The Autobiography of Mercutio Polinski Read online

  “Don’t be scared,” Paul tried to calm me down, and stretched out his hand toward me. I sneaked deeper among the shadows of the books, but he reached to pet me on my back. I shivered with pleasure when he touched me. The writer picked me up with one hand under my belly, and carried me to Rosa’s bed. When she saw me, she was so happy that she started clapping.

  “This is the loveliest little mouse I have ever seen.”

  I stood and put on an air of importance. I lifted my head and puffed off my chest.

  “What’s your name?” Rosa asked.

  “My name is Mercutio,” I declared proudly, and drew my paw over my longest whisker.

  “What a grand name for such a small mouse,” Rosa laughed.

  “I may be small, but my heart is grand.”

  “That may well be so,” she smiled at me. “You have beautiful eyes.”

  “Thank you.” I was a bit embarrassed. “You have beautiful eyes, too. They look like the chocolate cookies that my mother makes every Saturday morning.”

  Rosa laughed with a jingling, clear voice. I thought she was the most beautiful princess in the world. I turned twice around myself and curled up to lie on the pillow next to her. I yawned. I was so tired I fell asleep immediately. When I woke up, Rosa was still there.

  “So I wasn’t dreaming,” was my discovery for the day; or in that case, for the night.

  IV.

  On How I Learned to Read…

  I put my paw on Rosa’s nose to wake her. She stretched and yawned.

  “Good morning, Mercutio!” She gave a euphoric cry and briskly rose from her bed. The writer was just coming into the room.

  “Great! You’re awake. Get ready for school, your breakfast is waiting.”

  Rosa nodded, stood up, and opened the doors of her little wooden wardrobe. A pile of disorderly clothes came down and covered her up to her knees.

  “I simply can’t get on with that wardrobe! So many times I’ve told him to put my clothes in order, but he refuses to. What a disobedient wardrobe!” she complained, and suddenly started laughing. I couldn’t see anything funny in that, because my wardrobe was also of the disobedient kind and didn’t follow my orders, so I had to fold my clothes by myself.

  “Mercutio, when I come back, we’ll play, won’t we?” Rosa turned toward me while she was trying to pull a dress from the pile of clothes on the floor. “Do you go to school?”

  “No,” I answered with my head bent down, because I didn’t know what the word school actually meant.

  “How come?” Rosa was looking at her dress carefully, as if she was conducting scientific research or trying to solve a mystery.

  “Because we—mice—do not have schools,” I answered hesitantly.

  “And how do you learn to read and write, then?”

  I didn’t answer, and she looked at me with sympathy.

  “Father will teach you,” she said.

  I almost jumped for joy, but I didn’t want to look too agitated. I just smiled and added, “I’d like to learn, very much.”

  At that moment Rosa stumbled in her dress and fell on the floor.

  “Ah, it is so difficult to get dressed. I wish we could do without clothes.”

  When eventually she overcame her dress, she tied her hair in a ponytail with a little blue ribbon.

  “And what do you do, when you don’t go to school?” she asked.

  “I talk to the flowers and ants in the yard,” I replied.

  “Oh, how interesting! I would like to be able to talk to them, too.”

  I stood on my back feet.

  “I can introduce you. They like attention.”

  She nodded. Then she took her large, heavy school bag in her hand and swayed toward the kitchen.

  “Come on Mercutio, we wouldn’t like to miss breakfast.”

  I rushed after her and climbed the legs of the white table until I reached the top of it, where freshly fried warm pancakes and a cup of maple syrup were waiting for me.

  “Dad, will you teach Mercutio to read and write?” Rosa turned to her father, her mouth full.

  “Why yes, of course!” he answered swiftly. “We’ll start today.”

  “Оh!” I exclaimed.

  He continued, “Everyone must learn to read, and it doesn’t matter whether they are mice or people.”

  He stood up and went to take a thin book with a colorful cover from the library. He flipped through the pages on the table in front of me. Interested, I stared at those pages. They were studded with all kinds of pictures of strange creatures, with big noses or very short legs. The writer told me those were letters with faces and I laughed, because they were really funny indeed.

  “Studying without laughter is so boring that it can lead to nothing but sadness. And when you study and laugh, you improve your memory,” he told me. I immediately agreed with this statement.

  When Rosa went to school, we both bent over the merry pictures and spelled out loud together.

  “Gee...,” I pronounced slowly, then drawled, “De-e…,” I divided the letter D, and stretched my neck to the front. Paul was careful with me, and encouraged me the whole time. Thanks to him, I learned ten letters that day. My lesson for the day ended with the letter J. Then I went home to tell my mother. When she saw me covered with maple syrup all over, she pulled on my ear and we headed toward the bath to get me bathed.

  V.

  On How Easy It Is to Believe…

  I stood up on my back feet on the kitchen windowsill, waiting impatiently for Rosa to come back from school. It was afternoon, and I was tensely waving my tail while trying to count the pink tulips in the front garden.

  “Twenty-one, twenty-two…there are so many!” I was nervously quivering, stepping from side to side. But then I saw her coming. She was still far away, on the road to the house. I jumped to the floor, went through a little hole in the stone wall, and went outside. And my dear Rosa, when she saw me, she laughed so loudly that the freckles on her face glowed like stardust in the moonlight.

  “What a wonderful welcoming party I have!” She hugged me and kissed me on the nose.

  That day we were engrossed in jolly games, and forgot about the world around us. We first went to the backyard of the house, where I wanted to present Rosa to my favorite flowers. She stretched out her hand to shake with each one of them personally.

  “Hello, nice to meet you! How are you?” She talked to them merrily, and the flowers answered by shaking their little green leaves.

  “We’re fine,” they replied with one voice. “We’re very well, thank you.”

  But Rosa couldn’t hear them as clearly as I could, so I encouraged her. “Just believe it.”

  She thought for a while.

  “What are you doing?” I wondered, seeing the odd faces she was making.

  “I’m trying to believe.” And she stayed like that, staring at the flowers, her eyes far away and her forehead wrinkled as she thought it over. Soon, she opened her eyes widely and smiled. “How beautifully they’re singing!” she exclaimed.

  What Rosa had heard was the song of the flowers of the forest.

  “It is so easy to believe!” she cried, and lay among them on the grass. They went on singing their favorite song to her, because flowers never sing just for themselves. They sing for the whole world.

  VI.

  On What Is Small, What Is Big, and the Meaning of the Whole…

  I noticed the ants’ path to the house, and pointed it out to Rosa with my paw. She squatted without speaking, because she didn’t want to disturb them while they were working. They were humming a merry song and passing on some pale pink brier leaves to one another.

  “Those ants are so small,” Rosa whispered, comparing them to the big, fat snail that was slowly sliding by. “I wonder if they know how small they are.”

  “I don’t think so,” I said confidently. “I think ants are so many that most of them probably think they are very big.” Rosa laughed, and I went on importantly. “The whol
e and the small are tightly linked, but we can’t see the beauty of the small until we realize the greatness of the whole that it forms.”

  “That is so,” Rosa nodded, and continued observing the ants carefully. We had made a shadow over them. They thought that it was getting cloudy and it was going to rain, so they looked up to check the weather. Then they saw us and waved at us happily. We waved back at them.

  “How are you today?” I asked them in a good-natured, neighborly manner.

  “We’re fine,” the ants answered my greeting. “Today is a great day for sunny songs and happy games, don’t you think?”

  “But the only thing you do is work. When do you have time for games?” Rosa wondered.

  “Our work is like a game for us, because it brings us great pleasure.”

  “But don’t you ever stop to have a rest?”

  “We can’t, there’s no time! The winter’s coming soon, and we have to be prepared.” Together, they turned and started on their work again.

  Rosa shrugged.

  “Well, winter’s not even close. There’s the whole summer ahead,” she whispered to me. “This seems to me a bit meaningless—only work and no fun.”

  “Everything is meaningless until we give meaning to it,” the ants said with one voice. They had small heads, but could hear perfectly well. Rosa was a bit embarrassed, and stood up.

  “Maybe they are right.”

  We walked away on the bright path ahead, searching for other happy, hard-working creatures in the garden behind the house.

  VII.

  Where Birds Fly to in the Winter…

  The evening came unnoticeably, settling us in her hospitable cool comfort, and we dreamily looked at the lights shining above us. The stars twinkled, animated by our attention. A star would glow brighter here and there in order to impress us, but the others quickly overshadowed it, with their light just as bright and strong. So they blinked on the sky, their legs and arms spread; one could easily mistake them for shiny little sky ghosts with small triangular heads. A flock of wild geese flew above and cried loudly to greet us, but said nothing more as they were in a hurry. Suddenly Rosa’s face became serious.

  After a while she asked me, “Do you know where birds of passage fly to in the winter?”

  “I don’t know,” I admitted, and was silent. I was ashamed of not knowing.

  “I also do not know where. But I know that they go back home.” She became silent again. “Someday I will go back home, too,” she said, absorbed in her thoughts.

  “But you are at home!” I was bewildered.

  “Father says that our real home is not here, where we are at the moment, but somewhere out there among the stars, where mother is now.”

  “Don’t you like it here?” I asked her, feeling a bit offended. Rosa laughed.

  “Of course I like it,” and she turned her head toward the stars.

  “Rosa, if you decide to go home for the winter, will you come back to us again after that? Birds of passage always do so, don’t they?”

  Rosa nodded. “I would very much like to.”

  “But why do you want to go?” I just couldn’t stop being interested, after all.

  “That’s what the doctor said to dad. He said that I would soon go back home. I heard them while they were whispering at the door. I do not know why adults think that children don’t understand when they whisper. As if they were invisible when they whispered.”

  “I don’t know,” I shrugged. “Mum is always yelling at me, so it is hard to not understand her.”

  Rosa laughed with that wonderful, melodious voice that could make a flower blossom from the ground even in wintertime. And I grew sad, really sad indeed—I did not know why. Now I know. But then, I still didn’t understand.

  VIII.

  On How to Submit Our Fears to Other Magical Creatures…

  A few days later, I woke up to find out that the writer and Rosa were not at home. The absence of them both so early in the morning was so worrying that I complained to my mother, and she baked chocolate cookies to calm me down.

  A dozen cookies and two cups of milk later, Rosa and Paul came home, but they were strangely silent and very absent-minded. Something had made them sad, but they didn’t want to share with me what exactly it was. Rosa went to bed immediately, and Paul leaned over his typewriter and rattled away on it. I was alone again. A little tear rolled down over my nose, because nobody paid attention to me. Why did people not want to play with me today?

  Rosa was fast asleep until the evening. When she woke up she looked at me anxiously and said, “Mercutio, I had a nightmare.”

  “A nightmare is just a bad dream,” I told her.

  “But I was frightened.” She wept, and a star fell from her eye onto the soft pillow.

  “Then let me tell you a story about fear.” I jumped onto my back feet and waved my hands melodramatically. “Let me tell you how another little girl managed to overcome fear. She was as beautiful as you; she had eyes, a nose—and even ears! She often liked to sing and laugh. But every night, just before she went to bed, she grew really frightened. That girl was such a coward! She was so frightened by the darkness that she refused to go to sleep without the light of the night lamp in her room. She often had nightmares caused by her fears, and didn’t like to get up from her bed during the night. She claimed the paws of some fierce and ugly monsters were down there under the bed, waiting for her.

  “One evening, this beautiful and easily-scared girl couldn’t sleep yet again. She called for her parents, but they were too far away to hear. Then the girl grew even more scared, because she thought they had been attacked and taken away by the evil monsters. She huddled under her blanket, trembling, and held her little fluffy dragon toy tightly.

  “But suddenly, the girl felt really thirsty. She nervously lifted her white blanket and hesitantly stepped onto the floor. In no time she’d trotted through the corridor toward the kitchen, as if she was being chased by someone. In the distance the kitchen looked so dark and dangerous to the innocent mind of the child that she started weeping, and held her little toy even more tightly. The girl stopped timidly just before the door of the kitchen. She made one tiny step ahead, and then one more, and one more. She felt a breath in the dark, and heard faint steps just in front of her. She felt unknown eyes looking at her face, and that gave her goose pimples. The child ran ahead, her heart bumping, and switched on the light in the kitchen.

  “When the light spread through the room, she saw some really strange creatures in front of her: tall and short, one-eyed and four-eyed, short-legged or with no legs at all. They seemed frozen in front of the closed doors of the refrigerator, with food in their hands or paws, and they all stared at the girl. At that moment they opened their big mouths and roared at her. The startled child dropped her fluffy toy and cried so loudly that it drowned out all the monsters. Because of her overwhelming fear, she couldn’t see how they were running across the kitchen in panic. They were bumping into things and stumbling into one another. The girl gave them a puzzled look. Then she realized that they were really frightened. The monsters were crying because they were scared, just as she was.

  “After some running around the room, the monsters scattered on their way and disappeared, leaving no trace of themselves. Just one small creature, very much like a cockroach, was still roaming the kitchen in a fog of fear. It hit the wall twice and disappeared.

  “The girl was alone again. Her worried parents came running out of their bedroom and hugged her, but she was not afraid anymore. She even found it a little funny, when she remembered those clumsy, harmless creatures. She went back to her room, squatted, and bravely looked under her bed.

  “A pair of round eyes were anxiously looking at her. The child apologized for scaring them, and asked them to come out of their shelter. A little pink animal emerged from beneath the bed. After it seemed OK, a few more of those ugly but kindhearted monsters appeared. They explained that they were hunters of bad dreams and chi
ldren’s fears. They told her that people often cast them out of their homes, disgusted by their long nails or snouty faces, thus making it impossible for them to help children and take care of them.

  “The girl and the monsters became friends and she was never again afraid of them, because she knew that she was protected by lots of magical creatures.

  “That’s why, my dear Rosa, whenever you have a bad dream, you just have to call on one of those luminous, magical creatures, and they would gladly help you forget it. Give your fear to them, just as you would give away something you don’t need. Because someone is waiting for what you have to give away, in order to turn it into fairy dust and scatter it around the world.”

  Rosa hastily closed her eyes.

  “I give every worry, fear, or trouble of mine to those bright magical creatures that would gladly accept it. And I thank them.”

  After a while, she opened her eyes and smiled.

  “It worked! I’m not afraid anymore.”

  I was so moved that I clapped.

  This is how I, Mercutio Polinski, helped Rosa overcome her fear caused by the bad dream. But this is not the end of my story. Because the most beautiful things always happen when we free ourselves from our fears.