Taming Rats
(inspired by the avatars of the muzicologist George Sbârcea)



"Where's Frenchy?"
"Yes sir!"
In the upper bed, the straw of the mattress gave a short crackle. By several movements, well adjusted, the prisoner descended creeping between the two rows of metallic beds. By a pluck he straightened the battered aspect of his prisoner overall. Now, bare-footed on the lacquer-polished ciment, the young man, not too tall, and with his hair short cut, was waiting at command, palms against the thighs and chin lifted as required. His eyes, wakeful-sore, were struggeling helpless in the blinding halo that replaced the ceiling.
"Get out!"
Too little surprised, the prisoner moved in advance, stepping out in the coolness of the corridor, between the four heavy peephole doors, through which he was brought in two days before. He took several more steps, but stopped by the concrete stairway, which connected the levels.
"Go downwards!"
Behind him, with the piece of hose hanging from his wrist, the guard, bored to death, threw forward his hard wood-like boots. Who knows how many other things made him itchy that day, but for now he was only interrested in divesting with the tip of the tongue a lousy molar which was bothering him lately.
There was no light on the stairs.
At the next level, very dim-lighted, the prisoner, turning his head, seemed to hesitate.
"Never mind, walk..."
They descended three more levels. Very likely to have reached the basement, if not lower. Once the stairway ended, a twisted corridor followed, then another narrow stairway, convoluted, dim-lighted also. They descended it too, cautious not to twist their legs. The guard used the flashlight.
"Hold it!"
Taciturn, the man unlocked and creaked, with some effort a clinched door, massive, no peephole. Then, turning the light on from the outside, pushed him in.

From the door, he descended only two steps. He was in an disproportionately high cell, for a single person. It wasn't hard for him to realise that initially it was used for other purposes, beacause one of the walls, subsequently built, had its mortar thrown perfunctory, leaving the craggy, cinder-made, gudgeons uncovered, under the single layer of brushed lime.
Lacking any furniture, at the base of the left wall there was a cement slab built-in, as a bed, as wide as the back of a twelve-year-old. The floor was slightly concave, funnel-shapped, with a hole the size of a fist, at the middle.
It was in vain that the prisoner gazed high on the four walls. Disappointed, he had to concede that there, below, couldn't have been any window, not the smallest. At least a spiracle...? One, no doubt, might have been, only somewhere else. On the other side of the wall rather.
"This is your place a full month", said the guard, drawlingly, with the listlessly of one that has nothing to do with the given order.
And, after sucking his molar, aroused by the fact that the young man wasn't saying a word, he muttered:
"Hey, Frenchy, you've done it to yourself...What the hell, was it too much for you to make-up a song for comrade commander?... Isn't it what you do? Making jolly songs? And listen to me boy: Well-knitter men than you have left their bones in this lockup. When I found Caragea, the Liberal, he had no nose, no fingers. The rats had gnawed them, those rats that spare nothing!..."
But seeing he wouldn't pull it off with this stubborn boy, he reverted, sourly , to the hastily things:
"You shit in that hole, coz' there is no bucket here. On Mondays the floor is cleaned with the hose. You will be given food twice a day, and the light will be left on just as long as you eat. As to washing, the nurse washes you twice a week, also with the hose. Take your pants and shirt off right away. "
"But why...?"
It was the first time the boy dared asking something, even if he said it fadely, almost wispering. He was just dumbed by the abhorrences he had to go through, that world whose prisoner he became over-night; he would have never guessed he would be convinced there was really such a thing. To him the silence was now a form of sincerity, as his own face borne engraved, ever since he entered through the prison gate- twenty two days before-, an unhidden astonishment, like a child's perplexion to the senses reserved to adults only.
"This is the rule of the lockup, Frenchy. Well come on, quick, 'till I don't remove them for you...!"
The heavy door closed, the bolts were pulled. He didn't hear the light-switch.
As ancient owner, the pitch-dark that now bursted in the cell's space was eager to convince itself of his incredibly white skin; was necking him inch by inch, possessive, het up to feel him there, chilly, crippled by so much apprehention for what was going to come. He, the prisoner with the looks of a teenager, hadn't yet recovered from the astonishment; remained standing, naked as he was, uneasy, clenching his fists against his chest.
He just did not know what to do. Speechless, he rejected with horror the thought that eventually he would have to use the cement bed near by. The cruelty of the prison commandants - maybe sometimes justified- ought to, as anything, know some limits. With his removal from one place to another, though he saw no purpose in that, he got used to on the way. But it was too much, somebody to confiscate here, in this vault, even the bunch of rags that covered his music student frailty!... And after all, what the hell was this sadism good for? Among all, he was driven crazy by the thought that no matter what came next, where he was, in the vault in the back of beyond, his cold-chatter and moans had no chance of disturbing anyone outside.
And he was getting tougher every day. Everything that had happened so far made him close himself tight, with a drowners grip, prepared to suffer all sorts of humiliantions. But also to jump at the throat of anyone who would dare attack him, and that is why, not once, when between crooks, hoodlums and swindlers, in the cell he was thrown before the final sentence, did he had to defend himself with his teeth, with his nails.
So not only the dog is bewildered by the chain - he convienced himself fully.
He would have liked to lie back only on the narrow side of his soles, because he was feeling restless the blades of frost penetrating slowly, unforgivable, the bones of the foot, the joint of the heels, the ankles...
Eventually, tired an disgusted, he admitted he was overcausious, like an old hag. By gosh, you take reality as it is, not as you like it to be! All he could do was to get used to the cold that was now snatching him from all sides. He could only hope he would acclimatize eventually. He kept repeting to himself that the soles didn't seem so cold anymore, nor the shoulders, nor the hips, clear sign that soon he would acomodate with the new bedding. Of course it was one month only, not a year. One month, imagine, just one month!... Oh, yes, four more weeks...Well, no, he will not count only on his endurance; that would be a naive delusion. And look, he was lucky: his joints were howling what to do. Just one thing, and that thing necessarly, if he had in mind to stay alive. Yes, he was up to it...
Come on, quick: exercise, exercise, exercise!
He started with genuflections. Started trotting, lifting his knees as high as he could. Push-ups, body-twistings, spot-jumps. He tried to chunter some quadrilles, but he gave up, because it was making him gasp and stopped him from breathing when he had to. Eventually, good for him, he sweated.
He did not use the cold hard bank until he was fully dry. That would have been suicidal! And when he finally laid down, he realised how it really was without the protection of some clothes. He was feeling how, silently, how the purple claw of the frost was grabbing his sternum bone, ribbing his chest, depriving them of air...
No, definitely not, this his cannot allow! He will not allow the tonnes of concrete under which he was burried absorbe his vital warm by the deceiving smoothness of the bank! He got up like he was burned, having no other method, he began, patient, looking - with his soles, with his palms when he had to- for a less chilly place. There had to be one, definitely... The pitch-dark, oh well, the pitch-dark really helped him here - nothing distracted him now-, making him concentrate much better. He groped on well-marked paths on his mind, like he was cutting a cake in thin slices, concentrated not to missing the chance to find the ring dropped in the dough.
He found it eventually. So what if the place in question was not were he expected it to be? It was just by the leaking hole, two inches to the door. A collecting pipe, perhaps. He crouched, reclined satisfied on a hip, willing to fully convience himself. And, really, some difference from the rest of the cell was incontestable. Enough to worth the trouble, and that was his foremost interrest. Well, why would he flatter himself? With great compliance he could call it warm spot and not cold spot. Tolerable, rather, yes, that was the word.
He had no idea how long was his search; instead he knew how much fatigue he had gathered in the process. He crouched down there, with no hesitation, in an almost dogish position, falling asleep in a moment.
He wasn't quite awake yet, when some swishes, like from another realm made him prick his ears. They sounded reverberating, like through the tube of a vacum-cleaner. He came to himself quickly: they were coming through the hole next to his ankles.
" The rats!..."
So the guards words were not just dust in the wind, but seemed to have a certain base. Only regarding one matter- and its easy to guess which- did the man gave no details. That liberal, Caragea, it seems, was he gnawed only after he died?...
So, willingly-unwillingly, he was not alone in his cell, as he would have rather been…A danger that was to be made allowance for. Allright, done, he would, but how? First of all- let's say- he would sleep as away from them as possible, meaning from the hole. Easy to say-but where? On the cement bank? Well, he wasn't fully for the idea, but at least there, high, seemed...No, no way! He was not willing to desert the good spot he had found with such effort; it would mean to exchange it for a real bed of Proclus, where danger, even if not a close one, frightened him more then the rats. That would finish him before the rats- his hole body pointed it out earlier.
His body, as he was aware of it now- sweaty, unwashed for a couple of weeks, having a greasy skin and a smell alike, sharply-brackish-, could awake their appetite for human flesh at any time. Even more, he was shivery for being right under their nose, as if deliberately inviting them to have a bite. And what the hell were these diformed rats, with boar-like chap, feeding on there, below? From what he knew they were not choosy at all: they chewed on cables, wood, garbadge, rubber and many others. More than anything a gaunt, tired man like himself.
But the idea that he could not be bitten duaring sleep - inconceivable in his emaciation-, kept him tensed for hours, with all his senses vibrating at the edge of endurance. At a certain point, loosing the night-day regularity, the sleeping and the watching got mixed in a deplorable doze, often disturbed by some pats- imagined or not-, but which always froze his stomach with fright and horror, jumping stung-like and starting to beat the floor desperately with both of his palms. Not once did he hear their squeaks, razzle-dazzle at the exit of the leakage-hole. He could have sworn they touched him with their filthy tails, long and bald like earthworms. He was boiling of anger, nauseous and despere, beacuse de pitch-dark was always on their damn side, forcing him to settle just with the noise to drive them away. He would have liked to attack them as soon as possible, to crush at least one of them. Only by this would he dominate his fear. He felt like roaring, howling, snarling menacingly like an animal whose teritory was violated.
But, worst of all, the sleepiness was permanently harassing him. If only for a moment he were to repose his head on his arm, the sleepiness would come. The dreams, interrupted a while before, he would continue, generally, from where they were cut, even if with some modifications regarding space and some characters. It all lasted up to the moment when, as by chance, he was nettled again by some tail. And all over again my boy, with your wakeful-sore eyes...
It was probably morning, since he covered his eyes, quickly with his palms, flooded by the light of the damn bulb. He heard very well, someone was meddling the latch.
He would have liked to jump on his feet, but, alas, they obeyed him no more, as if they were not fully his anymore. Well... Only the elders go through this trouble when they want to descend the bed. In his case, it way clear: the cold had stiffened him. Just like a limp, hardly standing, he managed to move towards the door which was just pulled-open from the otherside.
The soldier with the food came in. Being told to keep it clean, and that he had no right to use a spoon there, in lockup five, he was given an aluminium dixie with lentil mush, and that he should not waste time, but eat at once, because in ten minutes sharp the light would be out.
Alone again, the ravaged boy took back, with no hurry, the spot - colder that he left it. He held the dixie with both of his hands, pressed against the hot metal, also propped on the bent knees, like on a table. He was waiting. It was miraculously to be warmed by something with such abundance.
Drawn by the steem of the mush, through the hole in the floor cement appeared a fuzzy rat head. Its little black, glassy eyes were blinking extremly fast, like a white flashing. Then, seeing that the man did not move, got bold. It popped out, full-body, from the hole, lifting its head to scent better where the the flavour which drawn him came from…
But it scuttled back instantly, in the hole, when the boy bent forward to pour some mush on the floor for its benefit.
What got into him to pour his stint? He must have been taken by surprise. If he had put a little thought into it, he only followed the lesson from his first cell: even to be let alone had to be paid for in a way. If he hadn't done it right away, he was to be paying in with preciseness, with harassments. Yes, something like that. Taken by surprise, he obstructed foolishly, he took it for something impetuous. Just the reflex of paying.
Flickering for a moment, the light-bulb went out, signifying that the eating time pased. But the fallen darkness did not worry him in any way; many became clear to him then. He had done as good as it gets. And, because he had sweated abundantly (well, he did not know himslef to be this sensitive), while eating he could dry up. His appetite came back, bigger this time. Between the sips taken from the brim of the dixie, tilted as needed, the young man bacame aware of the fervency by which the mere on the floors cement was sucked dry.
From target to tutelary...How inspired he had been! A paid-for peace-listen to this good folks!- with a drop of mush. He would have laughed, but he had no one to do it for. By the rustle, he was ready to believe that the whiskered had brought someone else with him. He felt peaceful, almost satisfied- he had so easily found the solution to a mater that was seen to be lugubrious, disgusting. At the end, after he licked clean the inside of the aluminum pot, he turned it bottom up, placing it next to him. The inside of it was to remain for himself only.
At the second meal, as he did not like the colour and the smell of the mush, he poured it directly into the hole in the floor. He listened afterwards, curiously, in the dark, how the rats fed, straddling eachother and routing the inside of the pipe with their pows. The thought of knowing them to be fed up made his sleep somewhat restful.
This action, repeated three days in a row, at both meals, settled as naturally as possible in the actual acquirements of the prisoner in lockup-cell five. For him, it was an stunnig new sensation, hearing their rout every time the soldier with the mush was comming, and this sensation started a restlessness of his flesh, a dully shiver, from which he suffered, even more dire, of coldness. The increasing of the reverberating noise through the pipe-hole was the alarum that woke him up in the middle of the night, but its sonourus harshness could not be stopped when he wanted. It was the roll in of water that required an immediate dam build.
The day, once begun in shivery, ended likewise. The cold had placed itself in every corner of his body, like some hard clots; contracted all his muscles, stiffed his knees, shoulders, neck, elbows, fingers, his bust crackling, crepitating at every step taken. All hurt him, bothered him like some alien slivers, pinned deep between the tendon and the bone.
What really flustered him was the colour taken by his palms in the hibernating climate of the cell. He got to the point of reserving three or four minutes of meal-time just for studying them carefully. He would turn them several times, to be convinced of the alienation of the color his fingers had gained, even on the backhands; looked a lot like the pheasant thigh forgotten in the freezer- just as red, shiny and hard.
The cold had became the burden he knew he would not get rid of for as long as he stood there. It had stiffed, hump-backed, constipated him. Then, that rare, gasp-caugh, came back with a clock-like regularity, grinding the composure of his chest with a devious perfidity.
Unfortunately, he was no longer interested in too many things; even the ones bound to his health were of no concern. To his mind, his listlessness was due mainly to the lack of daylight, of essential needs , others the the two survival-meals. For instance, not even the morning phisical needs, as vital as always, could not disgust him. When thrown in the hole, when feeling them of the conistency of sheep or goat droppings, not too malodorous,-, for them, the rodents, definitely meant something useful. As a proof, almost no remain of odor persisted, but disappeared, as by itself, in an instant.
Nightmarishly, the weekly cell washing, from the door-way, by water jet-, besides not bringing any visible service to that cleanness, was putting him through moments in which he would scratch the walls. That water, puddling endlessly on the cement floor, brought an agressive sharpness of cold with it, a sort of unbearable chillness. It drove him on the slab, where he waited, standing, for the floor to dry. And it lasted a tormenting long time. Meanwhile, the humidity was infiltrating him, dousing him, making him caugh from the bottom of his lungs, continually. He hated with all his being those infernal moments.
The change, for the prisoner, came at the begining of the third week. Before, on Saturday morning, he was just washed. The prison nurse had it done like with the floor cleaning. Also by hose - through the bars-, like washing cattle in a train-waggon. He was not thrown him at least a rag to wipe himself. And on Sunday, after an infernal night, during which he lied cuddled on his spot near the hole in the floor, he panted almost continuously; when he felt the need to breathe deeply, heard every thing clattering inside of him, tearing. He worried especially for his mother, whom, almost certainly, no one would bother announcing. Curiously, since he cared for lots of other things, he did not seem to be worried for what was about to happen to himself.
And without him knowing, the opening of an inhuman horizon wiped out, all of a sudden, the blotch of hate. Even the stubbornness, the taste of revenge, no trace of them. On the other hand, he realised, finally, how abject he had been seeing everything. Like waken up, he wondered whether his soul would be subdued to some stubborn child's trifle. He was provided with it for blood taiming! He just understood, without knowing how, but he realised that wit and soul are meant for one and the same thing, that both of them are unceasingly looking for affection, this being their jubilation and goal. Meanness? Hostility? Suspiciousness? Not to worry, these can be found anytime, abundantly, if one lives only in the present, with the fear of death hanging around his neck. Great foolishness, because the roots of death itself are in fear! While, establishing a certain goal, and putting hope in the quest, being both sunny and worm inside, one is actually giving himself, nothing more, and threats immediately loose any weight. Here, this was the revelation of the prisoner in cell five, this was his salvation.
In the morning, when the light of the electric bulb striked him right in the head, he heard them squirming, starved. Its clear that them too have been chilled over night, if the peckish was stiring them up like that. At the sound of the latches, the little ones nuzzled desperately through the pipe.
The soldier, after having fully filled his aluminum dixie, took off his dinginess bonnet, looking suspiciously at the sleepy prisoner in front of him.
"Hey, Franchy, dreaming of chiks...huh?"
The soldier smelled that it was not quite normal that a boy of "Franchy's" delicate constitution would also sneak a smile on his haggard face, but somewhat too serene today, after sleeping naked on the stenched cement of the former basement. Could he be sick...? Because he saw him going somewhat stumbled, with the grub in his hands, to place it on the slab...
"Watch it, boy!"
Yet too late,. "Franchy", swinging, had dropped the pot. The boy immediately bent to save what he could. But he got up helpless after a few moments, then turned, hesitating, towards the soldier, who watched him pitifully from the second stair.
"I'll clean, all will be spotless...Five extra minutes, that's it!...Really, if it's possible...
The prisoner, flushed-faced, with the empty pot hanging in his right hand, stared appealingly at the soldier.
"Frenchy woke up! huh?...You, the politics, always dreaming, but never watching your step. You poor things...Caporal Rada put it well when he called you that. Alright, give me the pot!"
And he filled it again, to the rim.
When alone, the boy walked satisfied to the place where he had spilled the mush and, putting aside the pot, he began to gather the mush with his palms. A pretty good pile remained. Of it he took just as much as fitted in his palm, after which he approached the leaking hole. He arranged it nicely around it, in a rich stratum. What he was doing now was not a barter anymore. He was careful and intentive.
They copiously ate, together. When they were all deluged by darkness, after finishing the mush, after he licked-clean his pot, he took notice of the fact that they were no longer intending to leave.
They came to curl, like kitties, around his back, beaneath his thighs and arms. They were doing it most naturally, like they've been doing it for ever.
He moved no more, or at least with great care, not wanting to scare them away. What is there to say, things were now different on the hole. Another perspective. He no longer feared the wilderness with which, he actually shared everyting. He was not surprised at all- they needed him. And besides, they were not bristly at all, they seemed wormer that he expected. They had crouched everywhere- some of them right on his hips-, and how nice that they had soft bellys, like kittens...How could he oppose the fellowship of a couple of souls whose tenderness he had aquired?
And he did not mind the rest of the lockup days.
Walking him back, with the rest of the prisoners, the huge guard contented to measure him up absently, staring, with his brown eyes- as disregardingly as ever-,bothered rahter by the sucking of his decayed molar.