“No,” The lawyer shook his head. “I will turn it on now.”
“It isn’t necessary. This is just a preamble, a prologue. When I give you a signal, then you can start to record, but now it isn’t necessary. So, about rats. The Ancient Romans, who were big experts in the destruction of civilizations, called rats by the short word ‘rattus’. By the way, contrary to popular belief, this has no relation to the Latin word ‘pirata’, though it seems conformable and, above all, similar in meaning. But I’m wandering off topic…
So…warm cellars, tasty garbage, darkness, silence – human cities became rat paradise. Especially tolerant people call it symbiosis, normal ones parasitizing, but, in fact, neither care much about nudicaudate rodents. They exist, and as long as they don’t transmit plague as in old times, that’s fine.
But everything changes when He appears. The Ratcatcher. Nobody knows who he is nor where he is. Nobody has seen him. Well, almost nobody. Nevertheless, the Ratcatcher is material, perceivable and corporeal. On the one hand, he is like time, existing regardless of our knowledge of him, and on the other hand, we, the people, we can observe the results of his actions, and empirically we watch the Ratcatcher carefully, framing conspiracy theories about him.
But while we are framing them, the Ratcatcher takes his pipe and he begins to play…
The sound of his music is at first heard only by rats. You can call it magic, neurolinguistic programming or exact calculation, but once they’ve heard the pipe of the Ratcatcher, rats begin to change. They leave their daily affairs, cares, entertainments and begin to gnaw…
‘Grrrum, grrrum, grrrum!’ This is not the shod boots of red-faced fellows in grey shirts clip-clopping on a cobblestone road. This is tens, sometimes hundreds, of thousands of yellow gnashers piercing basements and foundations. Of history and culture, of family and practice, of belief and traditions, of literature and music, of architecture and painting. Of language. Of education. Of the memory of a nation. All of it turns to dust, to garbage, to slime, to mud and ashes.
Rats gnaw! Precepts and principles are subverted, heroes and feats are discredited.
Rats gnaw!! White becomes black, and black white. Everything is turned inside out, remade, upside down, back to front, simple becomes difficult, and difficult is simply destroyed. The truth is replaced by a lie. The truth is drowning… no, not in wine – but in the streams of this lie.
Rats gnaw!!! Sharpen, crumble, and grind to powder. On radio stations and TV channels. On pages of paper and virtual media. In blogs and social media postings. Every day, each hour.
‘Grrrum, grrrum, grrrum! Grrrum, grrrum, grrrum!’, in tune with the melody of the magic pipe. ‘The worse “the better!’, is the slogan of the rats. Or the Ratcatcher’s?
Ultimately it isn’t important. On a lovely day, the castle of civilization once so firm and unapproachable, long undercut by rats, suddenly begins to be unsteady, then cracks, founders and stops being a stronghold and a citadel. Walls and towers fall, buttresses turn into taluses of crushed stone, and gates turn into dust. And then no more rats climb into the breaches and holes, but in their place, the real predators, greedy and hungry, and after them come the night deathbirds, numerous and dangerous.
The rats become the first, easiest prey of the newcomers. Weakened, exhausted by gnawing, but still captivated by the song of the Ratcatcher, the rats can’t perceive reality adequately. They are devoured alive, even while they are gnawing to the last gnaw the already decayed and useless walls.
But the acts of the Ratcatcher aren’t at an end because after the rats, the turn of the children always comes.
On the ashes, on waste grounds and heathlands, among crumbling gravestones and fallen statues, children dance wild dances to the music of the Ratcatcher, and around, in the darkness, predators and deathbirds whirl. From time to time, they rush in on the dancing children and drag away a prize which cries out in horror through the darkness, but the cries cannot be heard by the rest since their ears are ringing with the sound of the Ratcatcher’s pipe.
The finale of the Ratcatcher’s symphony, the end of his time, comes when nobody is left on the ruins, either children or rats. Fields grow with tall weeds, sand skims marble steps. Where life once thrived, wires buzzed, and the pulse of steel hammers roared, now wind whistles through bare branches and wild dogs prowl. This is what I wanted to tell you before you turn the gadget on to record!”
Kold was walking up and down the room for a long time, and as he finished his speech, his hands were shaking. The Lawyer looked at Kold if not with amazement then with considerable surprise.
The usually pale face of Kold turned red, and his nose fluttered a little. But noticing the Lawyer’s surprised look, he smiled simply, with a guileless smile, took a seat on the chair and almost cheerfully waved a hand.
“Turn it on, come on!”
Lawyer turned the smartphone over in his hands thoughtfully and found himself recalling Brodsky, from ‘Letters to a Roman Friend’:
Kold was confused, but in his eyes something doglike flickered, sad and fateful. But there was no turning back now; recording had begun.
File 001.wav
“My childhood was spent in the State of North Carolina. I was born in Elizabeth City, but we moved to Wilmington, where the Cape Fear River drains into the Atlantic Ocean. Yes, there still is a cape, and it is indeed called Cape Fear and somewhere in these regions in old times pirates earned their living, with Edward Teach the Blackbeard at the top.
The coast here is extraordinary, with vast sandy beaches, dunes and old boarding houses and tourist hotels. If you’ve seen Scorsese’s movie ‘Cape Fear’, you can imagine what I’m talking about. But the cape doesn’t get its name from the movie, of course. In the 16th century the English seafarer Richard Grenville – he was a corsair, I think, and a friend and accomplice of Francis Drake – well, he nearly went down with his ship here. Then, my father said, such places were called the graveyard of the Atlantic. It’s easy as pie to run aground even now, and in those days when seamen were guided only by compass, sun and stars, they were wrecked in great numbers here, so you really should call our beaches ‘The Skeleton Coast’.
North Carolina is quite a remarkable state, if you don’t know. Many key historical events happened here. For example, there was nearly a thermonuclear Armageddon. I learned about it when I worked in the Agency when the information was strictly secret, though now it is available to all ( This is the crash of a B-52 carrying two 3-4 megaton nuclear bombs at Goldsboro, North Carolina in 1961. Documents released in 2013 revealed that with one of the bombs just one of the four arming switches prevented it detonating. If that last switch had gone the result would have been catastrophic. The bomb disposal expert there, Lt. Jack Revelle, said “As far as I’m concerned we came damn close to having a Bay of North Carolina. The nuclear explosion would have completely changed the Eastern seaboard if it had gone off.” Each bomb had more than 250 times the destructive power of the Hiroshima bomb, with a 100% kill zone of 23 km.).