Anyway, it occurred to me that with nothing else to eat in the room, there was nothing but my body that the mice could easily choose as their food and be pleased to eat. It was only at that moment I realized that there was a problem between the mice and me that had to be resolved.
I had no particular grudge, hostility, or fear toward the species of animals called mice, and thought that mice, too, were just doing what they were supposed to do in this world into which they had simply had the misfortune of being born as mice, and thought briefly about the persecution and suffering inflicted upon them by men, and the revenge they took on men, and thought that I could give them a part of my body as an offering of sorts, but I couldn’t allow that while sitting still, watching a part of my toe being torn off. And at that moment I recalled a story I seemed to have heard from someone. In the story, a man wakes up from sleep to find a mouse sitting on his forehead, about to gnaw on his nose. I wasn’t sure if it was a story I had heard from someone, or one that I had imagined myself, but it seemed that something like that might happen if I fell asleep.
I turned off the light again to think calmly and properly about the things I could do with the mice, but I couldn’t come up with anything suitable. Nevertheless, I acted as if I wouldn’t just sit still, but for some reason, I just sat still. And the mice stayed still, instead of closing the distance between us in the darkness, through which the light from the outside faintly shone, as if they, too, were trying to come up with something suitable. I stared intently at the mice that made me nervous, growing more nervous, while at the same time, making the mice nervous as well.
As I thought about myself and the mice, keeping still in the darkness in somewhat different positions, it occurred to me that the history of the wretched and complete banishment of wild animals, which lost their homes and were driven into literal wilderness, has never been properly dealt with, neither in human history nor animal history, and I felt a kind of guilt about the animals that humans have doggedly driven out. (In this way, I was thinking indirectly about the mice in the darkness which, facing the crisis of banishment, overcame the crisis with wisdom.)
When I turned the light back on in the room, the mice were still in the same spot. It was plain that they hadn’t learned to fear men. Or they might have learned to forget to fear. Perhaps they were in the process of evolving from a wild animal into a pet. One of them was primping, again with a gesture characteristic of rodents, sitting balanced on its hind legs and rubbing its face with its somewhat daintily small forepaws. I thought, That’s the way mice sit, and the posture they take when they make themselves up, and it’s no different from the way women make themselves up. But the mouse wasn’t making itself up in that posture to win my approval.
I felt as if the mice were warning me not to fall asleep unguarded, or trying to teach me some sort of humor or sorrow I didn’t know, which only they knew, but I just couldn’t understand what they were trying to say. So I thought, They don’t look like they’re carrying daggers, but they could be carrying daggers, only because the expression, carrying daggers, came to my mind while I was looking at the mice. And that made me see just how ridiculous I was in dealing with the mice.
It was a very strange thing to watch a mouse primping in your hotel room in the middle of the night, so I tried to look at it through the eyes of someone looking at it in a strange way, but it wasn’t all that strange. (What in the world! There’s nothing in this world that’s all that strange.) And yet, looking at the strange mice, I thought that they were driving me nearly insane, and before that, thought that I was slowly going insane, which I’d been thinking for a long time, and thought about insanity, and briefly thought about Nietzsche while thinking that perhaps insanity was an ultimate state of being that could be reached by the potential within the self, and wondered what Nietzsche, who probably had a philosophical thought about everything, and must, in my opinion, have had a philosophical thought about green frogs in a pond or screws as well, thought of these animals called mice, and it occurred to me that perhaps Nietzsche felt something unique, different from (or along with) terror or fear, or in other words, what people generally feel about the rodents called mice, but I didn’t know what it was that he felt.
I wanted to leave the situation as it was, for it was possible that I may never again have such an experience with mice anywhere. The mice went around the room quite freely now, as if they knew how I felt. It seemed that if I reached out my hand, they would rub themselves against it instead of biting it. In any case, the mice didn’t grow more loathsome the more I looked at them or anything. At that moment, however, they began to flee because of the sound of loud footsteps of someone walking down the stairs outside the room. The mice disappeared into a hole somewhere, and did not reappear. They seemed to fear not me, who was in front of them, but someone invisible, someone whose footsteps only they could hear. Or perhaps they didn’t really have a good time in my room and went to another room with a hole in it. Only then did I realize that I hadn’t made any attempt to chase away the mice, and it seemed that it was I, not the mice, who had wanted to play. But I didn’t know how to play with mice, and thought that as a result I’d made the mice waste their precious time. Nevertheless, I felt that the night I spent with the mice in an Arab hotel in Paris, the city of romance, was at least a little fantastic, although it wasn’t very romantic.
Having gotten almost no sleep because of the mice, I got up in the end and saw that there was a plate at every corner of the room. A plate of rat poison, no doubt. It was clear that the clever mice hadn’t even looked at the poison, so old and stiff that it couldn’t possibly appeal to them. It seemed that there should be a notice on the wall for guests, who didn’t know anything, that said, Beware not to eat the rat poison, but you may, if you really want to. In the end, I left the hotel at dawn after staying up the night with the mice that the Arab perhaps kept as pets, or that lived in comfort and safety under his care, and could be on my way home.
And now I remember my night with the mice as one of the most memorable experiences I’ve ever had, and I’ve come to feel grateful for those mice. . No, I did feel grateful for them in a way, but the experience wasn’t one of the most memorable I’ve ever had. It was merely one of the many things that were nothing at all.
And having returned home, I thought that if I went to Paris again, I could perhaps run into someone in a park and be invited to his home, and he would take me to a residential boat on the Seine, with an interior like that of an ordinary home, and I could spend the night on the boat, which would rock in the current when other boats passed by. No, that’s not true. The day before I spent the night with the mice at the hotel, I actually spent the night on a residential boat floating on the Seine at someone’s invitation. The inside of the boat was quite similar to the inside of an ordinary home, and the only thing that indicated that it was a boat was the small, round windows that looked like windows on a boat. But the person who invited me was not the owner of the boat, and he had come to stay on the boat because he met an old woman at the park, and she asked him if he could watch her boat for her, which would be vacant when she went to her summer house. I spent a strange night on a house floating on a river, which wobbled whenever other boats passed by.