And The Rat Laughed (6 page)

I became nervous as hell, partly because my notebook was still empty and partly because I’d been so worried about having to listen to all sorts of horrible stuff. But now I wasn’t so worried any more because I understood it wasn’t going to be that kind of a story, and deep in my heart I was grateful that she’d been too little, back then.

I didn’t succeed in getting the names of the farmers who saved her either, and believe me I did ask, as tactfully as I could, just like you taught us in class. I even remembered some of the examples you put on the board.

What did you call them, Grandma? And I made some suggestions too, just to jog her memory, if there really is such a thing as jogging someone’s memory. Maybe she called them
Auntie
and
Uncle
for example, because I figured that maybe her parents had told her they were taking her to some relatives. Or maybe there were nicknames, which would seem logical for a little girl. And for a moment I thought maybe she’d called the farmers
Mother
and
Father
but I didn’t dare mention it to her.

But nothing worked. I’m sure she tried, because there’s nothing she wouldn’t do for me, so she says, and that’s what my mother says too, bitterly sometimes, and I think she may be a little jealous of me.

And I used to think that old people are really good at remembering things that happened to them a long time ago, but they’re perfectly capable of forgetting what they had for breakfast that day. Then again, maybe that’s just a myth, and maybe people can control their memory and keep rearranging it the way you arrange your school schedule and decide what to take at what hour, and they’re also the ones who decide when the bell should ring and maybe they keep deluding themselves into thinking that memory is just one big free-for-all. Even I know there are things that I’d rather not remember, but it doesn’t help me much. Maybe some day I’ll figure out a better way, to push memories aside.

Grandma said she wished she had more control over her memory, but that unfortunately you don’t always remember what you should, and vice versa. Then she said: Don’t feel too bad. It’s not such a great loss.

But I did feel bad actually, because people who saved a little girl deserve to be remembered, and I even felt sort of annoyed with her, because the least their survivor could do is to remember them, even if she doesn’t like being labeled a “survivor”. It seemed so unfair not to remember the people who helped you the most, but I hid this from her because I was sure that not a day went by when she did not try hard to remember them but that it just wasn’t her fault that she’d been so little.

Believe me, Miri, you’re my favorite teacher, and I wouldn’t lie to you. I tried everything. I asked her to tell me about that place under the ground because I have no idea what a potato pit is. We don’t exactly keep potatoes under the ground, you know. In our house, they’re in the vegetable bin in the fridge. And if it was some kind of a basement, then the only basement I know is the old bomb-shelter in Grandma and Grandpa’s house in Tel Aviv, which nobody uses, and the city closed it after one of the wars, I don’t remember which one, and there’s a warning sign hanging there.

She said: A pit. Just a pit. As if a pit that you lower a little girl into is the most ordinary thing in the world. And for me a pit is a hole in the garden where you plant a flower or a tree – not a place you live in, not even temporarily. I mean, it must have been something special that the farmer and his wife had prepared in advance. Maybe they even planned it together with her parents to make it look just like her room at home so she’d hardly notice the difference and would feel comfortable right from the start. With a bed and a carpet, and a cupboard maybe. Because I bet her parents sent all her clothes and her games and toys with her, and her doll of course. And there must obviously have been a flashlight or a lamp, because there had to be some light down there.

But no matter how hard I tried, she kept insisting: a pit. No more.

***

I went back to the notebook. I was getting really desperate, because I couldn’t understand why she was getting so hung up on the wrong word, though I’d always found it really funny how she mixed up all sorts of things and didn’t always know what went with what. Like for instance she used to say, “come on up downstairs” or “come on down upstairs”. And my dad, last time he came for a visit, said there was no point in trying to correct her because it was her own special sense of humor. Except that now I didn’t think it was funny at all. I looked at the questions I’d prepared, and saw they weren’t worth anything, and I had no choice but to start making up new ones.

I asked her how she’d gone up and down, and whether there’d been stairs, and I even imagined a special tunnel that the good farmers had made to take her out for a breath of fresh air, or to take a walk late at night or whenever they thought it would be safe. And I guessed they must have told the neighbors they were raising the poor orphan of a relative, who had nowhere to be because of the War. Of course they only confided in neighbors or close friends that they knew they could trust. And I got the feeling that all my guesswork about her life there was right on target. And the fact that there really are such good people in the world is pretty encouraging, because all you see on TV is people who do really horrible things. And I wish I could have gotten her to remember the names of those farmers, because then I might have written to thank them, even though I’m pretty sure they’re no longer alive, or at least I would have written to their children or their grandchildren, and I would even have contacted the Yad Vashem Holocaust Memorial Museum, and told them that I’d tracked down some Righteous Gentiles. That’s what I was thinking. About how unfair memory can be, and about how memory didn’t give a damn, and about what a shame it was that I hadn’t thought of asking her about it earlier. I was even more upset that my mother never bothered to find out all these details when Grandma was much younger and her brain was much sharper, because then I might at least have been able to hear the story from my mother – organized and clear, with a beginning, a middle and an end. And it just isn’t fair towards the people in that village that even its name has disappeared from her mind, though of course it wasn’t her fault. And it wasn’t that she was ungrateful, it’s just that she’d been too little.

She said she never ever left the pit. Only the rat did. And that’s how I found out about the rat.

And you know that I’m not one to give up easily, so I took down my grandfather’s old atlas, the one with countries that don’t actually exist any more because they’ve been split up, and I asked her to find the place. I even put my finger on the map. My finger moved from country to country, cutting across borders in no time. I flew across all of Europe and even reached Asia by mistake. I deliberately pointed to the tiniest countries in the world, the ones that you couldn’t see without a magnifying glass, like San Marino and Andora and the Vatican in the middle of Rome, just to prove to her that it’s possible. But she said she was no good at geography and couldn’t pinpoint the place. So I said it didn’t have to be the exact spot. Even something in the general area would do, and she said: Let’s just forget it, sweetheart, it won’t work. Still, I took her finger – she has long nails, and a nice manicure, with nail polish and everything – and tried to place it on the old atlas, but she said that maybe the place didn’t even exist any more or that it never had existed because everything was changing anyway at the end of the millennium and none of what had existed before would continue to exist in the next millennium, and that word, “millennium”, sounded strange coming from her, even though you keep hearing it all day on special sales and stuff.

And then she pulled a fast one on me. She moved the atlas and took the notebook instead. She opened it and leafed through it, looking at the cover and asking where I’d bought it.

I said it was from an ordinary stationery store at a back-to-school sale, nothing special. I’d bought a whole stack of them, to last me all year. And she asked if I liked angels. I said it didn’t matter what they had on the cover. You throw the notebook out anyway when it’s full and finished. I don’t even wait till the end of the year sometimes. I throw them out right away when they’re used up and I don’t bother keeping them as souvenirs. She looked at the cover again, checking it out as if she was still an x-ray technician and hadn’t retired.

I said the whole business with the covers was just a fad, and that as far as I was concerned they could put Britney Spears or Winnie the Pooh or the Fox Kids announcer on the cover, and the angel was just by chance, though I had to admit that whenever I got bored in class I’d give it a moustache or add some tattoos, and I’d erase the wings completely, really give it a workup. He’s really smart, that angel, having the time of his life, though I guess angels don’t have such a thing as time anyway.

She leafed through the notebook and I was sure she was going to make some comment about how I hadn’t written anything down, but she actually seemed happy about that.

I tried a roundabout approach, and asked her what language she dreamed in, and she said that some people never open their mouth in their dreams, they keep quiet all through the dream, and then she said she doesn’t dream at all. I said that was impossible, because everyone dreams, even people who don’t realize they’re dreaming. Especially those who suffer from nightmares. Even babies dream inside their mothers, according to scientists. And she said that some people have all their dreams at once. I told her that would be a terrible waste, spilling it all out in a single swoop, because then there’d be nothing left, and you have to save one dream for emergencies.

She didn’t say anything. And I thought maybe even the single dream that she must have had at some point had been used up already, which would really be a shame.

Then she left me for a moment, to the bathroom or something, I don’t know, and I heard her coughing. I don’t know if it’s a cold or something that old people get, but it scared me a little, because I don’t want her to die, like Grandpa, even though my mother keeps reminding me that it’s bound to happen.

Meanwhile, I took down Grandpa’s old dictionary from its spot next to the atlas. The pages were so old they were falling apart, but that’s all there was, so I opened it and looked up
memory.

“The power of the soul to recollect things and not to forget them.”

I gave it some thought, and realized that if I gave her mind the power, I’d be like some kind of battery pack, like an electrical supply, and that maybe whatever ought to be remembered will be, and I wondered whether my own mind had enough power to give to someone else, and how can you measure the power of a person’s mind anyway?

Then she came back, and I asked her if she was OK, because she looked kind of pale under her make-up, and I couldn’t quite figure out why she had to put on make-up on my account, because I saw right away that she’d put on a new coat of lipstick, and some rouge too. She said it was just because of the heat, but she didn’t fool me, because I saw that she was fingering one of those necklaces of hers, moving the beads back and forth. I felt like I was being hypnotized, and I even counted them between her fingers. Forty-one beads. Then she noticed the dictionary open on the table and put it back in the right slot on the bookshelf, next to the atlas. She was standing with her back to me when she said: I was a champion ice-skater.

For a moment I thought she was talking about that one dream that we’d been discussing earlier, a beautiful dream. I wish it had been mine. And then she moved Grandpa’s armchair, pushed the sofa aside, rolled up the carpet, kicked off her shoes and just like that, barefoot, she started sliding across the floor tiles. She took some real spins and axels, like a pro, as if she’d spent her whole life practicing. I started laughing out loud, not like she did. I asked: Grandma, what do you need the internet for? I’ll buy you some inline skates for your birthday, with my birthday savings. Just let me know when your birthday is.

That’s when she sat down on the floor, took my hand in hers, and said: Sweetheart, I don’t know when my birthday is.

But doesn’t everyone know when their birthday is, and when people celebrate it, and what presents they used to get? So how come she doesn’t remember hers? Where will I find the power for her mind, so she can remember such a simple thing, which means a lot to me...

And when she saw how much it upset me, she tried to make it seem like nothing. It’s just like any other day, and you can always celebrate it on a different date.

What different date?

One when something just as important happened.

Like what?

Maybe it was the day when her parents returned, but they didn’t return. Or the day when the farmer and his wife said good-bye and they must have soaked her with their tears because they were practically her parents by then – foster parents – and I’m sure it must have been terribly hard to give her up after they’d saved her life and they’d grown so attached to her. I know they must have loved her. That much I didn’t need to ask.

And now I understood that I didn’t even know how old she was, and maybe she didn’t know how old she was either. It wasn’t her exact age that I cared about, but to this day I can’t take my birthday casually. I mean, it’s the day when I came into the world, the happiest day in my father and mother’s life, and I couldn’t understand why she was playing down the significance of her birthday. I mean, she remembers mine and my mother’s and everyone else’s in our family, even though in the end she didn’t buy me a pet for my bat-mitzvah, or anything else for that matter.

And even though I didn’t say a word, she mentioned the rat again.

A rat?

He was with me, she said. Her voice was soft.

I shuddered.

What a repulsive animal, disgusting as they get. What a nightmare, living with a rat, spending days and nights with it. I would never have lasted.

Believe me, Miri, I changed the subject as quickly as I could, because that rat must have been a nightmare for her. I didn’t even manage to think of a single question I’d prepared, and I forgot every one of the headings in my outline. I don’t know why I wound up asking her what language she’d used with her parents, when I don’t even know what their names were, and now they’ve been lost forever.