And The Rat Laughed

by Nava Semel

  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 be
en 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.

  You could say it’s been wrought inside her.

  To think of all the complaints heaped on her by her own child, the one whom she bore and who had given her her share of complaints. The old woman had to be on guard, as if her daughter was the enemy.

  The daughter, the granddaughter’s mother, always suspected that her mother was obsessively repeating the story to herself. She claimed that whenever a person becomes immersed in a story, he doesn’t bother to listen to anything around him. Perhaps she was trying to cry that she had a story too, one that was no less important than her mother’s. No one had explained to her that her mother was immersed not in the story, but in the question of how to tell it or to refrain from telling it. If only the old woman really had allowed herself to indulge in self-pity, the story might have come to the fore much earlier. And if a few spikes did somehow come loose nevertheless, the granddaughter’s mother was quick to turn them against the old woman.

  You’re a lousy mother.

  You should never have had children.

  On that day, the daughter came knocking on the old woman’s front door ahead of schedule. The granddaughter who is no longer a girl opened it, and stood facing her, more surprised.

  Didn’t I tell you I’d be picking you up? Now there was a mother who kept her promises.

  When the daughter discovered the notebook, she lost no time trying to gain possession of it. She tugged at the sweet angel. The granddaughter resisted vehemently. She didn’t want anyone sharing the story. Not even her mother. Especially not her mother.

  Gratified, the old woman watched her granddaughter and told herself: It’s the worst traits that are passed on from one generation to the next. That’s what she said but what she really meant was quite the opposite.

  The granddaughter’s mother wasn’t the kind of person who gave up easily. If she had not been chosen to hear the story, then no one else should receive it either.

  Not everything needs to become known.

  Everything has already been written.

  Except for what has not been written.

  Mother, don’t you go messing up my daughter’s head.

  For the first time on a blinding afternoon, the old woman actually cracked a smile. The realization that the one she had given birth to had become such an expert at survival was gratifying.

  5

  When the farmer’s wife pulled her out of the pit, the little-girl-who-once-was covered her eyes. For a moment, the burning sensation caused by the light reminded her of the illusion of tears, though she would never ever shed any real ones again for the rest of her life.

  The farmer screamed to his wife: What a horrible stench! Wash her first.

  The girl who once was, was sure she was blind. Couldn’t see a thing. The farmer’s wife said: Cross yourself. Say thank you. And pulled her into the church.

  They went in, the farmer’s wife dragging her along like a sack of potatoes.

  Her whole body was itching from the lice.

  You stink to high heaven. Even Jesus would hold his nose. Ask His forgiveness.

  Emerging from a black pit-box was another Stefan. That’s the confessional, the farmer’s wife announced. Six years old, the little girl understood they were about to shove her into another darkness. A black figure stuck a head-spike out of the other side of the pit-box.

  It’s his reverence, our priest. Kiss his hand. The farmer’s wife pushed her inside.

  The little-girl-who-once-was teetered, stumbled, crawled. Said her first confession to Ave Maria.

  Holy Mother, thank you for making me blind. Never again will she see another Stefan intent on doing to her what the Stefan always does.

  She didn’t have a name for it.

  Back then.

  ***

  The story is between her legs. It must be excised.

  Cut it off.

  But without giving it a name. Not because she doesn’t know the exact word. It’s just that her granddaughter is so sharp. It would be dangerous to name it. Whatever energy she has left the old woman puts into concealment, because if she utters...

  ***

  “If.” A tough, unrelenting conditional word, which some people squander, almost like, “What if ”.

  What if they hadn’t handed her over...

  What if there hadn’t been a servant...

  What if there hadn’t been the farmer and his wife...

  What if they’d been childless...

  What if her parents hadn’t promised...

  Promise.

  That’s a word that ought to be abolished for all eternity, that should never exist in any story, or beyond.

  ***

  Outside the black box, the farmer’s son too was kneeling before a gilt statue of a woman.

  The girl prayed: Holy Mary Mother of God, pray for us sinners now and at the hour of our death. Don’t let him turn around. Amen.

  His face moved and he invaded the inside of her. Her sense of vision was back to normal. The trembling – between her legs and in her other cavities – made all the lice fall out.

  The farmer’s wife said, Confess, you little sinner.

  ***

  Black man, I hope you die.

  I hope Ave Maria dies too.

  The man in the box pulls some small round wafers out of his habit. Her mouth opens wide with hunger. He puts all of them on her tongue at once.
<
br />   Little girl, Jesus is your father and your mother now. I don’t want parents, she tells the priest. I hope they die.

  She avoids the word Father, to bypass the pain.

  When he pulled her out, she’d been soaking in her own urine. Excrement was dripping down to her feet. Her primordial sin. The stench overpowered the church, but the priest did not demand penance. The entire content of her body was seeping out under the gilt mother, but the man in black knelt down and wiped it off himself.

  ***

  A story cannot be stalled indefinitely. It has to draw to a finish. One way or another. When the old woman hears the story being told in her own voice for the first time, she’s glad that it shows neither orderliness nor clarity. By translating the story into words through the use of a part of our body, do we necessarily create a new, distorted version of it? If she could, the old woman would have volunteered to have her memory amputated, just so long as it continued to exist outside of her. The old woman wants the story to be known, but without having to be the one who provides it.

  ***

  There are some things that the old woman does not realize she’s withholding. But one thing she omits deliberately. Whenever the doorbell rings, whether expectedly or not, at any time of day, whether early or late.

  She walks to the door. As she faces the closed door, the sharpest spike of all jabs into her. Perhaps they’ve returned. They promised, didn’t they? Even though it’s been nearly seventy years.

  That’s something she doesn’t mention to her granddaughter. Maybe she’s too ashamed, or maybe it’s because the rage instantly gives way to unbearable pain. She switches off her eyes, giving in to the darkness. How she hardly breathes as her hand presses the door handle.

  ***

  It’s for your own good.

  If only to block the Stefan, her parents should have returned. If they haven’t – from wherever they are – it must mean they’ve shirked their responsibility and don’t deserve to be a father and mother, if anyone ever does.