By Eric Le Roy
For our 15th Wedding Anniversary, I decided to honor my wife Liubov’s request for us to buy a beautiful white Maine Coon cat, the very same one you see in the photo above (first of many pictures). Since we already had two cats and two dogs, and we live in an apartment (in Varna, Bulgaria, near the sea) that is plenty spacious for us (though not for a Russian oligarch), my first reaction was, Wow, things are going to get tight around here.
I am a dog man, not much of an expert on cats, although I’ve known a few and my acquaintanceship is growing. What I mean is that I sort of grasp how dogs think (ask my wife, who believes I am a dog or was one in a former life). Also, dogs, as I do, tend to express emotion in ways that openly invite an amiable (usually) response, whereas cats, while also very loving at times, seem more selective and subject to moodiness. Indeed, some people prefer cats because of their ‘independence’ and low-rate dogs because of their ‘neediness’.
My response is that over the years I have dealt with many people who only need you when they need you (re: when you’ve got something they want); therefore, it is a pleasure to enlist the company of an animal who lives heart-to-heart with you, enjoys being at your side, and seems to accept you as you are. Dogs.
Anyway, the new ‘super’ cat, whom we now call Lusik, became available through some sort of hotline that my wife uses. There was a Ukrainian family in Nesseber, which is an ancient seaside city become a resort town, about 100 km away, which can be accessed via a winding, picturesque drive through the mountains. It turned out that the woman we were swinging the deal with was actually in Ukraine, and it was her husband who was at home cat-sitting; I believe there were four, including the one soon to be our own. So, strange as it may seem, my wife was doing all the telephone negotiations (we were now on our way), not with a person present in Nesseber but with this woman via her phone in Ukraine. For reasons that will long elude me, we were given neither an address nor her husband’s phone number. I didn’t realize the full impact of this until we reached our destination and were driving down the hotel and restaurant-laden central boulevard of Nesseber.
Casually, cheerfully, expectantly, I asked my wife, “So where are we going? What’s the address?” Liuba didn’t know. “OK, what about a phone number?” Only the woman’s burner in Ukraine. “And the husband here in Nesseber?” Nope, no number provided. So we had to do all our business with her. The problem was, when we tried to explain to her what our Very Central current location in Nesseber was, she seemed to have no idea at all what we were talking about. Might as well have been sharing experiences with a Norwegian amnesiac trying to track down a lost aunt in an Asian market in Sao Paulo,
So, here was the situation: (1) No address; (2) No local phone number; (3) a woman on the end of a phone in a distant country who seemed oblivious of how to direct us to her home.
Well, it wasn’t long before I was about to enter one of my periodic meltdowns. The only way to describe the apparent hopelessness of the situation would be to compare it to someone plummeting through the sky who has just realized that neither his main nor reserve parachute will open. The ground yawns, but where is its megaphone of instruction?
As in similar situations with us, Liuba was shellshocked, and I was livid. Phone call after increasingly hot-headed phone call finally succeeded in wrangling some kind of address, but the woman couldn’t begin to tell us how to get there. Finally, as often happens (it must be said), an Angel of Mercy appeared (another young Ukrainian woman with her child who just happened to walk by our parked car) who was able to Google up a map and give us ballpark instructions on how to at least get close.
Soon we found ourselves tooling around a distant part of Nesseber, a mid-range neighborhood, and spotted a man outside gazing up and down at the traffic like someone waiting for a bus. It could only be The Husband. And it was.
Long story short, we shook hands, saluted the big cat with tentative, delicate strokes that, if not exactly welcomed at least were not reproved with claws, loaded him up in the massive contraption we had brought, and started the drive home, stopping only for me to purchase a two-liter flagon of well-deserved beer. Meanwhile, Lusik decided to uncork a great Maine Coon barrage of shit into his cage. The smell was what you would expect, and Liuba wanted to stop, drag him out of his confinement, and clean the cage (and him). No bloody way, I thought, looking at the dense, dark woods. If he had squirted out of the car, we’d never have found him. (An omen in disguise.) So, over her objections, I insisted on leaving him in the lock-up, driving with the windows down to invite the fresh night wind (it was dark now after fucking around in Nesseber all afternoon) to administer its now rainy fragrance; it allowed Lusik’s odiferous bounty to mingle with the trees and squirrels instead of dealing us a continuing smack in the gob.
I do not know if Einstein’s theory of relativity took into account whether a big animal’s shit is stinkier than that of a small creature, but Lusik was making a good argument that it is.
We reached home. Things were placid. The cats gave each other a bit of a stare down, but the dogs were out to lunch in the bedroom, and only noticed when they came wandering in, yawning and bleary-eyed. “All Quiet on the Western Front”. If cats liked alcohol, this would have been the perfect time for wine coolers or Lite Beer, like icebreakers at corporate conventions.
For the first week, Lusik went from frightened and withdrawn to cautiously more explorative and openly curious. The cat was a marvel of nature, dwarfing our other little darlings (who were not pleased), but from what we could see, our friends were working it out among themselves. As non-human animals do.
Then, after a splendidly non-confrontational week, disaster struck. Lusik found his way onto the balcony one windy night (it has been a tough spring here) that blew the supposedly secured door open, leaving the balcony exposed. We live on the second floor, and there is a concrete corridor below, meaning that it would take one hell of a leap to fly over it into the grassy area just beyond. Lusik somehow managed it. It must have been quite a sight if you had been an owl sitting on a tree top: this alabaster Concord aircraft, a combination of the fashionable human felines on the catwalk and an elongated prehistoric crane, airborne and elegant. A dinosaur that could win a beauty contest.
But it wasn’t fun for my wife when she got up in the night, restless, and started looking for Lusik.
A word about Lusik. He is male, unneutered, and 1 ½ years old. Also, as a special cat (white privilege, you know), he has been mollycoddled and allowed to ‘pussyfoot’ his way through his youth without flare-ups on the tough avenues of life. A sheltered boy. But big enough to get your attention and then some. Fortunately, not aggressive. Watchful, soft like snowfall, and regal as the King of a Winter Palace.
So, where was the Beautiful Boy? He had vanished. Aghast, Liuba hurried to the balcony and gazed down. “Meow!” said Lusik from the depths below. Liuba, completely distraught at 3 a.m., threw on some clothes and hurried down, circling the building until she saw him. What followed was exasperating and ultimately painful. The cat, no doubt homesick, had bolted, not realizing that Nesseber was hardly just around the corner.
Liuba chased him like Achilles pursuing Hector around the walls of Troy, finally had him in a position….almost….to be swept up and carried home, but as she reached out, she tripped and took a nasty tumble on the uneven concrete steps and fell, jamming her hand and bruising her shoulder. Lusik, seeing this as the last straw, bolted into the night. Liuba escaped, neck unbroken, body bruised.
Meanwhile, I knew nothing about what had happened in the other room, on the balcony, and over and beyond. Only when I looked in on my wife the next morning and found her sobbing and in physical pain did I hear the bad news. Of course, Sammy and Simka (our other cats) were delighted to have their dominion restored, but for Liuba it was tragic. The cat had cost $400, but that wasn’t the point. Rather, the great joy turned to sudden grief and pain caused me misery on her behalf.
We still had the others, I reminded her, but it was like saying that just because one family member died suddenly, it was no big deal because the rest of them hadn’t. And I knew that. A horrible, horrible morning devoid of heartsease and consolation. Then the search began.
I have heard of homesick animals crossing mountains and seas to find their old home, and it struck me that maybe Lusik had similar ideas. Anyway, where we live, the powers that be have authorised a massive construction project. Robotic new buildings are rising all around us like the master plan of a madman with a gigantic Lego kit (nothing but open space three years ago when we moved in). All the fields are buried under building blocks except for a single woodsy space where the dogs and I have always liked to go to sit, me on a couple of old tires because someone pinched the plastic chairs a few months ago. But the builders split open the earth to put an electric cable in, and when they filled it up, the stupid bulldozer driver just shifted the extra earth into a big, long pile, which blocks our way into the now dwarfish section of greenery.
To make matters worse, the cold, rainy weather this month has encouraged the wild grass to grow into a jungle. Good luck trying to find Lusik there. So we were reduced to driving around and gazing across the ‘alien corn’, so to speak. No chance at all of spotting even a prodigious cat amid the sprawling wasteland between and behind the buildings. Lost cause.
But – and I remember saying this after our problem-plagued trip from Moscow to Varna years ago, when a 3-day journey became a 6-day-and-night ordeal – the apparent abyss is full of guardian angel hitchhikers. (We had had a problem getting into Poland because Liuba was carrying a Bulgarian visa, not the Schengen version which the Polish border control demanded, and we had to go back to Brest (Belarus). That nightmare looked grim and never-ending, but a special guy appeared out of nowhere and helped us. And then another Good Samaritan popped up in a truck stop in Romania and gave us lodging for the night and a restoring dinner and breakfast.
The same thing happened here. First, a young female college student in our neighborhood (I’d never seen her before) started putting up signs and drove Liuba up and down and all around trying to spot Lusik, and then…the very next day a kindly old man and some gypsies saw him and confined him until we could pick him up. So….another miracle of sorts, and again, a case of strangers coming to the rescue. Now Lusik is home, and the process of getting acquainted is resumed.
What I want to say is this: Sammy and Simka are not pleased, but they will adjust, and they know we love them. Casper, our big Ridgeback, is curious but ‘nonjudgmental’. He is a gentle soul anyway. And Poppendoshka is getting so old she doesn’t care. Nevertheless, I find it remarkable how well and how easily these animals learn to live together, no matter what peevish thoughts may be circulating in their minds.
Maybe this is forcing an issue, pushing a point, however, it strikes me how well Sammy and Simka and Cass and Popp are reacting – and Lusik too. Wouldn’t it be great if people could be the same?
It appears that we cannot. All the shouting about Inclusion and Diversity notwithstanding, the truth appears to be that our world is falling apart in the very same areas where so much effort is being spent, ostensibly to heal the wounds and make a transfusion of fresh blood. I don’t see it happening. I wake up in a good mood and stay that way until I fall into my daily trap of looking at the news.
Sure, you can make the usual arguments about how animals are simple (you mean ‘dumb’), that their needs are basic, and that any affection they display comes when they start sniffing for the next meal. You can also argue, accurately, that animals are merciless in establishing a pecking order. Ask any wolfpack or herd of elephants. Moreover, we’ll have to have Lusik ‘fixed’. We’re not breeders, and we don’t want territorial aggression to enter the picture as he becomes more sure of his ground. We need to protect the little ones.
Poppendoska (13) and Casper (11) are very much in their twilight, and I dread the day they disappear from life. Sammy has a blood disorder called immune-mediated hemolytic anemia, the treatment for which requires weekly injections. If not curable, at least maintainable. I am 76 with bad teeth. My beautiful wife ages gracefully like a woman in a Renaissance masterpiece, yielding to the years with the dignity of great sculpture. But getting old.
Today we are all here, and today is all there is. In times of ‘scandal’ (as the Russians say), our dogs and cats have been our marriage counselors.
Surely there is a breakdown in human relationships that other animals don’t feel: a fissure, maybe a spiritual one, like the experience of some oceanic fish with no ocean anymore, a solitary human bereftness that transcends the pursuit of happiness and that connects amusement with darkest pain. We fold up like dying spiders or shrink away, while other beasts, friendless, just look out, wild eyes to the rip of streets, and we sit praying to gods of sky and science that our friendly beasts never heard of, as they watch us carefully.
My wife and I met too late to have kids. Yes, we both have them, but with other people. We met too late to try for our own. So we have given this love to our dog and cat friends, and they say, “Right Back at You.” That’s what they mean when they come to us. And now Lusik, safe at home, will soon start to feel at home.
My wife and I agree on one thing, right or wrong. When driving in the rain, we see a lost person or an abandoned animal, we both feel more sympathy toward the animal than the human. I’m not sure why that is, and I confess to feeling guilty, not about what I feel, but why I feel it. Maybe it’s because people have hurt us, and animals, in their cosmic blindness to human hatred, have no reason even to imagine doing so, except out of wildness.
They do what they do, and, as always, I am sometimes bewildered by their primordial decisions. But, for all of that, be what it may be, I see in the grey eyes of a stray animal, the secrets of the universe.
