Mice

Mice recur as small, vulnerable presences whose lives unfold at the edge of the narrator’s domestic routine. In the rented rooms at 9 Dzilka Street, their chronic infestation is a consequence of displacement and neglect; later, one mouse’s capture by Max turns that background nuisance into a closely observed scene of helplessness and predation. The mice do not control the violence around them, but the narrative gives their movements and final vulnerability a striking, independent presence.

Infestation in the Old Town

The narrator finds serviceable rooms in the Old Town, in a property whose previous owners had been forcibly displaced. The house had then served for nearly a year as a builders’ squat, and the mice had multiplied until the infestation was chronic. They remain mostly out of sight, but not outside perception: the narrator hears them working through the building’s crannies and runnels, scurrying, squeaking, feeding, and breeding. Their presence is continuous, diffuse, and difficult to isolate, less a single dramatic intrusion than an occupation of the spaces behind ordinary domestic life.

The account places this problem against a wider shortage of adequate housing. The Old Town’s primitive housing stock had led people connected with Buna-Werke to build a dormitory settlement in the rural eastern suburbs, complete with schools, a clinic, shops, a cafeteria, and a taproom. The narrator’s own rooms are more serviceable, but the history of their occupants and their subsequent use as a squat has left a living trace in the walls. The mice are not presented as the cause of that history; they are among its material aftermath, thriving in a building already marked by forced removal and neglect.

Max and the Temporary Silence

On her second visit, Agnes, the young charlady, brings a large male cat named Max, or Maksik. She describes him as a legendary mouser and says that a fortnightly visit should suffice. He may appreciate a saucer of milk, but he needs no solid food. The arrangement makes the cat a practical answer to the infestation, but Max’s effectiveness is conveyed less through a tally of kills than through the narrator’s attention to his quiet, controlled movements.

Max’s appearance is rendered with unusual care: his charcoal-and-white coat resembles a suit, with a triangular white front and white paws. When he lowers himself and stretches his forelegs, his paws fan out like daisies. The contrast between this delicate visual detail and his role as predator makes him more than a household instrument. He is both elegant and dangerous, moving unobtrusively through the same rooms in which the mice have kept up their hidden activity.

The clearest consequence of his visits is silence. Each time Agnes collects him after a stay, the mice’s audible activity has ceased. That silence is temporary and produced by predation, not by a lasting repair to the building: Max is taken away, while the chronic conditions that allowed the infestation to flourish remain. The episode makes pest control feel less like a neat domestic solution than a brief alteration in who can move and make themselves heard.

The Mouse Caught in Max’s Paw

One evening, after working at his desk and thinking about Hannah Doll, the narrator gets up to fetch a bottle of Sancerre. He sees Max sitting upright on the bare white slats, holding a small, dusty grey mouse down with one careless paw. The mouse is still trembling with life and looks up at the cat. Its expression seems almost apologetic to the narrator, who watches the remaining life flutter out of it while Max gazes elsewhere.

The scene refuses to settle on a single explanation for the mouse’s death. The narrator considers whether the cat’s claws exerted pressure or whether terror itself killed the animal. Either way, Max immediately turns to his meal. The mouse’s end is sudden, but the description slows the moment down: restraint, trembling, the cat’s averted attention, and the uncertainty of the final cause all receive separate emphasis. Afterward, the narrator goes outside and descends the slope into an empty Old Town; when he returns, Max is stretched across the study carpet and the mouse has been eaten without trace, tail and all.

The narrator imagines the mouse’s only possible appeal as the completeness of its defenselessness. Max, by contrast, is described as offering no response: his silence belongs to another order of being. This contrast does not turn the mouse into a speaking character in any literal sense. Rather, the narration makes the difference between its exposed vulnerability and the cat’s untroubled power perceptible by giving each a distinct imaginative position. The mouse appears to appeal; the cat neither answers nor needs to look at its prey.

Mice, Predation, and the Wider Landscape

The room’s small-scale predator-and-prey encounter sits uneasily alongside the book’s wider treatment of violence. Elsewhere, the narrator describes wounded, unconscious, and dead bodies passed by suited designers, engineers, and administrators from IG Farben plants as they measure and inspect the camp’s worksite. He also records the escalating stench associated with the dead and with the breached water table. These events are not caused by the mice, nor does the text equate a mouse’s death with human persecution. Their juxtaposition instead places the domestic scene within a narrative where living bodies are repeatedly exposed to forces that treat vulnerability as inconsequential.

The mouse’s helplessness is made intimate through a single encounter, while other forms of destruction accumulate across industrial and camp spaces. At the narrator’s later moment of self-questioning, he asks why the meadow was made to churn and spit, why disease and vermin accompany the camp, and why rats can fetch five bread rations per cob. Those rats are part of a separate observation, not another name for the mice in the rooms. The distinction matters: the mice belong to a domestic infestation and to Max’s predation, whereas the rats appear in a question about the economy and degraded conditions of the camp.

Taken together, the episodes give mice a limited but memorable narrative function. First they are heard rather than seen, their hidden multiplication registering the neglect left behind by displacement. Max then makes their unseen presence briefly legible by silencing it, and one captured mouse forces the narrator to dwell on the asymmetry between exposed prey and indifferent predator. The mice do not stand for a single fixed allegory. Their significance arises from the concrete sequence of infestation, temporary quiet, and death—and from the uneasy echo that sequence creates beside the book’s larger account of violence and its material surroundings.