Only the Animals (5 page)

‘What self-respecting cat likes a human baby!' I exclaimed.

‘Is she a good mother?'

I hesitated. She is ambivalent about the role and has been from the start. She mused to me one summer evening, as we sat on the balcony and looked out across the pastel rooftops of Paris, ‘How can I ever be a mother who happens to have written a book? I will always be, at heart, a writer who happens to have birthed a child.' I said nothing to the tom, not wanting to betray her secret: that she loves me more than she will ever love Bel-Gazou. I do not demand as much of her, and Colette, like all writers, is selfish with her time.

‘I shouldn't have asked,' the tomcat said. ‘I'll leave you alone.'

I thought for a long time about the dog's journey home, trying to imagine each stage of it, and wished I were a dog so that I could survive the same journey back to her in Paris, even if she no longer wants me, even if she has become serious in my absence, along with all those who have glimpsed the godforsaken future.

Eventually I went to find the tomcat in his trench. He made room for me next to him. We watched the soldiers bet on which mud turtle would win the slow-motion race they had been started on, from one side of the trench wall to the other. Three small turtles were plodding forward along the racing lanes the soldiers had created for them. A fourth was marching around and around in a determined circle, wearing a deep groove in the mud. And a fifth had somehow hoisted another turtle onto its back, and was winning the race.

Its preternatural strength reminded me of another trivial scene from years ago, before Colette's improving literary reputation allowed her to shift from music hall to theatre stage. She would take me with her to the Olympia or the Wagram Empire, or wherever she happened to be performing that season. I would lie across a spotlight in the wings until it became unbearably hot, watching each act from the darkness. One night I watched a sixteen-year-old girl, whose stage name was Jawbone, lift between her teeth a kitchen table with an enormously fat woman sitting on it.

The boredom on the faces of the soldiers betting on the trench turtle derby dissipated, to be replaced with alarm. They scattered, standing to attention.
A shadow was thrown over me and the tomcat. Somebody was standing in our sun at the entrance to the trench. I glanced up and saw Henri the sergeant, squinting as he tried to figure out exactly what he had caught the men doing.

‘I heard about the dog,' he said to one of the soldiers. ‘Was it the guard dog of this trench?'

‘No, sir,' the soldier said. ‘Several down along the line. But we gave it treats,' he added hopefully.

‘Give a dog treats when men are starving?' he said. ‘Shame on you.' His eyes had adjusted to the sunlight, and he now focused on us: two feline forms crouching in his shadow. ‘Get these pests out of here,' he said. ‘They'll spread disease.'

My brave, thin soldier stepped forward and tucked us under his arms. ‘Sir, they catch the rats that bother us at night. And they lift our spirits.'

In the direct sunlight, I knew my fur would give me away. Henri had jealously listened to Colette go into raptures about my varied colours and stripes too many times for him not to recognise me. I looked into his eyes and he stared back at me, and I knew I'd been discovered.

‘If I see those cats again, anywhere near these trenches,' he said, ‘I will personally shoot them, then shoot any soldier found to be harbouring them.' He took another long look at me, letting his malice bubble up into his gaze.

‘That's her husband, isn't it?' the tomcat said when Henri had left.

My paws were sweating again. ‘Yes,' I said.

‘Come back only at night,' my soldier said. ‘You are not safe here anymore.'

I purred and rubbed my cheek against his hand. Who was safe anywhere anymore?

‘Let's go catch a carrier pigeon for lunch,' the tomcat said to me. ‘It'll make you feel better.'

‘I'm not the slightest bit hungry,' I said. I could feel my pulse beating in my throat, a sensation Colette once described when she was upset. ‘I have to try to make it back to Paris.'

‘I know,' he said. ‘I've been waiting for you to realise this is what we need to do. We'll leave early tomorrow morning, at first light.'

A cheer rose from the other end of the trench. The smallest turtle had won the derby, carrying its friend on its back. The turtle that had chosen to go around in circles had dug such a deep trench for itself that it had successfully disappeared from view.

Going Home

The tomcat insisted on night-hunting in no cat's land, as he calls it. He asked me to join him but I lied and said I wanted to preserve my strength for the start of our long journey to Paris. Really I just wanted to watch my soldier and his friend sleeping hand in hand on my final night in the trench. It's something I love to do with Colette: watch her sleep. If she wakes and catches me gazing at her, she offers me a treat, usually a moth caught between the windowpane and curtain.

I worry that my soldier will not survive this war. Colette would be better suited to life in the trenches than most of these skinny boys. She is robust and fit, her muscles kept flexible by regular sessions in her private gymnasium on the rue de Courcelles. At first it was to match the other performers in the music halls, who used their bodies in such bizarre ways that she felt she ought to strengthen her own. Then it became part of her weekly routine, especially once Missy was in her life: the two of them would put on shorts and headbands and do all kinds of stretches and exercises that made no physiological sense to me but seemed to make Colette happy and strong. On holiday at Missy's villa in the seaside town of Le Crotoy, the two of them would do their sessions on an outdoor gymnasium custom-built by Missy, shocking the passers-by.

Two carrier pigeons, both male, have crossed the night sky bearing a crucial message and are now flying in ovals as they try to orient themselves. They hate the dark. It is bewildering to see a pigeon silhouetted against the moon. A bat would better suit these sinister times. I think of the message I would send her if I could, imagine her unrolling it from the canister when the exhausted pigeon taps on her window:
In trying to stay close beside you, I have put great distance – an entire war – between us. But now I am coming home. Keep this bird for my dinner if you can.

The tomcat should have returned by now. He promised he would be back before daylight. Colette always says there is a sad and suffocating difference between a room where a feline presence has a moment ago been reigning and the same room empty, and I feel that in this trench: a cold absence where the tomcat should be. It is clear to me what has happened and what will happen, but I cannot bring myself to move. Not quite yet, not with my soldier's feet beneath my belly. I will imagine movement instead, and perhaps these thoughts will take form and lead me towards the destiny that I sense is crouched waiting for me, not in the unreality of Paris but here in this trench.

I will wake the tomcat's adopted soldier from his slumber, and wait until he listens with enough concentration to hear the tom mewling from the mudlands in which he is trapped in wire. The soldier will crawl out to him without thinking of the dangers. The other soldiers will wait anxiously for his return, listening to the tomcat's cries, sick at the thought of the helpless creature in pain. As the sun begins to shade the sky a pale lemon, the soldier will return, shuffling on his stomach with the blinking tomcat tucked under one arm, both of them so covered in mud they could be two bits of the same mythical beast.

I will be waiting on the parapet, waiting for the tomcat, waiting for the sunlight, waiting for the moment a German sniper will mistake my glorious fur for a carelessly uncovered soldier's head, take aim, and fire. My own soldier and his friend will bring my body into the trench and grieve above me, and when my vision blurs they will look just like Colette and Missy dressed up as men. I will hear Colette saying that she and I must be curious until our final living moments, we must be determined to observe everything around us, that ‘Look!' must be our final word and thought, and I will know that I have made it back to our little apartment, the one she and Toby-Chien and I used to share on the rue de Villejust, and I will know that I am almost home.

 

RED PETER'S LITTLE LADY

Soul of Chimpanzee

DIED 1917, GERMANY

 

When I come home late at night from banquets, from scientific societies, or from social gatherings in someone's home, a small half-trained female chimpanzee is waiting for me, and I take my pleasure with her the way apes do. During the day I don't want to see her. For she has in her gaze the madness of a bewildered trained animal. I'm the only one who recognises that, and I cannot bear it.

Franz Kafka,
A REPORT TO AN ACADEMY

 

 

Frau Evelyn Oberndorff

Tierparkallee 55

Hamburg

June 13th, 1915

My dear Evelyn

          I know you said not to write to you, not ever again. But time has passed, and a war has been started, and Herr Hagenbeck told me in no uncertain terms that I should write to Hazel care of you, that she has come a long way since your husband began working with her, and it would be appropriate now for me to be in closer touch with her. ‘She is being prepared to become your wife, in due course,' Herr Hagenbeck said to me, in that manner he has of making one feel unaccountably guilty. He also gave me the distressing news that Herr Oberndorff has gone to the front. I am truly sorry to hear it. I am even more sorry that in his absence, Hazel's training has fallen to you. It cannot be easy. And here I am making it worse, asking you to read this letter below aloud to her.

Yours

Red Peter

Dear Hazel

        I chose this name for you at our first encounter at the zoological garden, many years ago, for the colour of your eyes in your wide, empty face. You may not remember me; my name, as you will come to know, is Red Peter – Red for my fur, Peter for my first trainer back in Prague.

I shall send this letter directly to your new trainer, Frau Oberndorff, who has stepped in while her husband is away. She will be reading my letters aloud to you for now, though it sounds as if your progress with reading and writing is beyond expectations. I am pleased to hear from our benefactor, Herr Hagenbeck, that your comprehension and speaking skills are already quite remarkable.

What to say, what else to tell you? My pipe is filled, a book of poetry lies at the foot of my armchair. I am looking out of my hotel window at the streets of Hamburg, watching dusk's possibilities evaporate. My thoughts have snagged on old Peter, my namesake, the man who taught me to read. He is probably no longer alive. He was white-haired and kind, and took me along to see Halley's Comet cross the sky, trapped in its oblong orbit, in 1910. We watched from the dome of the observatory, built above a bastion of Prague's medieval Hunger Wall, with a small group of young literary dandies to whom I owe my sense of style.

One was called Blei, another Kafka. The former took no notice of me. But Kafka, very thin, looked me directly in the eye. It was no moment of communion. He was envious of me, I think, of my small existence, and my ability to become almost invisible to humans at certain times. He lay down near me on the stone floor to watch the comet pass, which made me uncomfortable.

I remember what he said to his companions that night as they left to walk home. ‘Had I not been lying on the ground among the animals, I would have been unable to see the sky and the stars. Perhaps I wouldn't have survived the terror of standing upright.'

The terror of standing upright, my dear, is something you will soon have to survive yourself. Do believe me that it is worth it. The view is much better from up here.

Sincerely

Red Peter

 

Dear Red Peter

          I enclose Hazel's reply to your recent letter. I have tried to use her own dictated words as much as possible. She is coming along quickly now, as Herr Hagenbeck has informed you, and I am particularly pleased with her wordplay. Forgive her occasional coarseness, if you can. She has made a big leap recently, allowing me to dress her in an evening dress and small shoes without too much protest. It was the bodice that gave her the most trouble. The frustration with her body that she expresses should be seen as a positive step, I believe, as it can only motivate her to give up her chimpanzee habits and fully embrace human ways – as you have, to such astounding effect.

My husband is indeed at the front. It was his choice to go, I should tell you, though men may not have the luxury of choice for much longer, not even family men. The children miss him dreadfully.

Evelyn Oberndorff

Dear Red Peter

          What use is this body to anyone? Why can my nostrils not be small as pips? Why does hair grow on my back? Frau Oberndorff gives me exercises to do by the window in the laboratory. Calisthenics, she calls them, for a new body. I do what she says, for the ginger biscuits. They make my shit dark and hard.