“Just let me at them for one night,” my brother Elye begged the binder. Moyshe didn’t want to. He said: “I’m afraid you’ll ruin the books.”
“How can I ruin them?” Elye asked.
“I don’t know. But you will. They’re not mine.”
Go talk to a bookbinder! It wasn’t easy to get him to agree to even one night.
The first night didn’t go too well. We didn’t catch a single mouse. Elye said that was a good sign. It meant the mice had smelled the poison and run away. Moyshe wagged his head with a one-lipped smile. You could see he didn’t believe us.
Pretty soon the news got out that we were expert exterminators. It started with Pesye, who went to the market that morning and told the whole town we were the world’s best mice-ridders. Pesye is out to make a name for us. Back in the days when we made barley beer, she touted it all over Kasrilevke. Then we switched to ink and she spread the word that we made an ink to beat all. Not that it did any good, because who needed ink? But mice are something else. Everyone’s got them. There’s hardly a house without them.
Of course, every house has a cat too. But how many mice can a single cat take on? And especially, if the mice are rats. Cats scare a rat as much as the Book of Esther scares Haman. I’ve even heard it said that the cats are more frightened than the rats. At least that’s Bereh the shoemaker’s opinion. The stories he tells about rats are terrifying. Some people think he exaggerates. But even if he’s telling only half the truth, that’s enough. He says his rats once ate a pair of new boots in a single sitting. He swears to it by so many oaths you’d have to believe him even if he was a Christian. He saw it with his own eyes, he says. Two big rats came out of their hole at night and ate the boots. He was too frightened to come close, since they were as big as dogs, so he whistled, stomped, and shouted “Scat!” to drive them off. Nothing worked. The rats went on chewing even when he threw a shoe heel at them. Then he threw the cat and they jumped on her and ate her. No one believes him. It’s a fact, though. Bereh said it under oath.
“Just give me one night with them,” Elye told Bereh. “You won’t have a single rat left.”
“My pleasure,” Bereh said. “I do appreciate it.”
We spent the whole night at Bereh the shoemaker’s. Bereh sat up with us. Does he have some swell stories! He told us about the war against Turkey. Bereh served in the Russian army. He was stationed in a place called Plevne and the Turks were shooting at him with cannon. To give you an idea of the size of them, one cannon ball is bigger than a house. Each cannon fires a thousand balls per second — and just for the record, you can go deaf from a single one.
One night, Bereh says, he was standing guard when he heard a big bang and went flying high above the clouds, where he saw a cannon ball burst into pieces. It was sheer luck, he says, that he landed on soft earth and didn’t squash his brain. My brother Elye listened with his eyebrows. I mean, his eyebrows were the only part of him that laughed. That’s a strange way to laugh, let me tell you. But Bereh didn’t notice. He kept telling the grandest stories, one scarier than another. We stayed up all night. Rats? We never saw any.
“You’re a wizard!” Bereh said to my brother in the morning. He went and told the whole town that we had a magic charm that drove his rats away in one night. Blow him down if he hadn’t seen it with his own eyes! My brother Elye said abracadabra and the rats jumped from their holes, lit out down the hill, and swam across the river the devil knows where.
“Are you the exterminators?” Every day a new customer shows up and asks us to charm away his mice.
Elye is an honest man. He doesn’t like to fib. He says we use a powder not a charm. The mice smell it and run.
“A powder, a charm — just get rid of my mice! How much does it cost?”
Elye doesn’t like to bargain. He has one price for the powder and one price for his work. Both get higher every day. It’s not Elye who raises them, it’s Brokheh.
“What are you waiting for?” she says. “If you’re going to eat pork, do it till the fat runs down your chin. And if you’re an exterminator, get paid like one.”
“What about honesty? What about God?” my mother asks.
“Honesty? So much for honesty!” (Brokheh gives the oven a kick.) “God? So much for God!” (Brokheh gives a pillow a smack.)
“Brokheh! What are you saying?! What’s gotten into you?!”
My mother shrieks and wrings her hands.
“Leave the fat cow alone!” Elye says, pacing and playing with his beard. He’s got a pretty nice beard by now. It’s grown like nobody’s business. The more he plays with it, the faster it grows. It grows kind of funny, though. I mean, it’s all on his chin and his throat. The rest of his face has no hair. I’ll bet you’ve never seen a beard like that.
Call Brokheh a fat cow and you’d normally end up seeing stars. But this time she kept her mouth shut. That’s because Elye is making money. When Elye makes money, Brokheh treats him like a king. And being his assistant, I’m somebody too. Brokheh used to call me “Tagalong.” And “Stumblebum.” And “Beggarguts.” Now I’m Mottele.
“Mottele! Fetch me those shoes.”
“Mottele! Bring a quart of water.”
“Mottele! Take out the garbage.”
Make money and you’re treated differently.
The thing with Elye is that he likes to think big. If it’s barley beer, it’s by the barrel. If it’s ink, it’s a thousand bottles. If it’s rat poison, it’s a whole sack. “What do you need all that poison for?” Moyshe asked. Did Elye give it to him! Leave it to Elye to go off and saddle me with that sack instead of locking it in the closet.
I suppose you want to know what made me ride it like a hobbyhorse. Well, I’ve always wanted a horse. How was I to know the sack would burst and yellow stuff would pop out of it? I could have passed out just from the smell. As soon as I bent to clean up, I began to sneeze. I sneezed as though I had a snuff box up my nose. Hoping the sneezing would stop, I ran outside. Some chance!
Just then my mother passed by. “What’s the matter?” she asked, seeing me sneeze. All I could say was Ah-chooo! And Ah-chooo and Ah-chooo and Ah-chooo.
“Lord-a-mercy! Where did you catch such a cold?” my mother asked, wringing her hands. Since I couldn’t stop sneezing, I pointed to the house. She went inside and came back sneezing worse than me.
Along came my brother Elye and saw us both. “What’s going on?” he asked. My mother pointed to the house. Elye went to have a look and came running out sore as hell.
“Who broke the …Ah-chooo! Ah-chooo! Ah-chooo!”
I hadn’t seen Elye so angry in ages. He went for me with both hands. If he hadn’t been sneezing so hard, I’d have ended up a cripple.
Now Brokheh passed by and saw the three of us sneezing like crazy.
“What’s with you?” she asked. “What are you all sneezing for?”
What can I tell you? No one could say a word. We just pointed to the house. Brokheh went inside, ran out red as a beet, and laid into my brother Elye:
“How many times do I have to …Ah-chooo! Ah-chooo! Ah-chooo!”
That brought our neighbor Pesye. All we could do was point to the house. A minute later she ran out of it.
“What kind of …Ah-chooo! Ah-chooo! Ah-chooo!”
Pesye stood waving her arms. Moyshe came to see why, stared at the five of us, and burst out laughing.