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

On the days Momik didn’t go to the library, he would spend hours in the gloomy cellar. From a quarter to two in the afternoon till it got dark, and even a few minutes after sometimes, he would sit on the cold floor in front of the animals with their shiny eyes and nasty noises, and the way they tried to act as if they didn’t care when he was around, but he knew it could happen any minute, because obviously even the Beast would crack up if you made it nervous enough by studying its crimes in a scientific way, and by sitting and staring at it so maddeningly day after day, and it took all Momik’s effort to sit there one minute more, two minutes more, with his feet firmly planted to keep him from beating it out of there, and he started making weird noises like wheezing or like a kitten squealing, he was beginning to remind himself of Grandfather with all these noises, but he stayed put even after the light coming through the tiny slit in the window faded and it was pitch-dark, and he was doing this because of what seemed to be a very important clue which he found tucked slyly away in Mysteries of Fate where it said distinctly, “From utter ’darkness’ sprang the Nazi beast.”

Day after day. In the adult reading room at the public library Momik sat on a high-backed chair, with his feet dangling down. He told Hillel the librarian that he was working on a special report for school about the Holocaust, and no one asked any questions. He read history books with tiny print about what the Nazis did, and stumbled over a lot of words and expressions that weren’t used anymore. He puzzled over some peculiar photographs, he couldn’t figure out what was going onand what went where, but deep down inside he began to sense that these photographs might reveal the first part of the secret everyone had tried to keep from him. There were pictures of a mother and father forced to choose between two children, to choose which one would stay with them and which one would go away forever, and he tried to figure out how they would choose, according to what, and he saw a picture of a soldier forcing an old man to ride another old man like a horse, and he saw pictures of executions in ways he never knew existed, and he saw pictures of graves where a lot of dead people lay in the strangest positions, on top of each other, with somebody’s foot stuck in somebody else’s face, and somebody’s head on so crooked Momik couldn’t twist his head around like that, and so little by little Momik started to understand new things, like how weak the human body is, for instance, and how it can break in so many shapes and directions if you want to break it, and how weak a thing a family is if you want to break it, just like that it happens and it’s all over. At six in the evening Momik would leave the library, tired and quiet. On the bus home, he didn’t see or hear anything.

Almost every day at recess he would sneak out of school and detour around the street where the lottery booth is to Bella’s grocery store. He would get there all out of breath, pull her by the hand to the corner (if there happened to be a customer in the store just then), and start firing questions at her in a whisper that was more like a roar: What was the death train, Bella? Why did they kill little children? What do people feel when they have to dig their own graves? Did Hitler have a mother? Did they really use the soap they made out of human beings? Where do they kill people nowadays? What’s a Jude? What are experiments with human beings? What and how and why and why and how and what? Bella, who could see for herself by now how important and serious it was, answered his every question and didn’t cover anything up, only her face looked miserable and grim. Momik was also a little worried. Not nervous, just very worried. It was getting harder all the time, the Beast was winning, that much was certain, and though he knew everything about it now and wasn’t a little nine-and-a-quarter-year-old ninny anymore who believed the Beast would come out of a hedgehog or some poor cat or even a raven, he was still in one terrible mess; he’d found out where the Beast actually was, though he couldn’t tell how it happened, or how it could appear from just thinking andimagining it, but this much was clear, the Beast did exist, he could feel it in his bones the way Bella could tell when it was going to rain, and it was also clear that Momik had been the one who stupidly woke it out of its long sleep, the one who challenged it to come out, the way Judah Ken-Dor challenged the Egyptians at the Mitla Pass to shoot at him, so they’d give themselves away; only Judah Ken-Dor had his buddies covering him from behind, while Momik was all alone, and now he had to fight to the finish, though nobody cared whether he wanted to or not, and he knew only too well that if he ever tried to run away, the Beast would chase him to the ends of the earth (it has spies and supporters everywhere), and little by little, it would do to him what it did to all the others, only this time in an even slyer, more diabolical way, and who could say how many years it would torture him like that and what would happen in the end.

But then singlehandedly Momik discovered how to bring the Beast out of the animals in the