Bella’s café served breakfast specials and home-cooked meals for people of taste. Momik remembered the words “people of taste” because he was the one who wrote the menus three times (for Bella’s three tables), and decorated them with drawings of people looking all fat and smily after eating such a good meal at Bella’s. And she served home-baked cookies too, fresher than Bella, as she would tell anyone who asked her, though not too many people asked these days, because hardly anyone ever came in besides the Moroccan construction workers from the new housing developments at Beit Mazmil who showed up around ten in the morning for a quart of milk, a loaf of bread, and a cup of yogurt, or the few neighborhood customers and then of course Momik. Only Momik didn’t pay. The other regulars stopped shopping there when the new modern supermarket opened at the shopping center where they gave a free set of cork coasters for buying thirty pounds worth of groceries, as if people always had a glass of tea on a coaster with the princess, and now they rush over like maybe they’re going to find gold there instead of smoked fish and radishes, and also because everyone gets to push a solid-steel shopping cart around, says Bella, not really angry, and whenever she mentions the supermarket, Momik blushes and looks the other way, because he goes there too sometimes to see the lights and all the stuff they sell and the cash registers that ring, and how they kill the carp in the fish tank, but she doesn’t mind so much about her regular customers leaving (says Bella), or that rich she’ll never be, tell me, does Rockefeller eat two dinners, docs Rothschild sleep on two beds, no, what bothers her most is the tedium, the boredom, and if things go on like this much longer she’ll go out andscrub floors rather than sit around here all day, because to Hollywood she won’t be going, not this year, because of her legs maybe, so Marilyn Monroe can relax with that new Jewish husband of hers. Bella sits at one of the empty tables all day long reading Woman’s Own, and Evening News, smoking one Savyon cigarette after another. Bella isn’t afraid of anything, and she always says exactly what she thinks, which is why when the city inspectors came to throw Max and Moritz out of the storeroom, she gave them such a piece of her mind they had a conscience for the rest of their lives, and she wasn’t even afraid of Ben-Gurion and called him “The Little Dictator from Plonsk,” but she didn’t always talk that way, because don’t forget that like all the grownups Momik knew Bella came from Over There, a place you weren’t supposed to talk about too much, only think about in your heart and sigh with a drawn-out krechtz, oyyyy, the way they always do, but Bella is different from the others somehow and Momik heard some really important things from her about it, and even though she wasn’t supposed to reveal any secrets, she did drop hints about her parents’ home Over There, and it was from her that Momik first heard about the Nazi Beast.
The truth is, in the beginning Momik thought Bella meant some imaginary monster or a huge dinosaur that once lived in the world which everyone was afraid of now. But he didn’t dare ask anyone who or what. And then when the new grandfather showed up and Momik’s mama and papa screamed and suffered at night worse than ever, and things were getting impossible, Momik decided to ask Bella again, and Bella snapped back that there are some things, thank God, a nine-year-old boy doesn’t have to know yet, and she undid his collar button with a frown, saying it choked her just to see him buttoned up like that, but Momik decided to persist this time and he asked her straight out what kind of animal is the Nazi Beast (since he knew there weren’t any imaginary animals in the world and surely no dinosaurs either), and Bella took a long puff on her cigarette and stubbed it out in the ashtray and gave a krechtz, and looked at him, and screwed her mouth up and didn’t want to say, but she let it slip out that the Nazi Beast could come out of any kind of animal if it got the right care and nourishment,
