And the Rat Laughed - By Nava Semel Page 0,15

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