He told about Emma, and about the passion he’d experienced during their years of being in love, a passion which made him tremble with excitement and shake with jealousy. Love, said Eric Bear to Rat Ruth, had caused his heart to become heavier than an anchor from sorrow and dejection, and at the same time it had caused him to feel as exhilarated as a helium balloon. He told how passion deepened and turned into unselfish love, and then: the self-sacrificing, lavish love that made him courageous, invincible, and beautiful. Finally he told about love as the deep commonality that withstood trials and temptations by quite simply making him blind. How could he be lured by someone else, when he didn’t see anyone else, filled to the brim as he was by his soul’s one and only, Emma Rabbit.
Then Eric told about his twin brother Teddy, and about the life that Teddy was living which just as easily might have been Eric’s. And vice versa. And how the closeness and tenderness that ached in him became harder and harder to endure with every year since their teens. The same pain, Eric admitted to Rat Ruth, was in Teddy, the same closeness, although with other indications, and it had always been like that. They were each other’s fate, they could not be separated and therefore it must be so, that if Magnus took one of them, he must also take the other. If only one of them remained, an asymmetry would arise which wasn’t possible, like east without west.
At the start Rat Ruth shook her head at Eric Bear’s swarm of words, and she yawned to show how bored she was. More than once she raised her paw to silence him, but he didn’t let himself be silenced. And slowly but surely he won her interest. Word by word, sentence by sentence, and minute by minute he pulled her into his emotional life and stuck her solidly between love and desperation. He could see that what he was saying actually meant something to her, that deep within the rat’s soul was a little rat who recognized itself.
And when he fell silent after having for the first time dared to formulate all the pain he’d closed up inside himself since last Tuesday up at the Environmental Ministry, the rat sat silently for a long time on her throne, staring at him.
Then she made her decision.
She waved him up to the throne, and showed with a gesture that he could take a place on one of the stair steps right next to her right back leg. It was only then that Eric noticed that Rat lacked a right claw, and it demanded a real exertion of will not to stare at the clawless leg.
The bear sat where he’d been shown, and Ruth spoke to him in a kind of hissing sound that could not possibly be heard by anyone else.
“It’s not me,” said Rat Ruth. “I have it here, it’s true, and I send it on. With the camel or with someone else, and that’s true as well. But I’m not the one who makes the list.”
A confession.
Eric was amazed.
The confession came directly, without awkwardness or pride. It was too simple, thought the bear. Why did she confess? So thoughtlessly? How could she be sure that Noah Camel really had squealed; perhaps she’d already spoken with Noah in the evening and knew that the game was up? Had the Queen of the Garbage Dump been seriously moved by Eric Bear’s sentimental stories?
“I don’t know who does it, and even if I did know,” said Ruth, “I wouldn’t tell. And, believe me, there is nothing you or your friends can do to force me.”
She had to lie. The list must be hers. She was, after all, the Queen Over the Decay of Everything. Eric Bear refused to accept what he was hearing.
“Thereby,” said Ruth, “I believe that your business is—”
“It’s not over,” he interrupted.
“What?”
“After the Chauffeurs come. It’s not over, it’s just the beginning of something new.”
Rat shrugged her shoulders.
“I’m not getting involved in that,” she said.
“And everything you can do for me now,” he said, “will be counted in your favor then. In the next life.”
“You’re out of your mind,” hissed Ruth, but there was an amused look in her eyes. If nothing else he had lured her into extending the conversation.
“It’s not about wisdom,” he said.
“You’re a lunatic,” she answered matter-of-factly. “Just by the fact that you believe it’s possible to remove