by Lena Divani
Europa Editions
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This book is a work of fiction. Any references to historical events, real people, or real locales are used fictitiously.
Copyright © 2013 by Lena Divani
First publication 2014 by Europa Editions
Translation by Konstantine Matsoukas
Translation copyright © 2014 by Europa Editions
Cover illustration from photo by Sergei Didok © Sergei Didok/iStock
Page illustrations by Alekos Papadatos © Alekos Papadatos
All rights reserved, including the right of reproduction in whole or in part in any form.
Cover Art by Emanuele Ragnisco
www.mekkanografici.com
ISBN 9781609452087
Lena Divani
SEVEN LIVES AND ONE GREAT LOVE
Translated from the Greek
by Konstantine Matsoukas
To those who are at this moment
squeezing oranges for someone they love.
If I die before you
which is all but certain
then in the moment
before you will see me
become someone dead
in a transformation
as quick as a shooting star’s
I will cross over into you
and ask you to carry
not only your own memories
but mine too until you
too lie down and erase us
both together into oblivion.
GALWAY KINNELL, Promissory Note
MOMMY DEAREST
Though I run the risk of seeming disrespectful and ungrateful, I might as well confess it: I started planning my escape from the family home the moment I laid eyes on my progenitor. That lady (for want of a better word) was an alley cat, ugly as can be, thin and sickly, with one good eye and molting fur the color of nondescript rubbish. Darwin’s shame. A bottomless pit of aggression and fear. Cat lovers would woo her to try and feed her and she would launch into an attack. A bellicose ingrate and rude to boot. What business did I have with that? The only smart choices she ever made were: a) to have sex with my father; and, b) to hunker down in a nook of the enormous garden of the corpulent, cat-loving Mrs. Sweetie, to give birth to us.
My father, whom unfortunately I never met but fortunately had sex appeal in spades, must have been of noble extraction, a pure-blooded Turk from Ankara, with a pedigree. I am nevertheless prepared to bet he was all white, with a gleam in his eye, and a handsome devil. What attracted him to that lowlife tramp, my mother, only the Lord knows. In all likelihood, he was a bourgeois de salon who slipped out of his mansion one day, to see if he would make the grade out in the streets, had a run-in with the hood and realized how unforgiving street law can be. There he was, my hapless progenitor, wallowing in self-pity, when mother turned up and restored his self-esteem. Naturally, he was taken in by her street wise savvy, what momma’s boy wouldn’t be? Because, the truth be told, though mom may have been an eyesore, her street smarts were beyond reproach. She happened to be in heat and she deigned to allow him admission to the club of her many lovers, so she could add a blue blood to the random pool of genes she copped. The outcome was me myself, as white as vanilla ice-cream, a noble bastard, the four-legged exception in a mob of crooked, malformed and hideous siblings who stared at me mistrustfully. And smart to boot. Indeed, a genius.
WHAT A GENIUS DOES TO PROTECT HIS WITS
It’s simple really: one chooses one’s parents. Freud’s extrapolations may not have wide currency in our world, but our instincts are more acute than yours. I was a blind newborn behind Mrs. Sweetie’s bushes, and I already knew that the life of tramping and cat fights would be pure hell and that my purpose in life was in danger of being compromised. As soon as I opened my eyes I knew for sure that my siblings might as well be called Cruddy, Scum and Misery. I, on the other hand, was the living vindication of Mendel’s law. And it never did anyone any good, being that much different from the rest. Would an Eskimo seek happiness in Ethiopia? Urgent conclusion: I needed to beat it ASAP.
But where to? That was the question. I knew that one’s environment is not merely important, it is all-decisive: if you spend your time frolicking in the lake, sooner or later you turn into a fish. Which is to say, I wasn’t choosing a home, I was choosing a life. Take William Burroughs’ cat as a case in point. There’s no need to wonder why she chose to live with him. Yes, he was mildly deranged. Yes, he shot at his wife in jest. But his cat, he treated like the queen of Sheba. Rumor has it that he was even more fond of her ladyship than he was of snorting Benzedrine. Most importantly, he made a place for her in feline history. I bet you have all seen the pictures of her ladyship atop the mythical junkie’s typewriter. So, then, well done, Miss Burroughspuss. You were right on target.
Sylvia Plath’s cat, on the other hand, just plain blew it. She weighed up her mistress as a gentle soul and a huge talent, and thought to adopt her. Overjoyed to have hit on such a gem, she overlooked one basic element—the poet was at odds with her very skin. She had been hell bent on doing herself in since the age of twenty. She tried it once, twice, well, eventually she managed it. She ended up with her head in the oven and the cat ended up wailing alongside two babies, desperate and an orphan. Thanks, but no thanks: I myself, I could do without such drama.
At this point, there is one thing I need to come clean about: the popular rumor is true. We don’t make a big deal of it but we do, actually, have seven lives. If you’ve met one of those breathtakingly stupid cats that break their neck falling from the eighth story while chasing pigeons, then you know what we’re like during our first, and in some cases our second, life. Between you and me, I personally was such a nitwit in my first life that I kept attacking not a real bird (an annoying canary called Babe) but its shadow! I broke my nails against the wall daily. Imbecile! It embarrasses me to even think about it. Thankfully, we come out wiser in each life and by the seventh, we really do honor to our place in the food chain. We are no longer pupils but, rather, we become instructors. Of course, someone not open to new learning can expect nothing from us. As is well known, you can only learn what, deep down, you already know.
As you must realize, in the course of my six previous lives, I had been through hell and high water. Apprenticeship is no mean feat. In the hovels of destitute blacks of New Orleans I learned that love is more nourishing even than fresh fish, in Venice during the plague I learned to say goodbye to everything I called my own, in the yard of a juvenile correctional facility, I saw how much injustice is to be found inside justice. Pain—my own and that of others—made my fur molt. I’ve lost one eye and all of my self-respect over half a rotten sea bream. I sacrificed half an ear to learn the true meaning of the popular saying “getting licked aside, we owed it to ourselves to fight.” Obviously, I passed all tests with flying colors, because my sixth life landed me at London’s National Library, if you don’t mind. This was the equivalent of a jackpot in the karmic lotto. This was the sweet life, my dears, tailor-made for a culture vulture like myself. You can’t possibly imagine the things I picked up for seventeen whole years pretending to be fast asleep on the reading tables, under the comfy warmth of the green lamps. Yes, I turned into a bookworm, my claws grew blunt and my teeth could no longer have sliced through live flesh but, in return, I gained the universe. (Credo Conclusively Proven and Absolute—Henceforth Meow No. 1234: You can’t ever have it all. Not to be taken as self-evident, except by the obtuse.) I do declare
that I would again choose the gift of knowledge a thousand times over. I suppose your god disagrees, but for myself, I side with Adam and Eve’s daring. I am not saying that knowledge is a passport to paradise, but ignorance is surely hell.
I witnessed the eyes of thousands of readers sparkle as they leafed through the so-called books. I understood how humans, such silly and self-preoccupied animals, have wrested and maintained control over our planet: instead of transporting what they learned from body to body and mouth to mouth, they encased it in paper boats and sent those off to the four corners. Now, how brilliant is that? Einstein may be a bloated corpse by now, but he is still wandering about, analyzing his theories. And I swear to the tasty ocean shrimp, it’s like he’s lounging right there on the sofa and the two of you are chatting away for all you’re worth.
I’m telling you, I adored those containers of human knowledge, got addicted to their smell and decoded their hieroglyphs, gladly paying the price in hard work. It was through them that I strolled on the Red Planet and counted its rings one by one. I learned the bouillabaisse recipe à la mode de Marseilles. I heard the shamans of the Mexican desert talk about the plant of power, Datura (Meow No. 3678: Off the record, blithe Westerners, I wouldn’t recommend trying it. Power requires power and you don’t have it. You would be doing yourselves grievous harm.)
Why cosmic fate should have sent me to complete my apprenticeship on this earth as the offspring of a hideous alley cat, I had no idea. Why my first sense impression should be the azaleas of the cat-loving madam Sweetie, I knew not. All I knew was that there was a reason. It was up to me to solve the riddle. Which meant I needed to be tuned in with eyes and ears wide open. Thankfully, I was a living testament to patience and persistence. I would suckle the unspeakable mother and then retire for hours on end to a strategic position behind the bushiest bush. I observed carefully. I diligently searched. Unfortunately, Madam Sweetie’s garden wasn’t Hyde Park or even your average neighborhood commons. Nicely turned out, well-kept lawn, flowerbeds and all that sort of thing, but, my dears, the place was deserted. Few came into that place and few came out. How on earth was the Ideal Parent pageant I had in mind going to happen? The truth is that, despite my inherent optimism, I was close to despairing for good and to attempting a move to a more suitable observation point, when, finally, the heavens (i.e. the garden gate) opened and in they walked!
MY FUTURE FAMILY (AND OTHER ANIMALS)
He was Sweetie’s one and only son—I knew it because the sweetness in her greetings would cause a diabetic to drop dead on the spot. I swear she gazed at him like Michelangelo would at his David. The young Mr. Ziggy was tall and lean (so lean, as a matter of fact, that I became concerned. Might there be a food shortage at their place? To check!) and the perfect gentleman. He spoke in a low voice, quietly and precisely—he would be a great success on radio. A man of internal combustion. He sat in his armchair and only got up when he needed to help his father carry a cooking grill. She, on the other hand, was also tall, but thankfully well padded, so, no need to fear a food shortage. (Next fear—she wouldn’t be eating all there was and not sharing, would she? To check.) The Damsel in question wasn’t merely the external combustion type. By the ocean shrimp, she wouldn’t sit still, she was a live spinning top. You know the kind—one of those aficionados of the superlative, smoking with both hands, speaking in tongues, laughing up a storm and crying a river. OMG, the cyclone and its eye, I thought, with them barely settled on the straw furniture set up on the lawn. I liked it!
As it turned out, this was yet another of their traditional August evening family barbecues. The tables were laid out, the beers were set to cooling, the meats had been marinating since morning. Mr. Jean, Sweetie’s husband since time immemorial, was a natural with all things manual. He was a great tinkerer. Hot-water heating, pipes, watering systems, broken roof tiles, insulations, he could handle it all and handle it well. Above all else, though, his hands were partial to the grill. On that fateful day, then, he was organizing his much beloved cholesterol festival. Irresistible, yummy cholesterol hiding inside frankfurters and ribs and hams and hamburgers. The smell was making me swoon—it is a well-known fact that us felines need protein, a great deal of it. You can keep the courgettes and the tomatoes all to your healthy self, my vegetarian friends. We go after meat, whether red or white, and that is that. As such, we worship the Jeans of this world. If I could, I’d climb and park myself around his neck and be his fur collar for life. But I couldn’t. I was all of six inches and still undercover. My mission took precedence.
So, then, I eavesdropped, my ears pricked to full capacity. Allow me to clarify. Not to hurt your feelings, but our hearing is a lot better than yours. We register differences of 1/5 and 1/10 in tone, whereas your rudimentary ear makes do with ¼. Truth be told, the snow-whites among us have a certain ear deficiency. Some of us are stone deaf, others half-deaf. But where I am concerned, there’s no need for alarm. A grey mark over my left eye, the only blemish in my otherwise perfect whiteness, was testimony that my hearing was over twice as good as normal. I heard my personal god, Mr. Jean, complain about the inadequacy of the available lemons, I heard Sweetie pressuring everyone to have more cheese pie and, finally, I heard the visiting couple from the northern suburbs talk about books. Mind you, not books they had read but ones they had written! Hallelujah! Have the heavens rained breathing, living writers on my lawn?! I stretched out my ears like satellite dishes and distinctly heard the approaching footsteps of my destiny. That’s right, that’s what these folks were. Alright, my dears, don’t get overexcited, they were no Burroughs or Plath. They had each recently published a book with children’s stories and were congratulating each other over that. But that wasn’t to be frowned on, either. I was no snob. This was most definitely better than nothing.
My Perfect Whiteness had never chanced upon a writer, in any of my lives. Just upon their books, was all. What kind of a job this was, how one went about it, I had no idea. On first sight, it did look like it served its purpose. My housemates-to-be (if you don’t mind me jumping the gun here) evidently had time to spare, seeing they were parked on that lawn for 6-7 hours in high spirits, commenting on this and that and nibbling away at everything—of which there was an abundance, since they left at least five huge steaks completely unmolested. To be sure, there was the fear that they might belong to that category of intimidating writers who make up phrases like “the unbridled subjectivity of existence signifies the end of subjectivity,” but I was determined to risk it.
This is your cue, I thought to myself. Luck helps the daring! I gave my fur the once-over, I carefully licked my hands, feet and tail, I put on my “gorgeous but ill-starred orphan” expression and I came out to adopt them. As I am no novice, I went straight for the most challenging target: Her.
SHE WAS A WOMAN WITH A PAST . . .
. . . but I wasn’t going to let her past deprive me of my future. I may have easily fit in the palm of your hand, but I still had a few tricks up my sleeve (Meow No. 4567: Don’t let yourselves be taken in by sniveling, my dears. No one is stronger than those who pose as weak.) Well, then, the first thing that Madam Sweetie announced while serving five different kinds of meat, spinach, and cheese pies, quiches Lorraine and potato salad with homemade mayonnaise as hor d’oeuvres, was that behind the azalea bush a cat (that must have been my mother) a very ugly looking one (most certainly my mother) had given birth to a batch of kittens. (A batch? How dismissive is that, especially when madam hadn’t even laid eyes on me!?) The Damsel sprang to her feet but Sweetie held her back. “No-no-no, you mustn’t go near that fiend,” she admonished. “I take her food because I feel sorry for her, with her new litter and everything, and she hisses at me. If you touch one of the kittens she’ll tear you to shreds!”
The Damsel sat back down and reached for a cheese pie. Oh hell, I swore under my breath. Damned gossip. Can you imagine her coming over to investigate the bushes? Do you realize what a glamorous
impression my perfect whiteness would make, surrounded by three of nature’s monstrosities? (Meow No. 987: The perception of reality is comparative. Dear Hephaestus, you mustn’t go out in public next to Adonis, it shoots your chances down in flames.)
And then, at last, began the flow of valuable information. It was disclosed that the Damsel had never much liked cats. (But why, you nincompoop?) She always wanted a dog. (Oh dear! Please say you’re not a petty tyrant looking for subjects!) But years ago, a cousin pretty much tricked her into taking a male striped kitten of unsurpassable charm for a week, for a month, “only temporarily until we find someone,” in other words, for good. The infant was christened Zooey from the character in that novel by Salinger, a mysterious American Buddhist Jewish writer who lived as a hermit for fifty-five years driven by his fear of becoming well-known, with the result that he became even better known. (Meow No. 8643: Nothing worse than the fear of fear itself.)
At first, their relationship was the pits. The Damsel, prime minister and sole resident of her universe since forever, was at that time going through an “I-Don’t-Give-a-Hoot” phase. She used the phrase as ammunition against all and sundry (parents, siblings, friends, boyfriends, colleagues, fellow passengers on the bus asking her to move forward a tiny bit), including the perfectly blameless. For his part, Zooey—I surmise in his second or third life—who sniveled all day and all night long to get her attention, merely managed to get on her nerves. It isn’t hard for me to sympathize. Small wonder he couldn’t fathom how he’d been expelled from the comfort of the cat-loving cousin’s place and found himself in the mean apartment of this ice-cold maiden. Why must he hang from the tresses of the bedspread, trying to climb like a mountaineer up the Himalayas of her bed? Was he not entitled to a few inches atop the eiderdown? She said it was unhygienic. What the hell? He was not a slimy troll, he was just a baby with a little pink nose. Mind you, the word baby alone was enough to give the Damsel an allergic reaction. “The weight!” she intoned. “The responsibility!” “You aren’t even free to die, if you’re a parent!” “Who wants the commitment hanging over one’s head?” Well, lady, you do have a touchy head and one that is easily breakable, too, it seems to me.