Cat Country (6 page)

The forest appeared much greener than it had before and the grey atmosphere that surrounded me seemed just right, neither too hot nor too cold. There was even a general, poetic beauty in the green trees and grey atmosphere; and if one sniffed carefully, one could tell that it really wasn’t at all a foul odour that was wrapped in the dank air so much as it was a very rich and fragrant sweetness, something like that given off by a very ripe muskmelon. ‘Happiness’ is insufficient to describe my state of mind at the time. ‘Ecstasy on top of ecstasy’ would be more like it. Those two leaves had given my mind a muted kind of strength and had blended my whole being into the leaden atmosphere, making me one with it, like a fish thrown into water.

I squatted down next to the tree. I had never liked to squat before, but now it was the only position I found relaxing. I began to take a closer inventory of my cat-friend, and didn’t find him nearly as revolting as I had previously; in fact, I began to feel that he was really quite likeable.

By ‘Cat People’, I don’t mean to call to mind the image of a large feline walking upright and wearing clothes. My friend wore no clothes. I smiled and pulled off the few tattered remnants of shirt that still covered my own chest. Since it wasn’t cold anyway, what sense did it make to wear such a tattered shirt? However, I did keep my trousers on. This wasn’t out of prudishness, but out of the desire to keep a belt to hang my pistol on. Of course, I could have gone nude and still worn the belt, but I couldn’t bring myself to part with that box of matches. I’d have to keep my pants so that I’d have a watch pocket to keep that box in just in case they should ever put me in those flammable leg irons again. I took off my boots and threw them to one side too.

To backtrack a bit, my cat-friend didn’t wear any clothes. His waist was long and narrow. His hands and feet were very short, and his fingers and toes were also quite stubby. (No wonder these Cat People ran so fast, but worked so slowly. I remembered how clumsy they had been in putting the leg irons on me.) His neck was so long that he was able to bend his head down against his back. Above two exceedingly round eyes set low on a very large face was a great forehead. It was covered with a fine fur that joined directly to the equally fine and delicate hair on the top of his head. The nose and mouth ran together much the same way that the nose and mouth of a pig do. The ears were set on top of the skull and were quite small. The entire body was covered with a glistening coat of fine fur. Close up, it looked grey, but at a distance there was a touch of green flashing in it that reminded one of a jaded peacock feather. His trunk was round and seemed made for rolling. On his chest he sported four pairs of small breasts forming eight little black dots. I have no way of knowing what his internal structure was like.

His movements were the strangest thing about him. As I saw it, there was speed in his inertia and inertia in his speed – an odd combination that made it impossible for one to guess his intentions and merely gave the impression that he was unusually mistrustful. His hands and feet were never at rest and he was as dexterous with his feet as he was with his hands. In fact, he seemed to use his hands and feet more than any of his sense organs. He’d feel, first to one side, and then to the other. No, it wasn’t really feeling so much as probing, the way an ant uses his antennae.

But what, after all, did my cat-friend have in mind by bringing me here and feeding me these leaves? Without thinking, I was just on the verge of asking him. But how could I ask? We didn’t speak the same language.

FELINESE AND OTHER THINGS

I
N THE
space of three or four months I had mastered Felinese. Malayan can be learned within half a year, but Felinese is much simpler. By manipulating four or five hundred words back and forth, you can express anything you want to. Of course there are some complicated things and some complex ideas that can not be expressed very clearly in this way, but the Cat People have a way around that: they simply don’t talk about such things. There aren’t many adjectives or adverbs, and nouns are not abundant either. Anything that vaguely resembles a reverie tree is a reverie tree: you have the big-reverie-tree, the little-reverie-tree, the round-reverie-tree, the pointed-reverie-tree, the foreign-reverie-tree, and the big-foreign-reverie-tree. As a matter of fact, none of these trees are actually related to each other, and it is only the treasured leaf of the true-reverie-tree that can inebriate a man. They don’t go in much for pronouns, and relative pronouns are non-existent. In sum, it is an exceedingly childish language. Actually, all you have to do is remember a few nouns and you know enough to carry on a conversation, for you can use gestures for most of the verbs anyway. They have written words too, funny things that look like tiny towers or pagodas that are extremely difficult to recognise; an ordinary Cat Person can only remember ten or so at the most.

Scorpion – such was my cat-friend’s name – recognised quite a few of the words and could even compose poetry. You can write a cat-poem by piling up a number of nice-sounding nouns; you don’t have to throw in any content at all.

Precious leaves,

Precious flowers,

Precious cats,

Precious bellies.

This is a fragment from Scorpion’s ‘Feelings I Had Upon Reading Our History’. And the Cat People
did
have history – twenty thousand years of it!

Once I was able to talk, I began to understand my host. Scorpion was an important person in Cat Country. He was landlord, politician, poet and military officer all rolled into one. He was a landlord by virtue of owning a large stand of reverie trees. (Reverie leaves were the Cat People’s staple of staples, and the reason that he had taken me in was intimately related to this food.) He started talking and took out several volumes of history to corroborate what he was about to say. The books were all made of stone and each slab was two-feet square and half-an-inch thick; each of these ‘pages’ contained ten or so very complicated characters.

According to him, five hundred years ago the Cat People planted and harvested crops and had never heard of reverie leaves. Then one day a foreigner brought some of the leaves to Cat Country. At first only the upper classes could afford to eat them, but then they began to import the trees and everybody became addicted. Within fifty years, non-eaters were in the minority. Eating the reverie leaves was an exceedingly carefree and convenient way to live. There was only one thing wrong with it: although the leaves seemed to do wonders for stimulating one’s spirits, they had exactly the opposite effect on the hands and feet. Farmers no longer planted their crops and labourers no longer tended to their tasks. Everyone became idle. At this point the government issued an order prohibiting the eating of reverie leaves. At noon of the first day that the order was issued, the queen was in such pain from withdrawal symptoms that she thrice slapped the king across his royal mouth – Scorpion moved aside another slab of the history – and the king was in such pain that his only reaction was to weep. That very afternoon another order was issued making reverie leaves the national dish. Scorpion commented that in the entire history of the Cat People, there was no other act as honourable and humane as this one.

During the four hundred years after reverie leaves were made the national dish, Cat Country’s civilisation progressed several times faster than it had before. (For instance, in twenty thousand years, not one poet had ever before used the expression ‘precious belly’.)

But this is not to say that there were no social and political upheavals. By three hundred ago, the cultivation of reverie trees had become widespread; but the more leaves people ate, the lazier they became, and gradually they even became too slothful to plant the trees. It just so happened that precisely at this point, Cat Country experienced a flood year – Scorpion’s grey face seemed to turn pale as he spoke, for the Cat People were terrified of water and many reverie trees had been washed away. The Cat People could have gone without any other crop, but not reverie leaves. Now that they were hard up for leaves, they couldn’t afford to be indolent any more, and all over the country people began stealing. The government decided that too many robberies were being perpetrated, and issued a most humane order: from now on, stealing reverie leaves would not be considered a criminal act. Thus the last three hundred years of their history had become known as The Age of Plunder. There was really nothing wrong with that, for stealing is an act that most fully expresses a man’s freedom; and freedom had, throughout their entire history, always been the highest ideal of the Cat People.

‘In that case, why is it that you still plant the trees?’ I asked in Felinese. In its true Felinese form, the question goes like this: ‘In that case’, one expresses by a twist of the neck; ‘why is it that’, you express this by rolling the pupils of your eyes twice; ‘you’, one simply points at the other person; ‘still tree trees?’ (The listener will understand the first ‘tree’ as a verb.) There’s no way of expressing the ‘still’ of my original question.

When I finished my question, Scorpion closed his mouth for a bit. The Cat People normally go around with their mouths open, since they don’t use their noses too much for breathing. Thus, a closing of the mouth is used to indicate either gratification or deep thought.

His answer was that at present there were only a few dozen people who planted trees and all of them were very powerful politicians, military officers, poets and landlords all rolled into one. They had to plant the trees, for if they didn’t, they would lose their power. To be in government you needed reverie leaves, for without them you’d never get to see the emperor. To be a military officer you needed reverie leaves as rations for your troops. You needed them to be a poet too, for reverie leaves can make you daydream. In sum, reverie leaves were omnipotent and once you had them you could tyrannise your way through the world. ‘Tyrannise’ was one of the most exalted words in the vocabulary of the upper-class Cat People.

The most important task for Scorpion and the other landlords was to devise ways of protecting the reverie leaves. They had soldiers, but they couldn’t possibly use them, for Cat Country’s armies so pride themselves on ‘freedom’ that when they have a good supply of reverie leaves to eat, they simply won’t obey orders. Furthermore, the landlords’ own soldiers often robbed them. One could tell from the tone of Scorpion’s voice that, according to the Cat People’s way of looking at things, this kind of behaviour was to be expected. So who protected the reverie leaves, if not the soldiers? Simple: foreigners. Every landlord had to support a few foreigners as guardians. The awe the Cat People had for foreigners was one of the distinguishing characteristics of their nature. Because of their love of ‘freedom’ they couldn’t put five of their own soldiers together for more than three days without one of them being murdered. Consequently, fighting a foreign army was a virtual impossibility. With apparent satisfaction, Scorpion added, ‘Our ability to murder each other grows stronger every day; and the new ways of mutual massacre that we have devised are almost as ingenious as the new devices that we have discovered for writing poetry.’

‘Killing has become a kind of art,’ I observed. Since there is no word in Felinese for ‘art’, I used our Chinese word,
yishu
. I explained its meaning to him at great length, but he still didn’t understand it. However, he did succeed in learning how to say this one Chinese word.

In ancient times they actually had fought foreign countries, and had even won on occasion, but within the last five hundred years – as a result of constantly massacring each other – they had completely erased from their minds the very concept of fighting foreigners, and had devoted themselves exclusively to doing each other in, hence their unusual awe of foreigners. If it weren’t for the support of foreigners, their emperor wouldn’t even be able to safeguard his own supply of reverie leaves.

Three years previously, another flying craft had come. The Cat People never found out where it had come from, but simply remembered it as a kind of large, featherless bird. So, when my spacecraft arrived, they knew that another intruder was among them. They assumed that I was another Martian, for it had never occurred to them there might be another planet besides Mars.

Scorpion and some of the other landlords had run to the spot where my craft had crashed, in the hopes of recruiting another foreigner to guard the reverie trees. The foreigners that they had originally invited in to do this job had, for some reason or other, all gone home, and now they were faced with the problem of recruiting new guardians.

They had agreed that once they had recruited me they would take turns in using me, for recently they had experienced great difficulty in obtaining foreigners. They had originally planned on asking me if I would like to work for them. But when they discovered I wasn’t a cat-man, they couldn’t decide how to handle me. Having never before seen a foreigner like me, they had been extremely frightened at first; but seeing that I behaved in such a docile manner, they had soon changed their plans from
asking
to
shanghaiing
. (These were the big shots of Cat Country, and therefore not at all lacking in guile; moreover, when the occasion demanded, they could even bring themselves to take a few risks.)

Looking back on it, I realise that had I used force at the very outset, I certainly could have frightened them away. However, perhaps it was just as well that I had not, for though I could have frightened them away for the time being, they certainly wouldn’t have been willing to leave such a scarce commodity alone for very long. Besides, I wouldn’t have been able to find anything to eat on my own. But on the other hand, maybe letting them capture me might not have been such a good idea after all; for once they had me in captivity, although they continued to fear me, they had ceased to respect me.

Seeing how tractable I was, it had occurred to each of them simultaneously that it would be far more profitable to monopolise me, rather than share my services with the others. If one of them could make off with me then there would be no need to discuss the terms of my servitude; all he’d have to do would be to give me enough to eat. At this point, every one of them decided to go back on his word to the others and see if he couldn’t make off with me himself at the earliest available opportunity. Breaking treaties and disregarding solemn agreements was, after all, a part of ‘freedom’. I could tell Scorpion thought his success in finally making off with me was something to be very proud of.