Page 9 - I Live in the Slums: Stories (The Margellos World Republic of Letters)

look. Ah, it wasn’t the cat; it was a house mouse—twice as large as ordinary

house mice. Damn, it was chewing the old man’s heel! I saw the white bones,
but no blood. The house mouse was excited, chewing loudly—kakaka—as if
nibbling the world’s most delicious bones. I knew this old man well. He was
raising two pigs behind the house. The pigs were squealing with hunger in their
pen. Could he have died? I circled around to take a look at him in bed. He hadn’t
died. He was fiddling with his glasses. He generally sat in the doorway wearing
these glasses and looking at the design on a piece of paper that he held up to his
face. He looked at it for a very long time. If his heels had been gnawed off, how
could he go out and feed the pigs? At last the house mouse ate its fill and turned
around. He gave me a slight nod of his head, and at the same time his protruding
tummy hit the floor with a thump. I was very curious, wondering how he could
still burrow into a hole. This room didn’t have such a big hole, and the house
mouse didn’t burrow into any hole. Instead, it lazily circled the room once, as
though in pain from overeating. When I thought of what he ate, I wanted to
throw up. After circling the room, he felt sleepy from his meal and dozed along

the wall. He paid no attention to me.
The old man sat up in bed, about to bandage his heel with a rag. He had
prepared the rags earlier for this purpose. He made a lot of noise tearing up
cloth. He seemed to be strong. He kept wrapping his foot until it was encased in
one large package. The pigs squealed more and more insistently. They were on
the verge of leaping out of the pen. He got out of bed and stepped on the floor
without putting a shoe on his injured foot. He went outside to feed the pigs.
What was this all about? Why did he let the house mouse bite his heel? Was
there a tumor in there and he was letting the house mouse perform surgery?
What admirable willpower!
When I looked at the house mouse again, I noticed he was even more
swollen. Even his legs had thickened. Was this because he had eaten something
toxic? He was asleep. I felt oppressed. With a heavy heart, I walked out the door
for some air. Winter had passed, and the children playing outside didn’t want to

go home. Some slept next to the road. Their parents weren’t worried about them,
either, and let them sleep outside as much as they wanted. The children didn’t
have to do anything, anyhow. Aside from running around, all they did was sleep.
Some probably couldn’t even distinguish between day and night. And they
didn’t care. They cared about only one thing: the arrival of the wheelbarrows.
Wheels creaking, the wheelbarrows carrying food passed through from small
alleys. The children ran up, each one leaping onto a wheelbarrow—sitting with
high and mighty expressions on top of the flour. The wheelbarrow operators
from other provinces smiled a little and didn’t shoo the children away. People
said they came from the icy, snowy plains. When they unloaded the flour, the