The Autobiography of Mercutio Polinski (3 page)

“
No,” I answered with my
head bent down, because I didn’t know what the word school actually
meant.

“
How come?” Rosa was
looking at her dress carefully, as if she was conducting scientific
research or trying to solve a mystery.

“
Because we—mice—do not
have schools,” I answered hesitantly.

“
And how do you learn to
read and write, then?”

I didn’t answer, and she looked at me
with sympathy.

“
Father will teach you,”
she said.

I almost jumped for joy, but I didn’t
want to look too agitated. I just smiled and added, “I’d like to
learn, very much.”

At that moment Rosa stumbled in her
dress and fell on the floor.

“
Ah, it is so difficult to
get dressed. I wish we could do without clothes.”

When eventually she overcame her dress,
she tied her hair in a ponytail with a little blue
ribbon.

“
And what do you do, when
you don’t go to school?” she asked.

“
I talk to the flowers and
ants in the yard,” I replied.

“
Oh, how interesting! I
would like to be able to talk to them, too.”

I stood on my back feet.

“
I can introduce you. They
like attention.”

She nodded. Then she took her large,
heavy school bag in her hand and swayed toward the
kitchen.

“
Come on Mercutio, we
wouldn’t like to miss breakfast.”

I rushed after her and climbed the legs
of the white table until I reached the top of it, where freshly
fried warm pancakes and a cup of maple syrup were waiting for
me.

“
Dad, will you teach
Mercutio to read and write?” Rosa turned to her father, her mouth
full.

“
Why yes, of course!” he
answered swiftly. “We’ll start today.”

“
Оh!” I
exclaimed.

He continued, “Everyone must learn to
read, and it doesn’t matter whether they are mice or
people.”

He stood up and went to take a thin
book with a colorful cover from the library. He flipped through the
pages on the table in front of me. Interested, I stared at those
pages. They were studded with all kinds of pictures of strange
creatures, with big noses or very short legs. The writer told me
those were letters with faces and I laughed, because they were
really funny indeed.

“
Studying without laughter
is so boring that it can lead to nothing but sadness. And when you
study and laugh, you improve your memory,” he told me. I
immediately agreed with this statement.

When Rosa went to school, we both bent
over the merry pictures and spelled out loud together.

“
Gee...,” I pronounced
slowly, then drawled, “De-e…,” I divided the letter D, and
stretched my neck to the front. Paul was careful with me, and
encouraged me the whole time. Thanks to him, I learned ten letters
that day. My lesson for the day ended with the letter J. Then I
went home to tell my mother. When she saw me covered with maple
syrup all over, she pulled on my ear and we headed toward the bath
to get me bathed.

V
.

On How Easy It Is to
Believe…

I stood up on my back feet on the
kitchen windowsill, waiting impatiently for Rosa to come back from
school. It was afternoon, and I was tensely waving my tail while
trying to count the pink tulips in the front garden.

“
Twenty-one,
twenty-two…there are so many!” I was nervously quivering, stepping
from side to side. But then I saw her coming. She was still far
away, on the road to the house. I jumped to the floor, went through
a little hole in the stone wall, and went outside. And my dear
Rosa, when she saw me, she laughed so loudly that the freckles on
her face glowed like stardust in the moonlight.

“
What a wonderful
welcoming party I have!” She hugged me and kissed me on the
nose.

That day we were engrossed in jolly
games, and forgot about the world around us. We first went to the
backyard of the house, where I wanted to present Rosa to my
favorite flowers. She stretched out her hand to shake with each one
of them personally.

“
Hello, nice to meet you!
How are you?” She talked to them merrily, and the flowers answered
by shaking their little green leaves.

“
We’re fine,” they replied
with one voice. “We’re very well, thank you.”

But Rosa couldn’t hear them as clearly
as I could, so I encouraged her. “Just believe it.”

She thought for a while.

“
What are you doing?” I
wondered, seeing the odd faces she was making.

“
I’m trying to believe.”
And she stayed like that, staring at the flowers, her eyes far away
and her forehead wrinkled as she thought it over. Soon, she opened
her eyes widely and smiled. “How beautifully they’re singing!” she
exclaimed.

What Rosa had heard was the song of the
flowers of the forest.

“
It is so easy to
believe!” she cried, and lay among them on the grass. They went on
singing their favorite song to her, because flowers never sing just
for themselves. They sing for the whole world.

VI
.

On What Is Small, What Is
Big, and the Meaning of the Whole…

I noticed the ants’ path to the house,
and pointed it out to Rosa with my paw. She squatted without
speaking, because she didn’t want to disturb them while they were
working. They were humming a merry song and passing on some pale
pink brier leaves to one another.

“
Those ants are so small,”
Rosa whispered, comparing them to the big, fat snail that was
slowly sliding by. “I wonder if they know how small they
are.”

“
I don’t think so,” I said
confidently. “I think ants are so many that most of them probably
think they are very big.” Rosa laughed, and I went on importantly.
“The whole and the small are tightly linked, but we can’t see the
beauty of the small until we realize the greatness of the whole
that it forms.”

“
That is so,” Rosa nodded,
and continued observing the ants carefully. We had made a shadow
over them. They thought that it was getting cloudy and it was going
to rain, so they looked up to check the weather. Then they saw us
and waved at us happily. We waved back at them.

“
How are you today?” I
asked them in a good-natured, neighborly manner.

“
We’re fine,” the ants
answered my greeting. “Today is a great day for sunny songs and
happy games, don’t you think?”

“
But the only thing you do
is work. When do you have time for games?” Rosa
wondered.

“
Our work is like a game
for us, because it brings us great pleasure.”

“
But don’t you ever stop
to have a rest?”

“
We can’t, there’s no
time! The winter’s coming soon, and we have to be prepared.”
Together, they turned and started on their work again.

Rosa shrugged.

“
Well, winter’s not even
close. There’s the whole summer ahead,” she whispered to me. “This
seems to me a bit meaningless—only work and no fun.”

“
Everything is meaningless
until we give meaning to it,” the ants said with one voice. They
had small heads, but could hear perfectly well. Rosa was a bit
embarrassed, and stood up.

“
Maybe they are
right.”

We walked away on the bright path
ahead, searching for other happy, hard-working creatures in the
garden behind the house.

VII.

Where Birds Fly to in the
Winter…

The evening came unnoticeably, settling
us in her hospitable cool comfort, and we dreamily looked at the
lights shining above us. The stars twinkled, animated by our
attention. A star would glow brighter here and there in order to
impress us, but the others quickly overshadowed it, with their
light just as bright and strong. So they blinked on the sky, their
legs and arms spread; one could easily mistake them for shiny
little sky ghosts with small triangular heads. A flock of wild
geese flew above and cried loudly to greet us, but said nothing
more as they were in a hurry. Suddenly Rosa’s face became
serious.

After a while she asked me, “Do you
know where birds of passage fly to in the winter?”

“
I don’t know,” I
admitted, and was silent. I was ashamed of not knowing.

“
I also do not know where.
But I know that they go back home.” She became silent again.
“Someday I will go back home, too,” she said, absorbed in her
thoughts.

“
But you are at home!” I
was bewildered.

“
Father says that our real
home is not here, where we are at the moment, but somewhere out
there among the stars, where mother is now.”

“
Don’t you like it here?”
I asked her, feeling a bit offended. Rosa laughed.

“
Of course I like it,” and
she turned her head toward the stars.

“
Rosa, if you decide to go
home for the winter, will you come back to us again after that?
Birds of passage always do so, don’t they?”

Rosa nodded. “I would very much like
to.”

“
But why do you want to
go?” I just couldn’t stop being interested, after all.

“
That’s what the doctor
said to dad. He said that I would soon go back home. I heard them
while they were whispering at the door. I do not know why adults
think that children don’t understand when they whisper. As if they
were invisible when they whispered.”

“
I don’t know,” I
shrugged. “Mum is always yelling at me, so it is hard to not
understand her.”

Rosa laughed with that wonderful,
melodious voice that could make a flower blossom from the ground
even in wintertime. And I grew sad, really sad indeed—I did not
know why. Now I know. But then, I still didn’t
understand.

VIII
.

On How to Submit Our Fears
to Other Magical Creatures…

A few days later, I woke up to find out
that the writer and Rosa were not at home. The absence of them both
so early in the morning was so worrying that I complained to my
mother, and she baked chocolate cookies to calm me down.

A dozen cookies and two cups of milk
later, Rosa and Paul came home, but they were strangely silent and
very absent-minded. Something had made them sad, but they didn’t
want to share with me what exactly it was. Rosa went to bed
immediately, and Paul leaned over his typewriter and rattled away
on it. I was alone again. A little tear rolled down over my nose,
because nobody paid attention to me. Why did people not want to
play with me today?

Rosa was fast asleep until the evening.
When she woke up she looked at me anxiously and said, “Mercutio, I
had a nightmare.”

“
A nightmare is just a bad
dream,” I told her.

“
But I was frightened.”
She wept, and a star fell from her eye onto the soft
pillow.

“
Then let me tell you a
story about fear.” I jumped onto my back feet and waved my hands
melodramatically. “Let me tell you how another little girl managed
to overcome fear. She was as beautiful as you; she had eyes, a
nose—and even ears! She often liked to sing and laugh. But every
night, just before she went to bed, she grew really frightened.
That girl was such a coward! She was so frightened by the darkness
that she refused to go to sleep without the light of the night lamp
in her room. She often had nightmares caused by her fears, and
didn’t like to get up from her bed during the night. She claimed
the paws of some fierce and ugly monsters were down there under the
bed, waiting for her.