See Under, page 10
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 because he 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 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 closer very 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 drooping and 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 him up by a string, and suddenly the string broke and Munin fell down in a heap and lay there for a long time, and Momik could still hear him krechtzing quietly to himself like the crazy cat for a long time after it was over, and in the morning Munin wasn’t lying there anymore.
But the Beast knew it was a trick and it wouldn’t come out. None of Momik’s tricks was any use. The Beast could probably tell the difference between a real Jew and Momik suddenly trying to act like a Jew, and if Momik could tell the difference he’d do the right thing, but he doesn’t. He’s become like his own shadow lately, dragging his feet when he walks, and he has this new chendeleh, as Bella called it, krechtzing like an old person, even at school, and everybody made fun of him, and the only good thing that happened around that time is that he came in fifth in his class in the sixty-meter dash, which never happened before, why now all of a sudden when he didn’t have the strength to do anything, and everyone said he ran like Zatopek the Czech Locomotive, and they only laughed because he ran the whole race with his eyes shut tight and made faces as if a monster were after him, but at least now they saw he could do it if he really wanted to, and even Alex Tochner who was a friend of his once for two weeks and Momik coached him every day in the Ein Kerem Valley till Alex broke the class record and made the team like nothing, even Alex came up to him and said, Nice going, Helen Keller, but even these words of praise made no difference to Momik.
Bill and Motl had disappeared long ago, and he couldn’t bring them back. It was as if the Beast had frozen his brains, and everyone noticed now. Bella wouldn’t answer his questions anymore, and when he pleaded with her she told him she could eat herself for the harm she’d done by telling him what she’d told him already, and that she’d had it up to here with his investigations, that he should go play with children his own age please, and she didn’t say it in an angry way but pityingly, which is worse. His parents had also been giving him funny looks lately, and you could see that they were just waiting for a chance to explode because of him. They’d started acting really strange: first they cleaned the house like crazy, washing and scrubbing everything each day (including windows and panels), and there wasn’t a speck of dust anywhere, but they just kept cleaning and cleaning, and one night when Momik got up to pee he saw that all the lights in the house were on and Mama and Papa were down on their knees scraping the cracks between the tiles with kitchen knives, and when they saw him they smiled like children caught red-handed, and Momik didn’t say anything, and in the morning he pretended he’d forgotten. A few days later, on Saturday, Bella said something to Mama, and Mama turned white as this wall, and early Sunday morning Mama took Momik to the health clinic to see Dr. Erdreich who examined him thoroughly from head to toe and told Mama no no it wasn’t the Disease, that’s how they talk about polio, which in our country is contracted by several children each year even after vaccinations and shots, and the doctor prescribed vitamins and cod-liver oil twice a day, but nothing helped, how could it, and though Mama and Papa started eating bigger suppers than ever and forced Momik to swallow more and more food, they knew the child was breaking down before their very eyes, and that there was nothing they could do about it, they tried everything, you have to admit, they brought over a little bearded rabbi from Mea Shearim who rolled a hard-boiled egg all over Momik and whispered, and they even went to see Madame Miranda Bardugo who was practically the queen of Beit Mazmil, and she used leeches on people and cured everything, but she refused to come on account of what happened to her leeches the time she used them on Papa’s hands, and Mama and Bella sat in the kitchen together drinking tea, and Bella said crying tears of pity for the boy, Something must be done, look at him, there’s nothing left but his eyes, and as usual Mama started to cry with her saying, If only we knew what to do, if you tell me the name of a doctor we’ll take him to that doctor, but I don’t need a doctor to see what this is, Bella, I should be a doctor, a doctor of tsuris, and what Shlomo has, no doctor can help, I tell you, we brought it with us from Over There, and it sits on us here and here and here, and only God can help, and Bella gave a krechtz and blew her nose and said, Oy, God help us till God helps us.
These were very bad days. Everyone around Momik was scared and didn’t know what to do. They were waiting for him to get better, and meanwhile they wouldn’t move or breathe. It all depended on him. When he moved they moved, and when he screamed they screamed. And it felt like the street was different too, as if you were hearing the voices of people who were already dead and stories that only people around here remembered and names and words that only people around here understood and hungered for, and Hannah Zeitrin came out naked almost every night now and shouted at God, and people just waited patiently for Bella to come and take her away, and sometimes when you looked up you could see, between the treetops and the clouds, a fast-moving shadow, something that resembled black coattails flying, and the glint of glasses, and a minute later Munin landed next to Momik who couldn’t drag himself any farther, and glanced cautiously around (because he isn’t allowed to come close to children for some reason) and put his hand on Momik’s shoulder and walked that strange walk of his (because of the hernia) and whispered things in his car about the stars and God and thrust and where the happy life awaits us, not here not here, and the burned-out cigarette danced from his upper lip, while he muttered words from the Bible and synagogue prayers, and he laughed and laughed the weird laughter of someone who’s about to hoodwink the world, and Momik didn’t have the patience for him anymore.
All day long Momik’s head burned, but the thermometer showed nothing. He felt as if his mind were doing an oftzeluchus on him and making him think thoughts that weren’t good. Momik had been starting with the nightmares himself lately and crying out in his sleep at night, and Mama and Papa would come running, and beg him with their eyes to stop this please, to go back to being what he was before only a few short months ago, but enough, he hasn’t got the strength to pretend to be happy in his sleep for them anymore, aililuliii, what’s happening to him, what’s happening, everything is breaking down, the Beast is beating him, beating him before ever coming out of its disguise, and he punched his pillow which was wet all over and saw that his fingers were cramped and crooked with fear or whatever, and again and again he punched his pillow and screamed at his parents who huddled together and cried, and then he fell asleep but he woke up right away with a new nightmare: Motl was walking down the street of a city Momik didn’t know, Motl was small and scrawny and he walked funny, and Momik was glad to see him and screamed, Motl! But Motl didn’t hear him or pretended not to, and Momik saw a booth in the corner like the lottery booth, and in it sat Mama and Papa crowded together and sad, right in the corner where the Golden Ray of Fortune is painted on the lottery sign, and then he saw that it wasn’t a street at all, it was a river, maybe the San, and maybe not, and the lottery booth was floating in it like a little boat, and Mod was walking toward this boat, he was walking in the water but he wasn’t getting wet and he never reached the boat, because the closer he came, the farther away it moved, and suddenly a couple of boys were there, and a grown-up man was walking with them, and they were walking in circles around Motl, and suddenly for no reason at all one of them boxed him in the face, and they all jumped on him and started kicking him and punching him and yelling at each other, Bash him in the teeth, Emil, Punch him in the belly, Gustav, and Momik almost fainted when he realized it was Emil and the detectives, grown up now in Germany, and the man watching them and laughing to himself must have been Yashkeh the policeman who sometimes went to Emil’s mother’s house for a cup of tea, and Mod lay there bloody and half dead, and Momik looked up and saw Mama and Papa in the booth rowing their boat away, and Mama looked at Momik and said, God will help him, there’s nothing I can do to help him now, and Bella suddenly slipped out of her window (how did she get there anyway?) and screamed at his parents, Brutes, at least someone should stay home with him in the afternoon, if you knew the company he keeps, and Mama shrugged her shoulders and said, We don’t have the strength anymore, Mrs. Bella, we ran out a long time ago, that’s life, and everyone is alone in the end, and on they rowed till finally they were gone, and when Momik looked at Motl again, he saw that the river wasn’t really a river but a crowd of people streaming in from the side streets, and when he looked again he saw some people and children he recognized, from the famous Fives and secret Sixes, and Captain Nemo’s children, and Sherlock Holmes was there with Watson, and they were all yelling and laughing and rolling these strange little bundles, and when they came dose to him he saw that all the bundles were his good friends, Yotam the Sorcerer, and My Brother Elijah, and Anne Frank, and the Children of the Heart from Grandfather’s story, and even baby Kazik was there, and Momik started to scream and he woke up, and this kept happening all night long, and next morning as Momik lay more dead than alive in his bed which stank of sweat, he realized he’d been making a huge mistake, that he’d been wasting his efforts, because obviously the Beast knew he wasn’t Jewish enough, so all he had to do now was to get hold of a real Jew, someone who actually came from Over There who’d be able to taunt the Beast till it showed itself, and then we’ll see, and Momik knew of just the person.
Grandfather Anshel wasn’t at all surprised when Momik shared his secret and asked him to help. Momik of course knew Grandfather didn’t understand any of this, but he wanted to be completely fair so he frankly explained the pitfalls and dangers, while also pointing out that his parents had to be rescued from their fears once and for all, and when he said this, he didn’t quite believe it himself anymore because it wasn’t his parents he had to save, and who needs that Beast anyhow, let it go to sleep and leave us alone, but there was no choice, and he had to keep talking and arguing. At the end of the speech Momik told Grandfather that for such a major decision Grandfather was entitled to have three days to think it over, but he was only saying that of course.
Grandfather didn’t need three days, he made his mind up there and then. He shook his head so hard Momik was afraid his neck would snap, God forbid, and you’d have thought he understood something after all, that the whole time he’d only been waiting for Momik to ask him, and maybe this was the real reason he came to them in the first place, and Momik started to feel a little better.
