fifty thousand others ambled homelessly around the
ghostly piles of rubble, trying to work out which way was which, and which
slabs of broken home belonged to whom.

Five hundred souls.

I carried them in my fingers, like suitcases. Or Id throw them over my shoulder.
It was only the children I carried in my arms.

By the time I was finished, the sky was yellow, like burning newspaper. If I
looked closely, I could see the words, reporting headlines, commentating on the
progress of the war and so forth. How Id have loved to pull it all down, to screw
up the newspaper sky and toss it away. My arms ached and I couldnt afford to
burn my fingers. There was still so much work to be done.

As you might expect, many people died instantly. Others took a while longer.
There were several more places to go, skies to meet and souls to collect, and

when I came back to Cologne later on, not long after the final planes, I managed
to notice a most unique thing.

I was carrying the charred soul of a teenager when I looked gravely up at what
was now a sulfuric sky. A group of ten-year-old girls was close by. One of them
called out.

Whats that?

Her arm extended and her finger pointed out the black, slow object, falling from
above. It began as a black feather, lilting, floating. Or a piece of ash. Then it
grew larger. The same girla redhead with period frecklesspoke once again, this
time more emphatically. What is that?