Rats

Rats have a small but decisive presence in Stefania Tchornenko’s narrative: a mother rat’s defense of her litter prompts Stefania to intervene, and the image later returns as a measure of her compassion and self-recognition. The animals are not merely a symbol imposed from outside the scene; their immediate struggle for survival first compels action, then becomes part of Stefania’s understanding of herself.

Encounter with the dogs

While riding her bicycle, Stefania sees two lean dogs facing a large rat among scattered rags. The rat keeps its weight over something hidden, and its alertness suggests that it has already resisted the dogs. When they rush at it, the animal darts between them in a confusion of motion. Stefania looks to the place it is guarding and realizes that the dogs have uncovered a nest, where tiny young rats are moving among the rags.

The discovery changes the scene from a contest over scraps into a defense of vulnerable offspring. Stefania does not pause to consider what to do: she pedals toward the animals and shouts. The dogs scatter; the rat is knocked aside, rights itself, and hurries back to its litter. Its return is the scene’s essential action. Although Stefania’s intervention breaks up the immediate threat, the mother rat remains the one who protects and tends the young.

From alarm to compassion

Only after the dogs have dispersed does Stefania register how frightened she has been. Her physical reaction follows the danger rather than preceding her choice to help. The contrast gives the intervention its force: she acts before she can settle on an explanation or calculate the risk, and only afterward experiences the fear that the encounter involved.

The rat and its litter remain with her when she later reflects on the words of a priest. His response connects love with the watch she had wanted to use to strike the doctor’s hand. Stefania does not take in the words as a reasoned argument; instead, they provoke an overwhelming emotional response. Her thoughts turn to the vulnerable young rats, exposed to death among refuse or to the attack of starving dogs, while acknowledging that the dogs too are objects of pity. The image holds need and danger together rather than dividing the scene into wholly innocent victims and wholly undeserving aggressors.

The rats as a mirror of Stefania

The rats’ plight becomes part of Stefania’s account of pity directed toward herself. She imagines herself at once as a helpless kitten, a naked baby rat, and a dog driven by pain and hunger to attack the weaker. The comparison does not simply equate her with the litter’s vulnerability: it also makes room for the possibility that the suffering person can occupy the aggressor’s position. Her self-understanding is therefore divided, encompassing both the weak creature in need of protection and the creature whose own deprivation may lead it to harm another.

That doubled identification gives the rat episode a continuing significance beyond the dogs’ retreat. The mother’s defense of her young first moves Stefania to act; later, the exposed litter supplies an image for an emotion she can barely bear to direct toward herself. The rats connect an outward act of care with a painful inward recognition, without making either the mother’s effort or the dogs’ hunger disappear into a simple moral lesson.