The Rat: Excerpt (English)
The Rat
Eckhart King did not sleep, he lay on the wide bed his wife had chosen because it was the widest in the shop. It was also the most expensive one, featuring six motors, remote-controllable by two cable RC units, which alone cost as much as the bed Eckhart would have bought had he been alone as well. This bed had cost him three months of salary and ten years of sexual abstinence.
His wife would certainly have preferred an even wider bed, a bed that stretched right through the bedroom wall and into the dining room. She could have slept alone at last, away from her “stinking, snoring, husband”, as she enjoyed calling him, stinking of this nauseating mixture of sweat and sewer. At least this is what she persisted in smelling, though Eckhart had not been down in the sewers for a long time now and even when he used to, he had made sure he would shower better twice than once before he’d come home.
Unit 12 which he commanded had been called on emergency to unclog Drain 7, the one that runs under the Town Hall. The market place was now flooded with a murky tide so repulsive that no one was shopping or sitting inside the restaurants. And since Saturday is a wedding day, it was of utter importance that the drain should be free on the morrow. This is what his boss Ronald Träge had said. Later he had learned that a particularly famous couple was going to get married. Eckhart would have loved to see the great filmmaker and the great actress enjoy the pleasures of simple workers like him and walk in the shitty mud on the day of their wedding. But duty obliges, even in Public Service.
The vibrations of the number 12 and 9 buses that drove past every 20 minutes, day and night, following each other within 2 minutes had pulled him out of his semi-somnolence again, even with the wax balls he had plugged into his ears. His entire body vibrated in unison with the pistons of the buses’ diesel engines accelerating after leaving the stop. How he hated diesel engines! That night, he did sweat, but it was not so much from the heat, as from horror. Eight hours after the intervention, he still had not managed to erase the pictures engraved in his retinas that evening:
The drain was clogged downstream from the manholes of the market place. Because the drain was particularly narrow in this area, it was not possible to gain access to the clog without destroying the duct which connected Drain 7 to the next drain. They had sent down the submarine robot with its electronic cyclops eye. The camera had revealed that it was neither old rags nor sheet nor plastic tarpaulins intermeshed with typical gooey household waste which had clogged it. What had clogged it was a corpse and the camera had not even had the decency to reveal the shoes. It revealed the head instead. She had gone feet first as it one should. Eckhart had been the first one to see it, the bleak head thrown backwards, half-eaten by the rats. Her eyes were wide open and he had taken her stare right in the face. It had frozen his blood. She was looking at him with eyes full of reproaches, as if she had known he would come too late.
Eckhart rolled his own head from left to right on the mattress but the macabre portrait did not unhook itself from the nails forever planted in his brain. Then he heard the laughter of the from his neighbours who celebrated God knows what, so late at night. No one could understand how the corpse of this woman had got there. What did Eckhart in is that this woman looked like his wife. At the time, he had been breathless and prostrated while his mind wondered God knows where. His first reflex when he was back up above ground had been to call her, but she did not answer. She had not been answering for quite a while now when she was going out.
He closed his eyes and ears but the vision came back and went right through his closed eyelids. Not the video image but the one he had seen with naked eye through his diving mask, half obstructed by the condensation. The rats’s squeals had frayed his nerves and kept coming back. Normally, you would have drilled the clog, ramming a giant borer into it, a bit like when you uncork a good bottle, or you would have let acids run down and digest it, like all the entrails of the world do, but you could not hand the coroner or the family a sulphuric porridge nor a heap of minced human flesh which would just make them spill their guts out. In fact, there would be none of it left; it would have been swept away by the flow of the excrements across the guts of the city. And who would have wanted to drill in her brain?
This is why they had sent Eckhart, the most experienced one man, who had gone through such hard times that he did not need any more time to get on with it. They had to destroy this portion of the drain with the jackhammer while making sure not to damage the corpse. This would enable to rebuild the drain to standards. It took five hours.
When they got the corpse out, the nurse vanished: the rats had left only the bones of her left leg. An ambulance, how hypocritical! Eckhart had managed to go back to some sleep. That night he had emptied half a bottle of Aquavit, the real one, the one rated 50% ABV. He had not touched a drop in 20 years, at least not out of that strange thirst that makes you want to drink more, but the human soul is sometime powerless and crumbles down like a house hit by a flyweight on its temples. The rats! One had come out of her mouth as she was lying on the stretcher.
In his half-sleep, Eckhart heard them, the same way he had heard them before, in this very same flat. At the beginning, it was his wife who had the phobia. She heard them and every night, she would get up and check if the toilet lid was closed. “They can climb up the toilet drains!” She would swear while laying these heavy lead ingots on the lid, the ones she had smelted herself during one of these foundry workshops she attended to occupy her idle days. She would have so much loved them to be made of gold. She had read that about the rats climbing up the toilet drains in a technical magazine Eckhart had brought back from work and Eckhart had to put the ingot on the lid at night too and he’d better not forget! At In the beginning, Eckhart laughed about it all, tolerating this mania of her and tried to explain it by some vague ancestral affinity (as she actually she did have small glittering eyes). His laughter was not genuine because this mania was turning into a phobia. He even came up with the idea, similar to the way some Indian legend tells of wolves, that rats were reincarnated humans caught by the devil.
He also had to write absurd letters to the landlord and finally ask some colleagues to come around and spread rat poison all over the place. His wife was convinced that when a cobblestone stuck out of the ground in the courtyard, it was a rat trying to surface. Little by little, as often occurs with old couples through some kind of osmosis, he had made her phobia his, and had started to hear little screams and scratching noises at night. He would get up, grab his bat and chase these invisible demons in the dark. But he liked to think that as far as he was concerned, it was not for real,; it was just to please her. But lately, it seemed to him that this little game had nibbled the interior wall which separated him from his true self, just as when, after having played a role too long, an actor wakes up one morning to realise he has become his character and that this phobia has become his phobia. At first, he thought it was the gin he made regular use of back then. His hypochondriac tendency influenced him into thinking it was some kind of delirium. Some people saw small white mice and he saw fat black rats. This is when he became a teetotaller but that is the thing, the rats, even years after this decision, were still there!
And at night in his wide bed when he lay there alone, barely tolerating his wife’s nocturnal escapades, he knew he’d have to check each wall and each floor of his flat before going to bed to reassure his sick mind that they were all gone.
Suddenly he woke up, he had felt its warm breath, then hairs had touched him. He sat straight up on the bed and his heart beat went up to 180…