by Lena Divani
I, in any event, put all selfishness aside and did my bit as a proper partner. I made sure I followed her everywhere so she could find me there as soon as she needed me. I was under the impression that my intentions were perfectly transparent. I am your knight, Damsel, I would say, swishing my tail, you can count on me. Unfortunately she proved unteachable. She kept looking at me puzzled and every so often she got exasperated and wondered out loud, “Zach, why are you following me around all the time? Have you lost your marbles?”
I didn’t give up, of that you can be sure. I persisted. I stalked. The most appropriate time was usually in the dark of night, when there weren’t any “guests,” as she used to lie on the couch to watch a series she downloaded from the Internet. Then, when she was more susceptible, so to speak, I would gradually start putting my plan into action. First I jumped on the couch next to her, then inched closer till we were touching, then, if she let me, I would climb into her arms. The greatest obstacle in my mission, I must note, was her clothes. The more color the Damsel offloaded onto the furniture and walls, the more she subtracted from her wardrobe. It was like a throng of black crows was nesting in her closet: black skirts, black dresses, black coats, black bags . . . She had the dress sense of an existentialist widow. Lord have mercy! You might think that it was handy, her being all black, me being all white, a fetching combination, right? Not so! I molted terribly you see, against the black background, to the point where she was beside herself with exasperation. She would throw me off her as if I were a leech sucking up her lifeblood, yelling, “Oh, no, not again, Zach, you made a right mess of me again, I can’t take this anymore, now how am I to go out with your dirty hairs all over me?” (How can you use that tone of voice with me, madam? You forget that I am the cat of divorced parents?)
As you realize, the first roadblock I had to skirt was the wardrobe. If the clothes weren’t black, if they weren’t freshly laundered, if they weren’t overly delicate, if they weren’t her favorite, then she would let me snuggle in her arms. Once there, I lay low and quietly waited for a scene with suspense, at which point I took the opportunity of strategically placing myself under her hand, so she would stroke me. Have you not even a shred of dignity, you might ask. No respect for your Perfect Whiteness? Well, the answer is negative, my dears. I really do think dignity is overrated. I was determined to do whatever it took, to get the love I deserved. If she were ice, I would light a fire to melt her. If she were a rock, I would turn into a wave to erode her. If she forgot to reach her hand out and stroke me, I put my head under her hand so she’d be embarrassed at allowing me to embarrass myself to get one small caress. If I were Leonard Cohen, I would sing I’m Your Cat to her. In short, I would do anything that was necessary to teach her love, which, as has been aptly put, endures everything and so on and so forth.
And I was indeed gaining ground. Not a whole lot, a mere inch at a time. Mostly, it was enough for me. That’s something, I could console myself. Gradually, the citadel will fall. Except sometimes I got disheartened. Especially when we had visitors around, I would start feeling low. Don’t misunderstand me, I was sociable to a fault. It’s common knowledge that cats don’t normally trust new people. As soon as a stranger comes into the house, they are alarmed. They run and hide under beds and sofas. I, on the other hand, was the exact opposite. The minute anyone was through the door, I went all out to welcome them, sniff them, roll over for them and generally be as winsome as I knew how to. I did love them all and they loved me back. (“Just look at our Zach the Socialite, turning it on again,” the Damsel would say, laughing.) I even assaulted with friendly intent a crew from the electricity company who were over to fix some wiring. I was at my happiest going from one pair of arms to the next all night long, like a courtesan. But when she tried to get a show out of me against my will, I was livid. It is next to unthinkable, what hoops she made me jump through. She would drag me on the ground by my front legs calling, “There’s my good fatso, there’s my Zach the Mop, plenty of dust around here for you to be useful.” I obliged her. She grabbed me by the legs and rotated me as if I were a Ferris wheel. I put up with it. Then she would hurl me up to a height for the spectacle-loving audience to admire my dexterity in landing on all fours. It’s true we have a knack for doing that. Even if you drop us from the fourth floor, we are flexible enough to set ourselves right so as to land on our paws, whose thickness absorbs the impact. You would break every bone in your body, but not us. What of it, though? Was it right for her to set me up as the party clown and acrobat so she could get a laugh out of her guests? Still, what was I to do? I suffered everything with a happy face. (Love endures everything and so on.)
The worst though, the one that hurt my feelings, was when she made me do the trick of stealing a caress for her friends to marvel at my stealth and slyness. “Come, my Zach, there, see, I’m just letting my hand dangle, come and stick your head underneath and get it stroked.” I know what you’re going to say. Why did I do it? Why didn’t I walk off to make a point, to insult her in front of everyone? The answer, my dears, is simple. Life is too short. (Meow No. 777: You mustn’t let any opportunity to be stroked go to waste. It’s a sinful waste to die unstroked.)
Now that I see it all from a distance, I can put it into words: She was so absorbed in her readings, her writings, her friends, her hatreds and her passions—her ego in short—that it was as if I didn’t count. She was terribly bothered by my hairs everywhere. No matter how I tried to camouflage them, they were white and long; you couldn’t miss them from a mile away. Especially every spring and at the beginning of summer, in her irritation, she used to call me “the meandering hair loss.” She also took objection to my habit of chewing up the flowers she was sent by her various and sundry love interests. Yet I found those flowers annoying. I knew how things went—first the bouquet appears, then its enamored sender. No, thank you, I will not allow any such liberties to be taken on my home ground.
Anything I did, really, seemed to her strange—as in weird. And I really need to ask, my dears. Hundreds of books had been through her hands, why did she never take the trouble to read a manual of practical cat rearing so she could get her bearings? Why did she come after me, hurling slippers every time I scratched my nails on some surface? What did she expect me to do? Like our forefathers of old, we, too, need to trim and sharpen our claws by dragging them across a hard surface. Rather than wielding rifles and bazookas, Damsel, we have these as our armaments. I looked for hard surfaces in the house and found them on the living room table, the kitchen chairs and the sofa on the veranda. Those were what I came across, so those were what I used for my necessary pedicure. The red leather armchair wasn’t a hard surface as such but it was so pretty that I ripped it to shreds to see what was further inside. (How right they are when they say curiosity killed the cat! The Damsel, who was very partial to her chair, gave me chase with a hiking boot in her hand, outraged. Do you have any idea what those boots weigh? Three kilograms apiece! I spent a week on alert under the bookshelf in the hall.)
On a different occasion, she came back home tired and found me in an admittedly original situation. I was in the middle of the living room floor which was bespattered with blood and feathers. There was blood on my fur, too, especially around the mouth and paws—Count Dracula in the flesh. The Damsel was flabbergasted. “What happened, Zach my darling?” she inquired with a tender concern never shown before. She must have thought I was the victim, you see, of some terrible attack. As soon, however, as she glimpsed the corpse of the unfortunate pigeon I had (almost) devoured, she went bonkers. She took to cleaning up the blood and feathers while simultaneously castigating me as if I were a freak of nature. She called me a vampire, a bloodthirsty monster, an incubus. For my part, I felt bad on the one hand and puzzled on the other. Had she completely forgotten I was a carnivore? Pigeons are our pork ribs, Damsel, it’s natural for us to hunt them. How would you like it if I called you a bloodthirsty monster next time you ordered a hambu
rger with large fries and extra mustard?
Her worst time by far was when I sprayed around the house as a way of pointing out that my time had come for a bit of sex. A point of clarification: I am deeply grateful, Damsel, that you didn’t hasten to turn me into a eunuch, only there are consequences, as you might well have been apprised, had you taken an interest. The effects of my incarceration in your penthouse monastery may have been decisive, I may well have lost my zing and my kinkiness, but I wasn’t entirely out of commission yet! Since there was no available female inside, I sprayed the sexy red armchair (the ripped one), the worn postman’s leather bag with her smell on it and the kitchen table which smelled of pork chops. I, too, had my rights in life, in love and inside this house, and seeing she wasn’t paying notice, my stink was my way of letting her know. “Get up, stand up, stand up for your rights,” as Bob Marley has it.
All of that, of course, was the exception rather than the rule. Basically, I was asexual. Once only, I recall, I saw from a distance a beautiful kindred Persian and felt a piercing stab in my heart. I was on the fifth-floor balcony and she was proudly walking in the street, unaware of my very existence. I silently whispered to her the verse of Baudelaire and let her walk out of my life forever:
A lightning flash . . . then night! Fleeting beauty
By whose glance I was suddenly reborn
Will I see you no more before eternity?
Damn it, here I go, getting all soppy. Isn’t there a soul to pass me a fried shrimp to make things alright?
LONELY PLANET
Yet nothing cast a shadow on our relationship more than her travels. I don’t mean to play innocent. As the Damsel said over and over again in her discussions with her friends that went on till dawn, you can know everything about a person within the first hour of meeting them—provided you want to. I can only second that. Even a blind man could have seen that first day on the lawn that she was incapable of staying put—she was coming and going like a spinning top, asking questions, looking around, wanting to have a poke at everything, including the nest of my misanthropic mother. I knew who I was heading for and, as I hope you recall, I went straight to her. I was asking for it, as the saying goes.
It was equally evident that: a) she wasn’t pining for company (the furry, four-legged variety, that is; she was fine with the two-legged kind); and, b) she was not willing to take on responsibilities. I went and adopted her despite all that, brave as a Greek and determined to fulfill my mission. Still, all things have a limit, my dears. How the devil am I to fulfill the mission of training someone when that someone is away all the time? Via teleconference? I’m a cat, not a lecturer at Open University. In addition, how on earth am I supposed to spend my entire time just playing with my tail and tearing up the (already shredded) red armchair?
In actual fact, that issue came up at the same time as the color explosion in our home. As long as we lived with Ziggy, a sworn cat lover, everything that concerned my good self was going just fine. Ziggy grounded her. He would stand up to her. He kept her travels in check. As soon, however, as my personal benefactor packed his suitcase and left the house, she also packed hers and was scarcely to be seen ever since! Alright, I’m exaggerating, I did see her, though only for as long as it took her to organize the next trip. She behaved like a kid whose parents are away, drunk on the sudden freedom.
First off, there were the professional trips. In addition to being a writer she was a historian, and needed to attend historical conferences—fine, I got that. Work is work, and there were bills to pay. My tin food was strictly gourmet and on the pricy side. (Sorry kiddos in Africa but, seriously, does anyone believe that if I starve, all of a sudden there will be paella raining down from the sky on your village?) Apart, however, from being a historian, she was a writer, which meant, she said, that she had to travel to her book presentations in case some overseas agent got interested enough to launch her international career. (Ha!) Being generous at heart, I filed this, too, in a work context—although what actually took place was somewhat different: The touring Greek writers ate and drank at the alehouses of Frankfurt and the bars of Berlin, while the potential customers were being courteously indifferent.
The worst of all, however, the most needless and—alas!—the longest in duration, were the mountaineering trips. I’m no dark, brooding type, but I confess I loathed with every fiber of my being those enthusiasts who abandoned their loved ones on festive days, in order to go climb the world’s mountains and outcrops, for no good reason. They rushed like lunatics to the most improbable spots on the planet just so they could have a rough time. Vietnam, New Zealand, Ethiopia, Venezuela are but a few I could mention. By the ocean shrimp, I felt like keeling over and dying every time I saw the hated red backpack coming down from the loft along with the batons, the fleece outfit and the rainproof but breathable Gore-Tex membranes. I used to climb on the pack at night and chew the braces that kept the water canteen attached. Once I peed inside the sleeping bag. It was all in vain. Nothing ever stopped her.
The one occasion when I wouldn’t dream of whining was whenever I heard she was off to Berlin. First of all, that was the home city of my good pal Zach H(uman). He was a sweetheart like me, smart as anything, like me, a fan of Emmanuel Roides like me, adorable like me, wise like me and last but not least, a Zach like me! Unfortunately we never did meet—he never travelled to Athens, I never travelled to Berlin (or anywhere else for that matter); it was one of those modern, long distance relationships. Besides, according to Zach H., you didn’t need to be thick as thieves in order to prove your love. All the same, we did see each other on a daily basis: he had put up a most photogenic portrait of me in the collection of his friends’ pictures in his kitchen and I spent hours contemplating his photograph which the Damsel had on the second shelf in her library. Most importantly, he always asked after me, laughed at my heroics and excused my antics. So, it made good sense to consent to her visits to him.
To be sure, there was one trip to Berlin which I never did forgive her. A few days before her scheduled flight, she had become involved in a fiery affair with Beefcake. On the outside, Beefcake seemed to have it all: he was kind, he was tall, he was handsome, he was talented. Still, as it turned out, he was a bit short in self-confidence. The day the Damsel was due to leave he had an attack of insecurity. I could tell that he was suddenly not too sure about where things between them were heading. Did they have a relationship or didn’t they? Could it all have been a momentary lapse? So, in the blink of an eye, he decided to take me hostage to make sure that the Damsel would have to go and see him on her return. (The joke was that a blind man could see the Damsel was dying to have something long-term with him. But, this is a point I have made repeatedly: My dears, you are deafer than the deaf and blinder than the blind.
The only one who took stock of his dark scheme was me. The Damsel was far too busy admiring his chiseled torso. The truth is I did have a sort of a gift—the Damsel used to mock me, saying I had scanners for eyes. My scanners, then, started sounding the alarm when I heard the first—seemingly innocent—line:
He: “You are leaving tomorrow morning?” (In a horrified tone.) “And where will you leave your charge?” (In a tone that affected interest.) You mustn’t hasten to think me prejudiced: That man had been in our house for twenty-four hours and hadn’t once reached down to pet me!
The Damsel smiled at him tenderly. She thought he had a bleeding heart for me. She was that far gone.
SHE: “Right here. Zach is fine with that.” (Madam, it is you who says so, nobody else.)
HE: “You mean to say you just drop him like that, the poor thing, and disappear for a week?” (As you surmise, intelligent readers, Beefcake is referring to himself. For my good self, he couldn’t care less.)
SHE: “Oh, come now. It’s no big deal. I go away all the time. Zach is perfectly used to it.” (Again, madam, it is only you who says so.)
HE: “And who is g
oing to feed him?” (What do you care, pal?)
SHE: “Christina.” (Who else? My adopted mommy. The mother of the weak and the dispossessed. You get my drift, I’ll leave it here.)
HE: “Do you want me to take the poor darling home with me, so he’s not all alone?”
The Damsel smiles inanely, moved by this heartfelt kindness. Her eyes shine. She gives him a grateful kiss. She knows the kind of burden an animal can be in a house. Especially an animal with long white hairs and extreme views on the love that endures all things and so on and so forth.
SHE: “You think?” (Imagine this “You think?” served up with a disgusting dose of coquettishness, which annoyed me no end. As if watching them salivate all over each other wasn’t enough, I was now about to be turned into their third wheel?)