The floor suddenly tilted beneath my feet. There was a long, earsplitting creak and then, like the rumbling of a distant earthquake, I heard a thunderous “Cluuuck, cluuck…” The hut started pitching to and fro like a boat on choppy water. The yard outside the window shifted sideways and a gigantic chicken leg emerged from below the window and thrust its talons into the earth, making deep furrows in the grass before disappearing from sight again. The floor keeled over sharply, and feeling myself falling, I grabbed hold of something soft with both hands, banged my side and my head against something hard and tumbled off the sofa. I lay there on the mats, clutching the pillow that had fallen with me. It was quite light in the room. Outside the window someone cleared his throat thoroughly.
“Very well, then…” said a well-trained male voice. “In a kingdom long ago, in a certain state I know, there lived a king called… mmmeh… well, it doesn’t really matter that much. Let us say… mmmeh… Polyeuctus… And he had three princely sons. The first… mmmeh… The third prince was a fool, but what was the first?”
Crouching down like a soldier under fire, I crept over to the window and peeped out. The oak was back in its proper place. Standing on his hind paws with his back to the tree, lost in thought, was the cat Vasily. He had a water lily clenched between his teeth. The cat looked down at his feet and drawled: “Mmmeh-eh…” Then he shook his head hard, put his front paws behind his back, and, stooping slightly like the university professor Dubino-Knyazhitsky giving a lecture, strode smoothly away from the oak tree.
“All right…” the cat muttered to himself. “Once upon a time there were a king and a queen. This king and this queen had one son… Mmmeh. A fool, of course…”
The cat spat out the flower in annoyance, pulled a wry face, and rubbed his forehead.
“This is getting desperate,” he said. “I do remember something, though! ‘Ha-ha-ha! Such tasty viands there’ll be to savor: the steed for dinner, the youth for supper…’ Now where would that be from? Anyway, Ivan—he’s a fool, you know—answers, ‘The more fool you, vile monster, to devour the snow-white swan before she’s caught!’ And then, of course, there’s the red-hot arrow, and off with all three heads. Ivan takes out the three hearts and brings them home to Mother, the cretin… What a charming present!” The cat gave a sardonic laugh, then heaved a sigh and declared, “It’s a sickness, that’s what it is—arteriosclerotic dementia.”
He sighed again, turned back toward the oak, and started to sing: “Quack-quack my little children! Quack-quack, my little darlings! I… mmmeh… I have fattened you on my tears… fed you, that is…” he sighed for a third time and carried on walking for a while without speaking. Drawing level with the oak tree, he suddenly bellowed tunelessly, “I have left you the daintiest morsel!” Suddenly he was holding an immense psaltery in his paws—I didn’t see where he got it from. He struck it despairingly with one paw and, plucking at the strings with his claws, started bellowing even louder, as if he were trying to drown out the music:
He stopped bellowing and strode about for while, banging on the strings without speaking. Then he started singing in a low, uncertain voice:
He went back to the oak tree, leaned the psaltery against it, and scratched himself behind one ear with his back paw.
“All work, work, work,” he said. “Nothing but work!”
He put his front paws behind him again and walked away from the oak tree to the left, muttering, “I have heard, oh great and mighty king, that once in the glorious city of Baghdad there dwelt a tailor, by the name of…” He went down on all fours, arched his back and hissed viciously. “Oh, how I loathe all these repulsive names! Abu… Ali… Some Ibn somebody or other… All right, then, let’s call him Polyeuctus. Polyeuctus Ibn… mmmeh… Polyeuctovich… But anyway, I don’t remember what happened to the tailor. To hell with him, let’s start a different one…”
I lay there with my belly on the windowsill, fascinated to watch the unfortunate Vasily wandering around the oak tree, first to the left and then to the right, muttering, clearing his throat, whining, groaning, dropping down on all fours when the strain was too much for him—in short, suffering quite inexpressibly. The extent of his knowledge was vast. He didn’t know a single story or song more than halfway through, but there were Russian, Ukrainian, Western Slavic, German, and even, I think, Japanese, Chinese, and African fairy tales, legends, fables, ballads, songs, romances, jingles, and rhymes. His inability to remember drove him into a fury; several times he threw himself at the trunk of the oak tree and shredded the bark with his claws, hissing and spitting, and when he did this his eyes blazed with the fires of hell and his tail, fluffed out as thick as a log, stood vertically erect or twitched convulsively or lashed at his sides. But the only song he sang right through was the Russian rhyme about the little bird, “Chizhik-Pyzhik,” and the only story he told coherently was The House That Jack Built in Marshak’s Russian translation, and even then with several abridgements. Gradually—evidently as he became exhausted—the feline accent of his speech became more and more distinct. “And in the field, the fiaowld,” he sang, “the pliaow runs of itself, and mmmeh… mmmeow, and following that pliaow… mmeow… Our Lord himself does walk… or stalk?”
Eventually, when he was totally exhausted, he sat down on his tail and stayed there for a while, hanging his head. Then he gave a final quiet, desolate meow, picked up the psaltery under one front leg, and hobbled off slowly on the other three across the dewy grass.