Felidae on the Road - Special U.S. Edition (5 page)

By now the rain, which was coming down harder all the time, had made me very wet. When I looked up at the ground-floor flat in the old building, I realised to my surprise that it already seemed strange to me. For as the mighty building rose to the angry sky in the darkness, the paint on its façade peeling like the skin of a putrefying corpse to reveal stained grey stone, the windows like eye sockets in an emaciated head, I felt no sense of familiarity any more. It was as if I'd never lived in that building, never had a friend there, never shared his joys and sorrows. Suddenly it was just an old dump like any other crying out for luxury renovation. Good: that meant I needn't shed a tear for the amazing bulbous oriels and the basalt heads of demons set under the cornice, guaranteed to keep evil spirits away. I'd obviously had enough of the place and my boringly conventional life there anyway.

I trotted on along the pavement, following my nose, while the spring shower gave me a foretaste of something more like a summer splash. Incidentally, it's not true that we hate water. We just don't like being bathed, because unlike human beings we are always clean. Of course I knew my way about the immediate vicinity; I'd often been out and about in this district. Tonight, however, the place didn't seem at all familiar, but on the contrary downright foreign and threatening. The picturesque old street lights were like absurdly tall, lanky spies with opaque faces. The asphalt, which had a film of water rippling over it, was a ramp leading to the unknown, giving the impression it might come to a sudden end any moment and cast me into the deepest chasms of horror. Since I really knew these parts like the back of my paw, why did they suddenly seem so sombre? Surely it wasn't because I knew there was no going back now to the fluffy sheepskin rug in front of the crackling fire? That's unworthy of you, I told myself angrily, you haven't gone a hundred metres from hell yet, and you already feel tempted by all that bourgeois soft soap! Concentrate on your nuts, you effeminate fool, think of those nuts which will rise in summer like twin suns in a blazing firmament!

Spurred on by such thoughts, I marched automatically on as the storm gradually became a raging tempest. I was wondering if I'd win the Nobel Prize for proposing, as a new natural law, the simple fact that you're spoilt rotten for all the comforts of life so long as you don't lack for anything in any case, whereas no end of horrible things happen, instantly and all at once, just when you're in need. Why else must I find myself on the set of a bad film about the cruel sea just now, at the beginning of my glorious flight? To all appearances I was reduced to half my normal size, since my coat was drenched with rainwater, its wet fur clinging to my body like a marten's. Anyone who'd seen me in this state probably couldn't even have said what species I belonged to. Complicated flashes of forked lightning tore through the sky, showing the full extent of the flood in their sudden spotlights. The rain was now falling like great sweeping veils of water. The water-level in the street was rising perceptibly, and soon reached the dimensions of a small river. Everywhere, unfastened window-shutters slammed deafeningly against walls, branches were torn off trees and fell in the road, dustbins were overturned by powerful gusts of wind, and the penetrating rattle of raindrops on car roofs provided just the right rhythmic bass accompaniment to these outstanding soloists.

I stopped and thought. Couldn't I pick some better moment to set off on my travels? It might be sensible to shelter in the doorway of a building before I started to resemble those contemporaries of mine who like sleeping in washing-machine drums, and wake up - if they wake up at all - to find themselves in a fascinating underwater world full of sock eels and knicker jellyfish. In fact it would be an even better idea to sprint home to Gustav's, take a rest there to dry off, and try another jail-break when the storm had died down and my strength was restored. Although it meant going against all my good resolutions, I decided on the latter course of action. Easier said than done, though: when I tried putting my plan of retreat into practice I had a new problem to cope with -by this time I was hopelessly lost. The street where I found myself was very much the same as all the others in this old part of town. Furthermore, the curtain of rain meant that I seemed to be looking at every building, every front garden with curly cast-iron railings and every antiquated alley through a pair of steamed-up diving goggles. I should have paid more attention to the signs bearing street names during my previous clandestine excursions. Unfortunately, from unthinking habit I'd always preferred the specific technique of my own kind and made a scent-map of the town in my head from the marks my colleagues left behind them. And not surprisingly, this special kind of cartography failed me in a thorough heavy-wash programme like the present one. Of course I still had vague recollections of the occasional unusual building, and I could visualise a few major road junctions, but now even these few rudimentary means of orientation merged into a tangle of street-scapes in general.

Within a few minutes the euphoria of my departure had turned to sheer panic. The raging storm had washed away not only the dirt in the streets but all my daydreams about a Francis living wild, welcomed into the freedom of nature as if into his mother's bosom. My dearest wish was to get home as fast as possible, snuggle up to the radiator and stay there until I could be served for dinner as a nice roast. Let's face it, didn't sex usually prove a damn nerve-racking, exhausting business, and wasn't the pleasure achieved seldom worth the effort? Surely the world was over-populated enough. Shouldn't sexual intercourse be a pleasure best left to my more ordinary contemporaries, people too stupid and lazy to read a good book, people who took a compulsive interest in their genitals and the brainless amusement they provided instead? Yes, it should. I'd wave goodbye to my nuts and read good books for the rest of my days. And now to get out of here!

A flash, a crack of thunder, and in the glaring light a caprice of the stormy wind showed me a curtain of rain parting in the middle to reveal the mouth of a dark alley paved with cobblestones. I thought I'd come down that alley. It led to a road junction; so did the street where I now stood, which had quite a steep slope to it. I gazed at the alley, transfixed, until the bright lightning disappeared. Maybe it was my imagination, but I thought I really did recognise a familiar spot. Since the alley was on the other side of the street, seen from my present standpoint, my best course of action would be to cross the road diagonally and then turn right at the junction. It would mean wading paw-deep in the water flowing down the street like a shallow stream, but it would be worth the effort in the end.

I stepped into the water rippling by and hurried to the middle of the road. As a result I finally enjoyed total immersion, but in my present condition that didn't matter. The closer I came to my goal, the more clearly did the dim light of the street lamp on the corner show me the manhole cover in the middle of the road junction quivering as if shaken by a phantom hand. The gratings in the gutters on both sides of the street were swallowing a good deal of the flood, but things must be chaotic down in the sewers in such torrential rain, leading to the risk of sudden eruptions of sewage here and there. The immense pressure might force manhole covers off. So it would be sensible to get a move on and reach the alley before I was faced with any such unpleasant situation. Just as this thought shot through my head, I heard a rushing and roaring behind me as if the Atlantic Ocean in person was coming to town. I whisked round and looked for whatever was making the noise. Aghast, I watched as a tidal wave about half a metre high and stretching right across the street came foaming and raging round the corner and rolled on towards me at high speed. Bloody hell, had all the natural disasters in the universe just been waiting for me to take my first step into independence? No, not all of them - there were still some to come. For when I turned my head forward again to check out the best way of escape, I was horrified to see the manhole cover in the middle of the road junction tossed in the air by a mighty jet of water from underground. The paralysis induced in me by these moments of terror was my undoing. I'd lingered too long staring at the spectacle, and before I knew it, before I could get away from the middle of the road, the wave caught me from behind and flung me to the ground. I struggled to get some kind of footing, but the fury of the wild water forced my body to curl up into a ball and drove me on full speed ahead, like a car tyre come loose. The comparison with those of my kind who like sleeping in washing-machine drums was extremely apt now, for in this unfortunate situation all I could do was swallow water, strike out helplessly with all four paws and hope the wave would soon roll on and over me, leaving its victim behind like driftwood.

Although I couldn't concentrate on anything but sheer survival as I performed death-defying acrobatics in the belly of the wave, I saw out of the corner of my eye that I had now been washed dangerously close to the open sewer shaft. The latter had a particularly intriguing surprise ready to spring on me. For whereas the sludgy brown contents of its stomach had spewed up at the road junction like a liquid mushroom cloud, it was now acting like a whirlpool in a stormy sea, sucking all the water round it back down again with a crazy thirst. You couldn't call me a particularly timid type, but my bladder spontaneously emptied at the sight, enriching the waters foaming around me, for the simple reason that never in my wildest dreams had I envisaged myself drowning in the smelly vortex of the sewage system. I always expected to pop my clogs in old age, sitting on a velvet cushion, either from choking on a fist-sized chunk of liver or from fracturing my Adam's apple with shrill cries of lust while having it off with the Siamese queen next door. All this in radiant sunshine and to the accompaniment of Mahler's
Kindertotenlieder
, of course. But why so defeatist? It didn't have to turn out that way. The tidal wave wasn't necessarily going to wash me down that tiny hole - after all, it was a big road junction. No, not necessarily ...

After what seemed to me my three hundred and eleventh somersault, I saw the full glory of the open manhole right in front of me like some creepy prophecy come true. The tremendous suction from inside created a spiralling vortex at the top, circling slowly, but inexorably drawing in all the water and rubbish near by. It looked like the glowing eye of the Cyclops himself. I'd have liked to put up a final prayer to my Creator, who for some strange reason had obviously decided I was to go to a better world by way of an intake of human excretions. But before I could get that far, the wave brought me to the edge of the whirlpool. The whirlpool promptly demonstrated its power and sucked me into its orbit with all its might. I screeched, lashed out with my paws and tried a couple of feeble swimming strokes to escape its hellish powers of suction. I was wasting my time. Like an ant, I was washed round and round in the eddying water at the top of the manhole several times, and then I was finally dragged down into the depths.

In retrospect I see my involuntary venture into aquatics as if through a dirty, scratched plastic film. I remember feeling an urgent need for oxygen and opening my mouth as soon as I was in the water and going down. That was about the silliest thing I could have done, for what little air remained in my lungs was instantly replaced by water. Even worse than the physical shock was the feeling that in my helpless desperation I was on the point of drifting off into mental derangement. Moreover my body, like a living torpedo, kept knocking against the iron rungs cemented into the cylindrical interior of the shaft. But though I was nearly unconscious by now, and it was pitch dark inside the shaft, my highly receptive sense of sight showed me first a series of air bubbles splashing past, then the glimmer of something like a metal bar passing along the winding sewers below. Then I stopped falling, and just as I identified the bar as a hand-rail I collided with it, belly first. I stayed hanging there like a fox's brush soaked in water. The sudden impact, in its turn, brought all the liquid I'd swallowed spewing out of my insides as if it were rendering first aid. Obviously the whirlpool I'd been dragged into was the final consignment from above, because all I could feel now was a last trickle flowing down my back and then sloshing around on the stone floor.

Too badly battered by Fate to make any movement of its own, my body swung rhythmically to and fro where it lay draped over the hand-rail, until it finally dropped backwards to the floor. Once down, it curled up snake-like into a kind of spiral, and the water still in my lungs trickled out of the corners of my mouth. Although I'm equipped with the best optical system in the world, one which leaves even the residual-light cameras people use for nocturnal photography literally in the shade, I couldn't make out anything in my new surroundings at first, just overwhelming blackness. The rain went on splashing down on my fur through the open manhole, but judging by the small number of drops that hit their target I concluded that it must have slackened off. Typically, once the damage was done the perpetrator made a quick get-away. My battered body was sending me the most alarming signals of pain from every nerve ending, but I couldn't be sure whether or not I'd broken anything as I fell. However, I dared not move; I was too scared I'd find I was paralysed. And if so, what dreadful death confronted me? Unable to move from the spot, I'd be torn to pieces slowly and with relish by mice, or more likely rats who could match me for physical size. There were sure to be plenty of rats going about their nasty business down in this clammy vault. And all the time I'd be fully conscious, aware of every detail of my mutilations, watching it all
with the best optical system in the world
!