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

he would get frightened like this and wake up from his dream and look around and smell the stench of the animals which clings to him so strongly he sometimes feels as if it’s coming out of his mouth, and he doesn’t get up even though it’s pitch-dark now and his parents are probably worried to death about where he is, and please don’t let them think of coming down here to look for him, no they wouldn’t come down here, they better not, and he sits a while longer, dozing on the cold stone floor, wrapped in Papa’s big old overcoat to which Momik had pinned a lot of yellow cardboard stars, and sometimes when he wakes up and remembers, he reaches out to show the animals what he’s glued on his arms with plastic glue, numbers cut out of old lottery tickets he collected by the lottery booth, and if that wasn’t enough, he would sit up and pause for a refreshing cough or krechtz, and before he stood to leave, he would challenge the Beast one last time in a really disgusting way, by turning his back on it in the pitch-dark and copying a few passages from the diary of Anne Frank, who also hid from it, into his Geography Notebook #4, and whenever he finished copying out a really sad line from the book (which he stole from the public library), his pen would tremble a little, and then he would have to add a few words of his own about a boy called Momik Neuman who’s also hiding like that and fighting and afraid, and the amazing thing is that what he wrote came out sounding just like her, like Anne that is.

And sometimes after lunch, when Momik wants to get Grandfather out of the way and put him to sleep so he can go down to the cellar right away, Grandfather stares at him strangely and begs with his eyes to let him go out for a while, and even though sometimes it’s raining and cold outside, Momik can feel how much Grandfather is suffering in the house, and he takes him along, they put their coats on and go out, and lock the bottom lock too, and Momik holds Grandfather’s hand and feels the warm currents of Grandfather’s story flow into his own hand and up to his head, and he draws strength from Grandfather, unbeknownst to him, and squeezes and squeezes the strength out for himself till finally Grandfather lets out a kind of howl and pulls his hand away and looks at Momik as if he understands something.

They sit down on the wet green bench and watch the gray street that seems slanted on account of the rain, and the fog changes the shapes of things, and everything looks so different, everything is so sad, and out of the wind and the whirling leaves comes a black coat with two tails, or a blond wig, or the two dodos hand in hand, scrounging through the garbage pails, and so Grandfather’s friends gather at the bench, though no one told them he was there, and then the door at Bella’s opens and cute little Aaron Marcus steps out even though Bella begs him not to, and when she sees that Momik is there too, boy does she ever open her mouth and tell him to take Grandfather home this minute, but Momik just stares at her and doesn’t answer, and in the end she slams the door.

Mr. Aaron Marcus walked over and sat down with a krechtz, and they all made room for him and gave a krechtz, and Momik gave one too and it felt good. Momik wasn’t afraid anymore of Marcus’s twitches which made his face look a hundred years old, may-he-live-to-be-a-hundred-and-twenty. Once he asked Bella whether Marcus made faces on account of some disease, God forbid, or something like that, and Bella said, The father of my Hezkel, may-he-rest-in-peace, deserves more than the inquisitiveness of rude little children who must know everything and what will there be left to learn when they’re ten years old, but of course Momik didn’t give up—we know Momik and the type of person he is—he went off to think it over, and returned to Bella a little while later and told her he knew the answer. That was funny because meanwhile Bella had forgotten the question, but Momik reminded her and said probably Mr. Marcus makes those faces becausehe escaped from a certain place (Momik did not want to spell out that it was Over There) and he wants to keep people from recognizing his real face and capturing him, and Bella pursed her lips as if she was getting angry, but you could see that she was holding back a smile, and she said, Maybe it’s the other way around, smarty, maybe Mr. Marcus is trying to keep alive the faces of all the people who were with him in a certain place, and it isn’t at all that he wants to run away from them, he wants to stay with them, nu, what do you say to that, Einstein? And this answer knocked Momik for a loop, as they say, and he looked at Mr. Marcus in a completely different way after that, in fact he discovered the faces of a lot of people he never met before in Mr. Marcus’s face, old people, men, women, and children and even babies, not to mention the fact that everyone around here made faces all the time, which was a sure sign that Marcus like the others was fighting a secret war.

The rain fell and the old people talked. You could never tell exactly when the noises and the krechtzes turned into real talking all of a sudden. They told their usual stories which Momik knew by heart already but loved to hear over and over. Red Sonya and Black Sonya, and Chaim Eche the cripple who played “Sheraleh” at weddings, and