Georg Letham (20 page)

Bubbles continued to rise from the barrel for a fairly long time, two or three minutes. My father's eyes were fixed on my face with an ardent expression that I never deciphered. Love? Hate? Was I everything to him, or nothing? Just an experiment? Did he mean well toward me? He had taught me how to take the life of a living creature. And yet I loved him the way he was–now more than ever.

The rain barrel had to be destroyed after the rat's execution. The waterlogged wood was useless, even for heating. My father was sorry, for despite his great wealth he counted every penny.

Resourceful my father was, you had to hand him that, and I, his son, who looked up to him as though he were a kind of deity, handed him that and more. At that time he was having all sorts of trouble at his office (La Forest was still there and played a major role in it). He had always been a defender of high protective tariffs, but now the new minister believed in free trade. He had to adjust overnight, and that took some doing. He tried supporting a high domestic tariff while also coming down as a proponent of free-trade theory. Thus he was a patriot, a nationalist, yet international and liberal when it came to foreign trade. He could play any instrument in the orchestra. He played soccer with his feet while playing the fiddle with his hands, so to speak. And for all that, he was still unable to deal with the “enemies in his own house”! When he got some time off, he set to work.

How did he drive the rats from his house? Rats are full of passionate feeling, but they are clever, too. Indeed, they are so intelligent that one is inclined to credit them with ill will toward human beings, and this is the source of the great fury with which man has pursued them since ancient times, usually to no avail. But gods do not know fury. Only one thing helps against these animals, something for which man generally shows no affinity–the coldest reason, a scientific reason that tests and experiments, a
ratio
founded on the struggle of all living creatures for existence.

My father set about his work as follows. One fine day, assisted by
the gardener and myself, he set up a great trap, this time one not made of wire.

Between the courtyard of the house and the grounds, in a spot where the rats gathered in great numbers when the weather changed, he constructed a square pit one and a half meters deep and a bit less in length and width. That year an old heating stove (from my poor mother's bedroom, which no one used now) had been dismantled, and the nice tiles, white porcelain tiles, were lying around in the courtyard. Actually they were not lying around, they had been neatly stacked among the peach and rose trellises at the south wall of the house and covered with old boards. These tiles were used to line the bottom of the pit. The walls of the pit leaned toward each other at a bit of an angle. It was quite a trick to get the tiles to stay together so as to create this pyramid-shaped cavity. It took us several evenings to adjust the tiles precisely. Perpendicular walls would have been easier, but whereas rats have been known to climb vertical walls when they are in mortal peril, ones sloping inward are an insuperable obstacle for almost any animal without wings.

My father put his heart into this work. He forgot everything, free trade and protective tariffs, the minister and La Forest, even his own frugality.

I can still see him splitting the tiles with a chisel to make them fit. Running to the kitchen after a day's work, then to the pantry next to the kitchen, and bringing down a side of bacon, slicing off a piece the size of two fists, having
me
light a great fire in the stove (what a delight for me!). I can still hear the bacon sputtering merrily in an old iron pot.

Finally the fat was rendered out, the cracklings floating on top. Then the pot was taken off the stove and brought to the open window. The
marvelous bacon smell spread far and wide. From the pantry my father got a large, narrow-necked earthenware jar, a thick-walled, rust red clay vessel that no one had used in years and was covered with dust. It was cleaned, and my father took a funnel, shook into the jar's narrow neck some unused chicken meal (the chickens had wound up in the rats' stomachs, as we know), soaked this in some of the fat, and mixed it with the cracklings, arranging these nicely toward the top with an old spoon.

He poured the rest of the fat into the tiled pit outside, swinging the pot slowly and carefully to reach every corner. Then the jar was lowered to the bottom, and the preparations for the experiment were complete. He washed his hands, gave me some book or other to read, and left.

Here I must interject something that may seem irrelevant. This was the period when “inward urges” were awakening in me. They were not the least bit pleasant. Why bring it up now? Anyone who was ever young remembers what it was like: at first more anguish and trepidation than joy and pleasure.

I sat by the window with the book and controlled myself.

I had to wait for a long time. But then, toward evening, they came scampering out, the rats. They came running from all directions, as though pulled by threads, soundlessly. From the cellar door, through the narrowest holes, out from under the rain barrel, often three, four at once, large and small, pell-mell. It was the stronger species, all had dark stripes on their dirty-brown backs. They crowded around the four sides of the pit. They raised their pointed snouts, sniffing, the long, lighter-colored whiskers at their mouths bristling greedily, long hairs
also visible above their gleaming dark eyes and at the openings of their bare ears. They gave off a nasty smell. They did not whistle or shrill or twitter in their usual way. In silence they raised their long-toed, almost hairless feet, pawed and scraped insistently at the slightly protruding rim of the white tiles as though trying to scoop out a path into the pit. They were looking down. They laid their shallow, conical ears back, seemingly watching and waiting for something. They gripped the rim of the pit; they were not about to back off. Then suddenly they changed positions, they thronged wildly, they put their heads over the abyss and breathed in the lovely smell; newcomers kept arriving and pushed and shoved from behind at the ones in front. But the ones in front did not let themselves be pushed down. They were too smart for that. They resisted temptation. They did not jump in.

My father stayed away for a long time. Or was he standing behind me and watching me? I made myself believe that he was and kept a grip on myself.

I fell asleep in my steamy innocence.

When I woke up, the page I had been reading was completely crumpled. I was very sorry. My father was finicky about the way his books looked and trusted no one but me with them. And now! I looked down. It was night. The animals were still crowded around the pit in great numbers. They were no longer so quiet. They were in a state of great agitation, constantly changing their positions. The ones in front tried to move back, the ones in back pressed toward the front.

Suddenly the first rat dared to make the leap. I saw its dingy gray-brown fur and the dark stripe along its backbone sharply set off against the snow-white tiles. The animal reached the bottom with a pattering
sound. The kitchen staff, who had been following the whole thing from the window of the servants' quarters, erupted in triumphant laughter. My father was not there. The other rats fell silent, as though they were frightened. But they circled the pit, moving continuously around it from left to right. For a time the influx had stopped; now new arrivals surged forward once again, crawling on their bellies, following the scent, covered by the horde.

I saw the rat at the bottom very clearly from up above. It was so deep in the fat that its paws were almost invisible. At first it kept still, tried to pull its legs free one after another, swiveled its head like the one I had killed. But then it plucked up its courage and began to lick up the fat. First next to it, then farther away, as far as the corners that could not be seen very well from above. It was almost beyond belief, but in about half an hour the animal had eaten some two liters of fat. And was it satisfied? It cleaned its ears, licked its paws, and worried its claws with its tongue, but then–was it thinking about escaping? Hardly. True enough, it certainly would not have been able to. Our experiment had been designed too carefully for that. But the captive animal might at least have tried! This it did not do. It was still filled with nothing but greed. With its front paws it climbed up onto the upright earthenware jar, trying to tip it. When this first attempt failed, it threw itself head-first against the strong, heavy jar from the front and then from the side, until it succeeded in toppling it. Then, with agile, delicate movements, as daintily as a squirrel, it fished a few bits of grain and chunks of fat out of the neck of the wide-bellied jar. It got no deeper. It poked its snout into the opening, ground its teeth against the ceramic (I heard a metallic ringing). But to no avail. Then it took heart. It was not in the company of its fellows. Its belly grossly full, it withdrew into a corner of
the pit, the darkest one, coiled its naked tail around itself, made itself comfortable, pillowed its head on the soft parts of its lumbar region, and was soon asleep.

When I stopped by the pit the next morning, I saw a rat in it. But it was not the one that had eaten the two liters of fat. It was a much bigger one, with a lean, elongated body. It was uneasy and ran about incessantly. The pit was soiled. Instead of the fat, a bloody residue could be seen, not dark in color, but a pale, dilute red. Shreds of skin, claws, and the poorly cleaned remains of a spinal column were also lying about. The rat roamed among these repellent things, sniffed at the blood, vibrated its whiskers, cocked its head, bared its strong teeth, then threw itself against the heavy jar and rolled it into a corner, snuffled at it for a long time, and finally took up a position in front of it, as though to guard it.

I went to school. These were the last days before vacation, our lessons were no longer being taken so seriously. At noon I went home, but I deliberately avoided looking into the pit. In the afternoon I returned to school, where we had physical education and stenography, not compulsory subjects. Afterward I went to the tennis court. When I came home late in the day, it was as though the captive rat down in the pit were chasing me. The hole in the ground was easier to see from above than from the courtyard. Or so I imagined. I was pulled as though by magic into my father's room, where I sat down in the armchair at his desk, which I was actually not allowed to do. By the time my father arrived I had gotten up and was doing my homework. Evening came. I fell asleep with difficulty, late at night. I said nothing to my father. I believe this was the time of La Forest's farewell visit, but I may be mistaken.
As I lay in my bed, I heard nothing from the rats. But the treetops were rustling. The wind fell suddenly, and I heard the fountain splashing into the little basin. How far away it sounded. My father had forgotten to close the tap as he ordinarily did at night in midsummer. The water that was saved in this way could be used the next day for watering the lawn. Water cost money, something I was unwilling to believe for a long time. But my father, who otherwise did not shrink from lying (it just has to be learned, he said), never lied to me. He told no one what he thought, just me.

The birds stirred uneasily in the branches of the plane tree that stood in front of the windows. The air was heavy–though the sky was clear–and fragrant; nothing remained of the bacon smell.

A few minutes later I was awakened from a deep narcotic sleep (I believe it was almost morning and dawn was breaking) by a death cry.

When an animal dies, it makes a cry quite unlike its cries in life. An animal or a person may be wracked by the most extreme pains but never makes cries like the death cry until the end. The death cry has a singular inflection. A swell, I might say, a sort of terrible exultation. If I could only stop hearing it at last, the death wail of my poor wife!

Today I know it, as a man of ripe years, of more than ripe years. At that time it was only a suspicion I had, as an unripe yet overripe lad. But I had discerned it, even though I was still in short pants and sat on the school bench among boys.

It will be said that a child is not aware of such things, that no adolescent sees the world that way. I might say that myself if I heard my life story in someone else's telling. Yet that is how it was. What purpose would be served by lying to myself about myself?

I did have a normal child around me, my brother. That very evening
I had seen him take no interest in the “nasty” extermination of the rats. He gave no more than a curious glance into the porcelain pit as he ran past it with a deliberately stamping, jingling step when my little sister called him out of the yard. They had been playing their perennial simple game, in which my brother, a big, squarely built, very phlegmatic boy, would stretch a kind of leather harness studded with brass bells around him and play a “furrowbred.” My little sister had once heard something about thoroughbreds and had recast the word. The harness had actually been for her and would have fit her–a chubby-cheeked, light blonde, blue-eyed, somewhat squinty (and thus always armed with distance glasses) little beast–to a tee, but she, quite the gal despite her youth, had gotten her much bigger and stronger brother to strap the harness on himself; his arms, held at his sides, barely fit, and his rib cage did not fit at all. So they were playing “furrowbred” and “driver.”

My brother and sister were afraid of me. Yet it was they who jealously guarded their treasure trove of toys, which I was never allowed to touch, while I was only too glad to put my own at their disposal. They took them, but not when I was there. Stealing was more fun for them than receiving presents. Grotesque, but true. More than true, normal. Thus I was surrounded by normal, healthy, exuberant creatures. And my brother and sister turned into normal, healthy adults, too. So was my bloodiness not in the blood? We all had the same blood.