A Boy Is Not a Bird

  Copyright © 2019 by Edeet Ravel

  Published in Canada and the USA in 2019 by Groundwood Books

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior written consent of the publisher or a license from The Canadian Copyright Licensing Agency (Access Copyright). For an Access Copyright license, visit www.accesscopyright.ca or call toll free to 1-800-893-5777.

  Groundwood Books / House of Anansi Press

  groundwoodbooks.com

  We gratefully acknowledge for their financial support of our publishing program the Canada Council for the Arts, the Ontario Arts Council and the Government of Canada.

  Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

  Title: A boy is not a bird / Edeet Ravel.

  Names: Ravel, Edeet, author.

  Identifiers: Canadiana (print) 20190043857 | Canadiana (ebook) 20190043873 | ISBN 9781773061740 (hardcover) | ISBN 9781773061757 (EPUB) | ISBN 9781773061764 (Kindle)

  Classification: LCC PS8585.A8715 B69 2019 | DDC jC813/.54—dc23

  Illustrations by Pam Comeau

  Map by Mary Rostad

  Cover photo courtesy of Nahum Halpern

  Design by Michael Solomon

  For Nahum, Gina, Tammy and Dafna

  and for my darling Ivy

  who is all new

  ONE

  MINUS A HOUSE

  1940

  Summer

  1

  Something Is Wrong

  My best friend Max and I are playing a game called Life and Death on the High Seas. Max came up with both the game and the name. He gets all the good ideas. I’m more of a go-along type of guy.

  It’s our summer holidays. In three weeks we’ll be back in school, which means homework, teachers (including, unfortunately, Mrs. Bubu), waking up early, and our entire lives charted out like a multiplication table.

  For now, though, we’re as free as the wind. Max jumps up on the big crate we’ve been sitting on. The crate is our ship. We’re headed for Montreal, Canada, where my relatives live.

  “Hold on to the mast, hold on to the mast!” Max cries out, wobbling from side to side. His round glasses flash and flicker in the sun and his orange-red hair glows as if it’s on fire.

  “The waves are getting higher and higher,” I shout back. “Grab a raft before we drown!”

  “Watch out for pirates!”

  “Boys, boys,” a voice calls from behind us.

  It’s Max’s mother, standing in the middle of the stormy sea. Except that it’s not the sea, of course. It’s Max’s front garden. The chickens are pecking at the ground, looking for seeds. Near the shed, Max’s older brother Michael is chopping wood.

  “You’d better head on home, Natt,” Max’s mother says. She always speaks in a soft voice — so soft that her friends call her Kitten. But she sounds a little wild suddenly, and there’s a strange look in her eyes, as if she’s trying to hide something. “Your mother will be worrying.”

  I’m confused. Why would Mama worry? She knows where I am.

  But I take the hint. Max’s mother wants me to leave.

  Maybe there’s a medical emergency somewhere, and Max’s dad needs him. Max’s father is a doctor, and when he pays a visit to a poor person who has small children, he asks Max to come along and keep an eye on the kids while he attends to the patient.

  “Only if it’s a broken arm or something like that,” Max said with his usual wide grin, when he first told me about these trips. “Not if it’s that bug that turns you into a werewolf. The first symptom is sudden drooling.”

  Max may be on the small side, but he does a pretty convincing imitation of a drooling lupine monster.

  I remember my manners and thank Max’s mother for having me. I even give a little bow, because it usually makes her laugh.

  But today, Mrs. Zwecker barely notices.

  “Be careful — it’s a full moon tonight!” Max calls out as I let myself through the gate.

  I would have liked to spend more time with Max, but there are plenty of fun things to do at home. As a reward for my good grades last year, my parents bought me a magnifying glass, a telescope and a kaleidoscope. I can now spend hours in my room looking at small things getting bigger, faraway things getting nearer, and geometric shapes expanding and contracting.

  As well as being a go-along type of boy, I’m also the stay-at-home type. I’m not crazy about sports, partly because I have asthma, and partly because I’m a bit on the chubby side. According to my mother, some kids don’t lose their childhood chubbiness until they’re twelve. One year to go.

  Max loves sports. You wouldn’t think such a tiny kid could kick so hard or run so fast, but it’s as if he’s got invisible wings on his boots when he goes after that soccer ball.

  As I walk home, I entertain myself with a game I invented — the only game I’ve thought of myself, without Max. I try to think of a word that’s different in all the languages I know.

  My first and best language is German. That’s what I speak at home and with Max.

  Our town, Zastavna, has a large Ukrainian population, so everyone who lives here is fluent in Ukrainian. Ukrainian has some very bad words. Max’s brothers told him what those words mean and Max told me. It’s useful to have a friend with older brothers.

  Third language: Romanian. That’s what they teach us in school. We’re not really allowed to speak German to each other at school, but we do anyhow.

  My fourth language is Hebrew. Ordinary school begins after lunch, but in the mornings Max and I attend Hebrew classes in Mr. Elias’s house.

  Finally, there’s Yiddish, which some Jews speak at home. It’s similar to German but has a mind of its own. Yiddish is famous for its sayings —

  If you don’t open your mouth, a fly won’t get in.

  Sleep faster, we need the pillows.

  What will happen to the sheep if the wolf is the judge?

  That’s five languages swirling around in my head! Sometimes I don’t know which language I’m speaking until someone reminds me.

  My game might sound easy, but it isn’t. Take the word for mother. Romanian, Ukrainian and Hebrew are all different, but German and Yiddish, Mutter, are the same.

  I’m concentrating on my game and kicking a pebble down the road when suddenly I notice that something is wrong.

  It’s the quiet.

  In beautiful weather like this, with the sun shining in a cloudless blue sky, you’d expect to see kids playing, grown-ups rushing around and cart drivers shouting at everyone to move out of the way of the horses.

  But the streets are completely deserted.

  I almost stop breathing.

  What if the Iron Guard are on their way here?

  The entire town is terrified of the Iron Guard. They’re a group of ferocious, bloodthirsty men who wear green jackets and hate everyone. Mr. Elias calls them fascists. Max calls them “potato slime in human form.”

  They usually start off with a march or parade, but that part doesn’t last long. At some point they go berserk. They break into homes and businesses and sometimes they kill the people inside. They especially hate Jews, but luckily we look like everyone else, so unless there’s someone from our town marching with them, they don’t know who we are.

  I’ve never actually seen them, because my parents and I always hide behind bags of grain in my father’s warehouse when we hear them coming. We have a special hiding place, like a little fort, with books to keep us happy. We don’t have to worry about the sound of pages turning. The Iron Guard
make so much noise that they can’t hear anyone else.

  And the bags of grain are too heavy for them to lift.

  But not everyone has a fort. My friend Zigi had a close call. They smashed the windows of his parents’ bakery and threw the cakes and bread on the floor. They would have killed Zigi and his parents while they were at it, but the three of them managed to escape to a church in the nick of time.

  The Iron Guard never kill anyone in a church. I guess they think God can’t see them on the street.

  I look around for the nearest steeple. I’m three or four minutes away, if I make a dash for it.

  Instead, I run home as fast as I can.

  Being alone in a church is spooky, and what if the door is locked?

  2

  Alien Radio

  I run as if a fire-breathing demon is chasing me. By the time I reach our house my chest hurts and I’m wheezing. I hurry along the veranda that circles our house and enter the kitchen from the back.

  No one is there.

  Normally at this hour my mother and Lana, our housemaid, are busy preparing supper. But the table hasn’t even been set.

  What if the Iron Guard marched in and killed everyone in the house? My head begins to swim, and I grab at the stove tiles to steady myself.

  “Natt? Is that you?”

  As soon as I hear my mother’s voice, I feel like an idiot. She’s in another room, that’s all.

  Why am I such a baby?

  “Darling boy!” she exclaims as she comes into the kitchen. “You’re as pale as a ghost.”

  “It’s my asthma … I was … running.”

  “Why were you in such a hurry?” she asks.

  I sink into a chair. I’m not going to tell her that I thought she and Papa and Lana had been murdered. I don’t want to lie, but I don’t want to tell the truth either, so the best thing is to say nothing.

  But my mother, as always, reads my mind. She smiles. “Did something scare you? What was it? Hmm … let me guess. A snarling dog? A great big bear?”

  My mother hasn’t noticed that I’m no longer two years old. Maybe her jokes were funny back then, but that was a long, long time ago.

  “I know! A goblin with purple ears.”

  “There was no one on the street,” I say, trying to sound nonchalant. “I thought the Iron Guard was coming.”

  She shakes her head. “Poor Natt. No, it’s nothing like that.”

  I truly hate being a soft egg, as we say in German. A soft egg is a person who is not exactly famous for courage and daring. Max and I call ourselves the Two Musketeers, and our Musketeer names are Maximus and Natius. But we both know I’m not much of a Musketeer.

  Max is the opposite of me. Nothing frightens him — whether it’s creaks at night or bats in the attic. Even Mrs. Bubu, who would probably join the Iron Guard if they took women, doesn’t frighten him.

  Max just turns scary things into a joke. If we had to fight an enemy, he wouldn’t hesitate for a second. He may be on the short side, he may have glasses, but he’d draw his sword out of its scabbard and lunge!

  My eyes fall on several pairs of boots lined up by the front door. We have guests! At least ten, judging by the boots. But where are they? And why can’t I hear them?

  Again, my mother reads my mind. “Some friends have dropped by because we have a good radio, and they want to hear about some important events that are happening in the world.”

  Some important events that are happening in the world! This is why I usually have to get the low-down from Max. My mother is convinced that I’m too young to understand big words or complicated ideas.

  It makes sense, though, that people would come to our house to listen to the radio. Our town didn’t have electricity until three years ago, and lots of people still aren’t connected to the power poles.

  Max says it’s because we live in a “godforsaken backwater, light years away from civilization.” He likes to joke about our small town.

  But we’re not really out in the sticks. Even by horse and cart, we’re only a few hours from Czernowitz, which is the biggest city in all of Bukovina and one of the most famous cities in Eastern Europe.

  I can hear the low murmur of the radio now. Odd that it sounds so distant. Our radio is in the living room and normally I’d hear it in the kitchen, if it was on.

  My mother says, “Aunt Dora brought cinnamon cookies. You can have one if you promise it won’t spoil your appetite. Just this once, because supper is going to be late.”

  There she goes again. There’s something huge going on in the world, and my mother seems to think that all I’m interested in is a cookie. Though to tell the truth, I’m kind of starving. On top of that, my aunt is famous for her baking.

  My mother hurries back to the visitors.

  I sit alone at the table and munch on the delicious cookie. I have to stay put until I finish. That’s a rule in our house. No eating anywhere other than the kitchen. We don’t want mice seeking their fortune in other rooms.

  It’s strangely quiet in the house, considering that we have guests.

  I’m used to a lot of hustle and bustle at home. My father has a team of men who help him with his grain business, and they’re in and out of the house all the time. My favorite is Olek, who has a brown-and-white sheepdog called Zoomie. When I stand on a stepladder so I can reach the pears dangling from the tree in our garden, Zoomie thinks it’s a contest to see who’s taller and she springs up from the ground like a jack-in-the-box. She’s so hilarious! I swear she bounces five feet in the air.

  And there’s our housemaid Lana, who’s sixteen and lives with us. Where is she?

  I forget to brush the crumbs off my shorts before standing up, and they scatter on the floor as I head for the living room. Oh, well. With a bit of luck, my mother will be too preoccupied with important world events to notice.

  I trot down the narrow hallway on my imaginary Musketeer’s horse, Lightning III.

  But the living room is empty. No guests. And no radio.

  I listen again. The rumble of the radio seems to be coming from my parents’ bedroom.

  Impossible! My mother would never allow strangers in her bedroom. True, the reception is better there, but my mother says it’s “indecorous” to let visitors into the private section of the house.

  I tug at my reins and follow the sound. The door to my parents’ bedroom is half-open. I dismount and peek inside.

  At least twenty faces turn to look at me. The guests are crammed into every corner, and they’re so still they could be posing for a painting.

  And my mother seems perfectly fine with all these guests in the bedroom! The news must be even more earth-shaking than I’d imagined.

  A voice comes crackling through the radio on the bedside table. It’s the BBC, broadcasting in German. That’s what we mostly listen to, when we can, but suddenly the radio’s two knobs look like the eyes of an alien from Mars.

  Our lawyer, Mr. Bruno Jacobson, is here, of course. He lives in a separate apartment at the side of our house. He doesn’t have a single hair on his head, and Max and I call him Bruno the Bald. He’s got his notebook with him and he’s taking notes with a tiny pencil.

  Dr. Shiff, the dentist from across the street, is holding his chin in both hands, as if he’s the one with a toothache. I’m friends with his daughter, Lucy, who always smells good because her uncle has a cosmetics factory in Budapest and he sends her perfumed soap. Lucy’s mother is in a sanatorium, and Lucy’s an only child like me, so she often drops by after supper to play checkers and card games. But for some reason she stayed home today.

  Lana stands near the bureau with her arms folded. She’s the only one who smiles when she sees me.

  To my surprise, I see one of my teachers from school. His wife is by his side, holding a sleeping baby in her arms. He hasn’t noticed me. I’m glad. He
raps our knuckles and Max keeps hoping he’ll sit on a thumbtack.

  My violin teacher, Mr. Drabik, is looking right at me but he’s taken off his glasses and doesn’t see me. His wife holds on to his arm. She calls me Mr. Moonlight because I always ask her to play Beethoven’s “Moonlight Sonata” on the piano. If I owned that record I’d listen to it on my aunt’s gramophone every spare minute I had.

  The Drabiks have a daughter, Irena, who lives in Czernowitz, where she’s studying to be a teacher. Mrs. Drabik lets me and Max borrow Irena’s books. She has a whole set of German translations with loads of pictures: Robinson Crusoe, The Legends of King Arthur, Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde …

  My parents say I’m a born bookworm, but Max reads even more than I do. So far, our favorites are Kidnapped and Treasure Island. “Fifteen men on the dead man’s chest — Yo-ho-ho, and a bottle of rum!”

  3

  Too Late to Escape

  It isn’t until the guests have left that my father explains, over the supper table, what’s happening.

  Bruno the Bald, still clutching his notebook, joins us for the meal, even though he has a kitchen of his own and usually prefers to eat by himself, or with his very tall friend Andreas. We like to make up stories about Bruno the Bald and Andreas the Tall. Sometimes they’re heroes who help Natius and Maximus, and sometimes they’re pranksters who play tricks on us.

  Lana joins us once she’s finished serving the soup. She’s part of the family as far as I’m concerned. I like to watch her peel potatoes or draw water from the well or scrub our clothes in a big metal basin. I especially like helping when she hangs sheets on the clothesline. She asks me to hold one corner of the sheet while she pegs the other corner to the line. I keep wanting to touch her blonde braids, but I don’t dare.

  Lana always chats as she works. She tells me that one day she’s going to move to the United States and live in a big mansion and wear long silk gloves. She says her wedding cake will be three feet high and decorated with two thousand pink roses made of sugar. I nod my head as if I believe every word.