And The Rat Laughed Read Free

hands together, and eventually managed to hold them tight.
    It’s so you don’t look too Jewish.
    If there’s such a thing as too Jewish, there’s such a thing as not Jewish enough too. She’d already made up her mind: as soon as she could, she would stop being Jewish at all.
    If being Jewish was such a terrible thing, then being a Jewish little girl was the worst thing in the world.
    ***

    There was another word she heard for the first time. They spat out War like you spit out a broken tooth. Then they started whispering, as if they’d lost their voices. And even though her lungs were still full of screams at that point, she was already starting to sound like them. First masking her voice, then whispering, and finally utter silence.
    If you were going to hand me over to strangers, why did you bring me into the world?
    Where is “there”?
    Who’s going to help me with my homework “there”?
    Whose bed will I go to “there”?
    And who will be with me “there”?
    Who else will be “there”?
    Why isn’t “there” here?
    The old woman rattled off the questions one after the other, the way children do to control what comes next. Now she realizes that this had been her way of reducing her fear, though she can hardly bear to admit that the effort was doomed to fail. Would her granddaughter be able to see through the old-woman shell, and perceive the five-year-old child she once was? Her childish voice reaches out through the cracks in the story. Once she’d been forced into the next stage, the child had trained herself never to speak in anything but a grown-up’s voice.
    ***

    When her strength ran out – how much strength can a five-year-old have? –she whispered: Will you come to visit me? And they swore they would.
    Just before they left the house, as the servant clasped her hands with fleshy handcuffs, she asked, barely audible: Will you come to take me back when you can?
    And again they promised they would.
    ***

    The storyteller is supposed to gain something from the very act of telling the story. Release, after all, according to the experts, is supposed to bring relief. The old woman certainly has a hefty motive then. And yet, no gain seems to present itself in the case of her story. The natural act of returning to the past and rummaging through memories brings solace only to those with very different stories to tell. The growing weight of her own story leaves no room for relief. And there’s no turning back now either.
    Don’t turn your back on me, the story seems to be imploring in an almost-human voice. The deeper it was buried, the wilder it grew and the stronger its roots, though the old woman had deluded herself into thinking that she had managed to sever its limbs and eradicate it. Now it is her turn to implore, to beg her memory to set her free. She needs its blessing if she is ever to be able to emerge from her hiding place.
    ***

    They stood with their backs to her.
    Her mother did not turn around. Didn’t say a word. Not even good-bye. Didn’t touch her either.
    The old woman is almost choking. The story is lodged between her throat and her mouth. She couldn’t know that, had her mother made a move – even the slightest one, like holding out a finger or blinking or twitching – everything would have fallen apart.
    The granddaughter gets up. The old woman feels that the girl is about to touch her, but as if on an uncontrollable impulse, she turns her back.
    For a moment, that seems to be the end, but it isn’t even halfway through.
    3
    They lowered her into a pit under the ground. The stranger, the one whom she would come to call the “farmer’s wife”, dragged her down the ladder and said, This is where you stay.
    The little-girl-who-once-was thought that only the worst creatures in the world lived under the ground. Moles and snakes and worms. And the worst of all were the rats. She was worse than any of them though, if she had to be hidden away from all the people up