And the Rat Laughed - By Nava Semel Page 0,24

besides.

Why didn’t my grandma tell the farmers that the rat was bothering her? Or else, maybe they did try to trap it and it kept coming back, because rats are such disgusting parasites, and a little girl makes the easiest prey. I felt really sorry for her. Of all the animals in the world – a creature like a rat! It must have been hell. How gross. What a filthy animal. Makes you want to throw up. I remember when the caretaker at school found a rat climbing on the drainpipe one day last spring, and got the principal and all the teachers to come. We stopped class and the principal kept screaming. You couldn’t tell if she was screaming because she was angry or because she was scared. The rat must have come from the sewer. Anyway, they sent us home early that day. It was before you came to teach at our school. So they called in the sanitation workers from the municipality with masks and toxic stuff, and they disinfected all the cesspools around the school and on the whole block. All because of one rat that they saw on the drainpipe for half an hour.

Daniel who sits behind me said that maybe the rat was more afraid of us, but that’s because Daniel always turns things around, just to feel superior.

And my grandma had to put up with that rat much longer than a single day. It wasn’t a pit, it was a lair...

She must have screamed, poor thing, and they probably had to calm her down. The farmers, I mean, and I hope it didn’t bite her or give her some horrible disease like the plague or typhus, because in Bible class when we read Samuel I, I remember the part about the Philistines who captured the Holy Ark, and when they gave it back they put some golden rats inside. As a penance, our Bible teacher told us, to rid themselves of the plague that God had afflicted them with. We even had a test on that chapter, and I remember the verses because I felt sorry for the Philistine artisan who had been forced to make a statue shaped like a rat, and I even wrote the word disgusting! in bold print, and the teacher almost gave me a zero and wrote a note on my paper. After class she called me in and said I didn’t have enough respect for our sacred forefathers and said I ought to apologize, but I didn’t. And my grandmother had to be locked up down there with that ugliness – it’s one of the eight vermin that cause the desecration of humans and dishes. That’s what it says in the Talmud. And I’m quoting the exact words that the Bible teacher used, even if she thinks I don’t remember the material. And it’s a creature that multiplies very quickly, and lives deep inside the guts of the earth and only comes out at night to do its ugly stuff. That’s what my grandmother had to live with.

I felt sick.

You see, I do remember, Miri?

The farmer’s wife did try to get rid of the rat, probably to protect my grandma, even though they couldn’t yet hide her above ground in their own house, because it would have been too dangerous. So the farmer’s wife took a piece of paper and wrote: “I hereby order the rat living in this place never to do anything bad to me. And if you ever come near me again, I swear on the Mother of our Lord that I will cut you in seven pieces.”

Then the farmer’s wife put the note over the pit, before sunrise. And for this in itself I’d like a chance to thank her, if only I could find out her name. The note my grandmother did remember, but not the name.

And I wanted to hug her, but that’s when she turned and faced me unexpectedly, and suddenly she seemed so far away that I didn’t try any more.

Maybe it was just a certain mood, or maybe it was the wrong timing, or maybe I’d asked the wrong questions. And maybe she’s suffering from some unusual disease, not amnesia where people get all confused and don’t recognize the ones they love or get lost in the street, but something that scientists haven’t even started studying yet so they don’t even have a name for it. Maybe “surplus memory” is what she has, and maybe that’s why it