Next to Liesel, Rudy's mother, Barbara, sat with her youngest children. A thin blanket was brimming with kids and loosened grass. "Can you see Rudy?" she asked them. "He's the one of the far left." Barbara Steiner was a kind woman whose hair always looked recently combed.
"Where?" said one of the girls. Probably Bettina, the youngest. "I can't see him at all."
"The last one. No, not there. There."
They were still in the identification process when the starter's gun gave off its smoke and sound. The small Steiners rushed to the fence.
For the first lap, a group of seven boys led the field. On the second, it dropped to five, and on the next lap, four. Rudy was the fourth runner on every lap until the last. A man on the right was saying that the boy coming second looked best. He was the tallest. "You wait," he told his nonplussed wife. "With two hundred left, he'll break away." The man was wrong.
A gargantuan brown-shirted official informed the group that there was one lap to go. He certainly wasn't suffering under the ration system. He called out as the lead pack crossed the line, and it was not the second boy who accelerated, but the fourth. And he was two hundred meters early.
Rudy ran.
He did not look back at any stage.
Like an elastic rope, he lengthened his lead until any thought of someone else winning snapped altogether. He took himself around the track as three runners behind him fought each other for the scraps. In the homestretch, there was nothing but blond hair and space, and when he crossed the line, he didn't stop. He didn't raise his arm. There wasn't even bent-over relief. He simply walked another twenty meters and eventually looked over his shoulder to watch the others cross the line.
from The Book Thief by Markus Zusak
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