There was once a strange, small man. He decided three
important details about his life:
- 1.
He would part his hair from
the opposite side to everyone else.
- 2.
He would make himself a
small, strange moustache.
- 3.
He would one day rule the
worlds.
The young man wandered around for quite some time, thinking,
planning, and figuring out exactly how to make the world his. Then one day, out
of nowhere, it struck him-the perfect plan. He had seen a mother walking with
her child. At one point, she admonished the small boy, until finally, he began
to cry. Within a few minutes, she spoke very softly to him, after which he was
soothed and even smiled.
The young man rushed to the mother and embraced her. “Words!”
He grinned.
“What?”
But there was no reply. He was already gone.
Yes, the Fuhrer decided that he would rule the world with words.
“ I will never fire a gun,” he devised, “I will not have to.” Still, he was not
rash. Let’s allow him at least that much. He was not a stupid man at all. His
first plan of attack was to plant the words in as many areas of his homeland as
possible.
He planted then day and night, and cultivated them.
He watched them grow, until eventually, great forests of
words had risen throughout Germany...It was a nation of farmed thoughts.
While the words were growing, our young Fuhrer also planted
seed to create symbols, and these, too, were well on their way to full bloom. Now
the time had come. The Fuhrer was ready.
He invited his people toward his own glorious heart,
beckoning them with his finest, ugliest words, handpicked from his forests. And
the people came.
They were all placed on a conveyer belt and run through a
rampant machine that gave them a lifetime in ten minutes. Words were fed into
them. Time disappeared and now they knew everything they needed to know. They
were hypnotized.
Next, they were fitted with their symbols, and everyone was
happy.
Soon, the demand for the demand for the lovely, ugly words
and symbols increased to such a point that as the forests grew, many people
were needed to maintain them. Some were employed to climb the trees and throw
the words down to those below. They were then fed directly into the remainder
of the Fuhrer’s people, not to mention those who came back for more.
The people who climbed those trees were called words
shakers.
The best word shakers were the ones who understood the true
power of words. They were the ones who could climb the highest. One such word
shaker was a small, skinny girl. She was renowned as the best word shaker of
her region because she knew how powerless a person could be without words.
That’s why she could climb higher than anyone else. She had
desire. She was hungry for them.
One day, however, she met a man who was despised by her
homeland, even though he was born in it. They became good friends, and when the
man was sick, the word shaker allowed a single tear to fall on his face. The tear
was a made of friendship-a single word-and it dried and became a seed, and when
next the girl was
in the forest, she planted that seed among the other trees.
She watered it every day.
At first, there was nothing, but one afternoon, when she
checked it after a day of word-shaking, a small sprout had shot up. She stared
at it for a long time.
The tree grew every day, faster than everything else, till
it was the tallest tree in the forest. Everyone came to
look at it. They all whispered
about it, and the waited...for the Fuhrer.
Incensed, he immediately ordered the tree to be cut down. That
was when the word-shaker made her way through the crowd. She fell to her hands
and knees. “ Please,” she cried, “You can’t cut it down.”
The Fuhrer, however, was unmoved. He could not afford to
make exceptions. As the word shaker was dragged away, he turned to his
right-hand man and made a request. “Axe, please.”
At that moment, the word shaker twisted free. She ran. She boarded
the tree, and even as the Fuhrer hammered at the trunk with his axe, she
climbed until she reached the highest of the branches. The voices and axe beats
continued faintly on. Clouds walked by like monsters with grey hearts. Afraid but
stubborn, the word shaker remained. She waited for the tree to fall.
But the tree would not move.
Many hours passed, and still, the Fuhrers axe could not take
a single bite out of the trunk. In a strange nearing collapse, he ordered
another man to continue.
Days passed.
Weeks took over.
A hundred and ninety-six soldiers could not make any impact
on the word shaker’s tree.
“But how does she eat?” the people asked. “How does she
sleep?”
What they didn’t know was that other word shakers threw
supplies across, and the girl climbed down to the lower branches to collect
them.
It snowed. It rained. Seasons came and went. The word shaker
remained.
When the last axman gave up, he called up to her. “Word
shaker! You can come down now! There is no one who can defeat this tree!”
The word shaker, who could only just make out the man’s
sentences, replied with a whisper. She handed it down through the branches. “No
thank you,” she said, for she knew that it was only herself who was holding the
tree upright.
No one knew how long it had taken, but one afternoon, a new
axman walked into town. His bag looked too heavy for him. His eyes dragged. His
feet drooped with exhaustion. “The tree,” he asked the people. “Where is the
tree?”
An audience followed him, and when he arrived, clouds had
covered the highest regions of the branches. The word shaker could hear the
people calling out that a new axman had come to put an end to her vigil.
“She will not come down,” the people said, “for anyone.”
They did not know who the axman was, and they did not know
that he was undeterred.
He opened his bag and pulled out something much smaller than
an axe.
The people laughed. They said, “You cannot chop down a tree
with an old hummer!”
The young man did not listen to them. He only looked through
his bag for some nails. He placed three of them in his mouth and attempted to
hammer a fourth into the tree. The first branches were now extremely high and
he estimated that he needed four nails to use as footholds to reach them.
“Look at this idiot,” roared one of the watching men. “No
one else could chop it down with an axe, and this fool thinks he can do it
with-”
The man fell silent.
The first nail entered the tree and was held steadily after
five blows. Then the second went in, and the young man started to climb.
By the fourth nail, he was up in the arms and continued on
his way. He was tempted to call out as he did so, but he decided against it.
The climb seemed to last for miles. It took many hours for
him to reach the final branches, and when he did, he found the word shaker
asleep in her blankets and the clouds.
He watched her for many minutes.
The warmth of the sun heated the cloudy rooftop.
He reached down, touching her arm, and the word shaker woke
up.
She rubbed her eyes, and after a long study of his face, she
spoke.
“Is it really you?”
Is it from your cheek, she thought, that I took the seed?
The man nodded.
His heart wobbled and he held to the branches. “It is.”
Together, they stayed in the summit of the tree. They waited
for the clouds to disappear, and when they did, they could see the rest of the
forest.
“It wouldn’t stop growing,” she explained.
“ But neither would this.” The young man looked at the
branch that held his hand. He had a point.
When they had looked and talked enough, they made their way
back down. They left the blanket and the remaining food behind.
The people could not believe what they were seeing, and the
moment the word shaker and the young man set foot in the world, the tree
finally began to show the ax marks. Bruises appeared. Slits were made in the
trunk and the earth began to shiver.
“It’s began to fall!” a young woman screamed. “ The tree is
going to fall!” She was right. The word shaker’s tree, in all its miles and
miles of height, slowly begin to tip. It moaned as it was sucked to the ground.
The world shook, and when everything finally settled, the tree was laid out
among the rest of the forest. It could never destroy all of it, but is nothing
else, a different-coloured path was carved through it.
The word shaker and the young man climbed up to the
horizontal trunk. The navigated the branches and began to walk. When they
looked back, they noticed that the majority of onlookers had started to return
to their own places. In there. Out there. In the forest.
But as they walked on, they stopped several times, to listen.
They thought they could hear voices and words behind them, on the words shaker’s
tree.
-The Word Shaker by Max Vamdenburg in the book, The Book
Thief by Markus Zusak
P.S. Through this book I got to learn more about the power that words hold. Words are the best weapon and if you have it, you have everything. You can buy every kind of weapon but you cannot buy words. Treasure it, if you have it.
...SAP...
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