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

swallow, because that’s stealing, and look who from,too. They walked in the direction of Mt. Herzl, and Alex again said that he was going to make the team, and suddenly Momik had a really brainy idea, and he told Alex that he would be his coach, and Alex said, “You?! You don’t know noth …” but Momik quickly explained that he would be an excellent coach, that he’d read things about all the coaches in the world, that at home he had sports pictures and clippings from the newspapers (“And I mean newspapers from all over the world,” he said, which wasn’t exactly a lie because of Pshegelond), and that he could draw up an Olympic training schedule, and that his watch had a second hand, which is the main thing a running coach needs. Alex wanted to see the watch, and Momik showed it to him, and Alex said, Let’s try it out, I’ll run over to that pole and you time me, and Momik said, Ready Set Go, and Alex ran and Momik timed him and said 10.9, and maybe we shouldn’t wave our hands around like that because it wastes energy, and Alex said maybe he wouldn’t mind a little coaching, but he didn’t feel like coming over to Momik’s house anymore. That’s how the great friendship began, but Momik doesn’t like to think about it anymore.

And he has a pair of brothers too.

The older one’s name is Bill. Every month the magazine with the latest adventure comes in at Lipschitz’s in the shopping center. Momik stands in the corner and reads and Lipschitz doesn’t say anything, because he and Mama come from the same shtetl. And the stories are suspenseful and educational too. His brother Bill is pretty tough. He’s so tough he’s not allowed to stick up for Momik if someone in Momik’s class bothers him, because one blow from Bill and you’re dead, and that’s why Momik made Bill promise never ever to stick up for him, not even when that business with Laizer the Crook started, and at least twice a week Momik picks himself up off the schoolyard full of blood and dirt but smiling a mysterious smile, because he has mastered his impulses once again, as they say, and held Bill in check.

Bill calls him Johnny, and when they talk together they use short sentences with a lot of exclamation marks, like Punch him in the jaw, Bill!! Good work, Johnny!! etc. Bill has a silver star on his chest which means he’s a sheriff. Momik doesn’t have a star yet. Together they own a horse called Blacky. Blacky understands every word you say, and he loves to gallop wildly through the countryside, but in the end he always comes back and nuzzles Momik’s chest with his head, and it’s great,and just then Netta the teacher asks, Just what are we smiling about, Shlomo Neuman? and Momik hides Blacky away. He steals sugar from the kitchen and experiments with different ways of making sugar cubes which is what Blacky likes best, but so far no luck, and the Hebrew Encyclopedia isn’t up to Sugar yet, and meanwhile he’ll just have to find some way to feed this horse of his, won’t he. At least three times a week they go galloping through the Ein Kerem Valley in search of missing children or children whose parents lost them, and they set Orde Wingate ambushes for train robbers. Sometimes as Momik lies on his stomach in ambush, he sees the tall smokestack of the new building they just finished over on Mt. Herzl, which they call Yad Vashem, a funny sort of name, and he pretends it’s a ship sailing by, full of illegal immigrants from Over There that nobody wants to take in, like in the days of the British Mandate pshakrev, and he’s going to have to rescue that ship somehow, with Blacky or Bill or with mindpowcr or with his animals or the atomic reactor or with Grandfather Anshel’s story and the Children of the Heart, anything, and when he asked his old people what the smokestack is for, they looked at each other, and finally Munin told him that there’s a museum there, and Aaron Marcus, who hadn’t been out of his house for a couple of years, asked, Is it an art museum? and Hannah Zeitrin smiled crookedly and said, Oh sure it is, a museum of human art, that’s what kind of art.

And the whole time they’re there in ambush Momik has to keep making sure Bill’s star isn’t flashing light, so that the criminals won’t spot them, but anyway Bill gets killed at least twenty times a day by the bullets and knives of the villains, and in the end he always comes back to life, thanks to Momik who gets really scared when Bill dies, and maybe it’s the fear, his very hopelessness, you might say, that brings Bill back to life, and he sits up and smiles and says, “Thanks, Johnny, you saved my life!!” And meanwhile Blacky gorges himself on sugar cubes stuck together with mud and spit, and sugar cubes made out of plastic glue, and sugar cubes Momik freezes between the ice blocks in Eizer the milkman’s ice chest, and Bill died and came back to life and died and came back to life again and again, and that was the best part of the game, only it wasn’t really a game at all, a game, ha! Momik didn’t enjoy it one bit, but he could never dream of stopping it because he has to practice, because there are so many people waiting for him to become a leading world expert, just as everyone waited for ProfessorJonas Salk to invent the polio vaccine, and Momik knows someone’s got to be the first to volunteer to enter the frozen kingdom and fight the Beast and rescue all the people and take them away, and you just have to have a plan, that’s