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

atlas open on his desk, Momik carried out experiments, substituting Boibrik for Tel Aviv, and Haifa for Katrielibka with Mt. Carmel for the Hill of the Jews, the hill where miracles happen, and Jerusalem is Yahoupitz, and Momik made little pencil marks like an army commander makes on a battle map: Menachem Mendel goes from here to there, from Odessa to Yahoupitz and Zamrinka, and the Menashe Forest is where Tevyc rides his old horse, and the Jordan is the San River which demanded a fresh victim every year, they believed, till one day the rabbi’s son drowned and the rabbi cursed the river and it shrank to the size of a little creek, and on Mt. Tabor Momik writes Goldeneh Bergel, and pencils in the little barrels of gold that the King of Sweden left there when he was running away from the Russians, and on Mt. Arbel he draws a small cave, like the one Dobush the terrible robber dug in the mountain near Mama’s town, Bolichov, to hide in and plot his crimes. Momik has no end of ideas.

And down in Ein Kerem, three brothers galloped their horse Blacky, wildly and fiercely, holding each other by the waist. Bill the strong one sat in front, Momik the responsible one sat in the middle, and Motl sat in the rear, his payes curled behind his ears, his eyes gleaming, and his muscles getting stronger by the day, and soon they would be able to take him out on a real mission.

Okay, so there were a lot of things you had to explain to him that he never knew before like what the sound barrier is, which is broken by the jets given to us by our Eternal Allies the French, and who Nathaniel Balsberg the religious runner on the Elizur track team is, who beat the five-kilometer record, with-the-help-of-God, and what the Suleiman Fire Gang is, and what exactly they use the swimming pool at the new atomic reactor in Nahal Soreq for, and how you should always have a piece of cardboard folded in your shirt pocket wherever you go, to stop bullets aimed at your heart, and what a reprisal is, onefist three fingers, and Motl nearly botched things up because he just didn’t know how to sit still in an ambush and wait quietly, or what an Uzi is, and a Super Mystère and an EMX, because in his shtetl they probably had different names for guns and airplanes.

One time Momik dawdled in the school library waiting for it to get dark outside, and Mrs. Govrin told him to go home, so he hung around a little while longer in the playground, and when the coast was clear, he took the big surprise out of his schoolbag, the radish he had cut in two and scooped out with his jackknife, and he stuck a candle into the radish and lit it, and walked all the way home like this in a very gentle rain that didn’t blow the candle out, through the snowdrifts of the chestnut forest and the lilac groves and the big pojomkes which might in fact be yagedes, but who cares, and the good smell of the bread they baked at home, and the big river with the tadpoles and the tiny leeches, and the animal fair where they sold the good horse they loved dearly because they didn’t have enough money for food, and so the three-year-old child made his way home from Rabbi Itzla’s cheder to a house full of boys and girls, brothers and sisters, where he would sit and cat under the table like the gentry, and Mama and Papa came out to meet him because they were worried sick and they saw him walking through the streets of Borochov, slowly and carefully, shielding the candle with his hand to make sure it wouldn’t blow out, striding responsibly with the emotion of the torch runner at the Maccabean Games, all the way here from a foreign land, and Mama and Papa huddled together not knowing what to do, and he looked up at them and wanted to say something beautiful, but all of a sudden Papa’s face changed and shrank as if he were disgusted or something, and he raised his enormous hand and smacked the candle with all his might (his fingers didn’t touch Momik), and the candle fell into a little puddle and was extinguished, and Papa said in a choked voice, Enough of this nonsense. You pull yourself together now, and be normal, and never again did he tell Momik about his village and how he was a boy there, and Motl never returned again either, maybe he didn’t want to, or maybe Momik felt funny because of what had happened, and so, Momik was left alone once more to face the Beast, but the Beast wasn’t ready to appear yet.

At night Mama leans over his bed and sniffs his feet which smell of kerosene and then suddenly she says something really hilarious in Yiddish, she says, God, maybe you could play with some other family?

And don’t forget there were other things besides the search and the hunter and the sweat to think about, there were regular things too, and no one was allowed to suspect anything was wrong so they wouldn’t start asking questions and butting in, and he had tests to study for and there was school every day from eight to one, which is pretty unbearable unless you keep telling yourself that all the kids around you go to a secret school we established in the underground, and whenever you hear footsteps outside you have to get your guns and prepare to die, and there was Grandfather who was becoming grouchier and jumpier than ever to look after, his Nazi must have really been upsetting him, and Momik had strategies and special oaths to think about every time Nasser pshakrev says he’s going to stop one of our ships in the Suez