Only in Jerusalem: Of mice and men

A Ramot family implores, "Where's the pied piper when you need him?"

By ANN GOLDBERG
Have you noticed that you can never find a pied piper when you really need one? We first realized that things were getting really serious in that sphere just before last Pessah. Our first mouse sighting had been quite fun, being an unusual event. I think we frightened the mouse far more than he frightened any of us. But her scream had terrified the poor mouse, who cowered in a corner conveniently waiting for us to scoop him into a box and whisk him far away. We assumed that was that. But it was far from that. The next day we saw definite evidence of another mouse that didn't seem at all inclined to pop into any box we had ready. In fact, we didn't see him at all but continued to notice evidence of his sojourn in our home. Several days of this passed, and we decided we just had to get a mousetrap. My children and grandchildren refused to enter a room for fear of confronting the dreaded vermin. No amount of equating those tiny black droppings with the likes of Mickey Mouse, Minnie or even Remy the amazing mouse-chef from Ratatouille would help. They wanted to know that it was gone. So we put out a trap baited with a bit of chocolate. The kids felt it was a terrible waste of good chocolate, and they had to be restrained from removing the candy themselves and leaving a bread crumb in its place for the mouse. The next day, when I'd almost forgotten about the whole thing, there was a shout "Bubby, Bubby! There are two cute little kittens in the chocolate." Because my granddaughter had taken a fancy to these two tiny baby mice, she had decided they had to be kittens. Obviously our mouse had given birth, and although she was still at large we had caught her poor unsuspecting offspring. So knowing that this wasn't the end of it, we put the trap back in the same place. Days went by and no sign. As I sat alone at the computer one night finishing off an assignment in the stillness of the late night, out of the corner of my eye I saw her. We challenged each other - eye to eye. She won. I froze. She ran off. The next night she got bolder still. She ran circles around my feet around the computer as we fought it out together. Getting braver, the next night I put the trap next to my computer, but I couldn't work there. What would I do if she appeared and got caught? I couldn't bear to deal with the mouse in a trap, so I left the trap there and abandoned my work. But of course either she didn't appear that night or she managed to avoid the trap. We decided to try to further outwit her. We bought several more traps until the hardware store owner must have thought we had stock in the mousetrap company. But the mice aren't stupid. We discovered half-bitten pieces of chocolate left in the traps, as well as the top pieces of biscuits removed. Evidence that the mice had found comfort in our home was all around: in the kitchen drawers, which we had long emptied and filled with traps. Then suddenly the deluge started. We caught one. And just to be sure, we returned the trap to the same place and within an hour we had another one. Within 24 hours we caught six mice. And we knew the battle wasn't over. The rodents became so commonplace that aforementioned shrieking daughter no longer thought twice about them. She could be heard in the kitchen singing as she made some omelettes with the occasional squeak "Oh there it goes" every few minutes as she caught sight of a mouse avoiding the trap. When we tentatively broached the subject with our neighbors, we discovered we were not alone. Our immediate neighbors admitted to catching 20 over the last couple of months, and we were relieved to find this was not our private experience. Our neighbors had been told that the cause was the new commercial center being built in Ramot. Digging deep for the foundations always releases great quantities of vermin who had been happily living below ground and were suddenly made homeless and sought new abodes. As the weeks and months went by, we realized that the number of mice we caught had dwindled, and sometimes weeks went by without a sighting. We assumed that as the digging stopped, so did the arrival of the mice. But during Succot, my husband came home from Shaharit (morning prayers) and found our five-year-old grandson wide eyed, standing in his pyjamas staring at the top of the bookcase. "Zaidie, Zaidie - I'm watching him for you. He's there at the top." The war is obviously not over, and the battle lines have been redrawn again.