And The Rat Laughed Read Free Page A

above.
    That’s what the old woman thinks she must have been feeling then. But instead of adding to the story, she only seemed to be detracting from it.
    ***

    Early afternoon in Tel Aviv is always a difficult time of day. The light is invasive. Only rarely does the old woman let herself take it in. Most of the time, she draws the curtains and shuts the blinds, to let in the darkness, her old ally.
    Her mother and father hadn’t told her that “there” was in the darkness under the ground. Even the servant, who had shared their secret, had kept it from her. But if the old woman had known ahead of time what lay in store, would it have been any easier for her? Can a person prepare for the possibility of being lowered into a pit under the ground?
    The little-girl-who-once-was thought: Maybe I’m really dead. Because only dead people get pushed so deep down.
    ***

    Why do they call the main character of a story the “hero”? Some people naively assume that it’s because the main character gives the story its strength, but the fact that the character happens to be in the centre doesn’t necessarily mean he or she will be heroic in carrying the story along.
    The old woman’s style seems more in keeping with our modern approach – choppy, jumpy, breathless. But it’s not because she doesn’t have enough time, or because she’s eager to get to a point that will be particularly rewarding. Nor does she tell it out of consideration for the reader’s impatience.
    Her granddaughter is sitting across from her, confused.
    ***

    Darkness.
    This is where the story reaches an impasse. The old woman is finding it difficult to explain darkness to someone for whom it has an obvious meaning, part of the day-and-night cycle, associated with the safety of sleep, of dream life.
    At this point in her story-line, she is inclined to give up trying. Her darkness is not about a lack of light nor even a contrast with light. It’s a subcutaneous substance that has mass and weight, and has managed to defy the laws of nature and work its way through every barrier in the human body. Even when she discovered within herself the intention of shedding light on it, especially for the sake of the one with whom she has had children, that intention was short-lived, because she soon discovered that her darkness would not lend itself to reformulations.
    This is all she can offer then: I was in the dark. A muddle of time. I don’t know when it began or when it was over.
    If it was over.
    ***

    And those are the details of the story, pretending to be ordinary. The creatures who were there in the dark grasped her presence. A rat groped its way in her direction, first sniffing, then biting. She didn’t scream. It was she, after all, who had disrupted his routine. Then they grew used to one another. She petted him and he grew fat. The glimmer in the rat’s eyes was her only light.
    She could not make out her hands or feet. To be sure they were there – she fingered herself, and that’s how she discovered the lice, not knowing that’s what they were called, these tiny creatures that had set up home in her hair and on her body, being fruitful and multiplying. She picked them off her body and crushed them – the only sound in the darkness. That and the sound of her breathing, which she also learned to emit ever so softly.
    Her senses, which had grown sharp almost instantly, began by grasping the subterranean movement. The rotting of the potatoes. The slow progress of the roots. The groaning of the wood in the ladder leading down to the pit. The wheezing of the seeds as they fought to sprout. The drops of rain percolating through the soil.
    She learned to recognize the sounds above ground too. The lowing and the growling. The footsteps of cows. The croaking of frogs in a faraway lake. She concentrated on every murmur, deciphering its effects on the world above. Then she translated the sounds into pictures. The hay being stacked up in the silo. The thrashing