Rats

Rats are both an expected feature of hidden spaces and a measure of unexpected companionship in 2666. Their absence unsettles a group exploring the passages beneath Dracula’s castle; elsewhere, one rat becomes Nikita, the only friend of the imprisoned writer Efraim Ivanov. Together, these appearances turn a familiar creature into a test of what a place ought to contain and what forms of tenderness can survive inside a prison.

The Missing Rats in the Castle

In the castle episode, Reiter follows Neitzke, Kruse, and Wilke into a secret passage hidden behind an old mirror. The men proceed through branching corridors and stone staircases, uncertain whether they are still near the top of the castle or have circled back toward the cellar. Wilke, leading the way with a flashlight, gets lost several times. The passageways are difficult to map even as the group moves through them: each turn multiplies uncertainty rather than resolving it.

Kruse notices what is missing. Old castle passages, he reasons, should have rats, yet the group has not seen a single one. Wilke answers that he is glad of it because he hates rats; Reiter and Neitzke agree. But their dislike does not dispel Kruse’s point. The absence itself is strange, and the men stop to search the passage ahead and behind, shining the flashlight across the ceiling and the floor. Nothing appears. In a place already made uncanny by its hidden routes, the ordinary expectation of rats becomes a small, exact disturbance: a familiar sign of age and neglect is conspicuously withheld.

The search does not provide an explanation. The men smoke, talk about how they would make love to the Baroness Von Zumpe, and continue until the air is hard to breathe. They eventually turn back, with Kruse guiding the way to the mirror room. Wilke and Reiter then re-enter the labyrinth alone and in silence, trying not to confuse their direction with whispered conversation. Only after they nearly despair do they find the narrow side passage they had sought, running through apparently hollow walls pierced by slits that give a nearly perfect view of the rooms beyond. The rats remain absent even as the architecture reveals its concealed means of seeing.

Nikita in Ivanov’s Cell

In 1937, Ivanov is arrested, interrogated at length, and left in a dark cell. His interrogator is concerned with whether he has met members of the Trotskyist opposition and knows nothing about literature. The confinement separates Ivanov from the literary world he inhabits in his thoughts, but at night it brings him into contact with a rat who emerges from hiding. He names her Nikita, and the two become companions in a place where human company is unavailable.

Their conversations do not concern literature or politics. Ivanov tells Nikita about his mother, who remains often in his thoughts, and about his siblings; he avoids speaking of his father. Nikita, whose Russian is scarcely more than a whisper, tells him about the Moscow sewers and the sky she imagines there. Stars appear in that underground sky through the blossoming of certain debris or an inexplicable phosphorescent process. She also speaks of her mother’s warmth and her sisters’ foolish antics, recalling them with a smile. The exchange gives each of them a childhood and a family to speak of, even though one is a prisoner and the other a rat living in the sewers.

Their companionship is neither a rescue nor a way out. At times Ivanov gives in to despair, rests his cheek on his palm, and asks Nikita what will become of them. She looks at him with sad, perplexed eyes; in that look he understands that she is even more innocent than he is. The scene grants the animal no power to alter the prison’s machinery. Instead, its smallness clarifies the distance between a moment of connection and the violence that remains beyond it.

Execution and the Limits of Companionship

After a week in the cell—which seems to Ivanov more like a year—he is interrogated again. He signs papers and documents without being beaten. Rather than returning him to his cell, his captors take him straight to a courtyard, shoot him in the back of the head, and throw his body onto a truck. The contrast is stark: his relation with Nikita is made of listening and remembered family, while the state’s relation to him ends in interrogation, paperwork, and execution.

The rat’s role is therefore defined less by any power to save Ivanov than by what their conversation briefly makes possible. Nikita listens to the childhood stories he can tell and offers stories of warmth, kinship, and an impossible-seeming sky below ground. The cell remains dark, and Ivanov’s question about their future has no answer that can change his fate. His execution closes the companionship without turning it into an escape narrative.

A Recurring Figure of Concealment and Recognition

Across the two episodes, rats carry opposite narrative functions. In the castle, their anticipated presence is withheld: the men’s repeated search confirms that the passages contain none. In Ivanov’s cell, a single rat is present and becomes a conversational partner. The first episode uses the creature as an absent clue in an architectural maze; the second gives it a voice, however faint, inside political imprisonment.

The contrast does not make the rat a stable symbol with one fixed meaning. The silent, empty corridors and the rat’s barely audible Russian belong to different scenes and different kinds of uncertainty. But both appearances direct attention toward what a setting conceals. Behind the castle wall are hidden rooms seen through narrow slits; beneath Moscow is a sewer sky that Nikita describes in the prison dark. What the group cannot find in the labyrinth, Ivanov finds in the cell: not an explanation, but a fragile relation, cut short by an ending the rat cannot prevent.