And The Rat Laughed (5 page)

Once she walked into a pet shop and searched in the cages for a rat. The salesperson wanted to phone the police. Poor man. No sense of humor at all.

***

The addressee was born to the one who was born to her, which is why the old woman keeps hoping that the very first time the story is retold, at least, it will remain faithful to the original. And even if the content of the time capsule is never revealed in full, the spirit of the story will continue to roam. Stories have ghosts too, after all.

When her time comes, the old woman will be lowered into the earth, into the familiar darkness. She’s not afraid. Unlike those who find refuge in the light, she has been there. She emerged from the darkness, and has remained in the darkness.

And pretty soon, she’ll be going back there. If there is one promise that is always kept, that’s the one.

***

The old woman took her chances, and the granddaughter did not turn her back. Which doesn’t mean that there won’t be setbacks, but never mind that for now.

Even if the story is devoid of love, the closer it gets to its inevitable ending, something fills it in nonetheless.
To love
– a verb which she uses sparingly – is such a heavy burden. But without it the story would have no meaning. At the end of their conversation, the old woman intends to ask her granddaughter to search for her mother and father on the internet. People say that this net is spreading into the world beyond this world.

***

Just before the end, the story poses the most complicated challenge of all: how to overcome old age? Because she, of all people, must not change or turn into an old lady. After all, if she changes, how will her father and mother recognize her when they come back? She couldn’t bear the thought that the promise might be kept for someone else.

Inside her, it is true, time has become fossilized, but on the outside it has taken its toll.

***

Darkness falls. This commonplace natural phenomenon has never ceased to amaze her. Sometimes one side is completely dark while the other retains a pale pink haze. But whether she closes her eyes or leaves them open, the old woman meets up with the darkness all at once.

She is standing in the stairwell of a Tel Aviv apartment building, flicking the light switch again and again to keep it on, until she hears her granddaughter’s voice from below. An echo rises from the entrance hall, over the old bomb-shelter.

Grandma, I’ve reached the ground. Good night.

***

The story should be recorded in full, the old woman hears a voice within her, echoing the public demand to tell it before it’s too late. Those who can tell such stories are numbered. But she and others like her will never be the perfect storytellers. All they can offer is the shell. We’ll have to settle for that. One thing that the old woman’s hands remember well – because a flame burns on in her fingers to remind her, oblivious to the main Memory valve – is the slough of the snakes. Scaly, coarse, refusing to crumble. The little-girl-who-once-was envied the snakes.

A shell of a story, or a slough. No more.

***

The old woman gave in, and agreed to share a small portion of her story. Not because she thought it would be of use to anyone, but because in her heart of hearts she was hoping to uncover something which she herself had not known before.

Now she regrets having been hostage to the story for so long. The rage and the yearning have deprived her of the ability to express what she was feeling. And she is feeling so much. At this very moment, in Tel Aviv, the old woman is slithering into herself.

Despite the story.

***

One time the old woman crossed over and entered the confessional. It happened a few days before her conversation with her granddaughter.

Bless me, Father, for I have sinned.

For the first time in her life she had said Father. In her conversation with her granddaughter, she would try to say Mother too.

In St Anthony’s Church in Jaffa the priest sat behind the screen and did not rush her. In talking to his flock – foreign workers who have come all the way to Israel to provide bread for their children – he told her that an evil spirit once attacked St Anthony, patron saint of the poor and the ailing, the brushmakers and the household pets. The saint lay in his black cave, mortally wounded and mistaken for dead. He lay there all night, but in the morning, by some miracle, he was his old self again.

There was a long line outside the confessional, but still the priest waited for the old woman.

Finally she spoke, asking: What happens to all the sinners for whom no confession has been said, the ones still buried in the dark?

The priest at St Anthony’s in Jaffa asked her to switch places. He himself sat behind the screen as a repentant instead of the woman who was wrought. His head came lower than hers, with its hair which had been whitened by old age, not peroxide.

Yigdal Elohim Chai ve-Yishtabach

The living God O magnify and bless,

Transcending time and here eternally.

One Being, yet unique in unity;

A mystery of Oneness, measureless.

Lo! Form or body He has none, and man

No semblance of His holiness can frame.

The priest repeated after her the Jewish confession, recited before death, and begged for forgiveness.

***

Downstairs, above the old bomb-shelter, the granddaughter had the impression that the old woman had said something more.

Stash.

What’s Stash, Grandma?

The old woman fingered the necklace she was wearing and shouted from upstairs: It was just your imagination.

The granddaughter dismissed it, never mind, it really must be her grandma’s old age, and closed the open notebook she’d been holding.

***

The story has subplots and untold portions, but since the afternoon has lost the final vestiges of daylight and darkness is falling over Tel Aviv, the old woman leaves the untold portions suspended in the twilight. This was the hour when she would, if she could, have chosen to die.

There are stories which, like human beings, have a tendency to spill over. This story too contains so many feelings that every tilt, no matter how delicate the angle, is liable to cause it to overflow.

To make sure it doesn’t spill over, the old woman does everything she can to contain herself. She doesn’t want to be left with nothing, after finally managing to have whatever she has.

***

Should I turn on the light, Grandma?

Not yet.

But it’s dark already.

Almost.

Where are you? I can’t see you. Give me your hand.

I need you, Grandma.

***

Someone ought to intervene and tell the old woman: Hug your granddaughter. Don’t ever forget who she is, so you don’t get confused. In darkness which is darkness, and in light which is also darkness. Born of you. This is the right sequence. And as for the timing, there is no other. Face to face, hug her. Don’t turn your back.

And this too is a possible ending to the story.

Part Two

The Legend

Notebook

40 sheets

60 grams

14.8cm x 20.8cm

Front cover: Angel

Detail from The Sistine Madonna by Raphael

c.1512-1513

Gemäldegalerie, Dresden, Germany

The following day: Tel Aviv, late 1999

I don’t have a story, Miri. I’m so sorry. You can flunk me. I know your intentions were good. And besides, I’m the one who put my hand up in class and said that she’d been there. And I admit it, maybe I was kind of trying to make an impression, and you figured there had to be a story there, but I didn’t find it, and I swear to you I really tried. I deserve a passing grade for doing that much, don’t I? I spent the whole afternoon with her, till evening, and here’s the notebook, you can see for yourself, and I was all prepared to take down her story, just like you said, and maybe, much as I hate to say this because you’re my teacher, maybe there simply is no story.

She won’t even let me call her a “Holocaust survivor”. She said survivors are just the ones who’ve had some miracle happen to them, and my grandmother doesn’t believe in stuff like that. And now I don’t know what to call her. A Little Holocaust, that’s what she said. I swear those were her words, even though for some reason, I really don’t know why, I didn’t actually write them down.

I told her: But you did survive, you stayed alive, and I even stressed the word “alive”, like you told me to, but she answered right away that it wasn’t a miracle, though I suspect she really did expect a miracle back then. And I tried, I swear to you that I tried to get her to start from the beginning so I could get it all down, and I did just what you said to do, because even though you’re our history teacher, I know you’ve studied psychology too, but she just kept mixing things up and getting all confused, even though it isn’t like her to get confused, at least not on those kinds of things. And just when I thought she was finally getting on with it, she would stop and clam up, and Then she’d try again, and again everything got stuck, and I couldn’t understand where the bug was, and I started losing patience, but still I kept restraining myself, because it isn’t easy for them to go all the way back, and we have to be sensitive and responsible in how we draw them out. And the main thing is to be compassionate, though we’ll never really be able to understand. That’s what you told us. But even trying to listen is worth something.

I tried every way I know. I asked the simplest things, but it didn’t work. Because if the story is stuck, how am I supposed to know how to get it free? Unless there is no story, or at least not the story you were expecting.

And I admit that suddenly this whole project is beginning to look pointless, because even though my grandmother really was in the Holocaust, I’m not sure it counts, because she was a little girl and she didn’t go through any of the big, horrifying things we learn about in history or read about or see in the movies. If she’d been an adult, or at least my age, then she’d have had a story by now, or half a story, something that could count as a story. But me, all I’ve managed to get out of her was that they hid her with a couple of farmers in some small village. She couldn’t even remember its name because she was so little then, and considering that she can’t say anything about a ghetto or about concentration camps, her story doesn’t add up to much. And what little I got, which doesn’t amount to a story anyway, I could have put in my notebook without having to spend a whole afternoon at her place, because the tiny bit she told me is stuff that my mother knows too.

And if my grandmother doesn’t even remember what grade I’m in, then why should she remember something that happened when she was a little girl with a small memory? Whenever I have a birthday she always messes it up and brings me the wrong present. It’s become a kind of family joke, because when I was four, or maybe five, whatever, she refused to buy me a doll, and she and my grandfather even fought about it – he was still alive then – because he’d seen this commercial with a doll where you press its bellybutton and it wets itself. And after a while he even let me in on his secret, that he bought it anyway, but my grandmother took it to the shop and forced them to take it back, even though he hadn’t even bothered to take a sales slip.

We had a good laugh over it in the end. And I couldn’t help myself: even though my grandfather said it was a secret, it didn’t seem to me like such an important secret and I didn’t keep it to myself. I mean, I just blurted it out when I was laughing because she’d just come into the room and she saw us, so she started laughing too, because maybe she’d decided that it was silly to fight over a thing like that. I mean, why argue over a doll that wets herself. And Grandpa gave her a hug, which kind of embarrassed me – I mean old people hugging – and she went on laughing because if there’s one thing you can’t say about my grandmother it’s that she doesn’t have a sense of humor, although not everyone understands it, especially not my mom. My grandmother, what can I tell you, she like laughs at the weirdest things, like people on talk shows arguing about the meaning of life, or the horoscope telling you what’s going to happen to you because some comet crossed the horizon of Mercury while you were being born. And once we were watching TV together and we saw this expert talking about a technique for controlling your thoughts and your feelings, and another expert was telling the studio audience how to release anger and talking about energy points – you just have to press on the right places and you get rid of all the garbage inside. And she thought it was hilarious. She gave this strange laugh of hers. Really quiet, no sound, all you see is the way her mouth twitches, and the little muscles around her mouth. A silent laugh as if it isn’t coming from her throat, or from her stomach, or wherever people usually laugh, but from somewhere completely different.

And I’m telling you, Miri, none of the things you’d expect from someone who went through the Holocaust stuck to her. She’s a happy-go-lucky person with lots of friends too. And ever since she retired and stopped working in the x-ray lab at the hospital, she’s been going to the theatre every week and to the flea market every Sunday. And she brings back all sorts of junk, especially old necklaces. She has a whole collection hanging on her bedroom wall – she never wears them – and when I was little, she’d let me play with them. And she’s not a pain like some other grandmothers. Never tells me off for wearing a belly shirt or for debating between piercing my bellybutton and getting a tongue stud, and she never says: When we were young ... in our generation ... – which is what I keep hearing from my mom, who seems a lot older than my grandma sometimes. Even my friends say that my grandmother is cool, especially after she started getting into computers and announced that she was going to surf the net. I even screamed it at my mother once when we were having a fight, and she screamed back: I’m not in some competition with your grandmother. And I said: Why don’t you call her “my mother”?

So what do you want me to write? That she was a little girl and she was saved? That’s the whole story. My mother doesn’t think there’s much to look into either, because everyone who was a child there and who was hidden stayed alive at least, and had someone to care about them – which should count for something.

And what did they get me for my birthday in the end? Not for that birthday, I mean, but for my last birthday – my bat-mitzvah. She insisted on going to the pet shop with me, which sounds neat, even though my mother was against it, because she said animals are dirty and that she had no intention of cleaning up after one. My grandma got really mad when my mother talked about the filth that animals make, but she didn’t say a word.

I wanted a pedigree dog, a Pinscher or a Dashchund, or maybe a Siamese cat, but I didn’t feel comfortable asking for any of those because they cost a fortune, but my grandmother kept asking the sales guy about snakes and if he knew anyone who raises moles – at home, on purpose – and she asked if she could touch some worms, but he told her she’d have to go to a fishing place to get worms. He liked her a lot, and thought she was cool, so he let her open the cages. He simply knew he could trust her not to steal anything and not to kidnap some expensive animal, and he watched her when she started petting the hamsters and the gerbils and the guinea pigs, and for a second I got the feeling she was even talking to them, but I guess I was just imagining things. And when she caught the sales guy’s eye she winked to him as if they shared some secret, which seemed really odd, considering they’d never met.

Slowly, more people started gathering round, and she began explaining that the most faithful animals are the ones that you never find in a shop. And the sales guy said, You’re ruining my livelihood. But he said it nicely and you could tell he liked her, and when we were leaving he said: Your grandmother should have worked in a zoo, and he started explaining, like on Animal Planet, that some people just have a knack with animals and they could be lion tamers in the circus or jungle explorers. And I told him my grandmother could have been Mowgli.

She stood there with her back turned, halfway into the street already, and started laughing. The real zoo is right here, she said and stomped her foot. The salesman told her she was breaking up the Tel Aviv sidewalks, which were in need of serious repairs anyway, and she said that as far as she was concerned, she’d write to the mayor and ask him to remove the top layer of Tel Aviv, and then she’d organize guided tours, because there’s a Tel Aviv under the ground too. Every city has an under-the-ground city too, every place has an under-the-ground, because wherever there are people there’s an under-the-ground, and even if the under-the-ground wasn’t there before, it begins to form because of them, even without their noticing it, behind their backs, and that’s the real zoo.

The salesman told her: If you’ve got nothing to do when you retire, why don’t you come work for me, or for the SPCA, because they’re always looking for volunteers, and she said: Thanks, I’ve got lots to do, especially now, while I’m taking a special computer course for mature adults, and learning about the internet too.

But when all was said and done, she didn’t buy me anything.

When we got home she said: Your pet will find you. And I said: Come on, Grandma, what animals ever choose their pet-human? But she didn’t answer, and I thought, there goes another lousy birthday.

Believe me, it wasn’t easy to pin her down to arrange for us to meet for this school project. Every time I tried to set a time with her she avoided me. She had plenty of excuses. She had to wait for the computer guy to hook her up to the net. It was only when I told her that I was going to flunk on her account that she gave in. In the end, we made a date for the afternoon, and I even skipped drama class for this interview. I sat there across from her, all ready to go, if you get my drift, with my pen and notebook, just waiting to hear her out. Just like you said. And I had my outline ready and the list of questions I’d typed out at home, and I thought about what you’d said in class, that this is the eleventh hour because these are the last witnesses who can still tell us firsthand about what they went through in those terrible, horrible years, and pretty soon they won’t be around any more. I remembered that you said we should try to bring along a camcorder or a tape recorder to tape the story, but my grandmother just wouldn’t have it. She barely agreed to the notebook.

The first thing I noticed was that she’d made room for a computer in the living room near the window. She said they’d promised to hook her up within a day or two, and she was still waiting. I thought it was kind of funny to see people her age surfing the net.

I waited patiently for her. First she drew the curtains, even though the light never disturbs me. Then she straightened up the sofa and the propped-up cushions she’d made out of silk and lace, with embroidery in lots of colors that she collects from all over the world or buys at the flea market on Sundays. Finally she chose the armchair directly across from me and sat down, even though it was my grandfather’s chair, where he’d sit with the remote control and wind up watching just the sports channel. It was the armchair he died in, in fact. He got a heart attack all of a sudden, and took us all by surprise.

There was a bit of a distance between us, so I had to bend down to see her face. She sat there in a strange position, like a school-girl, or as if she was facing someone who has made her bow to him and even though she had to obey, there was something inside her that succeeded in resisting. I didn’t feel comfortable in that position. I kept thinking that I don’t want to upset her, and that if I just do what you told me, the story will come out clear and smooth, with a beginning, a middle and an end – and a sense of progression to boot. That’s what you explained in class. You really explained it well, Miri, and you know I’m not one to butter up my teachers. I thought a lot about the way you put it, and about how one thing leads to another. Otherwise things don’t make sense, because the biggest danger is when everything gets confused and chaotic. And I did whatever I could. I thought your instructions were really super, and that if I followed them, I wouldn’t cause her any unnecessary pain, because I certainly don’t want to do that, especially now that my grandfather is no longer alive.

My grandma asked: What did you bring that notebook for? I’ve got nothing to tell you. A few words and that’s all. Why don’t you try someone else?

I said: I don’t have anyone else.

And finally she said: Darkness, a pit, potatoes, and then the War was over.

I had a feeling she was a little mad at me then, but I didn’t know why, and I figured I was tiring her out, using up her time, which may be very precious to her, because old people really don’t have enough time, and I may be getting on her nerves with my school project, the one I have to do to get a grade, and that it wasn’t fair to make her go back to when she was so little, because a little girl cannot control her life when she’s so small, or tell herself in advance that some day this will become the most important and significant thing in her life. Even I myself, seven years older than she was then, I can’t know what will become important in the end and what will fly right out of my memory as if it never happened. And she said: What a shame Grandpa isn’t alive, because he had an amazing memory, and now that she was taking the special mature adults computer course, she realized that he was hooked up to the memories of others too.