And The Rat Laughed (3 page)

And there were other things that her spouse, whom she had never called “husband”, had said to her: “My substance was not hid from thee when I was made in secret, and curiously wrought in the lowest parts of the earth.” The old woman did not want to hear the Psalm. Supplications to heavenly emissaries are the invention of people who take refuge in light. They haven’t a shadow of doubt.

Still, she did devote her thoughts to the word
wrought,
which is no longer used. Had she been able to, she would have reinstated it as a key to the stories yet to be written.

***

The little-girl-who-once-was kept thinking that even God, whoever He may be, was ashamed of her. Otherwise He wouldn’t be hiding her in the dark. Maybe He removed her from the light in the process of Creation just to make sure He did not bump into her. She could not tell whether He was the Father or the Son.

And if in fact He does exist – God is a mother who turns her back.

***

Why tell the granddaughter?

Why not her daughter?

The old woman’s daughter, no longer young and not yet old, had been ruled out as a possible listener to the story. It wasn’t clear who had ruled her out. The old woman had kept postponing the storytelling, using a different excuse each time. Somehow it always seemed as if the story could endanger the offspring and maybe even jeopardize the chain of birth-giving. The daughter avoided it too. Maybe she felt that by accepting it, she was liable to be robbed of her mother, who would be superseded by a shattered creature, without a face or an identity. To tell the truth, she attributed otherworldly powers to the story. Anyone who criticized the daughter for shirking the burden of acceptance was ignoring the element of fear that the story contained.

Without fear no story would be what it is.

***

Now the old woman approaches the danger zone, the limits of control, the place where she would no longer be able to hold on to the story-line.

The footsteps of the farmer’s son.

At five she could count already. Up to ten, and one more. Coming down, closer, his legs heavy, the wooden ladder creaking. The ninth rung is shaky. Ave Maria, Holy Mother, make him stumble and crash. But the farmer’s son knows about the weak rung, and he treads carefully. She counts till she runs out of numbers.

She doesn’t know exactly how old he was. To her he was a man. How could she tell? A breed of giants, mean, deceitful, treacherous.

She never wanted to grow up.

***

The granddaughter stops.

That’s not the story I wanted.

It’s not up to you.

But I don’t want this story.

This is the only one there is.

It’s too late to stop now.

***

In all innocence, not realizing what lay ahead, the granddaughter has chosen to be the story’s addressee. Had she known, she would probably not have volunteered to document it, because the very act of committing the story to paper widens its circle of addressees. Throughout the conversation the granddaughter pretends to be writing, but in fact merely stares at the sweet angel on the cover. Since it was first painted, nearly five hundred years ago, it has managed to generate every possible form of replication. But the granddaughter, like most consumers of paper, has no idea about the artist or about the original painting, and all she can think about is whether the notebook will change as a result of the story. Perhaps this is why she refrains from writing anything down.

***

You were lucky, they told the old woman.

Even without hearing the story, they kept comparing. And the old woman too could not help weighing her own story against those of others, especially since new stories keep cropping up. But she never felt lucky. She’d smile, pretend to be grateful, and fine-tuned her deceptive front to a fine art. From that point on, the crack in the scaffolding began to show. How true are they, the details of her story? How true do they have to be for the story to count? Since this is the first time the story is ever being told, there is no yardstick for comparison.

The old woman wants to tell her granddaughter that the truth does not depend on the storyteller’s will.

Even though she is not making up a thing, the old woman is extra-cautious. She confines herself to what is absolutely necessary, to the parts without which the story would collapse, and she is overcome with despair whenever parts that she did not intend to include leak out anyway. Her laconic speech places her at the bottom rung of the storytellers. Or maybe she is one of those who tell their story best by keeping silent.

4

Stefan, that was his name. The farmer and his wife had all kinds of nicknames for him. Stefcho. Stefaniu. Stefanek. They were his parents. She heard them calling him up above. She could detect the affection in their voices. With her sharpened senses she could detect everything from below. He ate pork sausage, worked on the farm, amused himself with the cats and the dogs. On Sundays he went to church in his finest clothes. The village darling. There was a girl who followed him everywhere. One day she got as far as the mouth of the pit.

Let’s climb down, sweet Stefan.

I’ll let you touch me. You can do whatever you want to me.

No!

The village girl broke into tears, she was so disappointed. Stefan pushed her away from the mouth of the pit. She fell.

Janka was her name. The spike of that name juts out, so trivial.

Even though the old woman is trying to let the story unfold as slowly as possible, she knows it is hurtling towards the point of no return.

Stefan, what are you looking for down there?

Stefan, where are you?

Stefan???

The farmer’s wife, his mother, makes do with calling after him. Soon he’ll be married and have children. There will be an heir to the farm and all that goes with it.

***

Jewish skin, so soft, so smooth.

Jewish undies.

Don’t you dare open your Jewish mouth, or I’ll kill you.

How could she tell it now?

Either way, it will end in death.

***

Wrought
in the dark. That’s the point where the story implodes.

***

Maybe we should stop?

It’s the last chance.

We don’t have to keep going.

That’s enough for now.

Who said every story has to be told? Who said every story has to see the light of day? Maybe it is precisely the buried stories that are the perfect ones.

The old woman is tempted to rebury it.

But her granddaughter is committed to the story by now.

***

What’s that there between your legs?

Don’t you dare cry, you scum. Jewish scum.

Just you wait, and I’ll show you.

***

Soaked in her own urine, in her own vomit, in her own excrement. Hemorrhaging herself. The tears she’s learned to stifle, because unlike the other bodily discharges, tears can be a giveaway. Her very life depends on her complete control over her body. Quite an insight for a five-year-old. To this day she never sneezes or coughs.

The blood – that’s beyond her control.

Mother in Heaven doesn’t know what they do to little girls under the ground. If she did, of course she’d come down to earth, and if she doesn’t come down – she just doesn’t want to know.

Ave Maria of the Lice.

Ave Maria of the Snakes.

Ave Maria of the Worms.

Ave Maria of the Stefan.

Maria is just like her mother – turning her back.

***

I’ll stick it in your mouth.

Swallow it.

And again, swallow it.

Always swallow.

***

A human blob in the dark, keeping her breathing to a minimum. In the days that followed, or in the nights, to be precise, she started mumbling the Latin words. Ave Maria, turn me into a rat too. The happiest creature in the world.

***

She’d always hoped that old age would bring some relief. Above all she’d hoped it would take the edge off the rage. Time had not kept its promise, and her rage remained as razor-sharp as ever, matched in strength only by the yearning. Every day, every hour, her mother turning her back. Even now, when she is forty years older than her mother had been then.

Had the old woman told her story earlier, she might have been able to stifle her anger just a little. So many times she had wanted to forgive her parents, but the rage wouldn’t let her. Not even the guilt could take the edge off it.

It is rage that is forcing the story off course. How inarticulate and evasive the story sounds to her as it breaks free of her, removing itself from her grip. As the old woman observes it helplessly, the story keeps egging her on, insisting it has been disabled, and refusing to be hers any longer. But the old woman, sobered and perhaps brave too, won’t let it break out of the darkness without a battle. The rage continues to seethe, because without it she would cease to exist.

Her granddaughter is indeed young, but she’s already at an age where people are capable of working out the codes and deciphering the truth. And although she’s decided to get the story, no matter what, the pages of her notebook are blank.

The old woman marks a little victory. The story is missing its target after all.

Because more than she does want to tell it, she doesn’t.

***

Night after night, or day after day, in the shell of her wilting body, with every sense she possesses, the girl who was wrought detects the steps coming down, approaching, and even in their absence – which isn’t to last – she is on the alert, knowing that the Stefan is sure to arrive.

Suddenly the story folds inwards, to its core, where the earth was without form, and void; and darkness was upon the face of the deep.

But this is not a Bible story.

***

Even if we assume that the story is not make-believe, it may well be that its time axis has gone awry. Decomposing time into units and rearranging it – that’s no small feat for a child. One night can be an eternity, and what was tagged as the past turns out to be the present. Strange, but only now that old age is gnawing away at her – not simply overtaking her, mind you – does the old woman grow more acutely aware of the twists and turns along the time axis. The elements of the story have been fused into each other, which is why the darkness and the Stefan are liable to take up no more than a small fragment of the story-line, in complete contradiction to their dimensions in reality.

The key points along the way, then, are not shortcuts but time capsules. Darkness. The farmer’s wife. A rat. Ave Maria. The Stefan. Darkness. A rat. The Stefan. Ave Maria.

Darkness.

The Stefan.

Darkness.

***

Open your Jewish legs.

More.

Much more.

A Jewish hole.

That’s what you are.

***

While she was waiting for her granddaughter, the old woman vomited. It’s just the heat, she excused herself. Tel Aviv deifies the light. In this city, light is the be-all and end-all. Her guts were boiling. Even before getting on course, the story is already bursting out of her body.

Her flesh is simply growing slack. Old age, that’s just how it is. Even though she’d sworn never to grow up.

I was an old woman before I was a young one, she tells her granddaughter, and asks her not to put it in writing. When an old woman stabs at the child within her, she wastes whatever resources she has left.

Non-memory – that’s what she ought to have talked about.

Even in earlier times she’d been unable to put a face to the young man climbing down the steps. Couldn’t give him eyes or hair. All that stuck out in the shadows was his name. Stephan. Only with great difficulty did the hazy silhouette of the farmer and his wife appear. She found excuses to avoid the hard labor of remembering, as if the time she’d spent in that hiding place had been excised. Excised? Who was the surgeon who had done such a good job? The storyteller knows the answer; and the listener can only guess.

***

How long did it last? How much time?

The word
time
had not been part of her vocabulary, and even if it had been, the little-girl-who-once-was would not have known how to cut it down to size. Without understanding what she was doing, she calculated how many “whens” had gone by since her birthday. The one when they’d given her the skates. A doll with braids on the birthday before that one. But no matter how hard she tried, she couldn’t help thinking that if there had really been any skates, or a doll, or a birthday – they must all have been before she was even born.

How long did it go on?

The silence goes on for so long that her granddaughter figures the old woman hasn’t heard the question.

She hadn’t counted. They told her about it later, after the fact. Her guess was a winter, a spring and a summer, based on the calendar of the earth. New grass had grown over the crack that the rat used to slip away.

If time is calculated on the basis of a person’s expectations of change, her own watch had stopped. Anything beyond the darkness, anything that had come before and anything that might come after, became an illusion.

A big city. Her room. The frozen lake. A blue cape. The hand that had kept her from falling. All those things had disintegrated, to the point where one could hardly believe they had ever played a part in someone’s life. All that remained of her mother was her mother’s back. A locked body-door. All her attempts to conjure up even the slightest bit of her face were in vain.

Her parents’ promise was all that remained. Clear and precise. When she asked the farmer’s wife for the Latin again so that she could pray properly, the woman just laughed.

Dead people can’t keep promises.

Now the granddaughter is concealing from the old woman her own joy over memory loss. Her notebook is empty. What a clever girl. It’s the blank spaces that kept the old woman from hemorrhaging to death. Luckily, we don’t really remember.

Perhaps this crossroad in the story could be titled “Thank the Blank”.

***

An eternal outcast from the world. A walled-off existence. When asked, she’d say simply, “I was a child during the War,” to account for the fact that she had nothing to recall. The world keeps insisting on memories, whereas she has a miraculous power of forgetfulness. Even now, there’s a cesspool inside her, and into it she tosses the spikes of evil and ugliness. Meanwhile, far removed from those close to her, the story keeps unfolding secretly, of its own accord.