Of Mice and Women
'The problem was having to kill them.'
Mice weren’t the problem. The problem was having to kill them.
After a brief stop in Tbilisi that turned into nine months, J and I had finally made it to London. The ground-floor apartment in Clapham was otherwise clean, but during the night, strange noises came from the corridor.
“It’s probably just the neighbours,” I said, turning over on the other side, my eyes hidden behind a sleeping mask. “You know how the Brits are.”
“It’s rats,” she replied, with a tone of conviction—the kind you hear from lawyers defending a case in court. “Rats crawling inside the walls, plotting to eat us alive in our sleep.”
I chuckled. “Yeah, maybe that too.”
By the second year of our marriage, I was used to J’s paranoia about anything small that moved. Insects, birds, petite dogs, even odd-shaped rocks were under suspicion. Her fear was genuine, unshakeable, and largely indiscriminate. A gush of wind from behind the window, the dishwasher stopping—the tiniest things could wake her up from the deepest sleep and start shaking me by the shoulder.
I was dreaming of trains and steam engines one night when her voice came through like a conductor announcing the next stop. “Did you know that an average person eats up to seven spiders in their sleep?”
The way she said it sounded as if the Average Person in question chose to do it voluntarily. What an idiot. Someone should probably tell them.
Regardless of whether it was true, I instantly imagined what a spider tasted like, its eight tiny legs crawling by the insides of my cheek. Did it taste like a chicken nugget? Or more like a celery stick—bitter, with hints of juice when cracked open?
The image of a spider pacing in the stomach like a fugitive in a prison cell made me finally wake up and laugh out loud.
J looked at me with a mix of disbelief and disappointment—as if, in that moment, she realised that when things got hard, I would leave her high and dry. That maybe she’d agreed to marry me too quickly.
“You’re really enjoying yourself, aren’t you?” she said. And as she did, something shuffled in the living room. She darted her head towards me, eyes widening. “Did you hear that?”
“It’s just the sound walls make,” I said, somewhat unconvincingly.
“A wall doesn’t make sounds. That’s why it’s a fucking wall.”
I thought about this for a moment. “Maybe you’re right,” I said—and immediately regretted it.
Because agreeing with her only made things worse. She yanked the blanket over her head and let out a long, theatrical moan—“Oooooh”—as if the thin layer of IKEA cotton might protect her from whatever malevolent creature she imagined was crouched in the other room, sharpening its claws, preparing to strike.
We got married in Georgia (the country) two years before, and at the time, it seemed fitting that that’s where we’d have our honeymoon.
We checked in at the sea-facing hotel on the cliffs in Sarpi, a little town on the border with Turkey, and got to our suite, where we began unpacking. As I finished placing my underwear inside a Soviet-era cupboard, I heard a scream from the bathroom—the kind you hear on especially steep roller coasters or if someone was being raped.
“What is it?” I said, rushing to the bathroom doors.
“Th-th-there…” J said, pointing toward the corner of the wall, where, after years of exposure to humidity, a little paint had finally given up and let go.
“I don’t see anything,” I said.
“There, on the wall!” she screamed. “It’s moving!!!”
Finally, I saw it. On the bathroom wall leading to a small window, from which you could hear the crashing waves against the rocks and feel a sea breeze, sat three ladybugs. They were smaller than my pinky nail and looked like a group of friends on vacation.
In the UK, they are called ladybirds—a reference to an old farmer’s legend, in which the Virgin Mary had allegedly sent these benevolent creatures to kill the crop-eating pests. But in Russia, the name has a little more weight. They are called quite simply—“God’s Cows.”
So when I said, somewhat rhetorically, “Those are just ladybugs,” J replied:
“I don’t care what kind of cows they are. I won't take a shower there unless they’re gone. It’s disgusting.”
“Well,” I said, with a sigh, scratching my forehead, studying the three tiny creatures on the walls, “then it seems you’ll just have to wait.”
We were lying one night in bed in our Clapham apartment when something ran in the corridor. The “something” was small and barely perceptible. I instantly knew what it was and hoped J didn’t notice. But she did, and turned over to me, horror on her face, yelling, “DID YOU SEE IT?! I WAS RIGHT! THERE IS SOMETHING OUT THERE!!”
I walked out to the living room to investigate. When I couldn’t see anything after a few moments, I was about to turn away when I saw the plastic M&S bag we used for trash move.
Ah shit, I thought, worrying about what I’d have to do—as the man of the family—to get the thing out of the house.
“I AM NOT SLEEPING HERE TONIGHT!” J screamed from another room, having heard the garbage bag rustle.
When I became a vegetarian, it was with a single thought in mind: animals are my friends. I don’t know about my readers, but—with the exception of an occasional bite on the arm—I don’t eat my friends.
So when, from the bedroom, I heard J scream, “KILL IT!! KILL IT NOW!!” I faced a tough choice.
Either become a murderer or do something even more radical, like get a divorce.
Almost two decades before London, mice, or marriage, I was lying on the lawn at my babushka’s dacha, watching my sister Kate read a book. After several failed attempts, she had finally learned to read in Russian at the age of eight and was flipping the pages slowly, enunciating every word.
“WHEN. HE. WENT. IN-TO. THE. FO-REST…”
The book, which takes an adult reader twenty seconds to flip through, tells the tale of a small forest mouse named Pik, who accidentally ends up in a human home and goes through many dangerous and amazing adventures while trying to return to his family in the wild.
The book is popular among Russian parents for its kindness, vivid descriptions of nature, and the way the author helps children feel empathy for animals. It’s one of those stories that teaches kids respect and care for the natural world.
Just as my sister neared the moment where Pik found his way to the forest, something miraculous happened. I tend to exaggerate in my essays—as my father quipped recently, I’m more interested in “truth vs. facts”—but this actually happened. Right as the author guided Pik into the trees, which he had been desperately trying to reach over the book’s generous five pages, a real mouse ran by and stopped between me and Kate.
Its fur was the colour of Soviet concrete—tired, grey, and slightly grim. Its tiny paws were pressed into the grass, ears perked high, and whiskers twitching at the faintest gush of wind. It seemed alert, but at the same time curious, like it had questions for me and Kate, too.
We were so shocked by this coincidence, we stared at each other in pure awe, silent, afraid to utter even a word so as not to frighten the little creature. It felt magical, as if the book had come alive just for us. Here was Pik, in the flesh, standing, as if inviting us to be his friends.
As I took a grass blade and carefully moved it in the direction of the mouse, watching as its nose twitched in my direction, as if checking what was being offered, Kate screamed.
The mouse disappeared.
In its place now stood my grandmother’s meaty leg in a white leather slipper.
The leg jerked up, revealing a gray-and-brown pancake that used to be a mouse, and then went down again, this time with more force.
“Babushka, WHAT ARE YOU DOING?!” Kate screamed, her face full of terror.
“WHAT DO YOU MEAN WHAT AM I DOING?! CAN’T YOU SEE?”
She repeatedly hit her foot against the lawn where Pik had been standing just moments before with such force that she could easily bury the mouse into the ground.
Stomp, stomp, stomp.
“I AM PUSHING IT!”
Stomp, stomp, stomp.
When my grandmother was finally out of breath, she crouched down, grabbed the corpse by the tail like a used teabag, and carried it across the lawn to the compost pile, where it presumably began its next reincarnation.
Then my grandmother walked to the makeshift sink—a bucket with a hose—and washed her hands with soap, muttering, “Those little bastards are everywhere.”
Kate, meanwhile, started sobbing.
Remembering it now, I wonder what her tears were more about. Obviously, for the mouse, Kate was always one of those people who strongly empathised with every living creature. But perhaps those were also tears for the real world.
One where kindness doesn’t always win, and mice rarely make it home.
The showdown happened in the bathroom.
I deliberately closed all the doors to adjacent rooms to guide the Mouse—about the size of my thumb, hard to spot on the hardwood floor—into a small enclosed space. I ran after it, watching as it bumped into doors that were previously open, at the same time wondering why the Mouse seemed so well-oriented in the apartment. It was definitely a long-timer.
Finally, it got to where I wanted it to be. I closed the bathroom door behind me and armed myself with three towels.
“It’s just me and you,” I said. “Here’s the deal. I catch you, but you get to live.”
In response, the Mouse rubbed its tiny hands, as if it had just been served a good meal at a restaurant.
“Bring it on,” it seemed to say.
I made the first move, and the Mouse went berserk around the tiny room, running at the speed of light from one corner to the next. Every time it stopped, I aimed my towel at it and threw it in its direction.
The first towel went into the sink. No wonder, I stopped to think—I was bad at team sports.
The second one landed on top of the Mouse, but it managed to climb from underneath and rush to the other side of the bathroom in an instant.
The third one landed right on top of it and seemed to paralyse it, giving me a moment to gather the towel into a ball, feeling the wiggling inside.
Victorious, holding the towel-ball with the Mouse in one hand, I opened the door and marched into the bedroom, where J was sitting on the bed, listening expectantly. “So?”
“Look,” I said, showing her the ball, from which a tiny tail stuck out. “The prisoner has been captured.” As if on cue, the Mouse started squeaking—sharp, high-pitched noises.
“Get it away from me!!!” J screamed. “Kill it! Kill it now!!”
Carefully holding the Mouse in a towel, I proceeded to the balcony and opened the garden door. I walked to the fence beneath which, I knew, grew plants, and dumped the contents of the towel there. I didn’t hear it drop, but felt the towel stop wriggling and become somewhat lighter.
Meanwhile, from the other side of the communal garden, a neighbour was walking his Labrador. I hadn’t seen them approach. The moment I dropped the Mouse, the dog rushed to the side of the fence—barking, growling, clacking its teeth, and digging two small holes in the ground beneath my fence.
I nodded a silent hello to the neighbour, who stood surprised by the dog’s reaction.
“Zeus, what’s that you have there?” he said. “Oh shite, throw it away, that’s disgusting!”
The Mouse, now limp and covered in saliva, fell from Zeus-the-Lab’s mouth onto the ground. The neighbour kicked it into the gutter. Then, looking at me through the fence, said, “Fucking mice, eh?”
“Eh,” I responded.
As I walked back to the living room, full of guilt, remorse, and thinking about life and death, closing the door behind me, my wife yelled from the bedroom, “Did you get rid of it?!”
“Yes.”
“You didn’t use our towels, did you?”
“No,” I lied, turning back to look once again from the living room at the fence where I had dropped the Mouse, as if that place now held some hidden spiritual meaning. I couldn’t shake the feeling I’d betrayed a fellow tenant.
After all, we had a deal.
My wife and I eventually moved out of Clapham and found a place in Hammersmith, where we also had mice. I quickly learned from friends that that’s what it means to live in London. You get foxes, but you pay with mice.
“Ugh,” the man behind the counter of a local off-license grunted knowingly one day, as he scanned my twenty-odd glue mouse traps. “They’re everywhere in this city. It’s all because of immigrants.”
He didn’t look British, and I wanted to mention that I was an immigrant myself, but then decided to let it go. Perhaps, I thought, mice were fleeing the war too.
No matter how many mice came, there always seemed to be more, especially in the colder seasons. On some mornings, after an especially hard night, I’d wake up to find my apartment full of corpses stuck to glue traps. Some wriggling, some squeaking, others motionless and at peace, after what seemed like hours of useless fighting. I’d get rid of them in the neighbour’s green bins before my wife woke up.
In the years to come, I’d get divorced and go through a long period of unemployment. I’d meet Masha, who would eventually move in with me and introduce me to Perchik, whom I’d come to love as a son.
But who is, at the end of the day, a cat.
Which means, in our home today, mice aren’t that big of a problem.
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– S