All My Cats Read online

  I sat on the bench while my friend snapped the most charming pictures, and he never knew, nor could he have known, everything that was going through my mind, through my entire body. I already knew that from then on, without ever seeing the bloody mail sack again, or splitting wood with that axe, or even looking at my hands, I would have to live with constant guilt and that, apart from that enormous winter cat, those kittens, those six kittens, would haunt me like a bad conscience whenever I’d lie awake toward morning, unable to sleep. What did it avail me that those cats, Blackie and the one as yet without a name, regaled me with affection? It only intensified my shame and guilt. When they were still far off, they would welcome me with those penetrating looks of adoration. They loved me utterly, and when I’d lean over the basket and offer them my hand, they’d go into a swoon, salivating gently, so great was their affection for me. I was everything to them, the most beautiful thing they had ever seen. They even seemed to be fonder of me than those little transistor batteries of theirs, those four kittens I brought together for them, kittens that both mothers firmly believed to be their own. Further than that they could not think, whereas I thought about everything I had done, everything I did not have to do but did anyway. For more than forty years I have been constantly unsettled by sensory phenomena, and now, in the enclosed kitchen, I found myself unsettled by a strange sound, and when I went looking for the source of my irritation, I discovered a leaf caught in a spider’s web, fluttering against the windowpane. It was in this fragile state of mind that I had foolishly afforded myself the luxury of killing an emaciated cat in the winter woods, and now six kittens. I, who can hear the ticking of a watch wrapped in a scarf, had failed to weigh the consequences of what I had brought upon myself.

  4.

  Back then, I went to the movies in Semice, where they were showing Mr. Fellini’s La Dolce Vita. As soon as Steiner appeared –– a handsome man playing the Toccata and Fugue in D Minor –– and then when I saw his wife and children, I began to feel queasy, and when it came to the scene where the paparazzi shoot Mrs. Steiner with their cameras as she comes home from shopping, and when I saw those two children lying in their apartment, shot dead, and their father and murderer, Mr. Steiner, lying dead by his own hand in his armchair, I began to tremble and had to get out, so I pawed and clawed my way from the center of the row just to get away from there. Mr. Steiner had been as terrified as I was for the future of his children and he killed them just as I killed those kittens, and the stray cat that winter evening, except that I had foolishly decided to remain in this world, and not to take my leave of it, as foretold by Mařenka, who died and left behind the large handbag with the green handles in which my grown-up kittens would often play or sleep, a memento of her prophecy. And just as I had once suffered from chronic stomach pains, it was now my heart that ached, because my soul was sick, as was Dr. Steiner’s, or Raskolnikov’s, when he murdered those two old women, foolishly believing that it would mean no more than killing two human lice.

  One Sunday afternoon Blackie came down with a temperature. She jumped out of the basket where the kittens were and ran to me, shivering with the fever and I stroked her but she began to writhe in convulsions. At first, I wanted to put her back in the basket and take her straight to the vet in Říčany, but she clung to me, pressing herself against me, then lay down while I stroked her gently and she was so damp with sweat she looked as though I’d pulled her out of the river. Then my wife came and urged me to take Blackie to Říčany, but I felt Blackie would get over it and besides, if we took her by car now, she could go berserk and start clawing at us, because she was starting to become unhinged. The fever had addled her, and I was convinced that, as will happen to dogs, she had distemper and the disease had given her convulsions.

  And sure enough, Blackie stopped paying attention to me, and then she began clawing at me and I had to take a rag, and then a blanket, and hold her down. So violent were her convulsions that it was like trying to hold on to a live carp and I could feel that she was slippery with sweat.

  And so I held her down, pinned her to the floor and called out to her and swore to her that I was right there with her, but she howled and spat and hissed at me as though she’d discovered that it was me who’d killed her babies, that I was the guilty one, that my hands were steeped in blood, and that the hands she had once so loved now terrified her, and the realization of all that had driven her mad. The longer I held her down, the greater was my fear that, because she was so strong, if she slipped from my grasp, she would fling herself at me, so I pushed down harder and harder. Suddenly, something snapped, and she went limp. I was still on top of her, and when I removed the blanket I saw that she was dead. One terrible eye was still open, staring at me, and in that horrifying eye I could see everything I loathed about myself.

  5.

  The black-and-gray tabby, Renda, went missing. I patrolled the tree-lined roads, walked beside the brook and along the highway, searched the ditches, but I never found him. I fervently hoped the hunters had got him, or that he’d ended up under the tires of a car. But Renda had left, like his mother, Máca, the tabby who had whelped Renda and the others in my bed, and who loved me so much that when her kittens had grown up, she would come to check on me, to see if I were finally alone in the cottage. When her kittens appeared, with Renda leading the pack, she’d hiss at them and then give me a look of such hatred it kept me awake nights. Then she’d disappear, only to show up, twice more and then never again. She’d hiss at me, then run off, leaving me crushed, with a guilty conscience that would not go away, whether I was in the woods or in Prague. No matter where I slept, I’d wake up toward morning and a cloud would appear, a form of misty remorse that would gradually resolve itself into the shape of that cat, Máca, whose offspring I had treated in such bad faith that she couldn’t bear it and perished somewhere in the woods, over by the Míčeks’ place.

  Her son Renda, the charmer, made my life even more of a misery. It’s true I’d given him to a family whose black-and-gray tabby had just died, but they’d promised to bring him out to their cottage and that he’d be better off than ever before. Then they brought Renda back three months later and handed him over. The woman didn’t bother coming this time, just her son. But the moment I took Renda in my arms I knew he would become part of my destiny. He didn’t snuggle up to me as he used to, he wouldn’t let me cradle him or flip him over on his back, and he didn’t go limp with delight when I blew into the fur under his chin. When I finally set him down in the kitchen, his siblings greeted him like a complete stranger, as though he hadn’t been born here, as though he had never been the smartest and the handsomest tomcat in the house, Tomcat Renda, who would lick all his brothers and sisters clean, who refereed the meshugge Stunde, the crazy hour, who would lead his blood brothers and sisters across the bridge spanning the brook into the meadow, and who, when their spats and shenanigans got out of hand, would intervene and punish the guilty party who would then meekly submit because Renda was bigger than the others by a head.

  When they brought him back after three months, they told me he had howled for a whole month, and in the final week, he’d fallen silent and, as the young man who brought him back told me, he seemed determined to starve himself to death. Now that he’d been returned, he did eat, but he’d wait until the other cats had finished, and only then would he eat his food, and I watched to see if he would, as before, drink his milk in stages, pausing now and then to raise his head and look at me as if to thank me. But Renda knew I was watching him, he knew that he used to look at me and thank me every so often as he ate, but now he never once raised his head, and when he’d finished eating, he’d go outside for a while and then sit on the pump and gaze up at our window.

  Ever since they’d brought him back to us, listless and bedraggled, the other cats would sigh sweetly on the couch and the chairs while Renda, alone among them, would sit in the corner like an orphaned child and stare at me blankly. Sometimes he see
med to be trying to say something or to smile the way he used to, but the smile froze on his face and he’d sit there the whole evening, just staring at me. Whenever I’d try to pet him he’d close his eyes and recoil. It was unpleasant for him, as it had been for his mother when she’d come in to see if I were alone in the house, without those little terrors of hers.

  For the rest of the month Renda would sit in the corner every day and just look at me, and I could neither write anything nor do anything and all that time I would try to catch Renda looking at me the way he used to, back when each time our eyes would meet, he’d almost swoon, and even begin to drool, so moved was he when I noticed him, looked at him, talked to him, stroked him.

  But for a whole month after they returned him, limp as a bathroom towel, as a dishrag, I was unable to rekindle our affection. He could not forgive me, perhaps because in his eyes what I had done was too awful to forgive. As the days wore on my feeling of guilt intensified. I would pick Renda up and put him in bed with me, but not even that helped, because he’d just get up again, jump off the bed, and go back to sitting where he’d been and continue to stare at me accusingly, torturing me for condemning him to those three months in a Prague apartment.

  One day, when I arrived in Kersko, Renda didn’t show up with the other cats, and for several days, I felt an illusory sense of relief that his accusing eyes weren’t glaring at me from the corner of the kitchen. But I was still not sure Renda was no longer with us, so I went round the meadows and woodlots and walked along the main road, looking for his body. But as far as I could tell, he hadn’t been shot by hunters or run over by a car. I asked the neighbors, even those who lived some distance from me, whether they’d found a dead tabby cat. I went to the nearby villages, because hunters like to go there during the deer hunting season and I’d ask whether anyone had shot a tabby somewhere in Loskoty, by the stream in Olšiny, on the Deacon’s Road, or in Cihelná. I questioned the hunters about it in the pub as if I were interrogating crown witnesses, and watched them closely as they responded, but I was convinced they were telling the truth when they said they hadn’t shot a tomcat and that if they had, they’d have told me.

  So Renda vanished and I was relieved. But in a week, that cat began to haunt me, as his mother had, in the early morning hours. I’m not a sound sleeper, I get tangled up in the sheets and daybreak can’t come soon enough. I can hardly wait until five o’clock and it’s light enough for me to drive.

  That’s when Renda would appear to me, not as a puff of cloud or a thunderhead from which a cat’s head would emerge. Renda would appear toward morning like a bolt of lightning. Suddenly he’d be inside my head, and my head would swell to the size of the kitchen, then encompass my entire plot of land with the pines and the birch trees and the river. And there sat the tomcat, Renda, looking at me, just looking at me, and I would arraign myself, indict myself, and plead guilty to charges from which Renda had not absolved me and, as I finally realized, charges from which I could not absolve myself either.

  “Mr. Hrabal, three months –– an eternity –– I sat there behind the curtain in that apartment in Prague and I swear I never touched a piece of liver or a morsel of spleen or boiled beef, not even that saltwater fish I loved to eat at your house. I sat behind the curtain and I could not believe you could have given me away to those people. Why, Mr. Hrabal, did you not give them my sister, the little one. She would probably have been happy there behind the curtain, but I was thinking only of you because you know I was fond of you, I loved you, and you were fond of me too, you loved me, and I’d have happily cooperated if you’d put me in that mail sack and killed me, as you killed that cat during those bitter winter days. I’d have crawled into the sack on my own, and you’d have beaten me to death as you beat those newborn kittens to death, and I’d have accepted that from you, Mr. Hrabal, because I loved you. You could have beaten me to death against the trunk of the birch tree I used to sharpen my claws on. I know that’s what that sack was for, the mail sack that’s still lying in the woodshed, folded and caked with blood, waiting in the shed for you to use, to kill more kittens and cats, whose numbers are overwhelming your household. But then why did you turn me out into the world when I was your favorite, when, of all the cats, you loved me as deeply as I loved you? Mr. Hrabal, hand on your heart, you could have afforded to keep one extra cat. I didn’t want something for nothing, after all that food and milk you gave me. You know very well I put every mouse I caught, every single mouse, on your windowsill so you’d know I wasn’t freeloading, and I even brought you every bird, even grouse and baby pheasants, and once I brought you a wild rabbit that was still alive, and in the end, I dragged in a large rabbit I had wrestled into submission only to show that you were not supporting me for nothing, because I was born in your bed, and I’ve slept there with you and when you went for a walk, I walked with you in the night, when the snow fell I walked through the deep drifts with you, all the way to the pub in the woods, and I waited till you were ready to go home again, I jumped up to join you and we returned home to the warm stove so that I could lie down beside you, and I was the only one who slept with you, and you, Mr. Hrabal, preferred me –– though I see now I was mistaken –– to all the others, and I took pride in that, just as I took pride in your birch trees and pine trees, and your brook, and I even knew when you’d return to the woods in your car, and sometimes you’d be away from home for a long time, but I’d sit on the balcony with my ears pricked up and I knew when it was your car that was approaching, and I ran down the stairs and came out to meet you and when you stopped the car, I was already waiting there, beaming, because you were here. I know that when you drove too fast, you knew I’d send you a message through the air ordering you to slow down, so you wouldn’t kill yourself, so you wouldn’t badly injure yourself, Mr. Hrabal, because what would I be without you, if you were lying in the hospital or in your coffin? That, Mr. Hrabal, is how much I loved you, and how much I loved all of your trees and the grass and all those little pathways you walked along to get to the brook. When you were away I walked the paths you walked on, the paths I’d walked with you, and when you’d stop and lean down I’d jump up and you’d take me in your arms and hold me under your chin and close your eyes, and I’d close my eyes too, and so, Mr. Hrabal, we were happy, and that was everything to me, not when you gave me milk and saltwater fish, but when you picked me up and nuzzled your face into the fur under my chin and I was yours and you were mine.

  “Why, Mr. Hrabal, did you not open that mail bag and why, if you didn’t want me, did you not let me crawl into it and why did you not beat me to death against the birch tree and why did you not take the axe and crush my skull to make sure I was dead? Why, for the love of God, did you consign me instead to a fate so awful that I sat behind the curtains in that apartment for three months, pining for you and you alone? And in the end, when I could no longer hope or believe, when I was already a wreck, why did you take me back, a body without a soul, without love, because, Mr. Hrabal, after all of that I was no longer able to like you, I could no longer love you, because all that was left of me was reproach, nothing but accusations, homesickness, because you gave me away and I went willingly because I didn’t think that you’d give me away to strangers, I didn’t expect that of you. How was I to know that you, Mr. Hrabal, could live without me?”

  That was how Renda, the tomcat, reproached me in the early morning hours when I lay twisted in my sheets, unable to sleep, the ideal time to entertain reproaches and accusations from Renda, a crown witness. Back then, and for almost a year after that, I would stagger out of bed before daybreak drenched in sweat, quickly pull on the most basic items of clothing and go out for an early morning walk. I was so close to fulfilling what the fortune-teller Mařenka, who left me that handbag with two big green handles before she died, had predicted: that I would hang myself on the willow tree by the brook.

  But I didn’t want to hang myself. I wanted to be in the world. There were st
ill things I wanted to write, even if it were only this indictment about how I betrayed my tomcat, Renda, just as I had his mother, and how I was now suffering terrible pangs of guilt for what I had done to those cats. On such mornings, when I was racked with self-loathing, I imagined that all those who had taken part in wars and had killed millions of innocent people must have suffered from just such self-loathing, and a similar sense of reproach must have plagued all those who had expelled millions of people from their homes and their lands, and I wondered: if I was having a breakdown because I’d killed those cats, or because my cats had run away from me, what kind of breakdown might I have suffered had I killed a human being?