My Cat Yugoslavia

by Pajtim Statovci

  Bajram reached out a steady hand and escorted me to the bedroom door. To my surprise, he was the one to show me into our shared bedroom instead of his mother. He had doubtless demanded to have it like this. After the anointment, the groom usually waited at the front door with his back to it until his bride joined him there. I stole a quick peek at Bajram before taking another step. He looked arrogant, as though he was enjoying the situation and the attention to the full.

  The first things I noticed as he opened the door were the red curtains that made the room look dark and dingy, almost threatening against the light. The view from the window gave, exceptionally, into the garden. On the floor was a red rug, which had clearly been selected to go with the red bedspread. The wardrobe was made of dark wood, as was the bed and the tables placed flush against it. The ladies’ dresser was from the same series. It was a typical showroom: the furnishings had all been bought at once, no doubt directly from a furniture-shop display window.

  Everything betrayed the fact that lots of money had been spent on this wedding: both outside and inside the house was the smell of fresh paint, the aroma of wood and varnish would linger on the furniture for a long while yet, and the kitchen cabinets looked and smelled new and untouched.

  Eventually Bajram asked whether I liked the room and the items he had bought for me, the countless shades of red and the view from the window complete with the fully grown pear trees in the garden behind the house, the field behind them, the dusty pathway between them, and the cluster of mountains behind it all. He wanted to know this instant, he said. Tell me what you think of everything. I’ve bought you vast amounts of possessions. This is all for you, he said and groped at the curtains. I looked at Bajram, nodded, and sat down on the bed.

  “Quickly,” he urged me after a moment.

  “It’s good.”

  I asked him where he had put the clothes we had brought here, as I had slipped a small box of caramels into one of the bags. Bajram shouted to his mother, who ordered the girls swarming around the house to fetch the bags that had been taken up to the top floor.

  Once I had clasped a small bag of caramels in my hand, we stepped outside again.

  The wedding guests had formed rows a few yards apart and stood waiting for the moment when the bride’s veil was lifted and her face revealed to the crowd.

  Almost without noticing it I took Bajram by the hand. He had bought me enough jewelry to last a lifetime and chosen me a red bedroom and golden earrings.

  Then Bajram’s father held a sweet little boy in front of me, his grandson. I noticed that the boy smiled at me cautiously, embarrassed that everybody was watching him. I wanted to smile back at him but I was expected to look serious. I crouched down to the boy’s level, clasped his hand between my palms, and passed him the bag of caramels. It was the least I could do, because what he was about to do next would bring good luck and make me give birth to lots of sons.

  “Thank you,” said the boy.

  Bajram’s father held the boy up so that he could carefully lift the first layer of my veil above my head. Those with keen sight could already make out the contours of my face. Many of the guests held their breath and squinted to see better. I closed my eyes. My red-lacquered nails gingerly made their way up toward my chest. The boy took hold of the second layer of fabric and lifted it even more slowly than the first one.

  Now everything was visible: my neck, chin, and lips, my nose, eyes, brow, and hair.

  For a moment everyone was silent. Then the women began to clap and the men to whistle. A moment later I slipped both thumbs beneath my necklaces and lifted them up for all to see. Then I lifted my wrists into the air. The gold glinted like glaring sunshine. And all this gold my husband has bought for me.

  At this the assembled guests began to rejoice, to sing and play all the louder. Bajram and I must have stood on the spot for at least half an hour. People looked at us, took photographs of us, and Bajram’s relatives began bringing me presents. They slid more jewelry on my fingers, round my wrists and neck, and stuck money in my veil. All the while I was gritting my teeth, trying to shut out the noise, trying not to look anyone in the eye.

  After that the temenet began. The men resumed banging the drums over their shoulders and the women again rattled their tambourines while singing me songs with words to which I was to pay close attention, for they contained tasks the bride was expected to carry out.

  If you like your mother-in-law,

  Go and embrace her.

  If you like your father-in-law,

  Go and kiss his hand.

  And if you like your gold,

  Show it once again.

  I will be the perfect woman for him, I thought as I went about my tasks impeccably. Everything he wants, his wife shall give him. The whistles of unknown men and the clapping of the women and children showed that people liked what they saw—the bride was beautiful, her skin was unblemished, she had thick hair, full lips, and so much gold that it could have blinded them. I felt prettier than ever before, as though I had taken a microphone and walked across a vast stage, as though the people in front of me were groups of my admirers waiting for my song to begin, as though their claps were the flashes of cameras taking my photograph.

  And then I heard it.

  Somewhere. The meow of a cat.

  9

  A few weeks later I found myself sleeping on the floor in the hallway. The cat said the snake stank and I stank because I handled the snake, so he wanted to sleep in my bed without me. Either that or I’m leaving, he threatened, and at that moment I realized there was plenty of room for me to sleep in the hallway.

  I asked my employer if I could do some overtime and extra shifts at night and during the weekends because the cat wanted more space to itself, he asked for a new computer to edit his short films, a larger litter box to relieve himself, and expensive organic food.

  And he ate so much that he soon grew into a giant. When he leaped onto my king-size bed, which we had once shared without any problems, the duvet and pillows bounced up to the ceiling and the bedsprings almost touched the floor, which trembled as he plodded around the apartment, his paws now as big as a bear’s.

  When I came home from work, the cat was sitting in the middle of the bed eating pistachio nuts (I was naturally expected to pick up the shells he had spat and strewn across the floor) and scratching his coat so frantically that every corner of the apartment was filled with dander and hair. He left crumbs at the bottom of bags of chips and cookies, and these spilled out over the bed each time he shifted position or went to the litter box, and he let out reeking farts and belched grotesquely.

  The cat didn’t care that my books were all arranged by language group in alphabetical order or that I kept my deodorant and bottles of aftershave in a pedantic, precise row. I wanted to ask him whether putting things back where he found them could really be so difficult.

  If I’d known taking in a cat could be so expensive, I might have given it a second thought.

  —

  In June the cat received a thin letter from the university and I received a thick one. I’d hoped it might have been the other way round or that I could have given up my place and allowed the cat to take it instead.

  You don’t deserve it, he began. You’re just fooling around. You take, you steal, you lie. You probably cheated for all I know. Why else would you hide this from me?

  At first I thought the cat simply wanted to let off steam, to get over the bitter taste of being proved wrong, but he continued: They’re only taking you because you’re an immigrant. There are quotas for people like you, though they’ll never admit it. A bit of color, something exotic, you know, something different. How tragic. You’re so pathetic I never want to see you again. I can’t be with someone who doesn’t even realize he’s being used.

  “Don’t end things like this,” I begged him.

  “Oh, I will,” he said once and for all. “Because you know what?”

  “What?”

 
“I hate immigrants,” he growled. “Have you any idea how much you’ve received in this country? How many opportunities you’ve been given?”

  We started arguing at the top of our voices. I sat down at the table and rested my head against the palm of my hand. The cat was sprawled on the sofa, staring at me sourly.

  I replied firmly that I had been given just as many opportunities as everybody else. The cat burst into laughter. Dear, oh dear, he snapped in faux compassion.

  “I never thought I hated all immigrants, but apparently I was wrong. And I never thought I hated you, but it turns out I hate you most of all,” he snarled.

  He suddenly jumped down from the sofa and up onto the table. He threw everything from the tabletop and grabbed my throat, and pressed his paws so tightly that they almost stopped the blood circulating in my body. He grimaced, and now for the first time I saw his full set of teeth. Four of them were as sharp as ice picks.

  “You’ve been lying to me, haven’t you?” the cat asked and tightened his grip further.

  I placed my hands on top of his paws and tried to prize his claws open, but they were so hard and powerful that it felt as though they were made of metal.

  “For your information, I’ve looked up the names of your brothers and sisters on the Internet. And guess what? There are no such people by those names! None whatsoever! I even called the magistrate’s office, for Christ’s sake, and pretended to be a fucking onomastics researcher!”

  The cat laid one of his paws across my chin and gripped. He smirked at me. Well? What do you say to that? he asked, though he knew it was impossible for me to speak because my face had swollen up, the color of blood. I could feel the bulging veins in my forehead and sensed the blood draining from my body, the pressure in my head increasing.

  When I didn’t answer his questions, the cat placed his hind legs on the edge of the table and pushed. Fucking poof. My chair tilted backward and I went with it. The ceiling and the curtains came slowly into sight behind the cat’s ferocious grimace, and eventually the whole room seemed to somersault around me. I fell to the floor like a series of fragile vases, my shoulder crashed into the edge of the sofa, and the chair’s wooden backrest snapped in two.

  The cat slid his hind legs beneath a kitchen knife resting on the table, rose up on his hind legs, lifting one of them so that the knife flew into the air and almost hit the ceiling. As the knife was on its way down again the cat grabbed it with one of his front paws and began adroitly spinning it in the air. All the while he looked at me unblinkingly; he didn’t even have to look at the knife, which he whirled in his paws like a magician’s wand. His eyes were like sharp-edged triangles, and his tensed muscles made his whole upper body appear swollen.

  Then he readied himself. He stood up, the knife in his paw, as if in slow motion, and spun around like a figure skater practicing a pirouette. The knife followed him like a thin, dazzling strip of light, and his bulging stomach followed the rest of his body like a half-empty balloon—that’s how fast he was spinning, like a samurai.

  Finally, he pounced on me. His paws landed beneath my arms and the whole floor shook, the windows too. In a flash he grabbed my chin, the claws jutting from his paws scratching my skin. He pressed one of his paws against my throat, and I could feel the thin blade of the knife, how delicately it would slit my throat, like a fresh sheet of printing paper. I’ll do it, the cat threatened me, his face recoiling into a ferocious snarl. Tell me the truth or I’ll fucking do it, you’ll bleed to death, he seethed between his tightened lips and pressed the knife deeper still, so much so that I sensed my jugular would soon give way under the pressure.

  Just then the snake slithered out from behind the sofa and the cat turned his keen eyes to look at it. Hm. His ears pricked up. He hissed at the snake and eased his grip on my throat. The snake hissed back at him and edged closer, now only a few steps away from us. It wrapped itself into a bundle like a pile of small discuses. I tried to stretch a hand toward it and pull it closer, to wrap it round the cat’s throat and ask it to strangle the cat with all its strength, but I couldn’t reach it.

  When he saw what I was doing, the cat quickly raised the paw that had been resting on my chin and slapped it down again with such force that the air cracked as though someone had thrashed a slender whip. After that the cat dug his massive paw into the middle of my face, and at that point I fainted.

  When I came to a moment later, the cat and the snake were sizing each other up. The toppled chair, my body, the wall, and the sofa formed a battleground in which they were about to fight it out. The snake was curled up and hissing and the cat had risen up on his hind legs and seemed to widen in all directions, standing as tall as he could; his hairy stomach sagged so much that it was almost touching the floor. And he hissed too; they sounded almost identical.

  The cat’s claws were fully extended from his paws and he began to swing the knife around, to hit and scratch the air. He switched his body weight from one leg to the other like a boxer and held out his other paw as if to taunt the snake and make it move closer. Huyaa, he shouted to assist a sudden curving kick with his back leg, and his paw came down on the snake’s bouncy head with a slap.

  The snake’s head flew backward in a beautiful arc like a jig cast on a fishing line, but it quickly recovered from the blow and curled up again. It attacked the cat a few times, trying to grab him with its jaws, but the cat was too fast and agile. He leaped onto the sofa, and from the sofa up to the windowsill. He climbed up the curtains, grabbed the lamp hanging from the ceiling, and swung himself on top of the fridge, where he hurled the knife at the snake but missed.

  Then the cat made a mistake by jumping from the top of the fridge across the room to the table. Midway through the cat’s graceful flight through the air the snake stretched itself up as far as it could, its whole body standing straight for a moment, and with the symmetrical patterns on its skin it looked almost like a ruler. Its jaws sank into the cat’s furry side.

  Before I even realized what was happening the snake had wrapped itself round the cat three times. The cat was completely buried within the snake. His head popped out in one spot like a man sinking in quicksand. The cat looked exactly the same as I had only a moment ago. Red veins started appearing in his narrow irises, and he was making the squeakiest sound in the world. Mhhm, he whimpered.

  The cat tried to open his mouth and straighten his ears, to rub his cheeks and tweak his whiskers, but his movements only made the snake constrict even tighter.

  I saw a tear trickle from the corner of his eye, then another. Save me, his tears seemed to beg me. I heard what he was thinking and I began to wonder whether the cat deserved to live or die.

  I grabbed blindly at the cluster formed by the snake and the cat and pulled it between my legs. The snake instantly began to hiss. I took it by the chin and squeezed, but still its grip would not let up. I tried scratching its skin with my nails but even that didn’t cause the slightest reaction.

  The cat’s eyes began to close. I could almost see that its heart would soon stop beating altogether, almost feel its organ functions slowing down, sense the blood stop flowing to its head and limbs.

  I stood up, walked over to the tap, ran the water until it was ice-cold, and picked up a tall glass from the kitchen counter. I waited a short while without looking behind me, hoping the cat would hold out for a moment. Once the water was cold enough I filled the glass and hurled the water over the snake. It turned its head and seethed, and the cat gasped for breath as though he had been under water for many minutes. The snake was still tightly locked round the cat but had loosened its grip a little.

  I threw several glasses of water over it; only then did it straighten its body out, release the cat, and slither back beneath the sofa, leaving the injured cat and a trail of water behind it.

  The cat’s fur gleamed from the exertion. He looked newly born, his limbs squashed against his body as though they had been broken and twisted out of place. He took a few shallow breat
hs, as though he wasn’t sure of the world around him or of the fact that he was still alive. I knelt down beside him and stroked his little head.

  “Are you all right?”

  The cat lifted his head, bewildered, and looked up. Ugh, was all he could muster.

  Minutes passed before he was able to react to anything. He’d forgotten my question; he probably hadn’t even heard it properly or noticed that I’d been stroking and massaging his battered body. After a short while he began to stretch his limbs back into their normal positions, to breathe more heavily.

  “I’m sorry,” I said.

  The cat waited for a moment, then his eyes flew open, and they had never seemed as wide and as round as right now.

  “What the fuck is this?” the cat almost whispered.

  “I’m sorry,” I repeated.

  The cat slowly began to haul himself up, still without really comprehending what I was saying to him. After struggling to his feet he staggered around like a drunkard, supporting himself against the walls and chairs, and gripped his sides because his ribs were broken. As he walked out of the room he coughed and spat blood on the floor. I followed him.

  “Don’t speak to me,” he said cuttingly and began panting. “Don’t say a fucking word.”

  Nobody will ever love you, he said once his breathing had steadied. And all I saw was his furry back; I could no longer see his face at all.

  At this the cat wrapped a sweater round himself, held it against his bleeding elbow. Nobody, he repeated and pressed his chin against his shoulder, giving me a glimpse of his eyes, now white again, his dashingly handsome profile, and pushed his doddery paws into his shoes. You’re going to die lonely, alone and depressed, he said and opened the door. And you deserve every bit of it. Wog.