The Mouse That Cheated Death
A Short Story by Huda Al Naemi
from Kaleela and Huda
Translated by Shakir Mustafa
What a relief it would be to rid my library of this mouse! It felt at home in my bookshelves nibbling at pages, especially the yellowish ones of rare or out-of-print books. Like volumes of the 1960 Egyptian edition of the One Thousand and One Nights censored for years by the Azhar authority, only to return to bookshelves after bowdlerizing it. I have often bragged to friends of having a copy of this hard-to-find edition, but that dreaded mouse found it nonetheless! I moved volumes of the Nights around after I saw several chopped page tops.
That mouse feasted on pages of a rare Al-Shawqiyyat that I got many years ago from a bookstore whose owner died and whose son let people pick up books and place in a money box what they deemed their worth. Not many realized then how precious that Al-Shawqiyyat was, no matter how tattered it was. I dropped all I had in that box, even though I could have picked up several more books with that money. The owner’s young son wanted to get done with the sale and he couldn’t care less how many books people took. I couldn’t pay less for Al-Shawqiyyat, and I brought it to my then small library, which had grown bigger with us as we flourished and built our own house. The now large library occupied the entire basement, and it became my refuge after my retirement. Yes, my refuge and the delight of my days until that cursed mouse started chewing the pages of Al-Shawqiyyat.
Yes, that cursed mouse! I would look for it everywhere in vain—I would hear it move on this or that bookshelf, but it was hard to find as if it was playing hide-and-seek with me. One day I felt it moving near Nagib Mahfouz’s novels and then among the books of Al-Aqqad, Taha Hussein, and Al-Mazini. No, not that favorite shelf, so I helped that cowardly criminal escape and leave my friends and their legacy unharmed. But no, it wouldn’t leave those favorite writers and their cherished wisdom alone. Every morning I came back to the library I found traces of chewed yellowish pages on the floor. The spoils of that little coward, but I must admit it also had a discerning literary taste. It left Al-Sayyab and Nazik Al-Mala’ka’s poetry alone but chipped at the poems of Al-Mutanabbi and Abu Firas Al-Hamdani and the rest of poets of the Sayf Al- Dawla court. Would an ordinary mouse know the difference between modern and classical verse?
I decided to poison that literary taste along with its body. I got a can of blue rat poison from the nearby store where you can find almost everything—everything except newspapers which disappeared two or three years before due to lack of readers’ interest. When I asked the old man who owned the shop for rat poison, he went into an adjoining store and came back with what looked like a glue can, tightly sealed. I had to handle it with care, he said. All I needed to do was spread it on a sheet of newspaper of any kind so that the dead mouse would be wrapped in it and thrown away.
The blue stuff had a nasty smell, but I put up with the discomfort. It came in tiny pellets, and I pasted some of it on sheets of newspapers and placed them in three of the basement corners. Three corners of the library laced with tempting potion to entice the mouse. It would drop dead instantly, the old man said. I gingerly stayed away from the library that day, locking the door on the poison and the mouse, and looking forward to its demise the following day. That would be the end of the nightmare of nibbled precious books. But the following day I found the foul-smelling blue pellets on all three sheets as I left them, not only untouched, but there were more gnawed shards of papers on the floor. I became really mad on that mouse! And on the old man who seemed nonchalant when I told him the poison didn’t work. He casually mentioned that he was getting a more potent poison soon, but I was having none of that and I bought mouse traps and a few kinds of cheese. I made that decision because I knew better.
I placed three of the traps with cheese in the three corners of the library, and I sprinkled more cheese here and there. Killer traps for that criminal chopper of culture—they would clip its neck and trap its body between their metal teeth. I had arranged the traps on the mouse’s route: one from the philosophy books to the neighboring collection of translated novels, another between the Islamic doctrine and tafsir books and those on Islamic history and conquests that we teach to our children. Letting those kids know that we were a nation of considerable weight in the past. I placed the traps strategically. The mouse had to pass by them. I gave it all the space and left so that it would move around and fall into a trap.
None of that happened. The following day all the cheese pieces disappeared except those on the traps. None of the three traps caught anything, and I tried day after day. Those sharp metal teeth that would have snapped its neck didn’t do a thing. That rascal seemed to know the difference between the loose cheese crumbs and the ones on the traps that would have cracked its head. More or less the way it distinguished between free verse and classical poetry. And without knowing, I started to admire a mouse that my library had somehow turned into a smart creature capable of sorting out what can and can’t be done. But I felt smarted and capable of finding a way of catching it.
And that happened when I bought a mouse bait box, not from that old crook but from another store. It had a wide opening that shut down as soon as a mouse entered. I placed the bait box in the middle of the library with the mouse’s favorite cheese crumbs in there and scattered on a path leading to it. The poor thing marched into the box, and trapped there, it was no longer able to get to The Epistle of Forgiveness or to the works of The Brethren of Purity. The bait box became its new home or prison, and perhaps its grave if so I chose.
Could I send a mouse to its death? A smart mouse sharing my library that knew what books to gnaw? And which cheese pieces to eat? No, I couldn’t sentence it to death. I took the bait box, with that mouse jumping up and down its sides, and walked half an hour to a park far enough from my house. I placed the box in a shrub and opened the gate. As I walked away, I thought of the possibility of that mouse showing others how to get cheese without suffering lethal consequences.
Huda Al-Naemi is a Qatari writer with a PhD in Medical Physics. She published two short story collections and two novels, one of them, Za’farana (2024), won the Katara Prize for Arabic Fiction in 2025. She was selected as a judge for the International Prize for Arabic Fiction in 2012 and again for the Katara Prize for Arabic Fiction in 2018.
Shakir Mustafa is teaching professor of Arabic at Northeastern University. Mustafa grew up in Iraq and taught at Mosul University in Northern Iraq for eleven years. His book Contemporary Iraqi Fiction: An Anthology (2008) was recognized by the Bloomsbury Review as one of the most important books of 2008. He has given dozens of lectures as well as radio and television interviews on Arab and Muslim cultures and politics.
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