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  Momik intends to rescue Grandfather Anshel too of course, only he doesn’t quite know how yet. He’s tried one or two methods already, but so far, nothing works. First, when Momik used to sit with Grandfather and give him his lunch, he would accidentally knock on the table sometimes the way Raphael Blitz and Nachman Farkash the convicts did when they were planning their prison break. He couldn’t tell whether the knocking meant anything or not, but he had this hunch, this hope actually, that someone inside Grandfather would knock back. But nothing happened. Then Momik tried to figure out the secret code on Grandfather’s arm. He’d tried this before with Papa’s and Bella’s and Aunt Idka’s code numbers, but he didn’t get anywhere that time either. The numbers drove him crazy because they weren’t written in ink and they couldn’t be washed off with water or spit. Momik tried everything to wash Grandfather’s arm, but the number stayed fixed, which gave Momik an idea that maybe the number wasn’t written from the outside but from the inside, and that convinced him more than ever that there was somebody there inside Grandfather, and the others too maybe, which is how they call out for help, and Momik racked his brains to understand what it could be, and he wrote down Grandfather’s number in his spy notebook next to Papa’s and Bella’s and Idka’s, and did all kinds of calculations, and then luckily in school they learned about gematria and the numerical values of the alphabet which naturally Momik was the first in his class to understand, and when he got home he tried to turn the numbers into letters in different ways, but all he got was a bunch of strange words he didn’t understand, and still Momik would not give up, and once in the middle of the night he had an Einsteiny idea, he remembered there are things called safes where rich people hide their money and diamonds, and these safe things will only open if you turn seven dials in a certain secret way, and you can bet Momik spent half the night experimenting, and the next day, as soon as he picked Grandfather up at the bench on his way home from school and gave him his lunch and sat down across the table from him, he called out various combinations of the numbers from Grandfather’s arm in a slow, solemn voice. He sounded kind of like the guy on the radio who announces the numbers that won the thirty-thousand-pound prize in the lottery, and he had a peculiar feeling that any minute now his grandfather would split down the middle like a yellow string bean, and a smily little chick of a grandfather who loves children would pop out, only it didn’t happen, and suddenly Momik felt strangely sad, and he got up and went over to old Grandfather, and hugged him tight, and felt how warm he was, like an oven, and Grandfather stopped talking to himself, and for maybe half a minute he was quiet, and kept his face and hands still, and sort of listened to what was going on inside, but he could never stop talking for very long.

  Then Momik used his systematic approach, the kind he’s really good at. Whenever he and Grandfather were left alone in the house together, Momik would start following him around with a notebook and pen, recording Grandfather’s gibberish in Hebrew letters. Okay, he didn’t write down every single word he said, not every single word, that would be too dumb, but he did write down what he thought were the most important sounds Grandfather made, and it only took a couple of days for Momik to notice that what Grandfather was saying wasn’t all gibberish, in fact he was telling somebody a story, just as Momik had thought all along. Momik tried hard to remember what Grandma Henny used to tell him about Anshel (that was a long, long time ago, before Momik understood things like an alter kopf, before he ever heard about Over There), but all he could remember was that she said Grandfather wrote poems for grownups too, and that he had a wife and daughter who were killed Over There, and he also tried to find hints in the story from the old magazine, but he didn’t come up with anything. Then Momik went to the school library and asked Mrs. Govrin the librarian if she had any books by a writer called Anshel Wasserman, and Mrs. Govrin peered at him over her glasses and said she never heard of him, and she knows everyone. Okay, so Momik didn’t say anything, he just smiled to himself inside.

  He went over to Bella’s to share his discovery (that Grandfather was telling a story), but she only looked at him with that expression he doesn’t like, pitying him and shaking her head from side to side and unbuttoning his top button, and she said, Sport, yingaleh, you’re going to have to start pulling yourself together now, you’re pale and scrawny, a real little fertel, how will they ever take you into the army, tell me, but Momik was stubborn and he explained that Grandfather Anshel was telling a story. Grandma Henny also used to like to tell stories when she still had her mind, and Momik remembered her special story voice and the way she stretched the words out and how her stomach filled with the words, and the peculiar way his palms would start sweating and the back of his knees, which is just how it felt when Grandfather talked now. And then he explained to Bella that he understood now that his poor grandfather was locked up in the story like the farmer with the sad face and the mouth open to scream that Aunt Idka and Uncle Shimmik brought from Switzerland, and this farmer lived his whole life in a glass ball where the snow fell if you shook it, and Mama and Papa put it on the living-room buffet, and Momik couldn’t stand that mouth so one day he accidentally broke the glass and freed the farmer, and meanwhile Momik continues to record Grandfather’s gibberish in the spy notebook slyly labeled Geography, and little by little he makes out a word here and there like Herrneigel, for instance, or Scheherazade, for instance, which he doesn’t find in the Hebrew Encyclopedia, so he asks Bella for no particular reason what does Scheherazade mean, and Bella’s just glad to hear he’s stopped thinking about Over There, and she says she’ll ask her son Joshua, the major, and two days later she answers Momik that Scheherazade was an Arab princess who lived in Baghdad, which is a little strange since if you read the papers you know there isn’t any princess in Baghdad, there’s a prince, Prince Kassem, pshakrev, who hates us like all the goyim, may-their-memory-be-blotted-out, but Momik doesn’t know the meaning of the word “surrender,” he has the patience of an elephant, and he understands that a thing may seem mysterious and scary and confused today, but it will clear up by tomorrow, because it’s just a question of logic, there’s always an explanation, that’s how it is in arithmetic, and that’s how it is in everything else, but till the truth comes out, you just do things normally as if nothing happened, you go to school every morning and sit there for hours, and you don’t let it hurt your feelings when the children say you walk like a camel, the way you slouch, oh, what do they know, and you don’t feel bad when they call you Helen Keller because you wear glasses and have braces which is why he tries not to talk, and you don’t give in when they try to butter you up so you’ll tell them when the next surprise quiz in arithmetic will be, and on top of this Momik has to worry about the deal he made with Laizer the Crook who swipes his sandwich every morning and then there’s the distance home from school every day which you use arithmetic to figure out, seven hundred and seventy-seven steps, no more, no less, from the school gate to the lottery booth where Mama and Papa sit squeezed together all day long not saying one word, and they see him turn the corner, all the way up the street, for this they possess animal instincts, and when he gets there Mama comes out with the house keys. Mama is very squatty, and looks something like a kilo bag of flour, and she wets her fingers with spit to comb the hair of Motl Ben Paisee the Chazzan, he should look tidy, and she wipes a speck of dirt off his cheek and his sleeve too, though Momik knows very well there isn’t any dirt there, she just likes to touch him, and he, poor orphan, patiently faces her fingernails, gazing anxiously into her eyes, because if there’s anything wrong with her eyes they won’t grant us papers to get into America, and Mama, who doesn’t know she’s Motl’s mother just now, says quickly under her breath, Your papa is becoming impossible, and she can’t stand those krechtzes one more minute, like an old man ninety years old he sounds, and she swings around to look at Papa who just stares up in the air like there’s nothing there and doesn’t budge, and Mama tells Momik Papa hasn’t washed in a week, it’s the way he stinks that keeps the customers away, no one’s stopped at the booth for two days now except the three regulars, why should the lottery people let us keep the booth with no customers and where are we supposed to get money to eat I’d like to know, and the only reason she stays here with him all day long like a sardine is because you can’t trust him with money, he might go off and sell the tickets at a discount, or he could get a heart attack from the hooligans, God forbid, why is God punishing me like this, let Him kill me right now instead of a little at a time, she says, and her face falls exhausted, but then she suddenly gazes at him, and for just a minute her eyes are pretty and young-looking, not frightened or angry, the opposite, you might say she seems to be trying out some new chendelach on Momik to make him smile, to make him special to her, and her eyes light up, but it only lasts about a half a minute and she changes back into the way she was before, and Momik sees her eyes change, and Mod whispers softly to her, in the voice of My Brother Elijah, Hush, nu, hush, Mama, weep no more, the doctor said it isn’t good for you to cry, please, Mama, for our sake, and Momik makes a vow, tfu, may he die in Hitler’s black tomb unless he finds a green stone that cures diseases of the eye and other cholerias, and this is what Momik is thinking so hard to help him not hear the seventh-grade hooligans shouting a safe distance away from big fat Papa: “Lottery little, lottery big, turns a pauper into a pig,” a kind of ditty they made up, but Momik and Mama hear nothing, and Momik sees Papa, the sad giant of an Emperor, staring down at his enormous hands, no, all three of them are deaf to the hooligans, because they hear only their own secret language which is Yiddish, which soon the beautiful Marilyn Monroe will understand because she married Mr. Miller, a Jew, and every day she learns three new words, and these hooligans, let them drop dead, amen, a
nd Mama touches Momik here and there while he says the magic word “Chaimova” seven times to himself, which is what you’re supposed to say to infidels at the border tavern in the Motl Ben Paisee book, because when you say “Chaimova,” they drop everything and obey you, especially if you ask them to help you cross the border to America, not to mention a simpler thing like handling a gang of seventh-graders whom Momik will only refrain from throwing to the infidels out of the goodness of his heart.

  “There’s a drumstick in the refrigerator for you and one for him,” says Mama, “and be careful with the small bones, you shouldn’t swallow any, God forbid, and he shouldn’t either. Be careful.” “Okay.” “And be careful with the gas too, Shleimeleh, and blow the match out right away, so there won’t be a fire, God forbid.” “Okay.” “And don’t forget to make sure you turn off the gas knob when you’re done, and the little tap behind the stove too. The one behind is the most important.” “Yes.” “And don’t drink soda water out of the refrigerator. Yesterday I noticed at least one glass less in the bottle. You drank it, and it’s winter now. And as soon as you’re inside lock the door twice. The top lock and the bottom lock. Just once is no good.” “Okay.” “And make sure he goes to sleep as soon as lunch is over. Don’t let him go out like a shlumper.” “Okay.” She carries on talking to herself a little longer, making sure with her tongue that there are no words left over, because if she’s left out a single word, then everything she said will be wasted, but it’s all right, there’s nothing left out, nothing bad will happen to Momik, God forbid, so Mama can make her last speech, like this: “Don’t open the door to anyone. We’re not expecting company. And Papa and I will be home at seven as usual, don’t worry. Do your homework. Don’t turn the heater on even if it gets cold. You can play after you do your homework, but no wildness, and don’t read too much, you’ll ruin your eyes. And don’t get into any fights. If anyone hits you, you come here to us right away.” Her voice sounded weaker and farther away. “Goodbye, Shleimeleh, say goodbye to Papa. Goodbye, Shleimeleh. You be careful.”

  This must be how she bade him goodbye when he was a baby in the royal nursery. His father, who was still the Emperor and a commando fighter in those days, summoned the royal hunter and, with tear-choked voice, ordered him to take this infant deep into the forest and leave him there, prey to the birds of the sky, as they say. It was a kind of curse on children they had in those days. Momik didn’t quite understand it yet. But anyway, luckily the royal hunter took pity on him and raised him secretly as his own, and many years later Momik returned to the castle as an unknown youth and became secret advisor to the Emperor and Empress, and that way, unbeknownst to anyone, he protected the poor Emperor and Empress who had banished him from their kingdom, and of course this is all imaginary, Momik is a truly scientific, arithmetically gifted boy, there’s no one like him in fourth grade, but meanwhile, till the truth will out, Momik has to use imaginary things and hints and hunches and the talking that stops the minute he walks into the room, that’s how it was when Mama and Papa sat talking with Idka and Shimmik about the compensation money from Germany, and Papa said angrily, Take a man like me, for instance, who lost a child Over There, which is why Momik isn’t so sure it’s only imaginary, and sometimes when he’s really feeling low, it makes him so happy just to think how glad they’ll be the day he can finally tell Mama and Papa that he’s the boy they gave away to the hunter, it will be exactly like Joseph and his brothers. But sometimes he imagines it a different way, that he’s the boy who lost his twin brother, because Momik has this feeling that he used to have a Siamese twin, and when they were born, they were cut in two like in Believe It or Not: “300 astonishing cases that shook the world,” and maybe someday they’ll meet and be joined together again (if they want).

  And from the lottery booth he makes his way home at a precise and scientific pace, they call it the camel walk because they don’t understand that he’s directing his footsteps through the secret passages and shortcuts only he knows, and there are some trees you have to brush against accidentally, because he has this feeling maybe there’s somebody inside and you have to show him he hasn’t been forgotten, and then he crosses the dump behind the deserted synagogue where old Munin lives all by himself and you have to hurry past on account of Munin but also on account of the saintly martyrs waiting there impatiently for someone to release them from holy extermination, and from here it’s just ten steps to the gate of Momik’s yard, and you can see the house already, a kind of concrete block perched on four wobbly legs, under which is a small cellar, they should have gotten only one apartment in the house actually, not two, but they signed Grandma Henny up as a separate family, like Uncle Shimmik told them to, and that’s how they got the whole building to themselves, so even though nobody lives in the other half of the house or ever goes in there, it’s theirs, they suffered enough Over There, and it’s a mitzvah to cheat this government, choleria, and in the yard there’s a big old pine tree that keeps out the sun and twice Papa went out with an ax to chop it down, but he scared himself each time and came back quietly, and Mama stormed at him because he had mercy on a tree but not on this child who was going to grow up in the dark without the vitamins you get from the sun, and Momik has a room all to himself, with a portrait of Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion and a picture of Vultures with their wings spread like steel birds boldly defending our nation’s skies, and it’s too bad Mama and Papa won’t let him hang any more pictures on the wall because it ruins the plaster, but except for the pictures, which really do ruin the plaster a little, his room is neat and tidy, everything in its place, and this room could definitely be a model for other children, if they would ever come over, that is.

  It’s a very quiet street, more like a lane really. There are only six houses on it, and it’s always quiet, except when Hannah Zeitrin insults Our Lord. Momik’s house is pretty quiet too. His mama and papa don’t have many friends. In fact they don’t have any friends at all except for Bella naturally, whom Mama goes to see on Saturday afternoons when Papa sits by the window in his undershirt and stares out, and except for Aunt Idka and Uncle Shimmik, who come twice a year for a whole week, and then everything changes. They’re different from Mama and Papa. More like Bella really. And even though Idka has a number on her arm, they go to restaurants and to the theater and to Gigan and Schumacher, the comedians, and they laugh so hard, Mama glances sideways and kisses her fingertips and touches her forehead, and Idka says, What harm is there in a little laughter, Gisella, and Mama smiles a foolish smile like she’s been caught and says, Don’t mind me, laugh, laugh, there’s no harm, I do it just to be safe. Idka and Shimmik play cards too and go to the seashore, and Shimmik even knows how to swim. Once they sailed on a luxury ship, The Jerusalem, for a whole month because Shimmik owns a big garage in Natanya, and also he knows how to cheat on his income tax really well, pshakrev, and there’s only one small problem, which is that they don’t have any children, because Idka did all sorts of scientific experiments Over There.

  Momik’s mama and papa never go away on trips, not even out of town, except once a year, a few days after Passover when they spend three days at a small pensione in Tiberias. This is sort of strange because they even take Momik out of school for the three days. In Tiberias they’re different. Not so different, but a little different somehow. For instance, they sit at a café and order sodas and cake for three. One morning of the vacation they all go to the beach and sit under Mama’s yellow umbrella which you could call a parasol, with everybody dressed very lightly. Then they rub Vaseline on their legs so they won’t burn, and on their noses all three of them wear little white plastic shades. Momik doesn’t have a swimming suit, because it’d be silly to spend all that money on something you use only once a year and shorts are good enough. They allow him to run on the beach then as far as the water, and you can bet he knows things like the exact depth, length, and breadth of the Sea of Galilee, and what kinds of fish live in it better than any of those hooligans swimming out there. In the past when Momik and his parents went to Tiberias, Aunt Idka would come up to Jerusalem alone to take care of Grandma Henny. She always brought a stack of Polish newspapers with her from Natanya which she left with Bella when she went home. Momik used to clip out pictures of Polish soccer players from the newspapers (especially Pshegelond) like Shimko-viak, the fantastic goalkeeper with the catlike leaps, but the year Grandfather Anshel arrived, Idka didn’t want to stay with him on her own because he’s so difficult, so Mama and Papa went by themselves, and Momik stayed with his aunt and with Grandfather, because only Momik knows how to handle him.