Dada

On the way back from looking at a house that Lenin had once lived in, we saw a Dada house, or at least a house in which, according to a plaque, the spirit of Dada had been revived in 2002. Two young men smoking at a window upstairs for our camera. Downstairs, the skin of a black and white cat on a wall.

As a cat lover

As a cat lover, he told me that he was most distressed to see the cat in such danger at the top of the stairs – a large ginger cat in a cage at the bottom of a trolley that a hobo had pushed to the top of the stairs at Central station – the large ginger cat strangely quiet, as if content, and unaware, as it seemed, of any danger.

The hobo, of course, didn’t look as if he was the kind of man you would expect to have such a cat and such a cage (one of those small plastic cages, as he said, that you take your cat to the vet in when it needs a few shots). The hobo was so roughly dressed, my friend said, that he looked as if he had just spent the night in the park next to the station, covered only by the oily and foul smelling rags he was wearing, and yet he had the cat in a cage in a metal shopping trolley and was looking, for all the world, as if he was intending to push the trolley down the stairs, all the way down the stairs to the station or to the tunnel that opens out onto the other side of the city. God knows what he was thinking of, what was going through his head.

The cat can’t have belonged to the hobo, he then told me. No hobo looking the way this one did would have a cat of this sort – a large, content and obviously well fed cat in the kind of small plastic cage that anyone else might take to the vet. The hobo must have stolen the cat, he said – either stolen the cat or a trolley which just happened to contain a cat. He himself should have stopped to check whether the cat belonged to the hobo; for god’s sake he should have stopped to ask what the hobo was intending to do with the cat in the trolley at the top of the stairs. But when you are in a hurry to get to work via the tunnel that takes you to the other side of the city without crossing several streets and waiting at lights, you often find yourself continuing to walk on at such times, all the time thinking you will turn back and ask the questions you know you should be asking, all the time thinking these thoughts as you continue to walk.

The Ginger Cat

That ginger cat has been lying on the road all day, I was thinking. When I saw it in the morning it had been lying there, still, stretched out on the asphalt in front of a parked car. It might have been enjoying a lie in the sun. For a very short moment I thought that the cat was only lying in the sun as cats like to do – but there had been a small, soft, pink bundle of something on the road a short distance from its head – a small, soft, pink bundle of something that, more than the stillness of the body, had alerted me to the obvious: that the ginger cat was dead.

The bundle of pink had seemed fresh, I remembered thinking. I hadn't been able to stop myself looking at it. I hadn't wanted to look at the body of the cat either, but even so, without looking at the cat straight on, I had noticed that its head was flat and had been tucked in an unusual angle to the body, and as such it should have been obvious that the ginger cat was dead. There was something, too, about the stillness of the body – the quality of the stillness – and this I had gathered without looking straight on at the body of the cat on the road. I am a wimp, I had thought – not only a wimp, but a wimp that is morbid and curious. I should have looked at that dead cat’s body straight on, I was thinking. I should have placed the body of the dead ginger cat at the centre of my focus rather than only at the periphery.

There was something shrunken about the cat now, I could see from the bus stop. It was nearly four o’clock in the afternoon – many hours had passed since I had last seen it. Even from where I was standing I could see that the cat had shrunk and stiffened, looking less like a cat. I had forgotten to look out for it as I passed by the car (still parked) on my way up the hill to the bus stop. It was only as I looked back from where I was waiting for the bus that I saw that the cat was still lying on the asphalt in front of the car, but when I looked for the small, soft bundle of something near the head, I could see no trace of it and so I began to think that, perhaps, it had shrunk in the sun, or that another animal or bird had eaten it. From the bus stop it wasn't even clear that what I was looking at had once been a cat; it might have been a towel or a jumper that had stiffened with dirt. Many people would have passed the dead ginger cat since the last time I’d seen it. If the cat had been a human an ambulance would have taken it away, but you don't call an ambulance for a cat, I was thinking. I should have stopped and done something for the cat that morning. Even now, at the bus stop, it wasn't too late – not too late to save the cat from a foul and gradual disintegration on the road. But I didn't have anything with me – this was what I told myself: I don't have any newspaper or bags or anything that I could use. Soon I began to think about other things; the thought of newspaper and bags must have lead to other thoughts into which I slipped as gently as into sleep.

I didn't see the arrival of the man, but I saw him bent over the cat with his legs wide apart. He had a young man's way of bending over. He was wearing rubber gloves and with one hand he held open a stiff white bag that looked to be the kind of parcel packet you can buy in a post office; with the other, he slid the dead ginger cat into the bag, sliding it in easily without lifting it far from the surface of the road. The man carried the bag to the footpath, holding it a little out from his body. Once on the footpath he bent down once again to push a thin ginger limb – or what looked to have been a thin ginger limb – further down into the bag. He then seemed to be doing something to secure the top of the bag. I was thinking about this word ‘secure’ as I watched the man working. He seemed to be trying to fold over or tie or stick down the top edges of the bag, but from where I was standing I couldn't tell how he was doing it. The cat is probably already beginning to smell, I was thinking. Perhaps the man wants to avoid looking at the cat any longer. Soon the man had secured the cat, I could see – or at least such I imagined him describing it. Now nobody would get see the body of the cat again. Even the owner – if she or he existed – would never see the cat again or learn what had happened to it, because the dead ginger cat had been successfully secured as the man, as I was already imagining, would soon be telling everyone in his office – all of them standing for a moment at the windows to listen and to nod – an office which very likely overlooked the parked car and the bus stop on the other side of the road, its long line of windows watching over us all.