Tunes for Bears to Dance To Read Online Free PDF Page A

to know if you would like to learn wood carving.”
    Henry had always been without talent. He wasnot good at sports like Eddie. He had taken piano lessons for three months from Sister Angela at St. Jude’s and failed miserably. In school his worst subject was art. He saw visions in his mind of what he wanted to draw but could not transfer those visions, or even a hint of them, to paper.
    “I don’t think I’d be very good at it,” he said.
    “Try it,” George Graham urged.
    Mr. Levine held up a small knife and handed it to him. Henry took it, holding it gingerly. Mr. Levine picked up an identical knife, then a small block of balsa wood, similar in size to the duck he had carved for Henry.
    For the next few minutes he guided Henry in the first tentative steps of carving, placing Henry’s hands in correct positions, guiding his movements, his touch light as a snowflake on Henry’s skin.
    Flakes of wood fell away. Henry became aware for the first time of the smells surrounding the bench, the clean smell of wood shavings and the sharp odors of shellac and dyes, a confusion of smells that made his nostrils itch. A shape began to form in the wood. Did he have talent, after all?
    Then a slip of the knife, a brief slicing downward, and Henry saw blood spurt from his finger before he felt the pain. Moving quickly, Mr. Levine drew a white cloth from somewhere and wrapped it around Henry’s finger. The pain was not severe, although blood seeped through the cloth, bright and vividly red.
    The old man moaned and sagged against Henry. The giant was instantly by their side.
    “He can’t stand the sight of blood anymore,” George Graham said. “Or to see anyone in pain.“
    Forgetting the pulse of pain in his finger, Henry looked inquiringly at the old man. His face was whiter than his moustache, his lips as if stained from eating blueberries. The giant murmured gently to him, as if soothing a frightened child.
    Later, Mr. Levine apologized through the giant. “He is sorry that he let you cut yourself and for collapsing like that.”
    As the old man continued working, his fingers trembling a bit, the giant said, “There is so much evil in the world, Henry. That’s why Mr. Levine faints at the sight of blood. That’s why he sits here day after day rebuilding his village, and the people in it, trying to bring them back….”
    “Did something bad happen to his village?”
    “The Nazis happened. They turned the village into a concentration camp. Burned down some of the buildings, made others into barracks to hold prisoners. Then they built chambers where people were exterminated. The villagers were either killed or sent away or put to work, Mr. Levine and his family were separated. His wife and two daughters were taken away to a camp called Auschwitz. He never saw them again. He and his son, who was twelve, were put to work in the village, building thechambers. His son died that first winter, without medicine to help him.”
    “How did Mr. Levine escape?” Henry asked, watching the old man slice a curl of wood away from the figure in his hand.
    “He didn’t escape. He survived. He was beaten and starved. But he’s a tough old man and not as old as he looks. The camp made him old, the deaths of his family. When the war ended, the Allies set the prisoners free, Mr. Levine among them. The world finally recognized what had been going on in all those camps. How millions had died …”
    Henry had learned from newspaper headlines and newsreels at the movies about Hitler’s hatred of Jews, how he wanted to rid an entire race of people from the planet. He remembered pictures of bodies piled like logs of charred wood that were discovered at the end of the war. But those bodies had been far removed from his life. Now he shivered as he looked at Mr. Levine, and the war suddenly came alive for him, all these years later.
    “When the soldiers found Mr. Levine in the camp, he was only skin and bones. He was covered with sores. He