Page 39 - I Live in the Slums: Stories (The Margellos World Republic of Letters)

Part Four

One late autumn day, I climbed up to the thatched roof on this house. It was
so relaxing there. Below, the two people were still fighting violently. They had
smashed all the pottery bowls and pots to smithereens. For two months, I’d been
living in fear and trepidation. Especially that older brother: whenever I saw his
vicious brown eyes squeezed together in one spot, I thought I was going to die.
Although these eyes threatened only each other and not me, I still felt that they

concerned me. Day and night, I could hear knives being sharpened in some
corner of the house. How could there be so many knives? I squatted on the
rooftop, fearful that they’d find me. If I were down below, as soon as they
finished fighting each other, they would vent themselves on me. Once the older
brother almost cut off my ears. I surreptitiously considered whether I should
leave. I’d been leading a miserable life with these brothers for several months. I
often stayed hidden in a cardboard box under the bed. With nothing to do, I
spent my time worrying about depressing things. Mainly I was concerned about
the slums, and of those worries, I worried most about floods. I thought that if the
city were inundated, the slums would become a vast body of water. I
remembered there’d been a flood more than a hundred years ago. Back then all
the people in the slums escaped, leaving only the house mice. Later, in just one
night, all the house mice were killed. Why hadn’t they escaped? They should
have been the most alert to this kind of natural disaster. I really didn’t want the
slums to turn into a vast body of water. After all, this was my home. Once I
settled down in a certain home, I generally didn’t go out again, but I did take

journeys around this region in my mind. I rearranged the houses here as I liked,
then mixed them up, then rearranged them . . . Sometimes this was how I got
through the endless, long lonely nights. In my mind, I cut the rowhouses apart
into freestanding ones, each with its own cellar. A stonecutter from the city was
chiseling in each cellar. I thought this kind of scene was lovely. Like the
ancestor I remembered, I was an aesthetician. Because of talking with the sun,
that ancestor had been burned alive by the toxic sun on the grasslands. Back
then, his story was passed down throughout the pasture.
I mustn’t make any noise, because they knew I had disappeared. “Ricky!
Ricky!” they shouted for me. Exasperated, they searched the entire house. Then
they probably thought I had run away, and so they went out looking for me.
With the house now empty, I slid down from the hole. I was exhausted and

wanted to sleep. Shards of pottery were everywhere, and a lot of water had been
splashed on the two beds. They had even dampened the cardboard box I slept in.
Not caring whether it was wet or not, I burrowed in to sleep. Just as I was about
to fall asleep, the brothers returned. The younger one screamed like a pig being