When Matei heard the ambulance car starting and someone with an angry voice yelling hoarsely, “Come on, it’s late!” something moved inside him. Something, not even he knew what it was. He got up on his tiptoes, with the firm decision of getting dressed and bolting. He found a sweet, viscous drink in a green bottle. He drank it. He felt sick, felt like vomiting. He coughed a few times, as if from tobacco, like an old insomniac in the morning. Clara woke up, gave him a stunned look, and smiled. A crumpled, unctuous, guilty smile—only the intention of a smile mattered.
“I can’t run away now,” thought Matei, resigned. He drank the rest of the liqueur, then, putting his coat on over his pajamas, walked over to the window. Clara now spoke like a cascade, like rain, seemed tireless, mumbled sweet nothings, laughed to herself, smoked. She seemed cheerful, though Matei felt that this woman dissipated in superficiality and empty talk was fundamentally a good soul, a childish one, terrified of loneliness and of time’s desolate passage. He would have wanted to turn toward her, give her a word of warmth: kiss her at least, as would be right after such a long and stupid night. But he couldn’t turn.
Outside, in the garden, you could see a black tree with tormented branches, a few dead leaves remaining from last autumn. There was also an old fence around the area, almost broken now. Under the fence, moist snow, heavy, washed by rains and now gilded with night’s frost. None of this should have meant anything: he’d seen the same garden dozens of times, this tree and this very fence. Nor did the gray-greenish light, the light of winter mornings in the mountains, move him. Yet now, a flock of black crows was coming from the direction of the water, a flock and somewhere, at a distant mine, a siren’s frightened alarm seemed to be going off. All of these things integrated themselves in the interior landscape of laziness and of the nightwalkers of the eternal, merciless province. But something unusual had taken place, something outside the boundaries of logic, of the known order of known sensations. While on the radio, a languorous, soapy voice began to sigh that a step from happiness some hesitance had made its stop, as Clara, in the bathroom next door, hummed (among the dirty gurgles of the sinks and canals) the same melody about happiness, about wavering, the lights that were turned on in the room went out suddenly. The radio went quiet. The crows were gone. Matei jumped: he knew that, sometimes, due to various repairs at the mine’s station, the electricity in the Colony went out. For a few minutes, for a few hours. It wasn’t this that surprised him. He had jumped, somewhat frightened, because, suddenly, the garden had filled with light. The bathroom was silent too. The manes of the poplar had calmed down, the wind no longer blew.
And then, in this strange stillness suddenly fallen, Matei noticed the cat. He knew her. She was named Kitty, she was the house’s, the courtyard’s, Clara’s. Nobody’s, really. A frigid, unfriendly cat, mutely isolated in the feline splendor of her beauty, seeming profoundly disdainful of people and caresses. Matei couldn’t stand her, it seemed to him that he could read in the glassy coldness of her eyes the full depth of egoism and indifference of this murderous and suicidal world.
Kitty had gone mad: for what she was doing now, thought Matei, what he saw her doing there, in the garden, at only three meters’ length from the window he was gazing through was, without a doubt, demented, absurd, unreal.
Kitty, the laziest creature in the word, for whom every step seemed a yawn, as she was able to sleep almost without breathing, able to sleep so totally, animalistically, seeming to influence all the objects around her (the rocking chair, the Viennese pendulum, the oval portraits, the teapot) to yawn as well, Kitty, who seemed to him, especially when he drank a lot of vodka, the perfect symbol of time outside of history, of that frozen time felt only in the shadow of pyramids or in museums with old sarcophagi, well, this fantastic and splendid Kitty had gone mad, rabid, was out of her mind.
What was she doing? Like an agile squirrel, she climbed up onto the fence, mounting toward the slender tip of the black cherry tree in front; and from there, plain and simple, would throw herself down onto the beaten snow under the bedroom window. But she didn’t jump as any cat would. No! She fell from the tree like a rock, like a bird killed mid-flight. Matei heard her heavy thump on the thin snow. She stayed like that for a few seconds, dizzy perhaps. Then she began again. Again the fence, again mounting the cherry tree and again the deaf thump in the snow. From a height of four or five meters. Matei didn’t understand, he thought he might be dreaming, felt that somewhere a hallucination had been triggered or that someone was deriding the elementary logic of his senses.
He recalled that once, in his childhood, at an old aunt’s house, he had seen something similar. In a round, gilded birdcage, a squirrel like a redheaded lightning bolt ran insanely, standing still at the same time. With his child’s eyes, he’d remained hypnotized for a long time by the vain, terrible, hopeless racing of that unfortunate creature. But now it was Kitty, childhood was distant, Clara was singing in the bathroom again, although the lights were out everywhere. For the tenth, for the twelfth time, the cat climbed up to the top of the tree and, without any apparent reason, threw herself down without using the elastic suspension of her legs. It was like a rookie at a stupid instruction session: “at-attention—at-ease—at-attention—at-ease,” it seemed like she was committing a sacrificial act or suicide. But, Matei said to himself, animals don’t commit suicide, this is a human privilege. True, there is talk of a species of whales that comes to die on certain beaches in Florida, but that only happens there, and anyway who can know whether these whales come to commit suicide or whether they simply bring a message of death, an advertisement, an ultimatum of the oceans that gave birth to all of life.
What was happening with Kitty seemed absurd, entirely senseless. Tragic, ridiculous, stupid. It added symbolically to the fact that all the clocks had stopped, that the lights had gone out, that the flock of ravens had disappeared as if on command, that the fog coming from the Parâng Mountains was bruise-colored and filthy. He should have screamed, opened the window, should have sworn at the cat and shooed her away. He couldn’t bear it any longer, he felt in his heart the heavy thump of that body—otherwise soft and elastic—falling still like a rock, like a corpse in the already battered snow.
And he felt the woman’s body close. Clara smelled of lavender, of toothpaste, of morning. Silent, she pasted herself to his shoulder and gazed out the window. Matei, without saying anything, pointed to what was happening, asking her only with his eyes: “What can this mean?”
She looked, looked on, spoke softly: “Again!” Then, turning, almost forcefully, pulled Matei toward the center of the room. Her lips trembled, she’d gone pale, almost on the verge of tears.
“What is it,” asked Matei, “what’s happening?”
“Didn’t you understand anything? You really don’t understand?”
“No, I really don’t understand,” he confirmed. It all seems idiotic, demented, from another world.
She hesitated. Then, without looking up, she whispered, almost to herself,
“That beastly Kitty wants to get rid of it. She’s giving herself an abortion. It’s not the first time.”
And she was silent.
Everything confused him now. There was still liquor in the green bottle, there were still cigarettes on the table, the bed had been made. In the blink of an eye, Matei remembered that more than once he’d seen kittens, still blind, taken in a nylon bag to be drowned. He’d been through war, knew what death was, had his own idea about the fantastic waste that both humankind and nature allow. But he couldn’t cease to believe that the instinct of social planning had been seeded into the genes of this feline beast, having become a method and technique. That meant, that could mean that, where the instinct of procreation was holy, where the impetus toward life was law, a sort of mutation had taken place, a rupture; the claw of death, of the killer instinct, had been engrained in pure maternity. He had seen—at the cinema, of course—many of those disheveled preachers that screamed with despair, “Tell me, good people, is it worth having children in such a criminal world? For whom? With what purpose?” But all that happened in another country, in any case, it was a human business; there was no such thing as processions of cats, dogs, baby seals coming out to demonstrate on the great boulevards of contemporary history.
He began to feel sorry for Clara. The woman, now hunched over, sat mutely under the Gobelin in which handsome dancing Bavarian hunters murdered a few stags that seemed delighted by the spectacle. She held her head in her hands, le signe de la grande détresse, and, unlike herself, bore a heavy silence. Matei suspected the cause of this muteness: it seemed to him that he could hear in this poor woman’s being the criminal thump of the fall from the tree. He felt shame: the coincidences, too evident, hurt. (Just the evening before they had had a long and serious discussion: manly, lucid, with thousands of arguments, he had convinced her that it was no good, that everything is arranged, that the doctor is a friend and so, discreetly, elegantly, she could . . .)
But they both sat in silence, strangers and enemies.
There was no point in his staying. He put his clothes on silently, then, without kissing her, he went out into the garden.
Curiously, the cat had disappeared. “It was a dream,” thought Matei. But it hadn’t been. On the beaten snow, a long line of blood was clearly visible.
Clara was in the doorway.
“It means,” she said, looking at the red marks in the snow, “it means she succeeded.”
“Yes,” Matei confirmed, the cat succeeded. “Beast!”
Raising his gaze, he saw the woman’s tears of despair.
“What do you have against me?” she whimpered. “It isn’t my fault. I . . .”
He slammed the gate, spat. Without turning to look at her, he screamed loudly, the sound resounding through the entire alleyway.
“If you don’t poison it, I’ll never set a foot in your house again!”
“You’re a pig,” he heard behind him, “you’ll end up murdering me!”
He didn’t care anymore. The hourglass had been turned. Feeling the pockets of his padded coat, toward his joy, he discovered the unopened packet of cigarettes that he thought he had forgotten. And a fifty lei note. He could easily go drink some vodka, one hundred grams, with an empty heart, it wipes away any stain, any nightmare. Sunday, at ten, the buffets and churches are open.
