by Nava Semel
I looked at my empty notebook and realized that I didn’t have a thing – no story, no testimony, nothing that could be used to teach the coming generations a lesson, which is what you teachers are always after, and I knew that it was due the following day and that the whole class had already put together a tree and a genealogy and that they have everything they need, and I don’t have a thing.
She insisted: Just a legend. Take it or leave it.
I don’t understand where that legend idea came from, because she’s not one of those grandmothers who tell you a bedtime story or sing you a lullaby. I can’t remember so much as a single story or even half a lullaby that she ever ... just Grandpa. He was the perfect storyteller. He used to say it was for all the ones who weren’t able to tell, and he meant her.
OK, a legend. Whatever.
I had to go along with it. Otherwise I wouldn’t have had anything to hand in, because if this was all I could get out of her, then either it’s a lack of talent that I’ve inherited from her, or else I just don’t have the patience or the technique.
One name at least. That’s all I wanted. Damn you, memory. Just give me a name! I was absolutely begging for it in my heart.
And suddenly I had an awful thought, the worst. Maybe she can’t even remember her own name, the one her parents gave her. I’d rather not think about what if the name I know her by isn’t even–
So what is real anyhow?
Just at that moment, the doorbell rang.
Grandma got up. Slowly. She was tense.
Who could it be?
I didn’t understand why she was so nervous. I said, Maybe it’s just someone collecting for the blind or for disabled children. Those people never tell you in advance.
She leaned on the wall, right where she’d made room for the computer. And she started to cough. She covered her mouth.
I asked if she was expecting anyone?
She didn’t answer.
Maybe they’re finally delivering the computer?
She didn’t move.
Should I get it? I asked.
The doorbell rang again, and I didn’t bother waiting for her answer any more.
It was my mother, even though we hadn’t arranged for her to come pick me up.
Mom said: I was worried, so I came to pick you up. Then she tried to grab the notebook away from me.
I told her I’d be back whenever I was ready. I promised.
I think you’re too young for this, my mother said. This project can wait for high school when you’re older. I’m going to file a complaint against your teacher. Don’t you dare, I told her.
My mother said: You’re still a child. Don’t you understand that? What’s the rush? Why grow up before your time? Where is everyone running to? Your generation has no childhood left. I feel sorry for you kids.
You don’t get it, I told her. Our childhood – it’s not up to us. The world has changed.
She pleaded with me to come home. She said Grandma would understand. Let me explain it to her.
You’re spoiling everything, I told her. You’re always spoiling everything.
I wouldn’t let her in. I nearly pushed her away.
In the end she turned around and started down the stairs, turning her back on me. And as she walked down she said: I can’t even tell if what we know about her is what she really is, and maybe it’s better that we don’t know, because I don’t know what it could have done to me ... to us ... maybe destroying everyone’s life.
That final sentence reached me as a little echo from the floor below.
When I came back into the room, Grandma was determined.
A legend.
Or nothing.
All right then. I had no other choice.
So if this project is a disaster, I take full responsibility, Miri. At least I’ve brought in a legend, and maybe it’s worth a passing grade. It’s all she gave me. As far as the rest is concerned...
I don’t know.
Just a minute, Miri, one more thing, before you decide about me. I almost forgot. I think – I mean I’m not sure – that I did manage to get one name out of her.
Stefan.
I think that’s what she called the rat.
My grandmother’s legend goes all the way back to the story of Creation. But her Book of Genesis 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 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 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 trac
e.
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 in the dark. I started slamming the switch, banging on it so hard that I almost broke it, then suddenly the light went back on.
My legs ran up the stairs. I don’t know how to explain it, I don’t know why myself, but I shut my eyes. I went up in the dark and it was my own darkness. I could taste it, chew it even. That darkness got stuck between my teeth, in my throat, in my stomach, between my legs...
I wanted to throw up.
And even when I really wanted to open my eyes I couldn’t, as if something stronger than me was keeping them shut. I didn’t even have enough power left for my own soul.
I’ve never been so scared in my whole life. I don’t know how to explain it. I kept running up the stairs. I wasn’t even sure I hadn’t run too far, right past her floor. The fear and the darkness made me feel somehow that there was a light beyond my own body. Maybe that’s what kept me from falling.
Why did the rat laugh?
It seemed as if I was hearing that laughter rolling through the stairwell.
As far as the bomb-shelter underneath the house.
I have a question for you, Miri. Would you happen to know what Stash means?
Have you ever heard the word Stash? Because it doesn’t mean a thing to me. Though it does kind of reverberate. As though I’ve heard it lots of times and I simply can’t remember it.
I’ll tell you the truth. I thought I was hearing Stash in the stairwell, but I wasn’t really sure it was my grandmother’s voice, because she was upstairs and I was downstairs, so how could I have heard it at such a distance? Maybe it was just my imagination. You know. Being afraid and everything.
