All My Cats

by Bohumil Hrabal

  At the time, my wife would spend most of the day cooking for the cats and doling out milk for them, but the main problem was they were happiest in the kitchen and the room reeked of cats. I was so used to them I couldn’t smell it myself, but anyone who came to visit would always sniff the air. The cats would do their business, not just in the basin filled with sand, but sometimes in the corner of the kitchen, or the pantry, and when they had diarrhea, they’d poo wherever it caught up with them, and my wife would go around in a permanent state of seething reproach. She was sick and tired of washing the sheets and cleaning up the mess on the carpet, so I would do it. Every weekend I’d wipe up after the cats, first with a paper towel and then with a damp rag, and sometimes my nerves would snap and I’d shout at them and shoo them outside, and sometimes I’d even hit one of them. Or I’d be sitting and writing and suddenly, instead of a cat meowing at the door to be let out, I’d hear the awful sound of innards being voided, and I’d see red and pick the cat up and smack it, or sometimes I’d drop it on the doorstep and send it arcing into the woods with a powerful kick. The other cats would immediately flee outside, where they’d cower in shame and guilt and I would stop writing and feel sorry for them. I couldn’t write because I had struck a cat that I loved, I had kicked an innocent creature who meant everything to me, and sometimes, when in Prague, I’d feel such a sudden longing to see them that I’d drive out to Kersko and pick them up and press them to my forehead, so they could absolve me of my fears and my sorrow.

  I was ashamed at what I’d done and I’d go outside and would sometimes spend the rest of the day trying to win back their trust, to get back into their good graces and persuade them to come back home. But those creatures were more deeply ashamed than I was and they were loath to go back to a place they’d been kicked out of, a place from which I’d driven them, because not only can cats feel deeply embarrassed, they cannot forgive as readily as I forgave them.

  So I stopped spending the night in Kersko. I’d merely write what I had to write, feed the cats, and then leave by bus or by car, but I’d always turn to look back, or stop the car, and I’d see all the cats standing there as usual, peering through the fence, and their tiny heads looked so sad I’d step on the gas, or jump on the bus, which was my preferred means of travel because I’d be so distraught at leaving the cats I feared I might drive down the wrong side of the road, or into the ditch.

  It was strange, when I’d drive to the cottage by car, when I’d enter the Kersko forest and arrive at the spot where I turned into the lane leading to the cottage, I could see my cats come running in from the neighboring lots and gardens, so that by the time I pulled up to the gate, they’d all be standing there, beaming with delight that I’d come to be with them, that I’d made it, that I’d be giving them milk and food and taking them into my arms and finding consolation in each of them and giving each of them the courage to go on living, because these cats of mine may well have felt completely alive only when I was with them. And when I’d finished cuddling them and the weather was nice, I’d urge them to go outside and get some fresh air, to go and warm their coats, but I’d have to carry them out of the bedroom because they wouldn’t have gone on their own. Their greatest delight was to be with me.

  That week I didn’t sleep over in Kersko because I didn’t want to be there when the cats had their kittens. One day, I arrived to find the tabby cat missing, only to discover her in the woodshed where she’d given birth to five tiny kittens in a potato basket. She licked my hand and then, with her paws, she guided my fingers to her babies, who sucked at them, and they were as tiny as transistor radio batteries.

  I stroked the kittens but was trembling with dread because the longer I allowed my hand to linger, the more I knew that this was the hand that would have to randomly choose some of those kittens and usher them out of this world. I felt the bile rise within me and my stomach began to ache. I poured out milk for the other cats and cut up pieces of meat for them, but when I sat down at the typewriter, I couldn’t write, because my hands were shaking and I couldn’t type a coherent sentence. I walked past the woodshed, followed by Blackie, who walked behind me because her belly, too, was enormous and she was close to her time. I squatted down and she hopped onto my knee and arched her back and nuzzled against me, seeking reassurance. I knew she was terrified of giving birth alone and wanted me to be with her when it happened.

  I was disturbed because I could see the pointlessness of having come here. Kersko was not what my friends claimed it was, an ideal place to write and that I was lucky to have two places to live. In fact, the opposite was true. Whenever I was in Prague I worried about what my cats were doing and I couldn’t write for fear they were hungry and alone. Then when I came to Kersko, I’d curse myself for not having stayed in Prague, because I couldn’t write there either. My wife, it seems, was beginning to make sense. What were we going to do with all those cats? I already had enough cats of my own and now I had an extra one who’d just given birth to five kittens, and Blackie would shortly be giving birth to five more.

  I was beginning to think it would be best to make a huge mail sack, beat all the kittens to death in it, then crawl into the bag and drown myself in the pond in the woods, or . . .

  I now understood why my cats’ favorite pastime was playing with that large fiber handbag with the large green circular handles. Sometimes all the cats would crawl into it and fall asleep. The bag had been left behind by a fortune-teller, Mařenka, a former nurse who, in her free time, would walk the streets of our little town in a white turban with a green teardrop jewel on it. One day she came to gather wild mushrooms, and before she left she told my fortune from a deck of cards. She predicted not only that I would become a writer, but that I would find myself in a situation that would drive me to hang myself on a willow tree beside a river. She left behind that capacious handbag with the round green handles and never came back to pick it up because, in the meantime, she died.

  At first I’d made light of her prophecy but then later took it seriously enough that I had all the branches of a willow tree beside the brook cut off. Nevertheless, within a year it had sprouted so many new branches that ten people could have hung themselves from it, as in a drawing by Goya.

  Today, with her prediction on my mind, I went down to the brook and the willow tree was standing there, prepared to receive me, but I was not yet ready to fulfill Mařenka’s prophecy. To be on the safe side, though, I put all the milk and all the meat out on plates and then left, because I was terrified of what awaited me the next day.

  An odd kind of inertia set in, making it impossible for me to be in Prague or Kersko, and since I was in Prague, I set out once more to Kersko to see the cats, and when I pulled up and got out of the car and the cats ran out to greet me, I knelt down and patted them but did not pick them up or press them to my face. I walked slowly under the birches, feeling aggravated and anxious because my favorite cat, Blackie, who was fondest of me and about whom I was crazy, had not come out to welcome me. I unlocked the door and poured out the milk and laid out the meat, and when I opened the window and looked out, I froze. There was Blackie lying in the bird feeder made from an old radio, and transmitting such an adoring look of love that I walked out of the house in a trance. When I reached the bird feeder, I saw that Blackie too had a litter of kittens, black and brindled, and she’d turned over on her back like a foundering battleship and was gazing at me lovingly, inviting me to behold the joy she’d brought to my parcel of land, that here, in the bird feeder, she was offering me her treasure, her five little kittens. I stuck my hand inside and Blackie licked it, and I rested my head on top of the feeder and held both hands out to Blackie, pressing my head on the old radio as though I were listening to news of fresh catastrophes in the world. I took a deep breath and tried to relax but couldn’t quite manage it, so I remained there a while longer, my heart pounding, while the words my wife would utter to brighten my weekends in Kersko came into my head
: “What will we do with all those cats?”

  When I had regained some of my composure, my first thought was of Mařenka’s prophecy, but then I realized that were I to hang myself from my own willow tree by the brook, there would be no one to give food and drink to the cats. I stepped back from the feeder and looked at Blackie, at her beautiful, adoring eyes bright with pride, then she turned on her side so the kittens could suckle more easily and I was so moved by her eyes and by the love flowing from those eyes to mine that I stuck my head into the feeder and Blackie and I touched noses and she licked me over and over again as if I were one of her kittens, and snuffled such sweet words of kitty love into my ears that I decided I would keep all of those kittens, come what may, and would offer five hundred crowns as a kind of kitty dowry to anyone who would agree to take one.

  I brought Blackie some milk in a saucer, and she lifted herself up on her front legs and lapped it up, then I took the saucer to the woodshed for the tabby cat. After that, I went for a walk around our property, at times as far as the end of the lane where I turn to go to the bus stop, and from there I looked back at my cottage beneath those towering pines and birches, and thought that no one would believe I could be so utterly miserable here because of all those cats. I knew I’d have to kill some of those kittens in the woodshed in the canvas mail sack under the potato basket where the stray cat had given birth to five kittens, as many as Blackie, who had dropped her litter of five in the bird feeder among the remnants of the bread crumbs and oatmeal. I looked at my cottage from a distance and thought that no one, myself included, would have the audacity to claim that this modest house with the green shutters, shaded by tall trees, was anything but a place of pleasure and delight, providing a comfortable life for a writer who maintains two households and is free to choose between them, according to the mood of the moment.

  That Sunday, when my wife was again bemoaning the fact that we had so many cats, a car pulled up to our gate and a young man got out and, to our surprise, he was holding an emaciated tomcat in his arms. He said that his mother had been persuaded to return Renda to us because he refused to touch his liver or milk, though it was only in the past week that he started making a fuss about it and so the young man’s mother had agreed to send him back to where she’d got him over three months before. Then the young man left, and Renda, my glorious tomcat, that king of cats, that Renda who had been such a gorgeous creature and took care of all the kittens regardless of whose they were, now sat there, nervously clawing away at a coat of fur that had once glistened and shone like an otter’s pelt but was now limp and stringy, as though he had just crawled out of a sewer. And when he got up and began walking toward the cottage, he recognized at once where he was and arched his back. He went inside, walked around his chair and rubbed noses with his relatives, then he sat down in front of me and stared at me so long and intensely that I had to avert my eyes. Renda jumped up on my lap and put his paws on my shoulders and looked right into me, and I had to return his gaze and I saw that his eyes were the eyes of Máca, who had run off to the Míčeks’ and never come back, preferring to die somewhere in a woodshed to being here with me and those other annoying kittens.

  When Renda had finished looking into my eyes, he jumped down, this former charmer who had once glistened and shone and bristled with electricity, and walked unsteadily away, arching his gaunt back as if to demonstrate how wretched I’d made him, and he left, only to come back a while later, as if there were something more he had to tell me, some additional details about all that had befallen him during those three months, but he reconsidered and, cocking his wretched neck, he strutted off at a comic gait toward the river.

  3.

  Back then, when Blackie had her kittens in the bird feeder, making a touching kind of folk nativity scene, I did not want to be in the world. I’d begun to agree with my wife: all those cats were indeed a problem. She may have been right, but how were we going to sort it out?

  It was my fault we had so many cats that our weekends in our cottage in the woods were anything but recreational. Quite the contrary: we were constantly on edge, worrying that if we opened the door, a deluge of cats would come flooding into the hallway and the kitchen, and when those ten new kittens grew up, what then? My wife was in tears, and kept repeating her heartrending plea: What are we going to do with all these cats? I would walk down to the brook and look at the willow tree where Mařenka predicted I would hang myself, and one day I mustered my resolve and took a large basket out of the woodshed and then, after pouring two large saucers of milk for the cats in the kitchen, I took the kittens out of the bird feeder and, in a kind of fever I sent my wife to the neighbors, took two of the five kittens and put them in the basket, then went into the woodshed, removed two of the kittens and put them in the basket along with the first two. Then, as if in a trance, I opened the mail bag, which had a dark, caked stain along the seam, and put the remaining three kittens from the bird feeder inside, along with the three from the woodshed, then I hurried into the woods and battered the contents of that mail bag against a tree, again and again and again.

  I stopped to catch my breath, just as I had done one winter when I had ushered an enormous but emaciated stray cat out of this world and into the next. But even as I was beating her to death, just as I had now beaten those six kittens to death, a feeling came over me that I knew would stay with me forever. Even that winter, what I had done felt to me like murder, but since then I’d recovered to the point where it was only toward morning that the cat would appear to me, meowing pitifully for help and when I refused and instead, opened the mail bag, she crawled into it herself, as if to punish me for not picking her up and taking her inside, for not feeding her, for not easing her feeling of abandonment. I beat her to death to help me forget those nights when she would walk around outside my cottage and wail, crying from the depths of her soul for help. And I did help her. I helped her reach the other side, the other side of things and people and animals. I helped her achieve her death.

  Now, when I’d taken the lives of six still-blind kittens, I felt crushed, suffocated by what I had felt compelled to do. I was trembling all over but I had to keep going so I bent over and felt those tiny heads and realized to my horror that the kittens were still stirring and so, just like that time in the winter, I took the axe I used to split wood . . .

  And then I picked up a spade and in an out-of-the-way place among a stand of birch trees, I dug a deep pit into which I dumped the damp contents of the sack. But then I couldn’t help myself and I ran back to my cottage and picked six geraniums, and when I got back, I threw those flowers into the grave. The kittens were lying there in a terrifying mishmash and I felt a growing sense of alarm. I should not have looked down because those kittens were lying there like images from Nazi mass graves.

  I filled in the pit and placed a stone over it and covered it with dried oak leaves to hide any telltale signs. I folded the mail bag and put it back in the woodshed and when I came out of the shed and into the light, I nearly lost my balance and began to feel sick and I ran over and gripped the empty bird feeder and the pickets in the fence and retched and spewed out the contents of my stomach, again and again and again . . .

  My eyes were brimming with tears, I was pale, and I opened the door to the hallway and stood there for a long time with my hand on the kitchen door handle before opening it. And the tomcats ran out, along with the two cats that were fond of me, and when I patted them and led them to the basket, the first to crawl into it was Blackie and she accepted those four kittens as her own, and a moment later the second cat ran over and, as though it were the most natural thing in the world, she slipped into the basket as well, and the two of them lay there while the kittens took turns nursing from one and then the other, as though they were siblings from a single mother. I held out my hand to the mothers and they both licked my hand and closed their eyes and were happy that I had touched them, that I had patted those two pairs of kittens, and
I felt a great burden lift from my heart.

  The mother cats began to share their duties. They took turns in the basket, leaving the other time to go outside and do her business, to run into the clearing beyond the fence to wash herself and recover from caring for the kittens. When she began to miss her babies, she’d come back to the basket, which now stood in the kitchen, and relieve the other cat, though not before they both exchanged little kisses as they traded places. The tomcats, too, would come to look in on the kittens, and when the mothers were away, they’d crawl in with their nieces and nephews and lick them and clean them and keep them warm, and it seemed to me that by taking the lives of those six kittens I had helped others, most of all my wife. I told her I’d taken the kittens to Dr. Beník, who had administered chloroform.

  Back then, that month would seem to have been the happiest of times, because the two mother cats tried to outdo each other in demonstrating which of them was fonder of me, which got onto my knee more often and put her paws on my shoulder and looked lovingly into my eyes. One of my friends, who witnessed this display, even brought his camera along to take pictures of me sitting on the bench, the basket on my knee with the four kittens and two mother cats in it, each curled up so that her head nestled between the other’s legs, while I rested my hands in the basket. By this time, the kittens’ eyes had opened and they’d lick me and gently butt me with their heads and rub up against my hand. I looked at my hands in the basket, touching the kittens and like a bolt of lightning I suddenly realized that this was just like those photographs from the ghetto, where an SS officer or an execution squad would have their pictures taken standing over a pit filled with corpses. And then I remembered a moment captured in newspapers from 1911, when the Turks massacred a village, cut off the heads of their enemies, their victims, put them in sacks and took them to the city and then had their picture taken with the severed heads. Likewise American and South Vietnamese soldiers had themselves photographed after they had beheaded their victims, and they’d stuck cigarettes in their lips, just as I had thrown each of the kittens a red geranium.