Cat Named Sobaka

The genre essay-fable (which probably doesn’t exist in the literary halls) is appropriate for this cat’s biography, which contains descriptions of realistic hardships of animal lives and at the same time the fantastic and fabulous, reflecting human follies.

On the coldest day of the year, in St. Petersburg, Russia, as my daughter Eva, friend David, and I walked up the stairs from Brodyachaya Sobaka (an underground tavern, Stray Dog), we beheld a shivery kitten crouching on a cement step along the stone wall. David, a delinquent publisher of Israeli fiction in English translation, picked her up.

She could be sick, I said. You pick her up just like that?

What should we do with her? he asked.

We’ll take her, we can’t let her freeze to death, I said.

She’s cute! said Eva.

Of course, to you all cats are cute. She’s just a standard alley cat—tabby, scraggly.

Look how big her stripes are, she said. They run in circles. She’s like a leopard. Let’s take her home!

We took her to the first café on the way, where you could buy cheap food, Prokofii Café. It seemed a fine pun, Prokofiev, for a coffee place near the theater, Shostakovich Hall, where Eva and I had heard Anna Sofie-Mutter perform Mozart sonatas delicately just the night before. (There’s an even more inclusive musically punned coffee shop, Tchaikoffski). The kitten climbed David; he had on a worsted wool sweater, and she must have liked the warmth. David grinned happily and took off his glasses; his eyes watered a bit, not from allergies but from recollections: I had a kitten just like this one when I was a kid!

What gender is she? Eva asked.

I think your question answers the question, I said. A girl because she likes guys.

Not all girls like guys, I don’t, she said. She was eight years old—and excited to be in Russia with me and my wife for half a year, while I did research for a South Slav diaspora novel, which so far hasn’t materialized—the novel about wandering Slavs, stray southerners in the north, has strayed away from my imagination as Russia’s strange currents took me elsewhere.

Eva, her cheeks flushed and red—from the sheer joy of looking at a kitten and perhaps even more from the first stage of frostbite—was reaching over and petting the kitten, who didn’t seem to understand petting. The kitten shivered and purred and blinked. Her eyes were teary. She sneezed.

She doesn’t seem all that healthy, I reasserted my impression.

The otherwise bored and pained waitresses, who looked like retired strippers, tilting their hips, with half-moons sagging below their eyes, came over, and I thought they would want me to throw the kitten out. That’s what had happened to me and a beige cat at Starbucks in State College—the manager came over and asked me to leave with the cat. People could be allergic, he said, it’s against the rules. Well, I happen to be allergic to silly rules, I said. I get all itchy when I hear of an unnecessary rule. Yes, the rules, in our boastfully free country, but here in Russia, the land of the non-free, the cat was welcome. Nobody sneezed. Or that is, they sneezed all the time, so there was no point in isolating causes. Ochen krasivaya, said one dirty-blond waitress. Milaya. The other waitress stretched over the table and petted the kitten, brushing me with her bony hip en passant.

Before naming the feline, we needed to feed her. We got her a bit of milk and a meat pirog. She sniffed at the milk and sneezed. She chewed a little meat, and could barely swallow, and then trembled as though this was too much for her body. She looked at me pleadingly, her eyes wide open, as though she didn’t understand what food was and needed an explanation.

Maybe she’s too weak to eat, I said.

Maybe she had a bad relationship...