The mouse doesn’t try to escape. She could. She cannot. She is spellbound. She can’t leave the cat alone. The cat could let the mouse go. The cat lets go. Savours a moment of boredom. Lights a cigarette. Or a cigarillo. So this is how it is, thinks the mouse. Is it a game? The mouse stops moving. She reflects. In her linden robe, one might imagine an oak or arbutus tree. She looks more and more like a dead leaf. She grows bigger. Her four warm centimetres fill the frame.
     Where is she, the cat asks. I don’t know either, I say. The game was
    endless, I was enjoying myself. We felt fear, we felt desire, for the heart it was a test of endurance, there was no malice, we thought we would die, maybe we did—is she under some foliage, waiting for the postman to tell her what to do? By dint of running, of fleeing, of hiding, she has become extraordinary. Humanity, in sum. Her tail is like a strand of thread
    And she was waiting for the postman. Condemned? Or saved, given back to the light, to the forest’s generosity, to the Ocean’s gift? Or saved for another day?
     She was waiting for the verdict.
     It wasn’t ‘the postman’ she was waiting for, it was:
     life or its refusal
     the battle’s outcome. The battle unfolded like all battles on the other continent
     the Letter
     the Transfusion
     the last minute.
    He had said I’ll call you in five minutes. And ever since she’s been waiting for the fifth minute. The first four minutes ticked by according to the rhythm of her watch and since then she’s been waiting for the fifth. Or was it the fifth minute whose seconds were growing slower and slower? Or time wandered off at the beginning of the fifth minute, and History seemed to be stopped in the middle of a chapter, like a lazy river
     she was waiting for the postman to come and fix it
     Around the clock you could count on the postman
     To deliver the paper meals that nourished the box
     But he didn’t tell, his words were sealed
     Give, the postman didn’t do that,
     He promised, he passed on the secrets, but only in passing
     Tragedy’s understudy
     The one who comes and knows not and for naught
     The cruel, ignorant, innocent messiah
     A traveller from distant lands, who comes in passing, who passes on
     For a hundred years the same postman
     Understudy for permanence in the absence of permanence
     His name? Postman.
     Almost the same since the days of the stable
     Considerable had begun in 1298, in response to a need of Marco Polo’s
     Always dressed in the same practical outfit, all that has changed is
     His mount,
     Nowadays the postman came on a motorbike,
   Hers at least, her personal courier; and it is now in the postman story, after sixty long years of waiting, that the first change occurred: she no longer heard the postman cross the invisible distance, finished the buzz of wings stirring space some two kilometres from the House, vroom-vrooming like an earthbound airplane, the long thread of the wait was cut, henceforth the delivery person came without warning the way a carp rises silently through the water’s thicknesses, the bike’s lips are sealed
       thus, much of the postman panoply no longer exists, I thought,
     never again will I hear him crossing the earth; there are still such things as letters but the species is endangered, I’ll try to disappear before it does, I tell myself, there’s still the word post, and its countless relays and riders still travel the roads of my mental post office. Horses die in the end, but the letters mailed from London in 1588 continue to arrive from across continents at the House that is my beacon over the ocean of lands