See Under, David Grossman [the first e reader TXT] 📗

hibernation, and there’s a toad that wanted to cross the road but Momik saved its life and brought it down here, and a lizard that unhitched its tail the instant Momik caught it, but Momik couldn’t resist so he scooped up the tail with a piece of paper (it was pretty disgusting) and put the tail in a separate cage with a sign saying: An as yet unfamiliar animal. May be venomous. But then he had a scientific conscience about it and added a correction that looked more honest: Tail may be venomous, because you never can tell. And there was also a kitten that most likely went crazy in the dark cage, and then—this is what you could call the crowning touch of the collection—there was the young raven that fell out of its nest in the pine tree kerplunk onto the little balcony. The young raven’s parents are very suspicious of Momik, and they swoop down at him whenever they see him in the yard; a few weeks ago they even pecked his back and his arm and there was blood and a big commotion, but they can’t prove anything, and the young raven gets the drumstick every day and tears it to pieces with its claws and crooked beak, and Momik watches it and thinks, How cruel, maybe this is the Beast, but you can’t really tell who it’s going to come out of in the end, and we won’t know till they all get the right kind of nourishment and care.

A few days ago he saw a gazelle. He saw her on his way down the Ein Kerem path, a light brown patch on the rocks sweeping by suddenly. She stopped in her tracks and turned toward him looking beautiful and frightened and wild. A gazelle. She stretched forward to sniff him, and Momik held his breath. He wanted a good smell to come out of him, a friendly smell. She raised one hoof off the ground and checked the smell. Then she jumped back and stared at him with wide-open eyes, not lovingly, she was afraid of him and she ran away. Momik searchedthe rocks for about an hour, but he didn’t find her. He was angry and he couldn’t understand why. He asked himself if she might have the Beast in her too, because Bella said it could come out of any animal. Any animal? He’d better check with Bella again.

Momik took crates labeled TNUVA PRODUCE and REFRESHING TEMPO SODA from behind Bella’s grocery store. He padded them with rags and old newspapers, and made little locks for them out of wire. He lugged all the stuff in the cellar off to one side, Grandma Henny’s kifat, the big Jewish Agency beds, the straw mattresses that stank of pee, and the suitcases practically bursting with shmattes that were tied up with rope to keep them from springing open, and two big sacks full of shoes, because you never throw out old shoes, as anyone who’s ever walked barefoot for twenty kilometers in the snow can tell you, Papa said, which was about the only clue he ever got from Papa, and he wrote it down right away. The snow did pretty much fit in with that business about the Snow Queen who freezes everybody. And from the kitchen cupboard he stole a couple of old plates and half-broken cups for the food in the cages, and Mama noticed right away of course, and he screamed that he didn’t do it, and he saw she didn’t believe him, and he threw himself on the floor, kicking and pounding, and he even said something mean—that she should leave him alone already and stop butting into his business, which he never said before he started fighting the Beast, not to her or to anyone, and Mama was really frightened, and she shut up, and her hand trembled over her mouth, and her eyes popped open so wide he was afraid they would burst, okay, so what could he do, the words came out. He never guessed he had words like that inside him. But she shouldn’t have made such a big fuss about it. Maybe they can’t help because they aren’t allowed to, okay, but do they have to butt in?

After that he stopped taking things from the house. It’s risky to take anything because Mama has eyes in the back of her head, and she even sleeps with her eyes open, and she can always tell what he’s thinking, that’s happened several times. She knows about everything in the house. When she’s drying the forks and soup spoons and knives after supper, she counts them quietly, humming a kind of tune. She knows how many tassels there are on the living-room carpet, and she always but always knows exactly what time it is, even when she doesn’t have her watch on. Prophecy must run in the family, because it seems to havestarted with Grandfather Anshel and passed down to Mama and now Momik. The way diseases pass down.

And another thing worth mentioning is that Momik never slouches on the prophecy job, and he always tries to be a genius like Shaya Weintraub who calculated the minutes till Passover, and for the past few days Momik has been experimenting with numbers, not something really big, but fairly interesting all the same—it goes like this: he counts the number of letters in words people say on his fingers, and it could be that Momik Neuman of Beit Mazmil, Jerusalem, is the inventor of a spectacular new method of counting on your fingers, faster than a robot, and no one could ever guess how it works, because it looks as if Momik is just listening to what the person is saying, his teacher for instance, or Mama for instance, but in his head and on his fingers something else is going on. Not every word though, every word, what, is he crazy? Only words with a certain ring to