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 OverThere, 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, andMama 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
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