And the Rat Laughed - By Nava Semel Page 0,12
hint of a smile.
***
Every now and then, on Sundays, she’d sneak out of the house, covering her eyes with oversized sunglasses and take a bus to St Anthony’s Church in Jaffa. Along with the hardworking Filipino laborers who’ve come as far as Tel Aviv for their children’s sake, she opens her mouth to receive the wafer.
Later, as they kneel beneath their Ave Maria and ask for her blessing, the old woman turns her back and leaves.
***
A handful of friends, all of them old like her, are overcome with nostalgia whenever they speak of their childhood, that elusive and magical domain, which people grow ever more wistful about as it grows further away. They wax poetic, and she smiles. To her friends, her smiles confirm that her story, just like their own, justifies all the trite excuses people make for recollections of childhood.
***
A different storyteller – less involved, more distant might have produced a broader narrative, dwelling on the other protagonists too, preparing the groundwork for their individual versions, and giving them the space they deserve.
If only it were possible to have the vantage point of the rat, for example.
The old woman is worried about how the stories are liable to evolve. In a world where stages are glossed over, with no apparent sequence, one must take into account the possibility of changes and reframings. Whatever the next storyteller adds worries her even more than what he may leave out. The Stefan must never turn into the main character, God forbid.
Must never become the hero.
The farmer’s son, who inherited the farm and everything on it, will never divulge the story. If questioned, he will deny it categorically. On autumn evenings, he sits with the offspring that Janka – or some other woman bore him, and thinks fondly of his younger days. Once upon a time in a small village in Europe.
That is what the old man is telling people over there.
***
As for her name, never once did she blurt it out in the muddle of darkness. She was not even allowed to pronounce it, because if she did, that would be end of her. Maybe that is why, even at this late date, she is incapable of divulging it.
***
The story won’t be told by her again, either in part or in full. This is the first and last time. If ever another version is given, the future storyteller will have to dismantle the time capsules and expose their content. But that won’t happen. Dissecting the story into its individual parts under a magnifying glass is not the responsibility of the storyteller but of the listener. From here on in, the story is the listener’s. Whether she likes it or not, the addressee will be the next storyteller. And in the case of her granddaughter, concentrating on a particular part – especially on the Stefan – is liable to bury it forever.
***
For a moment, the old woman feels as if she has not told the story at all, but has merely imagined doing so. And even before her granddaughter gets up to leave, she is overcome with a burning desire to go back and try again, to tell it more smoothly, in a way that would include whatever the little girl hunkering in the pit knows.
Was there any point in telling the story? Could it have been told differently? No matter how it is told, after all, the scaffolding will stand strong. The darkness will remain darkness. The rat will be a rat.
And the Stefan Stefan.
***
When the granddaughter’s mother intruded into the house, the story stopped. The granddaughter insisted on staying. In fact, she just about threw her mother out. And yet, vestiges of the daughter’s presence remain in the room, eavesdropping on the story without actually being there.
At a different time in her life, as late as possible, the granddaughter will arrange the story anew. The scaffolding will be the same, and the wall too, but the house will be a different one.
The old woman smiles once again. In relief.
***
She has a soft spot for the creatures of the night. On summer evenings she sneaks out of the house, crawling on all fours, to look for snails and slugs that have pulled out of their shell. Luckily for her, nobody sees her. She smiles to herself. Don’t worry, she has not lost her mind. It’s nothing more than a private joke.
Once she walked into a pet shop and searched in the cages for a rat. The salesperson wanted to phone the