Anyway, that afternoon Momik drew a picture of Shaya Weintraub with a head like an ear of corn, with a wrinkled forehead from thinking so much, and over him he drew a bottle of Passover wine and matzo, and then he drew good old Motl as the parachutist on the Tenth Anniversary of Hebrew Parachuting stamp, and he cut out little teeth on the new stamps and pasted them in his stamp notebook, and looked at his watch and saw that it was six already, and then he turned the radio on because it was time for Children’s Corner, and they told the story of King Matt I, and Momik listened, but he jumped up every other minute because he remembered something or other he’d forgotten to do, like sharpening his pencils till they were sharp as a pin, or shining Mama’s and Papa’s shoes and his own shoes too on a piece of newspaper till they glistened and gave him naches, or making a note in his geography notebook, the secret one, about what he read in the paper yesterday, that the first two mares at the Hebrew Agricultural Exhibit at Beit Dagan are already pregnant, and everyone’s waiting, and after the program was over he turned the radio off and picked up Emil and the Detectives which he likes to read because of the suspense but also because of the five printing errors he enjoys finding and then he can check to see if he’s entered them in his notebook of printing errors from books and newspapers (he’s collected almost a hundred and seventy errors already), and even though he knows those mistakes from Emil and the Detectives have been in his notebook for a long time, it’s 6:33 already, and now Momik goes over to the living-room couch and lies down under the picture his parents got from Idka and Shimmik, a big oil painting of a forest and snow and a stream and a bridge, which must be what Neustadt looked like or Dinov where his old friend once lived, and if you lie down in a certain way, kind of curled up on the couch, you can see when you look up through the branches of the tree in the corner there’s a face almost like a child’s face which only Momik knows about, and maybe that’s his Siamese twin, but you can’t tell forsure, and Momik looks at it very hard but the truth is that today he can’t concentrate because his head’s been hurting badly for a few days now, his eyes too, but don’t get tired yet, because today’s war has not even begun.
And then Momik suddenly remembered that it was a couple of hours already since he’d decided to become a writer and so far he hadn’t written anything, and the reason was that he hadn’t found anything to write about. What did he know about dangerous criminals like in Emil and the Detectives, or about submarines like in Jules Verne, and his own life seemed so ordinary and boring, all he was was a nine-year-old kid, what’s there to tell about that, and he checked his big yellow watch again, and slid off the couch and walked around in circles saying comically, It makes my head ache to watch you krechtzing and spinning like a top, Tuvia, as a certain person we know says to another person, but it wasn’t really so comical, though at least when he looked at his watch again it was twenty-one minutes to seven already, and in his head he started broadcasting the final minutes of the big game soon to take place in Yaroslav, Poland, between us and the Polish team, and he let them win by four goals, and then with only five minutes to go and the situation looking kaput, our coach, Giula Mandy, raised his sad eyes to the bleachers full of cheering Poles, when who should he see there but a boy! And one look is enough to tell him that this boy is a born soccer player, the player who will save the day, and if only they had let the boy play at school he would have shown them too, oh well, and
