Page 51 - I Live in the Slums: Stories (The Margellos World Republic of Letters)

to think of this. When was this blockhouse built? My impression was that

although conspiracies riddled the slums, no major disturbance had occurred. So
what was the point of building this blockhouse? To resist outside enemies? City
people certainly wouldn’t come to these lowlands. People here and in the city
had nothing to do with each other. I couldn’t imagine where any enemies would
come from.
It was getting dark. I ran down from the blockhouse that had gradually turned
ice-cold. Another one of my species was running in front of me. He had a
somewhat longer body than mine, and a bigger skull, too. A spot of white hair
was growing on his left hind leg, somewhat resembling the two house mice I
knew so well. But he wasn’t a house mouse! He ran to the small pond and
jumped in. My God! I certainly wouldn’t jump into the icy water! At first he was
still visible. He swam and swam, then disappeared. Clearly, he had dived deep. I
stared blankly for a while at the edge of the pond. I thought of what had
happened early this morning: the woman of the house had thrown me out. She
disliked my dirtying the stove in her home. That wasn’t true, though. I ate and
slept on the stove every day and so I couldn’t avoid leaving a little trace of my

presence, could I? But she couldn’t put up with it! She was obsessed with
hygiene. When she had nothing to do, she swept and dusted. This made
absolutely no sense. I had never known any other slum dweller who did that.
Such a simple, crude house. Even if it was spotless, it looked no different from
any other houses here. But this woman (I knew the others called her Auntie
Shrimp) never gave me a break. If I tracked in a little dirt, she brandished a
broom and swore at me for a long time. At mealtime, she wouldn’t tolerate my
dropping a single grain of rice or a sliver of vegetable onto the stove. She
scrubbed my fur viciously with a brush every day, not stopping until I screamed.
As for her, she spent a lot of time taking baths in the wooden basin. Whenever
she had time, she heated water and bathed and washed her hair, as if she wanted
to scrub away a layer of skin. Auntie Shrimp loved to talk at midnight. Maybe
she was talking in her sleep. She always called me “the little mouse.” She tossed

and turned in that wide bed and talked incessantly: “The little mouse doesn’t
care about hygiene. This is dangerous. There’s pestilence all around. If you don’t
want to get sick, you have to be strict about hygiene. My parents told me this
secret. The year they went north and left me behind, they urged me to clean up
every day. I was a sensible girl . . .”
Early one morning, she stood up in bed and shouted, “Mouse, did you take a
bath today? Something smells rotten!” She got out of bed and scrubbed me with
the brush. It hurt so much that I screamed. I had always slept on the stove, but
one day all of a sudden that displeased her. She said I had turned the stove into
something unlike a stove. She said if this continued, she and I would both come
down with the plague. With this, she threw out the jar that I slept in. Broken-