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

cellar, and it was so simple really, it was amazing he hadn’t thought of it sooner, since even the sleepy turtle knows it’s a turtle when it catches a whiff of cucumber peels, and the raven ruffles its feathers when Momik comes with the drumstick, so quite simply, all Momik had to do now was show the Beast the food it liked best—a Jew.

So then he started to put a plan together, cleverly and very carefully. First he copied out pictures from the library books into his notebook, and made notes to remind him what a Jew looks like, how a Jew looks at a soldier, how a Jew looks when he’s frightened, how he looks in a convoy, and how he digs a grave. He also made notes from his own store of experience with Jews, like how a Jew krechtzes, how he screams out in his sleep, and how he chews on a drumstick, etc. Momik worked like a combination scientist and detective. Take the boy in this picture, for instance, the one with the visor cap and his hands up. Momik tried to figure things from the boy’s eyes, like what the beast in front of him looked like just then, and whether he knew how to whistle with two fingers, and whether he’d ever heard that Chodorov isn’t just the name of a town but the name of a great goalie, and what his parents had done to make him have to stick his hands up like that, and where they were when they ought to have been taking care of him, and whether he was religious or not and had a collection of real stamps from Over There, and whether he’d ever imagined that someday in the State ofIsrael, in Beit Mazmil in Jerusalem, there would be a boy called Momik Neuman. There were so many things to find out about how to be a real Jew, about how to have the kind of expression a Jew has, and to give off the exact same smell, like Grandfather, for instance, and Munin, and Max and Moritz, a smell that’s known to drive the Beast insane, so that day after day as Momik sits in the dark cellar facing the cages not doing anything much, just staring blindly ahead, trying not to fall asleep, because lately, he doesn’t know why, he’s sort of exhausted all the time, he can hardly move or concentrate, and sometimes he has these not very nice thoughts, like what does he need this for, and why does he have to do all the fighting himself, and why does no one step in to help him or take notice of what’s going on around here, not Mama or Papa, not Bella or the children in his class or his teacher Netta who only screams at him that his grades are going down down down, and not Dag Hammarskjöld from the United Nations who today arrived in Israel and went all the way to Sedeh Boker just to eat supper with Ben-Gurion, this Dag Hammarskjöld who founded UNICEF for the children of the world and worries about saving the children of Africa and India from malaria and other cholerias, the only thing he doesn’t have time for is the war on the Beast. And to tell the truth, there are days when Momik sits in the cellar half awake and half asleep and he envies the Beast. Yes, he envies it for being so strong that it never suffers from pity, and that it can sleep soundly at night even after all those things it did, and that it even seems to enjoy being cruel, the way Uncle Shimmik enjoys it when you scratch his back, and maybe the Beast is right and it isn’t so terrible to be cruel, but really cruel, and to tell the truth, Momik has also been kind of enjoying it lately when he does something really bad, it happens mostly after dark, when he starts being more afraid and hating the Beast more than ever and hating the whole world, it suddenly happens, he gets this feeling as if he has fever all over but especially in his head and his heart, and he almost explodes with power and cruelty, and that’s when he could almost fling himself against the cages and shatter them and smash every head on the Beast without mercy, and could even let it wound him with its claws and teeth and all its beaks, before jamming into it as hard as he can so the Beast will know once and for all what Momik feels, or maybe not, maybe it would be better to kill it without jamming into it, just to smash it and bash it and kick it and stomp on it and torture it andblow it to bits, and you could even throw an atom bomb in its face now because that article finally came out about our atomic reactor which is huge and awesome rising out of the golden sand dunes of Nahal Rubin near Rishon Le-Zion, towering proudly over the shore and the roaring blue waves, the builders’ hammers gaily tapping its splendid dome, that’s what it said in the newspaper, and even though the newspaper says “for peaceful purposes,” Momik can read between the lines, as they say, and he catches the meaning behind those smiles of Bella’s, whose son is a very high-ranking major in the army, peaceful purposes, yeah sure, sure, let them blast the Arabs away pshakrev, but he had to admit the Beast didn’t seem too worried by his threats, and sometimes Momik even suspected that whenever he started feeling this way, wild and hateful that is, the Beast was smiling slyly to itself in the dark, and then he would get even more frightened and not know what to do and tell himself, Calm down, but how much longer would he have the strength to calm down all by himself, and