And the Rat Laughed - By Nava Semel Page 0,19

to tell me about that place under the ground because I have no idea what a potato pit is. We don’t exactly keep potatoes under the ground, you know. In our house, they’re in the vegetable bin in the fridge. And if it was some kind of a basement, then the only basement I know is the old bomb-shelter in Grandma and Grandpa’s house in Tel Aviv, which nobody uses, and the city closed it after one of the wars, I don’t remember which one, and there’s a warning sign hanging there.

She said: A pit. Just a pit. As if a pit that you lower a little girl into is the most ordinary thing in the world. And for me a pit is a hole in the garden where you plant a flower or a tree – not a place you live in, not even temporarily. I mean, it must have been something special that the farmer and his wife had prepared in advance. Maybe they even planned it together with her parents to make it look just like her room at home so she’d hardly notice the difference and would feel comfortable right from the start. With a bed and a carpet, and a cupboard maybe. Because I bet her parents sent all her clothes and her games and toys with her, and her doll of course. And there must obviously have been a flashlight or a lamp, because there had to be some light down there.

But no matter how hard I tried, she kept insisting: a pit. No more.

***

I went back to the notebook. I was getting really desperate, because I couldn’t understand why she was getting so hung up on the wrong word, though I’d always found it really funny how she mixed up all sorts of things and didn’t always know what went with what. Like for instance she used to say, “come on up downstairs” or “come on down upstairs”. And my dad, last time he came for a visit, said there was no point in trying to correct her because it was her own special sense of humor. Except that now I didn’t think it was funny at all. I looked at the questions I’d prepared, and saw they weren’t worth anything, and I had no choice but to start making up new ones.

I asked her how she’d gone up and down, and whether there’d been stairs, and I even imagined a special tunnel that the good farmers had made to take her out for a breath of fresh air, or to take a walk late at night or whenever they thought it would be safe. And I guessed they must have told the neighbors they were raising the poor orphan of a relative, who had nowhere to be because of the War. Of course they only confided in neighbors or close friends that they knew they could trust. And I got the feeling that all my guesswork about her life there was right on target. And the fact that there really are such good people in the world is pretty encouraging, because all you see on TV is people who do really horrible things. And I wish I could have gotten her to remember the names of those farmers, because then I might have written to thank them, even though I’m pretty sure they’re no longer alive, or at least I would have written to their children or their grandchildren, and I would even have contacted the Yad Vashem Holocaust Memorial Museum, and told them that I’d tracked down some Righteous Gentiles. That’s what I was thinking. About how unfair memory can be, and about how memory didn’t give a damn, and about what a shame it was that I hadn’t thought of asking her about it earlier. I was even more upset that my mother never bothered to find out all these details when Grandma was much younger and her brain was much sharper, because then I might at least have been able to hear the story from my mother – organized and clear, with a beginning, a middle and an end. And it just isn’t fair towards the people in that village that even its name has disappeared from her mind, though of course it wasn’t her fault. And it wasn’t that she was ungrateful, it’s just that she’d been too little.

She said she never ever left the pit. Only the rat did. And that’s how I found out about the