And The Rat Laughed (7 page)

And I was sorry I’d brought it up, because you can’t replace an old memory with a newer, smarter one, with more gigabytes, the latest fad.

Still, she answered.

She said it was a language that people don’t use any more, like those ancient languages, Sumerian and Accadian for example, that have completely disappeared, and that she’d gotten used to not being able to remember the words. Darkness was what she could feel.

Darkness even had a taste, my grandma said. And when the sunlight disappears for good, maybe I’ll teach you to feel it.

Maybe.

Her fingers stretched and moved, as if she was feeling something. It seemed to me that she was holding something that I couldn’t see but she could.

kept quiet.

To feel darkness.

I’m not so sure I’d like that.

So what did they tell you when they sent you away?

Be a good girl.

I thought she was imagining things, because parents couldn’t possibly say that to their daughter just before they sent her far away. It’s much more likely that they hugged her tight and soaked her with their tears, and maybe that’s why she prefers laughing. To tell you the truth, Miri, I’ve never seen my grandmother cry. Not even at my grandfather’s funeral. She stood tall and looked right into his grave, even when my mother completely went to pieces and really embarrassed me with her screaming and my uncle Nachum had to keep her from falling. To tell you the truth, just between you and me, sometimes I think Mother loved Grandpa more than she loves Grandma, because she never stops grumbling that Grandma doesn’t care about anyone but herself, as if she’s the only person in the world. And I’ve told my mother that maybe it’s because she was in the Holocaust, and Mother said: What did she go through, compared to the others? And it made me feel awful. I don’t like it when people say “compared to”, because when it comes to suffering, some people suffer more and some suffer less, but there’s no way you can measure it. And it reminds me how people tell me I’m a fortunate kid because I’ve got a computer and CDs and a neat stereo set and unlimited internet access, when there are kids in the world who work from morning to night in some stinking sweatshop, just to glue the soles onto my Nikes.

And my dad came to the funeral too, even though he and Mom got divorced when I was six, because he really liked Grandpa. He flew in all the way from Palo Alto, where his hi-tech company is located. His new wife didn’t come, though. And when he saw Grandma standing so close to the grave, he simply pulled her away from there, but gently.

I told her: Don’t you trust me? I’m a big girl, and I can take anything. We’re a different generation. We see it all, we know all about things. We’re the kids with TVs and computers, and nothing’s hidden any more. You can see the worst atrocities live on TV, even on the family channel. Planes crashing and people cutting each others’ heads off or doing drugs, and buses exploding. What could she possibly tell me that I don’t already know?

Sure, she had it rough. I’m not stupid. They stuck her in some strange village, with people she’d never met, and it must have been difficult to learn how to get along with them. I guess the farmer’s wife was a little hard on her, to make sure she got used to the place as soon as possible, so she could play the role of their orphan-relative. And I guess she got used to those farmers, whether she liked it or not, because what choice did she have? And it’s just as well that she was so little, because I think little kids adapt to new places quickly and figure out how to do what people tell them to do, till they wind up feeling it’s the most natural place for them. Take me, for instance. Didn’t I get used to my parents being divorced?

And my dad didn’t even come to my bat-mitzvah...

So she was really lucky not to have to see her father and her mother being killed. It freaks me out just to think what she might have had to go through if she’d stayed with them. Her parents simply sent her away “till the storm lets up”, and saved her from having to see all those horrors.

I asked what games she’d played and what songs the farmers had taught her, and I hoped the question would help her remember some scenes from the village, which was probably very pretty, with forests all around and snow, and I could even picture her with a red bow in her hair and a white pinafore and a wicker basket, like Little Red Riding-Hood, picking flowers and fruit like the little girls in stories always do. Raspberries or blueberries. Shame we don’t have them in Israel. It’s a scene I even described out loud because sometimes just describing a scene like that can give your memory a kick in the stomach, so it finally wakes up. Smells do it, at least for me, though I couldn’t describe a smell this time.

There was another picture that I tried to describe to her. Of her with the other children.

Did the farmers have sons and daughters?

Did you make friends with them?

Did you play with them?

They were like your own brothers and sisters, weren’t they?

And it didn’t help when I tried names of games like catch or hide-and-seek. I don’t know if they played those games then anyway. Suddenly she seemed so helpless, though I’m sure that if she realized I was feeling sorry for her she’d have been really mad.

And when I saw that she couldn’t even remember the farmers’ children, I realized it was a lost cause. I couldn’t bring myself to ask her when she’d begun to forget her real parents, even though that was one of the questions that I’d written on the first page of my notebook, and I’d even marked it as the most important one.

I hid the notebook from her.

I thought to myself that at that age she must have forgotten really quickly, which was lucky for her, because if anyone stuck me at my age in some godforsaken place I’d never forget it, but maybe that’s because my memory works differently and I never forget anything, which is something I have inherited from my dead grandfather.

I consoled myself: it’s a pretty good story, even though it’s kind of short, without anything horrible, with good characters and with my grandmother who saw the nicer side of life, and it’s just my lousy luck that I can’t write the story and get a hundred, because that’s the grade I would have gotten if I’d been able to produce a story like that after we kept hearing only awful things.

And it was only much later that I noticed that I was the only one who was using the words
Mother
and
Father
...

I was about to get up, and then she said: Come, let me tell you a legend.

Why a legend? I asked. I’m not a child, and I’m not some kind of retard who needs to have everything painted rosy, with lots of soft edges that have nothing to do with how things really were.

I’m too old for legends, Grandma, I told her. Besides, our generation doesn’t go for legends. Except maybe for babies who believe in happy endings, and take it in along with “and they lived happily ever after”, which is the biggest lie in the world. So why was she treating me that way?

And then she said that some legends are horrible, and I said: Yes, like Hansel and Gretel with the witch who’s about to eat them up, or the ugly dwarf with the long name who wants to kidnap the miller’s daughter but then she pulls a trick on him. As long as we’re into legends, it should only be the kind that involves retribution and a chance to even the score, because if I’d been Hansel and Gretel, I’d never have forgiven the witch, and I would have run after her and caught her and shoved her in the oven and stood there watching the smoke and even burned down the gingerbread house till there was no trace of memory left of it. And as for the miller’s daughter, she wasn’t that little, so she didn’t forget anything, and she taught her kid – who stayed with her for good – never to believe what people told him, and to watch out for monsters in disguise, and how lucky we are that there weren’t any dwarfs left in the world, because there were more than enough mean people already, so there’s no point in inventing all sorts of nasty creatures besides.

Why didn’t my grandma tell the farmers that the rat was bothering her? Or else, maybe they did try to trap it and it kept coming back, because rats are such disgusting parasites, and a little girl makes the easiest prey. I felt really sorry for her. Of all the animals in the world – a creature like a rat! It must have been hell. How gross. What a filthy animal. Makes you want to throw up. I remember when the caretaker at school found a rat climbing on the drainpipe one day last spring, and got the principal and all the teachers to come. We stopped class and the principal kept screaming. You couldn’t tell if she was screaming because she was angry or because she was scared. The rat must have come from the sewer. Anyway, they sent us home early that day. It was before you came to teach at our school. So they called in the sanitation workers from the municipality with masks and toxic stuff, and they disinfected all the cesspools around the school and on the whole block. All because of one rat that they saw on the drainpipe for half an hour.

Daniel who sits behind me said that maybe the rat was more afraid of us, but that’s because Daniel always turns things around, just to feel superior.

And my grandma had to put up with that rat much longer than a single day. It wasn’t a pit, it was a lair...

She must have screamed, poor thing, and they probably had to calm her down. The farmers, I mean, and I hope it didn’t bite her or give her some horrible disease like the plague or typhus, because in Bible class when we read Samuel I, I remember the part about the Philistines who captured the Holy Ark, and when they gave it back they put some golden rats inside. As a penance, our Bible teacher told us, to rid themselves of the plague that God had afflicted them with. We even had a test on that chapter, and I remember the verses because I felt sorry for the Philistine artisan who had been forced to make a statue shaped like a rat, and I even wrote the word
disgusting!
in bold print, and the teacher almost gave me a zero and wrote a note on my paper. After class she called me in and said I didn’t have enough respect for our sacred forefathers and said I ought to apologize, but I didn’t. And my grandmother had to be locked up down there with that ugliness – it’s one of the eight vermin that cause the desecration of humans and dishes. That’s what it says in the Talmud. And I’m quoting the exact words that the Bible teacher used, even if she thinks I don’t remember the material. And it’s a creature that multiplies very quickly, and lives deep inside the guts of the earth and only comes out at night to do its ugly stuff. That’s what my grandmother had to live with.

I felt sick.

You see, I do remember, Miri?

The farmer’s wife did try to get rid of the rat, probably to protect my grandma, even though they couldn’t yet hide her above ground in their own house, because it would have been too dangerous. So the farmer’s wife took a piece of paper and wrote: “I hereby order the rat living in this place never to do anything bad to me. And if you ever come near me again, I swear on the Mother of our Lord that I will cut you in seven pieces.”

Then the farmer’s wife put the note over the pit, before sunrise. And for this in itself I’d like a chance to thank her, if only I could find out her name. The note my grandmother did remember, but not the name.

And I wanted to hug her, but that’s when she turned and faced me unexpectedly, and suddenly she seemed so far away that I didn’t try any more.

Maybe it was just a certain mood, or maybe it was the wrong timing, or maybe I’d asked the wrong questions. And maybe she’s suffering from some unusual disease, not amnesia where people get all confused and don’t recognize the ones they love or get lost in the street, but something that scientists haven’t even started studying yet so they don’t even have a name for it. Maybe “surplus memory” is what she has, and maybe that’s why it jams up and gets stuck. The idea that memory may have a will of its own suddenly gave me the creeps.

I looked at my empty notebook and realized that I didn’t have a thing – no story, no testimony, nothing that could be used to teach the coming generations a lesson, which is what you teachers are always after, and I knew that it was due the following day and that the whole class had already put together a tree and a genealogy and that they have everything they need, and I don’t have a thing.

She insisted: Just a legend. Take it or leave it.

I don’t understand where that legend idea came from, because she’s not one of those grandmothers who tell you a bedtime story or sing you a lullaby. I can’t remember so much as a single story or even half a lullaby that she ever ... just Grandpa. He was the perfect storyteller. He used to say it was for all the ones who weren’t able to tell, and he meant her.

OK, a legend. Whatever.

I had to go along with it. Otherwise I wouldn’t have had anything to hand in, because if this was all I could get out of her, then either it’s a lack of talent that I’ve inherited from her, or else I just don’t have the patience or the technique.

One name at least. That’s all I wanted. Damn you, memory. Just give me a name! I was absolutely begging for it in my heart.

And suddenly I had an awful thought, the worst. Maybe she can’t even remember her own name, the one her parents gave her. I’d rather not think about what if the name I know her by isn’t even–

So what is real anyhow?

Just at that moment, the doorbell rang.

Grandma got up. Slowly. She was tense.

Who could it be?

I didn’t understand why she was so nervous. I said, Maybe it’s just someone collecting for the blind or for disabled children. Those people never tell you in advance.

She leaned on the wall, right where she’d made room for the computer. And she started to cough. She covered her mouth.

I asked if she was expecting anyone?

She didn’t answer.

Maybe they’re finally delivering the computer?

She didn’t move.

Should I get it? I asked.

The doorbell rang again, and I didn’t bother waiting for her answer any more.

It was my mother, even though we hadn’t arranged for her to come pick me up.