Page 60 - I Live in the Slums: Stories (The Margellos World Republic of Letters)

little rooster’s remains on the floor. He told me to eat that little thing. I didn’t
want to. He struck me in the head repeatedly with the wooden club. I passed out
and then came to. After a while, I really couldn’t stand this. I decided I’d better
suppress my nausea and swallow this little thing. After doing that, I felt ill. I
rolled my eyes. I wanted to throw up, but I couldn’t stand up. I lay on my

stomach on the floor. The house mouse stuck his head out of the hole in front of
me and looked at me with a weird expression. What? Was he waiting to eat me?
Just look at his expression! I was nauseated again, and everything blurred before
my eyes. Oh, he was nipping at my face! I was losing my mind and stood up. He
kept biting me and wouldn’t let go, as if stuck to my face. I thought he must
have bitten through my face. I couldn’t move. If I moved, a piece of skin with
hair would be ripped from my face. From above, the landlord said, “Snake, oh
snake. This is testing your endurance.” I smelled sewage on the house mouse’s
body. He was so filthy, and yet the old man let him live in his home and run
about as he pleased. All of a sudden, he let go of my face. I rubbed my face with
my front claws. It wasn’t too bad—he had probably just chewed a few tooth
cavities. The odd thing was that this fiendish thing immediately fell over in front
of me, his belly swollen and black blood running out of his mouth. He’d been
poisoned! My body was hypertoxic! How come the old man’s disinfectant
hadn’t worked? Had he really wanted to rid me of poison, or had he wanted to
turn me into a hypertoxic substance and use me to poison the mouse?

He was sitting with his back to me. The view of his back resembled
something I was familiar with. I gave it a lot of thought, and at last I figured out
what he reminded me of: he was like the person-shaped rock in my hometown! It
had come to the surface out of the mud and stood straight up in the center of the
pasture. It was like a person, but it wasn’t one. Many of my kin loved to run
around it. “You mustn’t stare at me all the time. I came from the pasture,” he
said without turning around. Lined up against the wall, my kin listened
attentively. Now I saw that all of us had come from the pasture! I remembered
the harsh climate, the crystal-clear blue sky, the summer which passed so
quickly that it seemed unreal, the countless secrets concealed in the underbrush,
the eagles circling in the sky all day without tiring . . . These recollections were
killing me. I wished I could abandon my physical body and blend into that place
. . . I had no idea how I could remember things that happened in the era of my

great-grandfather’s generation and even his father’s. Those things could appear
in my mind at any time and be compared with the shape my life had taken now. I
knew that, even if it were possible to go back, I would be unable to adapt to that
climate. More than half my kin died there every year just as early winter
descended. If I were there, I’d surely be the first to die. There was no plague in
the grasslands. You just felt bone-penetrating cold, and then your heart stopped