And the Rat Laughed - By Nava Semel Page 0,26

is different. It starts on the fifth day, when God created the animals. We know all about that because it’s all there in writing. And He gave them all their animal traits. That much we can figure out even if it isn’t written in the Bible.

On the seventh day, after God had created man and had a chance to rest a little, He was ready to go back to work, because He realized He hadn’t put the final touches on His successful start-up. Despite what it says in Genesis He really was a pretty hardworking God. Can’t take that away from Him. The thing that was on His mind was how to upgrade man, because He’d already figured out that He’d gone about it too quickly and probably messed it up.

I’m not saying it was His fault.

The following Sunday, exactly one week since He’d started creating the world, God was working His ass off again, if you’ll forgive the expression, to work out a program that would provide man with a set of human features, because He thought it would all amount to some sort of improved version. Which is how man developed jealousy, a contagious fast-spreading human trait. That’s what my grandmother says. After barely a day, all the animals were lining up, clamoring for the same traits that man had got.

God told them: You’ve already got one human trait, and not just any trait, but jealousy, the epitome of human traits. But they wanted something more.

God in my grandmother’s legend isn’t only hardworking, but generous too, which is why he agreed to let the animals have weeping too. To this day the female turtle cries when she lays eggs on a lonely beach on a summer night, and cats and dogs cry after mating, except they do it without tears.

All of the animals were pleased. Crying agreed with them. Only the rat wasn’t satisfied with what God had given him and didn’t give any thought to what God had taken away. The rat didn’t want to cry. It had the audacity – a trait you get directly from God – to confront the Almighty and to demand the ability to laugh instead.

Grandma stressed the word laugh as if it were something completely foreign.

God was surprised. After all, in the world he’d created underneath the earth, this silence was his greatest achievement. He’d really gone all out to make it happen. Unlike above ground, when you were underneath, you could hear the roots growing or the drops of water being absorbed. That’s what God told the rat, and He was definitely proud of all He’d done.

But the rat didn’t buy it, and he still insisted on asking God for laughter.

My grandma was talking so quickly, as if she was afraid she wouldn’t remember the legend. I told her: Grandma, I can barely get it all down, but she pretended not to hear me.

God told the rat: I’ve given you teeth to gnaw with, and claws to dig tunnels, and a wonderful sense of hearing and a highly developed sense of smell. These are all excellent traits in general, and for rats in particular. God couldn’t understand why the rat kept wanting more and more. He hadn’t made the rat greedy.

But the rat was extremely stubborn, just like God, and he didn’t give up. He just kept insisting “I want”, “I’ve got to have” – which is how God figured out that the rat had been given a surplus of human traits.

God said: The snake doesn’t have laughter, the mole doesn’t have laughter, the worm doesn’t have laughter, and you’re a subterranean creature just like them. Why should you be different?

So the rat decided to try a new tack, and he started begging. Because he really did want to laugh, at least once.

And he pestered God so much that God, who just wanted to get back to work, because now he was really keen on fixing some of the glitches in his creation project – he’d figured out by then that some of the things were beyond repair – and because he wanted to get rid of that pesky rat, said: So long as you don’t hear some other creature laughing beside you underneath the ground, you will not laugh.

And then God decided it was time to throw that subterranean animal out of Heaven, once and for all, and He figured that the rat had a short memory and wouldn’t remember the promise.

OK. I closed my notebook. I thought that