him to buy any, even with his own money. She says books attract dust. But Momik simply must have books, and when there’s enough money saved up in his hiding place from presents and what he gets from Mr. Munin sometimes, he hurries down to Lipschitz’s to buy a book, and on the way home he writes in the jacket in deliberately crooked handwriting: To my good friend Momik, from Uri, or in big, grown-up-looking letters like Mrs. Govrin’s he writes: Property of Beit Mazmil Elementary School. This way, if Mama should ever happen to notice a new book with his school things, Momik has a cover. But the Encyclopedia was no use this time, because they weren’t up to P for pregnancy yet, and there was nothing under Cubs either. There seemed to be an awful lot of things the Encyclopedia was trying to ignore, as if they didn’t exist, some of the most interesting things of all in fact, like the thing Mr. Munin has been talking about more and more lately, “Happiness,” the Encyclopedia doesn’t even mention it, or maybe there’s some good reason for this because usually it’s very very smart. Momik loves to hold the big books in his hands, and it makes him feel good all over to run his fingers down the smooth pages that seem to have a protective covering that keeps your fingers away, so you won’t get too close, because who are you, what are youcompared to the Encyclopedia, with all the little letters crowded in long, straight columns and mysterious abbreviations like secret signals for a big, strong, silent army boldly marching out to conquer the world, all-knowing, all-righteous, and a couple of months ago Momik vowed he would read an entry a day in alphabetical order, because he’s a very methodical little boy, and so far he hasn’t missed once, except for the time Grandfather Anshel arrived, so the next day to make up for it he read two entries, and even though he doesn’t always understand what they’re talking about, he likes to touch the pages and feel deep in his stomach and his heart all the power and the silence, and the seriousness, and the scientificness that makes everything so clear and simple, and best of all he likes Volume VI, which is all about Israel, and from the cover you might think it was an ordinary volume like the others, because it looks serious and smart and scientific, but in this volume, right before the end, you suddenly see a burst of fantastic colors, two fantastic whole pages of pictures of all the stamps issued by the State of Israel, and Momik gasps when he turns the pages in this volume slowly and all the beautiful colors leap out at him and take him completely by surprise like huge bouquets of flowers or a peacock’s tail fanning out in his face and all those pictures and colors and the wildness of it, and the one thing that reminds him a little of this is the red lining that looks like fire in Mama’s black evening bag.
And another secret which can be told now is that those were the stamps that gave Momik the idea of drawing his stamps from Over There. In the past few days, thanks to everything the old people have been teaching him about Over There, he managed to fill nearly a whole album. Once, he had to make do with what he knew already, which wasn’t that much, and which wasn’t that interesting either, why not admit it; for instance, he used to draw Papa the way they draw Chaim Weizmann our first President on a blue three-piaster stamp, and he drew Mama holding a peace dove, one fist, four fingers, wearing a white dress as in the 1952 Holiday Greetings stamp, and Bella as Baron Edmond de Rothschild, she’s a famous philanthropist too, with a bunch of grapes on one side, just like the real stamp. There didn’t use to be that much to draw before, but now everything has changed. Momik draws lots of stamps with Grandfather Anshel as Dr. Herzl, Seer of the Nation at the Twenty-third Zionist Congress (because Grandfather Wasserman is a seer and a prophet like that), and little Aaron Marcusas Maimonides with the beads and the funny hat on the brown stamp, and Max and Moritz like the two people carrying the pole of grapes on their shoulders, Ginzburg in front, with his head bowed, and a little balloon coming out of his mouth with his three words, and behind him, Zeidman, small and pink and polite, carrying a tiny briefcase in one hand, with Ginzburg’s words coming out of his mouth too in a balloon, because he always does what he sees someone else doing. But the best idea of all is the one with Munin. It’s like this: on the Holiday Greetings stamp for 1953 there’s a picture of a white dove flying nobly in the air and it says on the stamp, My dove in the mountain clefts, and for three days Momik sat down and drew maybe twenty sketches till it came out the way he wanted, a picture of Mr. Munin flying in the air with a bunch of other little birds that always fly around with him because of the bread he crumbles, and Momik drew Munin just like he is in real life, with his black hat and his big red nose like a kartofeleh, only in the picture Momik gave him white wings too like a dove, and in the corner he drew a little white star and wrote Happiness, because that’s where Munin wants to go so much, isn’t it? And there were a lot of other pretty and interesting stamps in his collection, like Marilyn Monroe with her blond hair, as pretty as Hannah Zeitrin’s wig, and in the margin he wrote (Bella helped him translate), Marilyn Monroe redst Yiddish, because she did promise,
