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

that meshuggeneh they called Job who sucked lavender candy and the children dragged him around everywhere like a dog and made him do whatever they wanted by promising him candy, and the big, beautiful mikva they built, and how everyone put the cholent in the bakery on Thursday to cook overnight, and the whole shtetl smelled of it, and this way you could rest from the war and the Beast and the stink in the cellar, you could forget everything and sort of not exist, and just then, for some reason, oftzeluchus as they said around here, he thinks of something annoying and troubling, the memory of a big fat palm slapping the candle, and the candle fell and the flame went tsss in the puddle, and Papa’s face, and the word he said, and suddenly Momik sits up and moves his head away from Hannah Zeitrin’s shoulder where he was leaning a little without noticing, and he said in a hard, loud voice that in the big game coming up in Yaroslav we’re going to beat those Poles 10 to 0, Stelmach alone will score five, and at once the old ones grew quiet and looked at him blankly, and Hannah Zeitrin said sadly and clearly, Alter kopf, and Yedidya Munin on his other side reached his skinny hand with the black hairs out to him, and for once he wasn’t going to pinch his cheek but gently cup his chin and draw it closervery slowly, who would have believed Momik would let Munin do such a thing to him, and in public too, but now Momik is a little tired and he doesn’t mind feeling his face against the black coat with the strange smell, and he thinks it’s a good thing he isn’t alone and that he has these secret warriors with him here, they’re like a band of partisans who fought together for a long long time, and the big battle is about to begin and they’ve sat down to rest a while in the forest, and though to look at them you’d think they were just a bunch of meshuggeners, who cares, it’s so nice to lie here on Munin’s coat beside his friends and hear the wool rustling and the quiet ticking of the pocket watch and the heartbeats that seem to come from far away, it’s nice like this.

That night something terrible happened, which started like this: they heard terrible screams coming from the street, and it was fourteen minutes past eleven o’clock at night by Momik’s watch, and the shutters rolled open and the lights went on, and in his heart Momik felt uh-oh now the Beast is coming out of the cellar, and he hid under the covers, but it was a woman screaming, not a Beast, so he jumped out of bed, ran to the window, and raised the shutters, and Mama and Papa called from the other room to close the shutters, but he’d stopped listening to them a long time ago, and he looked out the window and saw a real live naked woman running up and down the street screaming terrible screams, and you couldn’t understand her, and even though the moon was almost full, it took Momik a couple of minutes to see that it was Hannah Zeitrin, because her pretty blond wig had fallen, and her hair was bald underneath and she had great big breasts that were flopping all over, and it was a good thing she had on a kind of small, triangle thing, like black fur down below, and Hannah Zeitrin who only this afternoon had been sitting on the bench next to him like a good friend raised her arms and screamed in Yiddish: God, God, how long must I wait for you, God, and people started screaming, Quiet, go home and sleep, you’re crazy, it’s the middle of the night, and somebody on the second floor where the uppity young couple live threw a whole bucketful of cold water down and drenched her, but she didn’t stop running and tearing out her hair, and when she ran under the streetlamp, you could see the makeup she always smears on her face dripping, and suddenly the lights went on at Bella’s and wouldn’t you know it, Bella ran down the stairs and hugged Hannah with a big blanket, and Hannah stood still at first, trembling a little from the cold with her head droopingand Bella led her very slowly, but suddenly she stopped and shrieked, “Brutes!” and when she passed the house of the uppity couple she shrieked, “You’re worse than they are! God will pay you double for this!” and then she and Hannah disappeared between the black cypress trees next to Hannah’s house, and one by one the lights went out in all the houses, and Momik rolled down the shutters and went back to bed. But he had seen something no one else noticed, that while Hannah was running naked, Mr. Munin came out of the synagogue next door to Momik’s and stood there, in the shadows but also a little in the moonlight. He wasn’t wearing his glasses and his whole body jerked back and forth, and his eyes looked at Hannah and shone, and his hands were down in the darkness, and Momik saw his shoulders shake and his lips move, but he couldn’t tell what he was saying though he had the feeling it was probably something very important, that Munin may have been revealing a great secret about the Beast and how to fight it, and Momik wanted to scream out the window, I can’t hear you, but Munin’s eyes suddenly popped open, and his mouth opened together with his eyes, and his body fell forward and backward as if somebody were shaking him with all his might, and then he raised his arms like a big black bird and started jumping and screaming, but without a voice, as if somebody above were pulling