by Lena Divani
HE: “It’s all settled then. We’ll take him with us when I drive you to the airport and then I’ll take him home.” (He had the whole thing already planned, the sly bugger!)
SHE: “But it means carrying his litter and his food over and then carrying them back here . . . ” (Why, the guy wouldn’t have minded carrying the ocean with all its fish, if it served his purposes.)
He: “There’s a pet shop around the corner. I won’t be doing any carrying, hardly.” (Damsel, whenever you see an excess of willingness, be suspicious. Do I have to teach you everything?)
SHE: “Well, since you insist, you can have him, what can I say?” (You can tell him to leave me in my peace and quiet.)
In actual fact, she didn’t say anything at all to him. She kissed him. And then she picked up the last of her stuff, she put me inside the hateful carry basket (which ten times out of ten is used for no good purpose) and they offloaded me in the backseat of the car. I was feeling so let down by her attitude that I didn’t even bother whining. After the tearstained farewell at the airport, Beefcake led me silently to his house. As soon as we arrived, he opened the door for me to get out but I stayed put, as good as dead. No, I am not stubborn or mean. But I can’t stand human hypocrisy. I need for the masks to come off. And if there is something I’ve learned in my seven lives, my dears, it’s that there is no better way to check someone’s feelings than getting them irritated. (Meow No. 3467: Do any old blooper. The person in love will see it as a charming eccentricity and admire it. The person who loves you will be upset but will patiently try to understand your motives. And the one who couldn’t care less is going to be livid.)
Beefcake was livid. After ordering me five times to “Get out!” he went back to his business saying, “You can sit there until kingdom come for all I care.” He didn’t go out to get me litter and he didn’t get my any food. So, pal, is that how it’s going to be? I thought. I’ll show you! While he was busy at his computer, I quietly came out of the basket and left a huge turd on the hall rug. As you see, I was restrained. I could just as easily have decorated the Persian rug in the living room. Six hours later, he finally remembered my existence.
“Oh gee, Zach! I forgot to get you some food. What are you going to have now? Do you like eggplant salad?” (He hasn’t yet seen the turd.)
I remain expressionless.
“No, huh? What shall I give you, then?” (He still hasn’t seen the turd.)
I remain expressionless.
“You jerk, what have you done here? I’m going to kill, you filthy thing!” (He just saw the turd.)
I am still expressionless, only under the couch, just to be on the safe side.
Just about then the phone rang. It was the Damsel from Berlin. As soon as I heard him say her name, delighted, I ran toward him with my ears all pricked. At last, I thought, she had remembered me. She is calling to ask how her beloved Zach is coming along in his enforced house-sharing with this dude. Well, you can’t imagine how very wrong I was, my dears. The unconscionable woman was calling to find out how her beloved Beefcake was coming along in his enforced house-sharing with me! As far as I could tell, she was even consoling him over my shitting on his carpet. I started meowing furiously. Tell her that you didn’t get me any cat litter, you coward, I was screaming in felinese. Only, of course, there was no cat-to-human translation available on the premises.
I won’t go into any more detail. I’ll just say that, for a week, we lived like cat and dog, literally. When she finally got back from her stupid trip, she saw I was one kilo thinner but even that didn’t rattle her.
“What happened? Why is he like this? Didn’t little Zach eat?” (Madam can spare me the endearments. I have curtailed diplomatic relations with your good self.)
“How could he? He was missing you terribly . . . ” he said. (Referring to himself again, of course.)
THE FELINE-NESS OF STRANGERS
No, don’t hasten to come to any conclusions, my dears. I am NOT the jealous type. I am merely just. Instead of abstract arguments, let me present you the case of Mr. Tall. Now, here was a man dear to my heart! First of all, from the moment he set foot in the house, he showed me the respect that was mine by right. Because there is everywhere an invisible book of years, no two ways about it: I was with her for twelve whole years before he turned up. I knew both her good and (especially) her bad side, whereas he didn’t know his head from his ass where she was concerned. All of this was taken into consideration. Let it be noted that: a) he had a dog at his house; and, b) he was allergic to my hairs. (The crowning glory of my Perfect Whiteness, that which distinguished me but also led to my downfall. The Damsel, as I have oft repeated, was sickened by the sight of them trailing like a plague on every fabric surface in the house. She never did get used to them. For fifteen whole years she called me “Mr. Molt.” Her mother was loath to even sit in the living room. Many visitors, good friends though they were, came up in boils as soon as they came in contact with them due to allergy; as a result, the Damsel took to locking me out on the balcony for the duration of their visits. Have you any ideas how many parties I missed out on because of my hair? How many bucketfuls of petting? By the ocean shrimp, I had even contemplated going to the barber’s and getting it shorn off, like Bruce Willis.
But Mr. Tall immediately loved the totality of me, hairs and all. Even more that, he became my personal advocate. When he would settle with the Damsel on the couch, not only did he not send me away, but persuaded her to let me snuggle in between them, be part of their company, cozily covered in a white fleece blanket with colored circles which I adored. He had slyly suggested it to me one day, as my hiding place: “Under here, Zach, this is where you should burrow; it’s all white, like you, and nobody will be any the wiser.” Whereas I would receive a pet every six months from the Damsel, I was getting an endless stream from him. He had even come up with a way for tricking the old allergy: He would pull his sleeves right down over his hands and use them as gloves, so he could pet me without coming out in a rash. (I know, I know, intimate contact is a worrisome and dangerous thing but if you set your mind to it, there are means and ways—isn’t that right, Mr. Tall?)
The thing, though, I’ll never forget, and for which I will forever be raining kisses on him from seventh heaven, is that for three years, he tried to get me inside the bedroom, in the face of strong opposition. At the beginning, he just opened the door for me to come in. The Damsel threw me out on the spot, before I had even a chance to see the color of the bedcovers. Once he realized that his mission was far from simple, he adopted a more orchestrated approach: a) the method of persuasion (“Come on, baby, look what a sweet thing he is, why can’t we let him have a little corner somewhere?”); b) beseeching (“Come on, do it for me, I can’t stand that imploring look in his eyes. No, it’s no trick, he’s going through some real heartache.”); c) threats (“I swear I am going to report you to the RSPCA for cat abuse, I’m telling you!”)
I had a lot of my hopes riding on Mr. Tall—maybe too many. I was hoping, for instance, that he might stave off her obsession with every so often grabbing a suitcase and disappearing for weeks on end. He himself was a couch potato, one of us. He wouldn’t even go out to get cigarettes without his car. All this love, I kept thinking, has got to have an effect. Their first Christmas together she wouldn’t, couldn’t, leave him and disappear off to Alaska somewhere, I was thinking. Alright, she didn’t go to Alaska, she went to the other end of the world, to a place called Fin Du Mundo, the World’s End. Directly beneath lay the freezing Antarctic. He was freezing in Greece, waiting for her.
He didn’t stop her from leaving for exotic locales, but I couldn’t blame him for that—like I couldn’t blame him for failing to curb the worst part of himself. In any event, we each sum up the records for our own private benefit. Nobody knows as well as we do just where we screwed up. And I’ll always have a smile saved up for him on account of the following inciden
t:
They’d slept in quite late on that occasion. (Nothing unusual about that. From the moment they met, those two never managed to go to sleep before six. They talked. Daylight came, the birds started singing in the garden next door and then, exhausted, they would decide to take a nap. What the hell they talked about during all those long hours, I have no idea. It goes without saying that I was glued to their door, eavesdropping, but unfortunately, I could only make out what was being said when there was a fight on. All the good bits slipped away and got lost. Nonsense. There’s no way it got lost. Nothing gets lost. It’s hiding somewhere, waiting. (Investment idea: If one day I find out where all the lost kisses and caresses are hiding, my dears, I will turn that place into the new Dubai of the heart. All the scorched hearts worldwide will come there to have healing love baths. I’ll be a millionaire.)
The Damsel was the first to wake up at about noon. She left the room to make coffee, thinking Mr. Tall was still fast asleep. Appearances, however, can be deceptive and he was just playing possum for my sake. As soon as she was out of range, he got up, quietly opened the door for me and let me sneak under the warm eiderdown in his arms. For about three minutes, I experienced heaven. The only thing missing was the mountains of fried sea bass. But no miracle lasts more than three days—or three minutes, as in the present case. The Damsel arrived with the coffees and she caught us at it, blissfully laid-back and content. Without a moment’s hesitation she swooped down to grab me by the scruff of the neck but was stopped short by Mr. Tall. “Wait, just wait a moment before you throw him out.” Immediately after that, he slunk back under the covers, so that no part of him was visible, his face included. “Now, do what you like,” he mumbled from his hiding place. The Damsel unceremoniously dumped me in the hall, then went back and uncovered him. “What was that about? Why did you hide under there?” she asked him with genuine surprise. “I don’t want him to associate me with his exile. I wanted him to see that I didn’t agree,” he said and smiled apologetically. (He didn’t know it at the time but in the future, that one phrase would be his salvation from the most relentless enemy: forgetfulness, mine and hers.)
In general, I owe a great deal to the kindness of strangers—at least as much as Blanche Dubois. Her sister Smaroula and her best friend, Fillip, for instance, were always stroking me, from the moment they set foot in the house to when they left. The conversed and they stroked. They ate and they stroked. They idled and they stroked. Did she have to go live in Volos and he in London?
But my greatest love, the protector of all the weak and the dispossessed, human, canine and feline, was Christina, her other sister, who became my sister. In all the years I lived on this earth, the afternoons when Christina would come over for coffee were my birthday parties, my delight, my consolation. If it wasn’t for her, I wouldn’t have lasted through my endless days of solitude when the Damsel was clambering up and down mountain paths all over the globe. She didn’t just nip in to feed me and then go. She came over, made coffee and kept me proper company. We even had our own ritual. As soon as she sat down, I immediately went up to her to see what she was wearing. If she was in jeans, I would jump straight up in her lap. If she had a dress on, I was more careful. First I reached with my paw, ascertained the robustness of the material, and then I adjusted my leap accordingly. But if she was wearing stockings, I never went up until she picked me up herself. The two sisters laughed themselves silly, watching my calculations. “Look at the trickster, figuring out what you’re wearing to decide on his course,” the Damsel would say. I was no trickster, madam. A gentleman is what I was. And, as is well-known, a gentleman never places a lady in an awkward position. All the more so if he has such a soft spot for her.
You mustn’t think that I was happy to make the acquaintance of everyone who petted me, insofar as I met all sorts of people in the Damsel’s living room. I am talking from the point of view of variety rather than numbers, because that woman may have appeared sociable and all the rest of it but, if you ask me, deep down she was very solitary. She could sit for days on end at her desk, in bed or on the carpet like a yogi, weaving (and unweaving) a story line in her head. She neither met with nor spoke to anyone. Me, well, you know me: despite the difficulty I have pretending to be a ghost, I was capable of a modicum of respect. In truth, I, too, am quite private, all my social graces notwithstanding. And if I’m telling this story, my dears, it’s because I would very much like to advise some of you to keep a few things yourselves; not everything needs to be made public. Your quarrels, for example, can very well stay at home, can’t they ? Do take pity on the rest of us and don’t take them out to air and exercise them.
I will explain at once. I am no gossip, but I will never forget the evening when the Damsel and Ziggy had over for dinner a friendly couple, the kind whose conversation is made up of comments like, “The novel is dead, alongside individual responsibility and the social contract.” The foodstuffs were ready, the tables were set—as I’ve had the opportunity to mention, the Damsel was an expert at throwing dinner parties. “A proper house needs cooking smells and the lights on” was her motto (alternating, of course, with “Leave me well alone, I don’t give a hoot.”) The doorbell rang at around nine. The Damsel ran to answer, all smiles. The evening was shaping up to be a very promising one. The guest was famous for his storytelling verve and his wife for her verve in general. Unfortunately, however, the verve turned to nerves. Two tight-lipped people appeared at the door who barely nodded “good evening” and then proceeded to sit at opposite ends of the couch, far from each other. One was facing toward the library in the hall and the other toward the table in the dining room. The Damsel and Ziggy, on the other hand, were facing each other, increasingly anxious. In vain they tried to get a word out of their visitors all through the evening. The select guests just sat there with their long faces, nervously jiggling their arms and legs and braying monosyllables at the questions of their hosts, who were getting more discomfited with every passing minute. At one point, the storyteller-who-wasn’t picked me up and started stroking me nervously, evidently wanting to do something more constructive than jiggling his leg. Within five minutes I had run out of patience and good manners, too, and I escaped after scratching his right hand. “Strange, Zach never scratches,” said the Damsel, relieved there was at last something to say. “Strange, the guest always talks,” Ziggy whispered in her ear when they nipped into the kitchen to get some clear alcohol. I rubbed against his leg. You say it like it is, I meowed, gratified as always when someone in the house understood the spirit of justice that moved me.
If I had to name the greatest cult figure out of all the cat-loving crowd that paraded through that house, it would be a Dutch-Scotsman, fabulously gifted as a writer and one hundred percent mad. As soon as the guy clapped eyes on me, he asked the Damsel if I had an active sexual life. The Damsel stammered something about living on the fifth floor etc. and offered him a cup of tea (he didn’t drink alcohol). Then, she closed the curtains (he couldn’t bear the sun) and, after that, she heard him, openmouthed, advise her to buy me cat porn. He himself, living with his equally mad wife on some Scottish mountainside, had two cats, whom he regularly provided with cat porn. Looking into my eyes, he assured us that his cats were as happy as can be. For better or worse, I slunk off and hid under the washing machine. Call me a prude, but that isn’t my definition of happiness.
THE MAN WHO SQUEEZED ORANGES
In a few words, my dears, I lived long and saw many sights and many folks. I saw people who’d never grown up and others whose soul had fled from them at some point, leaving the body an empty husk. I saw people remain empty from the time they were born, like balloons—material designed exclusively for parties. I observed in terror as some folks were gradually displaced by another, stronger soul and henceforth remained homeless and invisible. I saw people as thick-skinned as pigs and others whose transparent skin barely contained the wound which was them. I have seen all of that without movin
g an inch from this deep red couch. There was only one whom I hadn’t managed to see all those years: her dad, the mythical “Father” as the three sisters mock-lovingly called him.
I confess that with the years, my curiosity had reached quite a peak. As I pointed out previously, I am no gossip; it was just that the Father had become a kind of urban legend in the house. He was the invisible but indubitable protagonist in dozens of stories that caused paroxysms of laughter in friends and acquaintances. My favorite story was the one where the Father (who, I gathered, had taken on himself the role of safeguarding, which is to say, monitoring, which is to say, policing the good health of his girls) secretly followed the ten–year-old Damsel to school to discover himself if she bought, on her own initiative, sweets, candies or takeaway treats of any description, which might in the future irrevocably undermine her sound health. The Damsel, healthy through no choice of her own, despite her generally scandalous good luck was on this occasion singularly unlucky. The Father put his detective plan in action on the one and only day when the young Damsel succumbed to the temptation of buying a bright red, delectable sugar apple from a vendor outside her school. At the very moment the poor lass reached to take a delicious bite into the forbidden fruit, she was stopped short by the Father’s unexpected, drawn-out cry:
“You murderer of young children, do you know what carcinogenic coloring is in that rubbish you just sold my child?”
It doesn’t take much to imagine the speed with which the “murderer” packed up and went off in search of new turf. He night as well have been dealing crack.
Apart from the endless stories, I also listened in to the phone calls the Father made to the now adult Damsel, living in Athens, all of which started with the same question: “How many oranges did you squeeze today?” Because, while some people believe in God, others in Buddha, others in the benevolent intervention of aliens, the Father believed in vitamin C: A large glass of fresh orange juice decimated, among other things, viruses, sexually transmitted diseases, cancer, constipation and depression. I had good reason to suspect that if the orange juice was absolutely fresh, it might also guarantee you perfect happiness!
