See Under by David Grossman (famous ebook reader TXT) 📕

and now his sister, little Paula Brig, with the thick blond braid and blue, blue eyes, like Otto’s eyes; vivacious Paula, who always finds the shortest distance between two points, no-nonsense Paula, who cares for the band firmly and lovingly … but there were still others waiting to be born, and the invisible womb contracted, and Grandfather Anshel was panting and his face was red and perspiring, and my fingers pulled out a clear, viscous liquid, and then with a long, hoarse groan of regret, and with a great yank out came Fried, little Albert Fried, silent and introverted, imprisoned in his shyness and anxiety, with barely a hopeof ever knowing friendship or affection, though luckily for him, Anshel Wasserman projected him into the company of Otto and Paula, and they accepted him with such ease that he was happy to surrender his suspicions and secrets, which were unimportant and superfluous anyway, and open like a flower to the world. And who else is here? Sergei the Russian, thin and tall, Golden Hands Sergei, who could build any kind of tool or machinery, or sew the leap-in-space boots, or open a little door in the wall to distant worlds, and especially memorable in Grandfather Anshel’s story were his experiments with the time machine, and the only humorous episode in “The Children of the Heart” stories is the one in which he threw the whole city into confusion—unintentionally—by turning back its clocks. And Harotian the Armenian is also here, flute in hand, and Grandfather Anshel turns to me, weak and pale, but smiling.”Heed me, Shleimeleh, invoke anyone your heart desires …”

“What did you say?”

“Anyone your heart desires!”

And he reaches out a limp hand and indicates the tiny attic filling up with the Children of the Heart. I notice that something is preventing them from feeling each other, it’s as though they are inside a bell jar. Yes: they are moving, treading in place, they even look around as though waiting for something, but they are totally isolated. And for some reason I think I’ve seen them standing like this before, or almost like this anyway, but there were others with them, I couldn’t remember who, and Grandfather doesn’t help me. He lies on his back, his hands covering his mouth, a strange smile in his eyes, a happy smile of longing. He looks like a very ancient baby. “They are all here before you,” says Grandfather gently, as though telling a grandchild the fairy tale he couldn’t tell me. “And here you see them as they should be seen, not as I wrote them, but as my Sarah drew them, line for line …” Incidentally, only then did I realize that it was not until he had seen her drawings—and that was eighteen years after writing the series—that Wasserman had any idea what his characters looked like. “Her drawings,” he confirms with a moony smile, “were to my stories what Harotian’s flute was to Beethoven’s leaden ears: suddenly the sweet sounds trickled behind the screen of my deafness …”

But five were not enough. We both felt this. And even though I didn’t know at the time about the traps Wasserman was planning toset for Neigel in order to “send him back to Chelm,” it was dear to me that for this war we were going to need many more warriors, partisans of an unfamiliar kind, “partisans,” I say, in a special sense, that—

We looked at each other. “We are now alone in the world,” said my grandfather. “Just you and I. How empty the world is. We could divide it up between us and give it a new name … Come, Shloma son of Tobias, sit with me in this attic, there is no one here but you and me and our friends, enough evasion, Shleimeleh! Hurry and bring in your partisans …”

“NO!” I screamed. I was a little frightened. Things had ended badly last time someone invited me to divide the world and name it, and the rest is history. “No, Grandfather, not you!” I screamed out loud, maybe too loud. “Not with you! I had enough of Bruno’s utopia! I don’t have the strength for great aspirations.”

And then my grandfather explained—in his language—that utopias are not for mortals. And that people are like flies, that the stories they are told must be like flypaper. Utopias are gold-covered paper, he said, and flypaper is covered with everything man secretes from his body and his life. Especially the suffering. And our hope is that its measure is the measure of man, and forgiveness.

“And THEY, you really think THEY will be suitable?” I asked with great skepticism. “After all, they’re only—”

“They are the best of warriors, in their own way. You know that as well as I. In the first place, you thought of them even before I thought of them. And though they did not appear in my story last time I told it, it will be seven times sweeter to be with them now, as it was then, on our street, in the one war worthy …”

And we gave birth to the others as well. Aaron Marcus and Hannah Zeitrin and Ginzburg and Zeidman, our miserable Max and Moritz, and Yedidya Munin, fresh as on the day I led them to the Beast. And they, too, stood as if surrounded by an invisible screen. Hannah was scratching her thighs and groaning. Aaron Marcus’s tortured face was still twitching. Nothing had changed: feverish Ginzburg, his skin covered with ugly white scars, and not a tooth left in his mouth, was nodding his head and asking who he was in the same familiar way, while his little friend, Malkiel Zeidman, a doctor of history, they said, who had lost his mind and was now all empty inside, was as usualmimicking everyone around him, this time, by chance, it was Yedidya Munin, and the hands of both were deep in their pockets, as they groped for something with all their might. They were