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Birth of a Rat
Kim
Soom Translated
by Brother Anthony of Taizé
It was around eleven o’clock on a
Thursday morning that they arrived at
her home. They were all wearing identical blue uniforms.
Thanks to these
uniforms, they looked like experts. At least when it
came to catching rats. About thirty minutes before they rang
the doorbell, she had gotten a call from her husband. He
said people would soon
be arriving at their home to get rid of the rat. He hung
up after repeating three
times that they were experts at rat catching. She knew
that there were all
kinds of experts in the world, but she hadn’t known that
there were people who were
experts at catching rats. Anyway, since they were
experts, she hoped they would
catch the rat quickly. Flashlight, hammer, iron rod, iron
skewer. Such were the tools they had brought with them
to catch the rat. They looked
complacent and relaxed, as if those tools alone would be
sufficient. As she
looked on, they doled out their tools amicably. Paik,
whose head was so large it
looked deformed, was the first to choose a tool, and
without hesitation he
picked up the hammer. Ku, who had a habit of constantly
sniffing, chose the iron
skewer. Stocky Kim, with protruding eyes, glanced at her
before slyly picking
up the iron rod. Park, rail thin and completely bald at
the front of his head, grumbled. “I always end up with the
flashlight.” “You know that you have to pay a
hundred thousand won per rat, right?” “A hundred thousand…won?” She asked, looking confused. Ku snorted. “Everyone takes it that way.” “What’s the problem? Some charge more.” She wondered if a hundred thousand won
per rat wasn’t a bit expensive, but she nodded. She had
no choice but to
believe what they said, that everyone charged that much
and that some demanded
even more. There might have been one rat, two or three
rats, maybe even more
than that. Still, as the rat had been glimpsed only
once, there was a high
possibility that there was just one. She informed them
there was a baby in the
house. She reckoned that they should know about the
existence of the baby. “A baby?” asked Kim, rolling his
eyes. “But the baby…is asleep…” she
muttered, unable to tear her eyes away from the hammer
in Paik’s hand. The iron
head at the end of the handle was round, iron-colored,
moderately worn and
polished. Just imagining the scene if a rat was struck
by it was horrible
enough. The mere thought of a rat gave her goosebumps.
In the whole world, rats
were the most disgusting creatures she could think of. They divided into teams of two and
looked around the house. Paik and Park, Kim and Ku each
became a pair. Paik and
Park explored the veranda. There were clothes on the
drying rack that had still
not been brought in after three days out there, her
underwear among them. It
was embarrassing that her black bra was hanging from the
rack like a bat, but
she just had to let it be. She went to the sofa, sat down and stared
at the TV that had been on when they arrived. When they
pressed the doorbell,
she had been watching TV and, with purple thread,
cross-stitching one of the
grapes hanging abundantly from a grapevine. Filling in
empty grapes was extremely
boring, but it served to pass the time. When she sat
alone on the sofa in broad
daylight and filled in grapes, she felt as if there were
so many empty grapes
hanging in rows that she would grow old and die before
she finished filling
them all in. It didn’t take them long to look
around. Her house was an apartment of 66 square meters,
its layout fairly
typical. Two rooms, a living room, a kitchen, a bathroom
and a veranda. The
living room and kitchen were separated by sliding doors
fitted with opaque
glass, put in by the people who had lived there before
during remodeling. They didn’t look into the bedroom
where the baby was. The door to the bedroom was closed
tight. The baby, only
nine months old, was asleep in its cradle. She didn’t
want it to wake up. Once it
woke up, it was hard to get it back to sleep, and if the
baby woke up it would
interfere with catching the rat. Ku and Kim emerged from
the bathroom and stood
in front of her. Park and Paik also came and stood in
front of her. Ku asked
her, still snuffling. “Okay, when was the first time you
saw a rat?” She felt awkward because it was not
she, but her husband, who had seen it. “Well, you see…” It was three days before that her
husband had first seen the rat. Late in the evening,
after midnight, her
husband had gone to the kitchen to drink some water and
had seen it. According
to her husband, when he entered the kitchen, the rat was
sneaking over the gas
range, its long, pink tail hanging down. The rat stared
at him, then quickly
disappeared behind the range. He was so surprised that
he forgot that he had gone
to the kitchen for a drink of water. After closing the
sliding door of the
kitchen tightly to keep the rat from coming out into the
living room, he came back
to the bedroom. Then, as she wearily tried to calm the
fretting baby, he told
her, “There’s a rat in the kitchen…!” Then he lay down and fell asleep
after muttering, “There’s a rat in the kitchen…How can
there be a rat…” That was it. She changed the story so that it seemed
as if the person who had seen the rat was herself, not
her husband. When they
had heard the whole story, they looked rather
disappointed. Kim frowned and
said, “Only one!” “You’re right.” Park chimed in. “We’ll only know how many there are
after we catch them.” Ku sniffed to clear his runny nose. She hoped that there would be only one
rat, but at the same time she worried that if there was
only one, they would be
disappointed. They said it was a hundred thousand won
per rat, so the more they
caught, the better. But she tried to reassure herself by
reflecting that even if
there was only one rat, it wasn’t her fault, and it
wasn’t something she had to
feel sorry about. Until yesterday, she had been expecting
her husband to get the rat, thinking that as soon as he
left work he would come
home and proudly catch it. But he had worked overtime
for the last four days,
and after that he and his staff went drinking until late
before returning home.
She didn’t want to blame her husband. She reflected that
perhaps he found rats
as disgusting as she did. After her husband saw the rat
in the kitchen, she
only entered it when she needed to prepare formula to
feed the baby. As she
boiled the water and mixed the formula, a chill ran down
her spine at the
thought that the rat might be hiding somewhere in the
kitchen, watching her. Before they set about catching the
rat, they held a kind of council of war. Ku spoke first.
Kim rolled his
eyeballs and kept nodding, while Paik grasped the hammer
tightly and listened
silently so that the veins on the back of his hand
swelled. Park pouted and glanced
at the TV. On the screen was a rerun of a popular drama
from three or four
years back. “I wish we could catch a hundred rats.” At Park’s words, she imagined a
hundred rats swarming about the house, the sofa, the
dining table, the bed and
the cradle where the baby was asleep, teeming with rats.
She didn’t like Park
from the beginning. In fact, she didn’t like any of them
very much from the
start. “How many is the most we’ve caught
so far?” “Five, surely?” “What, that’s all?” “Three out of five were babies with
no fur.” “Let’s get them in one go!” Paik raised the hammer into the
air. They rushed into the kitchen,
talking loudly among themselves. They didn’t seem to be
using poison or
mousetraps. Clearly, they got rid of rats using nothing
but the hammer, iron skewer
and iron rod. As soon as they rushed into the
kitchen, she closed the sliding door, expecting them to
catch the rat very soon. She had just managed to regain her
composure and pick up the embroidery when she put it
down again, thinking that
they might catch the rat at any moment and emerge from
the kitchen. With the
sliding door closed, she had no idea what they were
doing in the kitchen, but clearly
they were frantically trying to find the rat. She tried
not to forget for a single
moment that they were rat-catching experts sent by her
husband. Chaotic cries of “Huh,” “Hold it!”
“There, there!” “Hey” and “Aigo” could
be heard from behind the sliding door. She slowly turned
her head toward the
kitchen and looked at their forms as they loomed through
the opaque glass of
the door. The shapes glimpsed through the opaque glass
were distorted and
weird. Their movements, tangled together as if they were
a troupe of performing
artists on stage, were so extreme that they seemed to be
hitting each other
with the hammer, stabbing one another with the iron
skewer and striking back
and forth with the iron rod. In addition, the flashlight
swirled like stage lighting,
adding a dramatic effect. It was about twenty minutes after
they’d rushed into the kitchen that she heard a crash.
It was the sound of the stainless
steel pots that had been piled up one on top of another,
collapsing and clashing.
She recalled the set of German stainless steel pots in
the sink cabinet, a set
she had ordered without her husband’s knowledge from a
home shopping site some
time before. After the crashing sound had subsided, she
heard them babbling
with excitement. Had they finally caught the rat?
Hit it with the hammer? Stabbed it with the iron skewer?
Or struck it with the
iron rod? The sliding door opened and Park walked out
hesitantly, pointing the
flashlight at her. Taken aback, she jumped up from the
sofa and the beam from
the flashlight struck her left eye. As she raised a
hand, Park turned it off. “It’s urgent. I can’t control…” Park slurred the ends of his words
as he went trotting towards the door of the main
bedroom. “The bathroom is this way, not that
way.” She pointed at the bathroom door. “Not that way, this way!” She screamed just as Park grabbed
the handle of the bedroom door. “That way?” As soon as Park entered the
bathroom, she was embarrassed to hear the stream of
urine striking the water in
the toilet bowl. As she gazed disapprovingly toward the
bathroom, she was shocked
to find that the door wasn’t fully closed. The bathroom
door opened almost at
the same time as she heard the toilet being flushed. Park came out and went to stand in
front of the TV. He gazed at the screen and his lips
curled. “That’s the drama my wife’s crazy
about, isn’t it?” She was lost for words. “She’s a pathetic woman who lounges
around all day watching dramas on TV.” Park spoke as if spitting out the
words, then went striding toward the kitchen. She felt
annoyed. While the baby
was asleep, she had little to do other than watch drama
reruns on TV, do cross-stitching,
and fiddle with her smartphone. They seemed not to have caught the rat
yet. She heard them opening and closing the doors under
the sink. She was
worried that they were going to break the doors off. She
felt inclined to go
rushing into the kitchen to check if there were any
broken doors, but had to be
content with looking at the opaque glass. Their image reflected in the glass
of the sliding door was still tangled. The tangled
shapes came together to form
a single flailing shape. A question suddenly struck her. How
had the rat got in? Spiders, ants and cockroaches often
appeared, but this was
the first time a rat had shown up. She had never dreamed
that there would be a
rat in her house until one appeared and her husband saw
it. It must have been
the same for her husband. Moreover, her home was on the
nineteenth floor of an
apartment block that had only been built five years ago.
Like most apartments,
her home was as safe as an airtight container. She
wondered if the rat might
have entered through the front door, but it was tightly
shut except when someone
came in and out. The front door, with its automatic key,
closed by itself, and once
it was shut, locked itself. She wondered about the
drains on the veranda and in
the bathroom, but they were covered with stainless steel
mesh. As she racked her brains to figure
out the path the rat might have taken in order to enter,
she heard the sound of
glass breaking. She couldn’t stand it any longer
and got up from the sofa. After hesitating for a moment,
she approached the
sliding door to the kitchen. She wanted to open it right
away but held back. It
wouldn’t do for her to open the door and set free the
rat they had almost
caught. As she hesitated, the figure in the
glass tore and split into several pieces. The door slid open and the men emerged,
waving the tools they were holding. She expected one of
them to have a rat in his
hand, but all they had were the flashlight, hammer, iron
rod and skewer. Their eyes were roving wildly after
making such a commotion. Ku was sniffing and Park’s lips
were curled. The kitchen was a mess. The sink cabinet
doors were wide open, pots and pans lay thrown about,
potatoes and onions were rolling
across the kitchen floor. They chatted among themselves, ignoring
her agitation. “It’s not in the kitchen.” “There seem to be three rats.” She couldn’t figure out how on
earth they could be so convinced, but as they were
rat-catching experts, they
must have had a reason. “Did it hide in the bathroom?” “Could have. We caught our first
one in the bathroom, didn’t we?” “I got it with the hammer while it
was gnawing the soap.” They rushed toward the bathroom
door with enough momentum to catch not a mere rat, but a
bison or even a wild
boar. She peeked into the bathroom and saw
them forming a circle around the toilet, as if there
really were a rat hiding
somewhere inside. The flashlight in Park’s hand was
shining on the water in the
toilet bowl, and the water was blue as if bruised. Ku
stabbed at the back of
the toilet with the iron skewer while Kim stirred the
water in the tank with the
iron rod. Paik was holding the hammer high in the air. She hadn’t been able to clean the
toilet that morning. Every morning, she sprinkled in
some chlorine bleach and
scrubbed it thoroughly, but today she had been
preoccupied with the baby and
had forgotten. She felt very worried in case there might
be some kind of dirt
on the toilet. “How on earth can the rat be hiding
in the toilet…?” Her careful mutter earned her a
rebuke from Park. “You have no idea. We’ve caught two
rats in a toilet.” “That black rat was swimming about.” Kim stirred the water in the toilet
with the iron rod. After ten minutes spent checking the
toilet, what they found was
unfortunately not a rat, but a crack. “Is it cracked?” Park fussed as excitedly as if they
had found a rat. “Where?” They bent over with their rear ends
sticking out awkwardly while they
examined the crack as if they had come to replace the
toilet, not to catch rats. They came out of the bathroom after
examining the sink, bathtub, chest
of drawers and baskets holding bath supplies. She glanced at them, then went into
the bathroom, closed the door and
checked the toilet. It was only after she had screwed up
both eyes that she was
able to find the crack on the side of the water tank.
Actually, it was more of
a scratch than a crack. She felt so intensely resentful of
her husband, who had sent them
without consulting her in the least, that she even began
to reckon that she’d
rather have rats in the house than them. The rats hid in
secret, but these
people moved around the house as a group. “I’d rather have rats! Rats!” She grumbled, then realized that
they were men, and quickly shut up.
They were men with tools in their hands that could in an
instant turn into
terrifying, lethal weapons. Already it was one in the afternoon.
It had been around eleven in the
morning when they reached her home. Contrary to her
expectations, far from
catching any rats, they had messed up the house. “I’m starving!” Paik struck the living room wall
with the hammer. As a result of the
shock, the frame hanging on the wall tilted by fifteen
degrees. In the frame
was their first family photo, taken on the hundredth day
after the baby was
born. Her baby was wearing a bear-face hat and sitting
on her husband’s lap,
smiling. Her husband was also smiling with his mouth
wide open. She was looking
at her husband and baby with great satisfaction. “I’m starving!” Paik again struck the living room
wall with the hammer, and the frame
tilted another fifteen degrees. In the photo, which was
now tilted at about
thirty degrees, her husband had a startled look. Her
baby was frowning as if about
to burst into tears at any moment. And she was glancing
at her husband and baby
as if she were very annoyed. “If that guy’s hungry, he can’t
work,” Ku explained, so she felt obliged
to order jajangmyeon,
jjamppong
and fried dumplings. Paik finished off a bowl of jajangmyeon
in three or
four mouthfuls. Kim picked up the greasy fried dumplings
with his hand and
shoved them into his mouth. Instead of eating his jjamppong, Park picked up the
remote control and flipped through
the TV channels. Then they went out together onto the
veranda, carrying the paper cups of
instant coffee she had prepared. They giggled as they
looked down from the
nineteenth floor. She watched Ku throw a still-burning
cigarette butt into the air, and reflected
that she might do better to send them away immediately,
seeing as how they had
not caught any rats. There must be a lot of other expert
rat catchers. When they returned to the living
room, they wandered around, yawning and stretching as if
they were drowsy. She
too was feeling sleepy. She dozed off without realizing it,
then woke, startled. She looked at
them with terrified eyes, as they stood surrounding her.
They were pointing the
hammer, the iron rod and the iron skewer at her, as if
she were the rat they
were looking for. “Did you really see a rat?” Ku asked
her. “A rat, a rat!” Kim pressed her. “I…saw…” Even she could hear that her voice
was trembling. “Did you really see it?” Kim pushed the iron rod under her
chin. “I did…I saw it.” They drew closer, step by step, and
surrounded her. “I, really…saw…” By the time she finally managed to
spit out the words, they had her completely
surrounded. As she listened to the sound of Paik
grinding his molars, she had the
impression that she had become a rat – the rat her
husband had seen in the
kitchen three days before. Another moment and she
clapped a hand over her mouth,
which was about to let loose a scream. Thinking that she had to get away
from them somehow, she jumped up onto the
sofa. The hammer was glistening just above her forehead.
She wrapped her hands
around her head and yelled, forgetting that her baby was
sleeping peacefully in
the bedroom. When she took her arms away from her
head and quietly looked up, they
were talking among themselves. “She said she really saw a rat.” “If she said that, she must have
seen it, right?” “Yeah.” “I guess it’s hiding behind the
sofa.” The instant Kim spoke, they rushed
to the sofa and pushed it away from
the wall. Immediately, the disposable diapers piled up
on the back of the sofa
fell to the floor. They trampled roughly on the diapers,
searching behind the
sofa, but there was no rat. “Listen!” Everyone stopped moving at Ku’s
word. “What’s that noise?” She listened with them to the sound
coming from somewhere in the house. She
longed for it to be the sound of a rat, but it wasn’t.
It was a sound made by
her baby. “The baby…must have woken up…” she
muttered, glancing at them. She hoped
the baby might fall asleep again, but instead it cried
even louder, at the top
of its voice. “It’s really loud!” Paik complained. She quickly got off the sofa and ran
into the bedroom. The baby was waving
its arms and legs in the cradle, its face turned blue.
She held out her arms and
picked up the baby. Holding the baby, she went back into
the living room, where
they surrounded her as if they had been waiting. They
stared at the baby pressing
its face against her breast. With a confused expression,
the baby stared at
them in amazement, one by one. Park spoke to Paik. “It looks just like you! Look at its
thick lips.” “What?” said Kim, “It looks just
like you!” Ku sniffed in Kim’s face. “In my opinion it looks like you.
That nose the size of a fist.” Even though she didn’t think it
looked like any of them, they kept
insisting that the baby looked like them. She was
reflecting that the baby
couldn’t look like them, any of them. It really was
impossible. “Who among the four of us do you
think it resembles most?” She opened her eyes wide and looked
at Ku. “Who...?” “Who among the four of us do you
think the baby looks most like?” She stared seriously with fresh eyes
at the baby’s face, which she normally
considered to be the spitting image of her husband’s.
After carefully studying
the baby’s eyes, nose and mouth, she raised her head to
examine their faces one
after another. It turned out that the baby looked like
Paik, Ku, Kim and even
Park. It resembled all of them so equally that she
couldn’t really say it
resembled any one of them. “Well…” “I hate babies,” Paik complained. “It’s pretty chubby,” Park said
scornfully. The baby was certainly plump. Its
bulging thighs were thicker than her
forearms. “It’s as fat as a piglet.” Kim suddenly took the baby from her.
He put the baby, who was only nine
months old, on his shoulder, and spun around on the
spot. Amazed, the baby
laughed with eyes open wide. He made as if to throw the
baby up into the air,
and each time she couldn’t help screaming inside. Next, the baby was handed from Kim
to Ku to Park. As Park tried to hand him
the baby, Paik complained with his arms folded. “I hate babies. I hate any baby!” Just then, the phone rang. She
picked up the handset as if it were her
savior’s hand. She hoped it was her husband, but it was
the water purifier meter
reader. The meter reader informed her that he would
visit to check the water
purifier at eleven on Saturday morning, then hung up. He
visited once a month
to change the filter in the water purifier, and went
away after promoting
products such as bidets and water softeners. As soon as
she finished talking to
the meter reader, she called her husband’s cell phone. The baby was still nestling in
Park’s arms. He was kneading the baby’s
limbs as if it were a rubber doll. The baby had adopted
a strange expression
that she had never seen since it was born, and perhaps
because of that
expression, it looked like each of them. Yet there was
no reason why the baby should
resemble any of them. They were simply people her
husband had sent to get rid
of the rat. Her husband didn’t answer the phone,
probably busy with some kind
of important conference or meeting. “Perhaps it’s hiding in there?” As soon as Ku spoke, they dumped the
baby on the sofa and rushed towards
the small room. She ran to the sofa and quickly picked
up the baby. They opened the door of the small
room and went running in. The small
room was full of junk. “A rat!” One of them shouted and Paik struck
the floor with the hammer. The
hammering was so intense that she was worried about them
cracking the floor. As
she hugged the baby tightly and looked on desperately at
Paik’s insane
hammering, she shook her head, the image of a tattered,
bloody rat’s body spontaneously
arising in her mind. However, it wasn’t a bloody rat that
lay trembling on the tattered, torn
floor-covering. It was a plastic mechanical duck. The
duck had lost its head and
one leg, making it an ugly sight. Fragments from the
duck’s body lay scattered about. “But it looked just like a rat…” Paik’s disheartened voice came from
behind her. At first glance, the
duck really did look like a rat. She picked up the duck and started
to wind up the spring. She wound it
fully and when she let go, the clockwork turned and the
duck kicked with one crushed
leg. The baby waved its arms, enjoying the sight, then
shook one leg as if
imitating the duck. Knowing that the duck was broken was
going to make her
husband very sad. She recalled how happy her husband
looked as he wound up the
duck then placed it on the baby’s chubby thigh. As the
duck took a few
tottering steps before falling over, the baby would get
excited and shake its butt. But she was soon obliged to realize
that the duck wasn’t the problem. Looking at the air purifier they had
wrecked in the blink of an eye, she
suspected that they might not be real rat catchers. The
tools in their hands
were so absurd and rudimentary. It seemed like buying
some sticky boards and
putting them here and there would rather be an easier
way to catch a rat. She had bought the air purifier a
month before through TV home shopping,
on a ten-month interest-free installment plan. She was
furious at the thought that
she would have to pay installments for the broken air
purifier for the next nine
months. She felt desperately inclined to
call the police and have them kicked out
of the house. As she picked up the phone to do so, the
flashlight shone on her. “It seems you have to phone someone
urgently?” “If she wants to call someone in a
hurry, she should do it!” She dialed her husband’s cell phone
number with trembling fingers. She
got the number wrong and had to dial again. The call
went through, but her
husband still didn’t answer the phone. “My husband isn’t answering the
phone…Catching the rat is proving
difficult...I wanted to tell him…” “We’ll catch it soon, so hold back
on the worrying!” Park giggled. “Where the hell can the rat be
hiding?” Desperately eager to catch the rat,
they removed all the shoes from the
shoe closet. As she looked around the messed up house,
she recalled the not insignificant
loan she had taken out from the bank in order to set up
the home. A not insignificant
monthly interest payment was being automatically
deducted from her account. Suddenly, the thought that there
might not be any rats flashed through
her mind like lightning – a foreboding that there might
not be a single rat in the
house. The night he saw the rat, her
husband had been very drunk. Since no droppings
had been discovered anywhere in the house, she wondered
if her husband had been
so drunk that he had imagined the rat. It was three days
before that her
husband had seen it, so it was also possible that the
rat had gone on to
another house in the meantime. She put the baby down on the living
room floor, wound up the duck as far
as she could and placed it within reach of the baby. Then she quietly went into the
kitchen, closed the sliding door and
looked behind the stove. She could see ramen crumbs and
dried kimchi slices, but
no droppings. A blackish, pellet-like thing struck her
gaze as she looked at
the floor under the stove. She desperately hoped it
would be droppings, but
unfortunately not. It was just a grain of rice that had
rotted and dried out. When she came out of the kitchen
with shoulders drooping, they were
scouring her bedroom cabinets. Already, clothes and
blankets had been pulled
out and spread across the floor. She wanted to get them
out of the house, even
if it meant pressing a hundred-thousand won check into
each of their hands, as
if they had each caught a rat. After they had ransacked the bedroom
without finding the rat, they
rushed back into the living room. “The rat…” Her voice trembled violently and she
swallowed once. She didn’t have the
courage to tell them that there might not be a rat
anywhere in the house. “Will it be caught soon…?” The baby, who had been happily
playing with the wrecked duck, began to
fret. She picked up the baby and went into the bedroom. The cradle, the one thing they had
not touched, looked more cozy and
serene than ever. If only she could, she longed to lie
down in the cradle together
with the baby and fall asleep without a care in the
world. “It’s all because of the rat your
dad said he saw. That rat!” she said
after lying the baby down in the cradle. The baby’s
mouth was hanging wide
open, a drop of saliva the size of an acorn dribbling
from it. Just as the
saliva bubble burst, the baby spat out a single word. To
her ears, it definitely
sounded like “rat.” “Rat?” The baby’s mouth gaped again, and an
even larger drop of saliva than
before formed. The swelling saliva bubble burst, and
again the baby spat out a single
word. “Rat!” “Rat? Did you say rat?” “Rat rat rat...” Now that the baby had opened its
mouth, it didn’t seem to stop. She had never
imagined that the first word her baby would say would be
“rat,” and not “mom”
or “dad.” She should have been sad, but she couldn’t
afford the feeling. She put the broken duck on the
baby’s stomach. One leg of the duck,
which she had wound up tightly, trembled wildly. She waited for the baby to fall
asleep, then moved away from the cradle.
As she left the bedroom, she shut the door tightly. She
went to the sofa,
picked up the embroidery which had been thrown onto the
floor, and began
filling in the grapes. One grape, another grape, another
grape… “Shh!” “I think I just heard a rat…” “Me too!” “I think it came from that room?” Ku picked up the iron skewer and
pointed at the bedroom door. Ku nodded
towards Kim, Paik and Park. They crept, with Ku in the
lead, toward the door of
the bedroom, which she had closed tightly. They quickly surrounded the cradle
where the baby was asleep, before she
had time to stop them. Only then did she reflect that
the sound of a rat they thought
they had heard might be the sound of the baby in the
cradle. At that moment,
the silver cross-stitch needle in her hand trembled like
a fisherman’s float. She was uncertain whether to go on
filling in the almost-finished grape
or whether she should go running into the bedroom and
stop them. To the point
that she forgot they were expert rat catchers her
husband had sent. ##### |