So anyway, meanwhile Mama stood up white as this wall, all weak and wobbly and Bella braced her and said, Lean on me, Gisella, and Mama wouldn’t even look at the new grandfather and she said to Bella, This will kill me, mark my words, why doesn’t God just leave us in peace and let us live a little, and Bella said, Tfu, tfu, Gisella, what are you saying, this is not a cat, this is a live human being, you shouldn’t talk that way, and Mama said, It’s not enough I’m an orphan, not enough we had so much suffering from my mother, now this, now everything all over again, look at him, look how he looks, he’s coming here to die, that’s what, and Bella said, Sha sha, and held her hand and they huddled together next to Grandfather but Mama wouldn’t look at him and then Papa coughed, Nu, why are you standing there, and he bravely put his hand on the old man’s shoulder and looked at Momik with a shy expression and led the old man away, and Momik, whoalready knew he would call the old man Grandfather even though he wasn’t his real grandfather, told himself that if the old man didn’t die when Papa touched him, that must mean a person from Over There is safe from harm.
The same day, Momik went to search in the cellar. He’d always been afraid to go down to the cellar because of the dark and the dirt, but this time he had to. There, together with the big brass beds and the mattresses with straw sticking out and the bundles of clothes and the piles of shoes was Grandma Henny’s kifat, a kind of box you tie up, with all the clothes and stuff she brought from Over There and this book called a Teitsh Chumash and also the Tzena u-Rena, and the bread board Grandma Henny used there for making pastry dough and three bags full of goose feathers she had dragged halfway around the world in boats and trains braving terrible dangers just so she could make herself a feather quilt in Eretz Yisrael to keep her feet warm, but when she arrived it turned out that Aunt Idka and Uncle Shimmik, who got here first and quickly made a lot of money, had already bought a double feather quilt, so the feathers stayed in the cellar where pretty soon they caught mildew and other cholerias, but you don’t throw out a thing like that around here. So anyway, the point is that at the bottom of the kifat was a notebook with Grandma’s Yiddish notes, all her memories like from the days when she still had a memory, but then Momik remembered that a long time ago before he could even read, before he’d turned into an alter kopf, which means the head of a smart old man, Grandma showed him a page from an old, old magazine, and in it was a story by Grandma Henny’s brother, this Anshel, written one hundred years ago, but Mama got mad at Grandma for upsetting the boy with things that are no more and shouldn’t be mentioned, and sure enough the magazine page was still in the notebook but when Momik picked it up it started to crumble, so he carried it between the pages of the notebook with a fluttering heart and sat down on the kifat to tie it back up with the ropes but he was too light so he left it open because he wanted to get out fast but suddenly he had an idea that was so strange he just stood still and forgot what he wanted to do next, but his thingy knew and he made it out just in time to piss under the stairwell, which is what always happens to him when he goes down to the cellar.
So anyway, he sneaked the notebook into the house without anyonenoticing, and ran to his room and opened it and saw that the page had crumbled a little more on the way and the top corner was torn off. The page was yellow and cracked like the earth after a long time without rain and Momik knew right away he’d have to copy what it said on another piece of paper, otherwise, kaput. He found his spy notebook under the mattress and, wild with excitement, he wrote out the story on the tom page, word for word.
THE CHILDREN OF THE HEART Rescue the Red Sk
A story in fifty chapters by the popular auth
Anshel Wasserman-Scheheraz
Chapter the Twenty-seventh
O Constant Reader! In our previous episode, we saw the Children of the Heart swiftly borne upon the wings of the “Leap in Time” machine: destination—the lesser luminary called the moon. This machine was the product of the craft and intelligence of the wise Sergei, whose mastery of technics and the currents of electricality in the case of the magnificent machine we did so fully elucidate in our foregoing chapter, whither we refer our Constant Reader for the sundry particulars effaced from memory. And so, aboard the machine, arm in arm with the Children of the Order, were Red Men of the Navajo tribe and their proud king, who rejoiced in the name: Red Slipper (mayhap our Amiable Reader knows of the Red Skin’s predilection for suchlike names fantastical, though we may smile to
