Felidae on the Road - Special U.S. Edition Read online

  FELIDAE ON THE ROAD

  (Felidae Part II)

  Akif Pirinçci

  A novel of cats and murder

  Special U.S. Edition

  FELIDAE ON THE ROAD

  (Felidae Part II)

  A novel of cats and murder

  Special U.S. Edition

  First American eBook-Edition

  Copyright © 2011 by Akif Pirinçci, Bonn, Germany

  Translated from the German by Anthea Bell © 1994

  First published in Germany in 1994 by Wilhelm Goldmann Verlag

  All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. No part of this publication may be reproduced, transmitted, or stored in a retrieval system, in any form or by any means, without permission in writing from Akif Pirinçci

  Cover design by Ursula Pirinçci © 2011

  Cover illustration by Andreas Liss © 2011

  Contents

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Notes

  About The Author

  FOR CATS –

  whether feline or human.

  'I will not again curse the ground any more for man's sake; for the imagination of man's heart is evil from his youth; neither will I again smite any more every thing living, as I have done.'

  GENESIS 8: 21. The Flood.

  CHAPTER 1

  They call it evolution. There's an invisible mechanism at work on this planet, they say, enabling the stronger to get stronger all the time and forcing the weaker into unconditional surrender. It's a law of nature, they say, and resistance is useless. The strong will survive and sooner or later the weak will be wiped off the face of the earth - that's what they call evolution.

  But just who are all these weaklings doomed to perish? What are their names? What species do they belong to? Aren't they as much a part of this earth as the elect? Or are they simply anonymous, of unknown race, in-between stages on the way to final beatific perfection? Does the concept of nature conceal this melancholy fact? Is that the eternal law?

  They call it evolution. I call it a crime.

  Over the weeks that followed I was to learn a lot about this endless crime. But in the spring of this year, before it all began, I was lying on the yellow tapestry sofa in the living room without a care in the world. During the last few years the façade of the renovated old building had been overgrown by an ivy with delusions of grandeur, and it was gradually occupying the windows too. Consequently, only a few isolated sunbeams made their way like bright lances through the leaves and into the room, one of them falling on my head at that blessed moment of harmony like a spotlight. I lay majestically outstretched on the sofa, half dozing, half philosophising about the strange ways of the world, and I felt wonderfully comfortable. Life has certainly been good to me, I thought in all innocence. Here I lie, safe and warm, looking forward to stirring adventures this summer in the intricate setting of the gardens outside the back of the building.

  This green oasis had long ceased to be a cosy garden-gnome sort of place and now displayed design trends of Babylonian complexity, with ornamental Japanese bridges surmounting artificial ecological habitats and paths paved by DIY enthusiasts in natural stone. In short, the former tenants - eternal students, folk who'd taken early retirement - had all been cast out of their idyllic surroundings, making way for people with peculiar-sounding double-barreled surnames: people who sorted their rubbish for recycling and collected signatures on petitions against anything and everything. Although they wore battered straw hats to do their gardening, like half-starved Asians, you'd have been wrong to conclude that they were on the breadline. Far from it, in fact. It was just that their bloated complacency had taken strange forms and they'd moved into these old-fashioned buildings en masse. And we had moved in with them, of course. You're bound to see pictures of us in interior decorators' plans these days. We dot the i's and cross the t's of the good life.

  So in fact I couldn't have done better for myself, even if my companion does spot fashionable trends with the same fervour as a City baboon following the fluctuations of the Dow Jones index.

  There's really only one thing to be said for this so-called companion, whose name is Gustav Löbel: he doesn't eat the same sort of food as me, so I'm spared undignified squabbles about fair shares of whatever's in the bowl. The man is an eccentric mixture of Dumbo and Doctor Dolittle. (The Dolittle bit because he insists that his inconsequential soliloquies are 'conversations' with yours truly.) The mere sight of this hot-air balloon on legs doing perfectly ordinary jobs about the home is enough to make a cat laugh. But laughter soon turns to exasperation, because you'd never think a man of forty-nine weighing twenty stone could be such a fool. Well, did you ever meet anyone who could break his nose and burn the palms of both hands while cooking spaghetti? There's no call to go into the details of this incident. Just picture any scene you fancy from a slapstick cartoon film where everyday situations maliciously turn to a choreographic representation of chaos. With simple souls like Gustav, this can easily deteriorate into a case fit for Casualty. Up to a few years ago his main source of income was writing trashy novelettes for women's magazines under the name of Thalila, a pseudonym which may be considered sheer creative genius when you think of the tripe he concocted under it. The pattern of these daft stories was always the same: mother of eight mysteriously suffering from frigidity consults gynaecologist who is the spitting image of Bela Lugosi; gynaecologist drugs mother of eight on the pretext of conducting a thorough examination; gynaecologist repeatedly rapes her, gives her a sex change and then has the nerve to claim in court that he did it under the influence of laughing gas, thus getting off with probation and winning the Nobel Prize next day. Got all that quite clear, have you? To be fair to Gustav, it should be said that he was far from deriving any kind of satisfaction from this activity. He did it just to earn our bread. As a professor of Egyptology, in a career parallel to this deplorable scribbling, he had the reputation of being an authority in his field. It wasn't a very big reputation at first, but then he published work which created quite a sensation and his fame grew. Finally he was able to give up the newly-weds harassed by their mothers-in-law entirely, and devote himself exclusively to his beloved mummies and me.

  Which doesn't mean that our relationship became any easier. Relieved of the nagging anxiety as to whether the fee for the trash he'd just cobbled together would cover the next electricity bill, he had so much extra leisure time that he took to treating me like a New Age father persuaded, by dint of a cocktail of tax loopholes and obscure appeals from the feminist front line, to abandon a good career and try the maternal role for size. His earlier fits of solicitude had often made me wonder why on earth he ever got me instead of a comfort blanket. But now all the baby talk and the tempting offers of increasingly exquisite delicacies were really getting me down. A substitute, that's what I was, just a love substitute for this failure who knew nothing about the female form except from tedious nudist videos, and nothing about the female psyche except from those magazines he used to write for. A love substitute for a hermit whose odd life-style led him to indulge in some very peculiar rituals - like the irritating fuss he made over his thousands of pipes and brands of tobacco -and who ended every day with at least two bottles of French red wine, since the night hours showed him to himself in a particularly painful light. A substitute for children never conceived and friends who never knocked on his door.

  Almost bald, afflicted with the worst stoop in orthopaedic history and a
n expression not unlike that of a melancholy hippopotamus going through the menopause, this exponent of petting as terrorism was getting to be more and more of a burden to me since he'd stopped providing escapist stories for sexually harassed secretaries. I've no objection to grooming in moderation, but the constant feeling that I was merely a compensation for an old professor's failures in life both saddened and irritated me. At this point you may well ask why, with so much smother-love lavished on me, I didn't just pack my things one night and move in with the busy yuppie a few doors up the road. All he'd have required of me would be to sit decoratively on his Le Corbusier chaise-longue during the champagne parties he threw.

  Well, there weren't many reasons for me to stay, but those there were carried weight. First and foremost, the question of cultural standards. In human terms Gustav might be a total idiot, but his intellectual horizons were open to culture and scholarship, even philosophy on occasion, although unlike me he had never explored the gloomy depths of the likes of Schopenhauer. Of course there are others of my kind who are smitten with such things, but I well remember the delight I felt as a child when I sat on his shoulder, looking at the books he was reading until I had taught myself to read too and was infected by the same sweet plague. And I remember our orgies of Mahler and Wagner on his old Dual record player as we sat by the fire on cold winter evenings. Strictly speaking, then, it was a combination of intellectual compatibility and habit that bound us together. We both revered the intellectual achievements of civilisation, and we both hated all the ugliness daily created outside our four walls by devils in many forms. Habit, of course, can also mean stagnation. Yet who would seriously deny that once youth is over, any inclination to philistinism will attack every cell of a person's being like a tenacious virus?

  So was there anything else to justify my staying with this Oliver Hardy of the educated classes? Love, maybe? Hm, well, it's difficult to give a straightforward answer to that. Think of those coy little maxims beginning 'Love is ... ', going on with the alleged evidence in remarks like '... when you can laugh all the same!' and printing a cartoon underneath showing a naked little couple holding hands in a nauseatingly sweet pose. I don't believe you can explain the phenomenon of love that way. Love's more like a constant flow of lava beneath the earth's crust; we are unaware of it until it suddenly erupts from volcanoes long believed extinct, surprising us with its unimaginable power. But I'm straying into metaphors, and I don't know if they really cast light on the curious relationship between me and my 'master' Gustav. Anyway, this part of my story is not the place for sentimental analyses of love in an old couple rather the worse for wear like Gustav and me.

  In general love doesn't turn out as expected. That's life. Had I known, that memorable afternoon, of the change about to come over my life in the next few seconds, I doubt if I'd have been indulging in critical reflections on Gustav, I'd have been wallowing in pure nostalgia. Oh yes, I was going to miss my simple-minded friend. Indeed, I was going to find I loved him so much I'd willingly have signed a ten-year contract to be the victim of his petting. For the one thing sure to bring a living creature endowed with reason to his senses is the loss of those comforts he's acquired over the course of time. In short, I didn't know when I was well off.

  Before I come to this radical watershed in my life, let me make a few last remarks about the changes that had imperceptibly been made to the paradise described above. For all I was so well off, a sensitive spirit like mine couldn't help being aware of an alteration in the urban climate dating some way back. I'd heard with increasing frequency of burglaries in our part of town, mindless acts of violence even in the posh villa where the respected local dentist lived. Shabbily dressed figures in a sozzled condition, carrying plastic bags, prowled around our comfortable fortresses, knocking on our perfect replicas of original walnut doors and begging. And I hate to think what they did to members of my own kind if they could get their hands on us, there being good reason to suppose that the only how-to manuals they ever read had such tempting titles as How to Cook Domestic Pets.

  Another nuisance stemmed from the inorganic kingdom. It isn't true that rabbits breed faster than anything else in the world. In point of fecundity, monsters made of steel and plastic overtook rabbits ages ago. By now it was practically impossible to do as you could in the old days - take a pleasant stroll round the neighbourhood, have a nice little dust-up with Bigmouth Tom over the road here, do your bit towards the preservation of ancient monuments there with some environmentally friendly spraying - without constantly running the risk of being suddenly chosen by Fate as an up-to-date radiator mascot for a car, only not on the radiator but lower down.

  I was obviously not the only one struck by this decline in the quality of life. Those who caused it had noticed too, and the word 'country', a word full of promise, was being bandied about more and more insistently. Escape from the city, that was the idea. People got all excited by TV cereal ads showing country life in hues of the ripest golden corn as a kind of never-ending picnic with at least eight sunrises a day, ditto sunsets. Even I was slowly falling for such illusions. In my mind's eye, I already saw myself roaming fertile meadows at crack of dawn, sitting on the river bank methodically decimating stocks of some indefinable kind of fish, and washing them down with a huge bowl of milk taken from the cow by Gustav's own hands. There was nothing on my imaginary Disneyland farm but fresh air, fresh eggs from birds which probably nested right on the chimneys of our farmhouse, and eternally fresh young females in a state of nymphomania - no Mickey Mice, though, because eating them made me feel sick even in dreams. I used these fantasies to shield myself from the horror stories that reached me from the wicked city, tales of brothers and sisters there and witty folk who thought it amusing to stick iron bars up their arses.

  'Of its very nature, desire means pain: its fulfilment quickly breeds satiety; the goal was only apparent, and possession of it deprives it of its attraction. Desire and need will reappear in a new guise, or if not, then desolation, emptiness and tedium will follow, and to contend with those is as hard as to contend with want.' Well, Schopenhauer was dead wrong about that! Because when my desire to wave goodbye to city life was finally granted, desolation, emptiness and tedium were not what followed at all. Sheer horror, that was what followed, so there! This is the true story of a dream which turned to a nightmare ...

  Sleep, which contrary to appearances is of poorer quality in me than in humans,(1) had passed like a sultry wind lulling you with pleasant warmth on the one hand, threatening to smother you gently on the other. Muddled thoughts about my little world and the problems that loomed so large in it had disturbed my nap, distilling from it a sour, hung-over and compulsively pessimistic feeling, as sleeping in the day usually does. I felt rested, all the same, and fit to risk a first glance at the waking world. Maybe it would be a good idea to go straight to the fridge now, dig the claws of my left paw into the white rubber seal, walk slowly backwards in order to open the door, and then tuck into a nice fresh stick of Italian salami. The fridge-opening trick can never be explained too often; many of my colleagues will scratch or tear at the door excitedly in their greed, forgetting that the muscle power of a small paw won't work as an Open Sesame on something so firmly shut. Success depends on simply using your claws as a grappling hook, your whole body as a traction engine, and your paw to transfer the tractive power. Oh yes, and don't forget to slam the door shut afterwards.

  So I opened my eyes.

  I saw a face, right in front of my nose. Sometimes sleep has a nasty way of making you believe you've woken up while in fact you're still in the imaginary world of dreamland. That's what I thought had happened now. Because what I saw didn't belong in the world of my own experience, or in a world of which I wanted to have any experience either. I am often accused of comparing people with colourful figures of pop culture, particularly film stars, thereby giving a distorted and ultimately inaccurate idea of the person I'm describing. OK, I promise to mend my ways - but let me ma
ke one last reference to Hollywood, because this time it really does hit the nail on the head. The face of the woman leaning over me, some thirty centimetres away, was a replica of the actress Joan Crawford's. Her eyebrows were thick black arcs like the diva's, looming menacingly over eyelashes lengthened to infinity with mascara and eyes the size of ping-pong balls. Her angular chin was obviously designed in a heavy machinery engineering workshop, but the focal point of her whole face was her mouth, painted fire-engine red. The lip pencil had made her lips almost twice their real size, giving her the look of a jet bomber with a fearsome shark's mouth painted on the nose by bored soldiers. The only difference between her and the film star was her hair, which was definitely greying, but like the original model's it was set as if in concrete by tornadoes of hair-spray.

  She wasn't looking at me, she was sort of glittering at me, and I felt as if her cold grey eyes were blasting me with a thousand lightning flashes. With an expression of condescension, even distaste, as if wondering what to do about me, she observed my incredulous reactions the way a cheetah observes an antelope calf wedged tight among rocks. It gradually dawned on me that this grotesque stranger, who could easily have featured as a goddess screeching for revenge in some ancient opera, was perfectly real. And with prophetic certainty, I knew at once that she was going to shake the very foundations of my own future reality. The good old times were over. Here came the bad.

  Where was Gustav? What had happened? Who in hell was this monstrous nicotine-stained mouth surrounded by a small quantity of woman and apparently drenched in some unspeakable Arabian perfume for old ladies? Was she a witch hypnotising me with a view to skinning me later, to make herself a smart forties-style hat? While all these impressions plunged me into wild confusion, making the hairs on my back rise and my whiskers vibrate, she shook her head slightly and disapprovingly, and delivered herself of the fateful words: