And the Rat Laughed - By Nava Semel Page 0,16

hers. Really quiet, no sound, all you see is the way her mouth twitches, and the little muscles around her mouth. A silent laugh as if it isn’t coming from her throat, or from her stomach, or wherever people usually laugh, but from somewhere completely different.

And I’m telling you, Miri, none of the things you’d expect from someone who went through the Holocaust stuck to her. She’s a happy-go-lucky person with lots of friends too. And ever since she retired and stopped working in the x-ray lab at the hospital, she’s been going to the theatre every week and to the flea market every Sunday. And she brings back all sorts of junk, especially old necklaces. She has a whole collection hanging on her bedroom wall – she never wears them – and when I was little, she’d let me play with them. And she’s not a pain like some other grandmothers. Never tells me off for wearing a belly shirt or for debating between piercing my bellybutton and getting a tongue stud, and she never says: When we were young ... in our generation ... – which is what I keep hearing from my mom, who seems a lot older than my grandma sometimes. Even my friends say that my grandmother is cool, especially after she started getting into computers and announced that she was going to surf the net. I even screamed it at my mother once when we were having a fight, and she screamed back: I’m not in some competition with your grandmother. And I said: Why don’t you call her “my mother”?

So what do you want me to write? That she was a little girl and she was saved? That’s the whole story. My mother doesn’t think there’s much to look into either, because everyone who was a child there and who was hidden stayed alive at least, and had someone to care about them – which should count for something.

And what did they get me for my birthday in the end? Not for that birthday, I mean, but for my last birthday – my bat-mitzvah. She insisted on going to the pet shop with me, which sounds neat, even though my mother was against it, because she said animals are dirty and that she had no intention of cleaning up after one. My grandma got really mad when my mother talked about the filth that animals make, but she didn’t say a word.

I wanted a pedigree dog, a Pinscher or a Dashchund, or maybe a Siamese cat, but I didn’t feel comfortable asking for any of those because they cost a fortune, but my grandmother kept asking the sales guy about snakes and if he knew anyone who raises moles – at home, on purpose – and she asked if she could touch some worms, but he told her she’d have to go to a fishing place to get worms. He liked her a lot, and thought she was cool, so he let her open the cages. He simply knew he could trust her not to steal anything and not to kidnap some expensive animal, and he watched her when she started petting the hamsters and the gerbils and the guinea pigs, and for a second I got the feeling she was even talking to them, but I guess I was just imagining things. And when she caught the sales guy’s eye she winked to him as if they shared some secret, which seemed really odd, considering they’d never met.

Slowly, more people started gathering round, and she began explaining that the most faithful animals are the ones that you never find in a shop. And the sales guy said, You’re ruining my livelihood. But he said it nicely and you could tell he liked her, and when we were leaving he said: Your grandmother should have worked in a zoo, and he started explaining, like on Animal Planet, that some people just have a knack with animals and they could be lion tamers in the circus or jungle explorers. And I told him my grandmother could have been Mowgli.

She stood there with her back turned, halfway into the street already, and started laughing. The real zoo is right here, she said and stomped her foot. The salesman told her she was breaking up the Tel Aviv sidewalks, which were in need of serious repairs anyway, and she said that as far as she was concerned, she’d write to the mayor and ask him to