And the Rat Laughed - By Nava Semel Page 0,27

was the end of the story. It sounded like an ending.

Memory cannot be put into words, my grandma said. Throw your notebook away. But I held onto it anyway, clutching it on my lap, though my knees were shaking.

She continued. Time marched on, because the progress of time is the most fundamental law of that first Creation and no laughter was heard under the earth. The rat kept looking for laughter in his pit. Nothing. Then he dug tunnels under the whole earth, and discovered lots of other pits. He saw dead people resting, some with a peaceful expression, others looking tormented. But they weren’t laughing, because dead people don’t laugh.

My grandmother added that maybe there are some dead people who do laugh, but these the rat did not find.

The rat despaired, and so did his child rat and his grandson rat. And he started to hate God, and even cursed Him in secret. The rat, like humans, didn’t dare curse God out in the open. And even though the promise was handed down through the generations, the first rat’s grandchildren despaired too, and so did his great-grandchildren when their turn came, and they told each other that God makes promises but never keeps them. They even started looking for a different God, but they couldn’t find another one.

Then one day the little girl reached the rat’s pit. She was a man-cub. She was alive and breathing and she would nibble on their potatoes, and she smelled like a human. She made liquids and things that only humans make, and even though she wasn’t one of them she lived in the darkness just like they did.

Although the rat in that pit hadn’t witnessed the promise given by God, it was part of his rat-memory, which wasn’t short at all, and he started hoping. He hoped and he hoped, but the little girl didn’t laugh.

Grandma stopped, and I thought she wanted to rest. I asked if she would rather we continued on a different day. I’ll work something out with my teacher, I said. I’ll ask for an extension. Because I knew you’d understand if I asked to hand it in a week later.

Grandma stood up. She walked over to the window and said it was getting dark already. She asked me to turn on all the lights.

Another day went by, said Grandma. She wanted to know about the expression we use, “the time of your life”.

It’s just a figure of speech, Grandma. The time of your life just means something that you’re eager to hang on to. The best. You try to catch time with both hands, to keep it from moving, like in a black hole.

She laughed. Maybe to her I sounded like one of those know-it-alls on TV.

That’s what the rat should have told God...

She stopped.

Aren’t you taking it down?

I said I’d remember it all.

She went on.

...or the little girl.

And I wasn’t sure whether she was referring to the one in the legend or to me.

She picked up again right away.

Slowly, the smell of underneath the earth stuck to the little girl, and she became blacker and blacker and darker and darker, but she still wasn’t laughing. The rat tried everything he could to make her laugh. He hopped around in the pit, he crawled out of the tunnel, he climbed back in, he sniffed at her smooth skin covering, he ate out of her hand, and she almost laughed, till the rat was convinced that pretty soon he’d succeed in laughing along with her. That’s how he figured he’d prove to God that promises should always be kept.

But then, just as the rat was about to make his rattish dream come true, another human climbed down underneath the ground. Not a man-cub like the little girl, but one that had also been created in the divine image. He began to bite her, human bites, not rat bites. And digging tunnels inside her, human ones, not rat ones. The rat compared them, and concluded that it was definitely a human creature, but was disturbed that this human had invaded his space and was reducing his chances of making his dream come true. Because even though the little girl had once made sounds, they’d been stifled by silence, and laughter was entirely out of the question.

I started to tremble. I couldn’t help it. This wasn’t the legend I’d been after, if I had ever asked for one in the first place – but I had no way of stopping