And the Rat Laughed - By Nava Semel Page 0,28

it.

By now, this little girl was the most silent creature on earth. The rat had to pounce on her and go so far as to hop on her head just to prove to himself that she was even alive. Sometimes he thought she might be dead, and he would try to wake her up, because that was his only chance of making the ancient dream come true.

The fact that my grandmother believes that rats dream sounded ridiculous to me, but I didn’t laugh. And the thing that caused the rat to make the effort was the scent of the little girl. A smell, but not that of a dead person. And even though he jumped higher than ever and hopped further than ever, the little girl was as still as a potato now, except that her skin covering wasn’t smooth any more. The rat had figured out that his last hope had gone to pot. God, that son of a bitch, had cheated him, and had broken the promise without so much as blinking – another trait he’d passed on to whomever when he made that pompous announcement about man being “created in My image”. That’s what my grandmother said.

The rat – an animal that’s anything but dumb – had worked out what God’s worst mistake was. Because a world where children need to be placed in hiding, a world like that isn’t just a glitch, it’s the total collapse of all systems. A world like that ought to be wiped out completely and started from scratch.

And I’m not sure that this part belongs in the original story. I guess it must have been something my grandmother added.

And then the little girl climbed out of the earth.

I stopped.

There’s something missing.

How did she just come out all of a sudden?

Grandma said: There was this ... black angel. It just arrived, and put her back in the world above.

I stopped again.

An angel? You don’t believe in stuff like that, do you?

Grandma explained that this was just one of the figures of speech in the legend. They’re codes, just like the icons on your computer. You click on them with your mouse. And that’s what’s so nice about the legend, because in ordinary stories the symbols are always liable to be carrying too heavy a load. But it’s lucky that the computer can make symbols clean again and restore their lost dignity.

I refused to drop it: So she was saved. A miracle had happened after all.

My grandmother denied it right away. She said she didn’t want to dwell on the angel too much, because a sharp turn like that is crucial to stories. It was getting late. She wanted to wind up and to leave me with something, even if it wasn’t down in my notebook.

The most important thing, she said, was that the little girl had come back into the world above. She was finally standing above the pit and watching the gaping hole beneath her in broad daylight – even though she would never really feel warm in the sunlight again. Here was more proof that all the systems had broken down, that’s what Grandma said. I bet it was the computer course that made her say that.

The little girl pointed at the rat and emitted an enormous sound instead of all the sounds she hadn’t made before. She pointed to the sky, or maybe it was to the earth – and screamed: There’s the happiest creature on earth!

Nobody knows who she was shouting to or who actually heard her shout. Those details my grandmother left out of her story, because even if you’re just telling a story, you need to have a memory.

And then the rat laughed. His laughter made the ground shake. It was his first and last laugh, and it made the pit shake too from end to end till it shook so hard that the rat collapsed into the pit, and was buried without a trace.

Thy footsteps are not known, the Psalms tell us.

I stood at the bottom of the stairs, and the light in the stairwell was out. It was so dark I couldn’t even make out the opening to the old bomb-shelter. I waited for her. I shouted out that I was down, that I was OK, but nobody answered. Suddenly I got really worried. I pressed the switch but the light didn’t go on. I figured there was a power cut, and I got scared for her. I hated the idea of her alone