by Lena Divani
“Jaaacques! My little Jaaacques!” I heard her voice calling as she unlocked the apartment door. “Where are you, fatso? You’re not being willful, now, are you?” (Oh, Damsel, you really don’t want to believe it, do you? When was I ever willful?) She burst in and for the first time in her life, she dropped the mountaineering gear and started searching for me in one room after the other. I tried to meow but her voice covered mine. Finally, mad with anxiety, she turned on the kitchen light and saw me. I’ll only say this, my dears: It would have been much better if I had ascended to the heavens. I wish she had never seen me in the state I was in. I was a skeleton, perched on the sink, my fur filthy (not my fault! I could no longer give myself a tongue bath) my head wet from the water dripping on it (I was so thirsty, it was imperative to be next to water—me, who loathed it so much!). A mixture of blood and saliva dripping from my mouth. What can I say . . . It was a blessing there was no mirror anywhere near. As self-conscious about my appearance as I was, I would have committed suicide had I suddenly caught a glimpse of myself.
The Damsel grabbed me in her arms, cleaned me up and dried me, while crying inconsolably. She had understood. All the days she lived away from me, all the mornings she didn’t let me under her bedcovers, all the caresses she never gave me, rose up and started demanding justification. Don’t cry, Damsel, I wanted to say. Let bygones be bygones. I want to remember you smiling, O.K.?
That night, we slept together. As soon as it was morning, she wrapped me in my favorite white blanket and took me to the neighborhood vet. He was a quack—she was the one who came up with the diagnosis in his place. She had already searched on the Internet and found that malfunctioning kidneys affect the teeth. Cassandra had been right. That’s why my gums were bleeding. That’s why I desperately wanted water. That’s why I was in the process of collapsing.
The doctor recommended a special dietary regime of croquettes for cats with failing kidneys plus some prescription medicines. The Damsel left me in my nest and ran out to get them. I instantly rejected them, naturally. Come now, Damsel, I told her, swishing my tail. I only have a few days left, spare me this tasteless stuff and these pills and get me some ocean shrimp. It’s my farewell party we’re talking about—let’s live it up like there’s no tomorrow!
It has been mentioned before: When it came to throwing a party, she was second to none! She and I reached an instant, and perfect, understanding. The pills and the rest went into the rubbish bin and I was feasting again on my beloved shrimp. For a week, I seemed to be O.K. again. I don’t know how come—maybe her feverish wish to make me well, what with all the energy she poured into me, revived me. It was the happiest week of my life. The Damsel rarely went out so she wouldn’t leave me on my own. Finally, we were having our honeymoon. We were literally glued to each other. She let me sneak slowly under her cardigan and reach up to her neck, she kissed my ears (first the left, then the right, my favorite), we slept together, we were touching constantly—the miracle had come to pass: She had at long last become a cat and I had become human! I was so immensely pleased that I would gladly exchange ten years of normal living for another week like this one. I, the sleepyhead, hardly slept anymore: My hours were precious. You can sleep when you’re dead, my boy, I told myself as I watched her sleeping next to me, lawfully at last! When she woke up, I tried to make her look me in the eye to greet her, to say to her that I was O.K. with never managing to be turned into a book, it was more than enough that I was her beloved. (You don’t know this, my dears, but that is how we get into your mind and talk to you without words, by looking at you straight in the eye.) I was impossible. She couldn’t bear it. My strange eyes, one lettuce-green, one sea-blue, had always been her weakness. Impossible to watch them fade away. So, to avoid them, she hugged me to her.
Then the countdown began. Day by day I was getting thinner, whittled away. After a while, I could no longer move. I stayed put, inside a kind of nest she’d made for me, with my head literally hanging inside a large bowl of water. We both knew it—my time had come. Still, it was hard for her. Mighty hard. For years, I’d heard her speeches in favor of euthanasia, how she would gladly help any loved one to make an exit, help them maintain some dignity in their last hour. But theory is one thing and practice is quite another. If only you knew what compassion I felt for her in those hours she spent hovering above me and stroking me with shaky hands. She knew she had to do something, she couldn’t allow my humiliation to go on and on. “Zach,” she would whisper in my ear, “my fatso, what shall I do? I can’t make you well, and I can’t help you make your exit. And in three days I have to go to the literary festival in Berlin; how am I ever going to leave you here to find your way out by yourself?” I, who always ran to her when she called, hated to let her down, even now. I did my best and managed to move my tail a little. I hear you, I was saying to her, not to worry, everything is going to be alright.
Which means that my guardian angel (and hers) Christina would take it on herself to free me from this derelict body in which I’ve been trapped. That same afternoon Christina turned up and made the suggestion. She knew that you had taken me twice to the doctor and that both times you came back in tears, with nothing to show for it. “I will look after little Zach,” she said. “While you are in Berlin. I won’t tell you when it’s going to happen. But when you get back, everything will have been taken care of.” I gave everything I had to meow (“Hurrah!”) but nothing came out.
In the night, I dreamt we were living our love backwards. From the end back to the beginning. Leaving behind the tears of the end, we moved day by day backwards, full of hope for the excitement of the first meeting. The dream finished when I became again a white fluffy ball who, after meeting you, ran off and disappeared forever behind Madam Sweetie’s bushes . . .
Hello and goodbye, Damsel.
RISEN FROM THE DEAD
Before leaving for the airport, she had left on the kitchen table the fleecy white blanket with the colored circles. On it she had pinned a note: Wrap him up in this to keep him warm. It’s his favorite.
Christina helped me cross the wide river in two wraps: my blanket and her love. I won’t say more.
The point is that when the injection was given, I felt like a door had been thrown open. I was now free, a perfectly white, fuzzy light on a journey, here, everywhere and nowhere, all at the same time. Happy again. But what about her? I needed to make sure she was alright before I left for good. If I met the Father over there in the depths of the hereafter, swimming in a lake of orange juice, he would crucify me for abandoning her on some airport escalator. So I dived in a northern direction and with a whooshing sound I found myself in Berlin. I flew over the Ku’damm, flew over Fazantstraat, then over the kitchen of my namesake, Zach H. There they were, sitting at the large kitchen table, having coffee and chocolates. The Damsel was smoking with one hand and wiping tears with the other. I was the subject of their conversation. My namesake was trying to come up with some words of comfort. Wise though he was, he couldn’t find any. Now that I mention it, I always knew it wouldn’t be easy for me to be forgotten. I really was sweet!
“I can’t believe that when I walk in the door he won’t be there. How is it possible that I’m never going to see him again? Not ever?”
Zach H. then took her hand and said something unexpected:
“Don’t cry, you will see him before you all the time, when you least expect it.”
She raised her eyes, full of childlike expectation.
“Really?” she said. “Where?”
“Look behind you,” Zach quietly said and pointed to the tableau with all his photographs up on the kitchen wall.
The Damsel turned slowly and saw me looking at her straight in the eye from my picture. It had been there for years. She herself had made a gift of it to him (from Zach to Zach) but she had forgotten. Now the old photograph was shining, animated, because I had sneaked into it a mere second before. Which i
s why, the exact moment she looked at it, her eyes locked with mine. AT LAST! AT LONG LAST! Damsel, look at me, I am right here! Will you listen to me already?
The Damsel smiled, came close, stroked me, sat back down in her chair and, smiling even more broadly, she said:
“Zach, darling, I just got a crazy idea: I’m going to write little Zach’ memoirs!”
YES!YES!YES!YES!YES!YES!YES! My dears, I made it!
With another whooshing sound I ascended to heaven after casting one last look at her. She had dried her tears and was excitedly explaining her plan to him. Mission accomplished, then, do you read me, my dear Cheshire Cat? I, too, did your trick: I have departed, indeed I have, but I left my smile behind. Forever.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Lena Divani was born in Volos, Greece. She is the author of novels, short stories, and plays. This is her first novel to appear in English.
