“What is it?” the m-d asks soothingly. “What are we afraid of? Come on, kitty. You were always trying to run out. So run. Run for your life!”
It’s true-the cat was always rushing out to the stairs, or guarding the door, driving everyone crazy with her hoarse moans. She cried at night. But it was dangerous to let her out-what if she never returned? After all, the m-d loved animals. Even if, just now, she doesn’t.
Joyful, alive, she drops the cat to the floor on the landing outside the apartment and then slams the door behind them both-there!
In a robe and slippers, she stands at the precipice of her new fate. She is her own master: she’s defeated the Creature. It can romp and slither around all it wants, if it intends to follow her, in these huge wide-open spaces of the great outdoors.
The cat sits on its tail as if it’s been kicked. It huddles down pitifully and looks somehow… pensive. The woman descends half a flight of stairs and turns around: The cat sits frozen still and staring straight ahead, its eyes filmed over as if with cataracts, its pupils like little black seeds drowning in the green lakes that are its eyes. Its little face looks bony. Its skull suddenly emerges, it seems, and you can see its outline under the cat’s black fur. Death itself is on that stairwell, dressed up in a thin fur coat.
The woman nearly bursts into tears! The cat is preparing to die. The street awaits it, and wild dogs, and hunger. The cat can’t fight for its life-it doesn’t know how. Tonight they will kick her out of the entryway, plant a boot in her stomach as soon as she takes her first pee.
The m-d pauses on her triumphant march downstairs. She imagines the cat falling apart the way everything else has-the dishes, the chairs, the television, her clothes.
The Creature will celebrate a total victory.
“That’s a little much,” the m-d thinks to herself. “To give up everything to such a nothing. I think we’ll make it, after all.”
Lulu sits there like the scarecrow of a cat, her glassy, cloudy eyes popping out of her head. Her tail, usually so energetic, subtly expressing all her thoughts, now lies like a dusty dead little rope. All her fur is dusty, drab, and sick.
The woman immediately takes the kitty up in her arms, presses its stone-cold body to her own, rings the neighbor’s doorbell, quickly calls the super, and sits down on the chair she is offered to wait for someone to come up and force open the door.
She walks into her ruined apartment, sets Lulu down on the floor, and looks around her with the eyes of a new owner. It is as if everything were new, strange, and interesting.
There are still shoes in the hallway! In the kitchen, all her pots and pans have survived, as has a salad bowl and a coffee mug. Her forks and spoons! “What luxury,” thinks the woman, who’s been ready to graze downstairs, outside, near the trash containers, looking for a discarded can she could use for drinking water, and a moldy piece of bread to eat.
“Would I ever find this kind of luxury in the trash?” murmurs the woman as she opens the refrigerator and sees a saucer and a soup bowl, with the boiled (!) fruits of the earth, with beets and potatoes. And a little plate of fish for Lulka!
This apartment has everything. It is warm, and outside of the kitchen it is relatively clean; the water runs in the bath, there is soap, a telephone! And her bed! There is still a sheet and a duvet, luckily. There are lots of records on the couch and a record player in the corner, forgotten there; someone in this house used to like to listen to music-either the mother or the daughter, she can’t remember which.
The mother-daughter quickly cleans the shattered dishes in the kitchen-and so what: it isn’t the first time this has happened in this particular house. She makes a series of trips to the trash container outside; on the third trip, as she spills her shards into the container, two men in soiled, dirty clothing and sacks over their shoulders approach carefully, wait until she moves away, and immediately dive into the trash. They behave like shades of men-shy, unnoticeable, dark.
The m-d takes a look at the ground beneath her window. Naturally the contents of her potato sack have been picked off long ago. Well, someone else would have to walk around in her sweater and pants, while she, liberated, would walk around in nothing. That’s right. Returning to her clean, swept, washed apartment, m-d is surprised first of all by how timid she’d been-she failed to throw away her groceries, failed to smash the insides of the refrigerator, and kept all the lamps and bulbs intact.
Suddenly she remembers, and puts out the plate of fish for her Lulka.
But Lulka just sits there like a post, frozen in the middle of the front hall, and her eyes still look like grapes cleared of their skin, with a barely visible pit inside.
The breath of death must have frozen her frightened soul.
The woman doesn’t try to console her cat-her task now is to put everything in order as quickly as possible, and then the cat will also be all right.
And, as often happens when one member of a family is momentarily indecisive, afraid, or hysterical, the other takes heart and saves the situation. The woman begins moving faster-quickly placing the shelf atop the piano, gathering the records, removing the blanket and quickly washing it in the bath.
It turns out there are still some towels left-a little one on a hook in the kitchen and two drying on a radiator in the bath.
“It’s all right,” the woman tells Lulu. “We’ll make it.”
Not only that, she immediately finds a screwdriver and gathers the screws from the fold-out sofa and screws them back in tight, then folds it into its daytime position.
There!
It had been so easy to destroy everything, and it is so hard to fix, clean, and order it again. She has to bend, crawl into corners, gather shards, carry out trash, drive the screws back in! The television is the worst. She has to wait for dark and then throw it out the window with all her might, then pick it up downstairs-the woman lives in a walk-up-and carry the remains to the trash in her little grocery cart.
It is as if a war had ravaged the territory of the m-d’s peaceful apartment-a veritable war.
The living room looks empty without the television and the chairs.
But a person can make do without all sorts of things, so long as she’s still alive. There is nothing to watch, true, but all of a sudden in the darkness you could make out a shelf of the m-d’s favorite books. She puts on her once-favorite record-the tango!
Then, as the music plays, she begins to go through the backpacks and suitcases filled with her old clothes. Her whole life unspools before her, like a newsreel. The beloved apparitions rise up before her and around her, though none of the old things quite fit the m-d anymore-she must have grown fat sitting in front of the TV all day. All right. She has a few pieces of fabric, and there is a sewing machine in the corner of the closet, and she could probably put together a reasonable skirt to go with the several blouses that still more or less close on her.
And anyway for many years the m-d has worn only her old and ragged things, keeping her clean and nearly brand-new clothing for special occasions-which never arrived.
As she is working this out for herself, the m-d also gathers a big bag of old clothes and shoes, recalling the shades of men who’d greeted her last trash trip with such enthusiasm.
God, what a life now opens before the m-d! But the cat still sits in shock in the hallway, like someone who’s lived through too much, and stares ahead at the same spot with murky, unseeing eyes.
Then suddenly the cat pricks up her ears.
The woman laughs.
Obviously the building is settling, drying, aging, boards are cracking-that’s first of all. Moreover in all these apartments above, below, and to the sides, people are living, living people, and some of them are moving, something is breaking or being fixed, something is falling or cooking. “That’s life!” says the woman loudly, addressing herself, as always, to the cat.