The Cat at the Wall (3 page)

Five

—

I smelled
sage. I could tell from the rhythm of the footfalls that the passerby was an old woman heading down to the market with herbs to sell for making tea.

The soldiers kept their guard up. Aaron quietly recorded everything he saw out on the streets, all the comings and goings of young moms and old men. They also kept their backs to me, so I took the opportunity to keep shopping in their duffel bags.

I poked around their belongings, looking for something small enough to carry away. Among the socks and ready-to-eat meals I spied a packet of gummi bears. I almost took them. They reminded me of my old life. But they were wedged under an ammunition clip and I couldn’t get them out.

I decided to take a small pack of batteries. I dragged it under the sofa and lay down on top of it.

Mine.

There. I felt better.

There are little stashes of things I’ve stolen all over this area, on both sides of the Big Wall. I wish I could keep it all with me.

A package of batteries is not very comfortable to lie on, so I left it and went back out to sniff around some more.

I wandered away from the duffel bags and over to the pile of trash called the City of Dreams. It
was
trash — boxes, bottles and tin cans spread out over the entire end of the room. Unfortunately, at first sniff it seemed like it was all spotlessly clean, without a speck of food in any of it. The boxes had been cut and reassembled to look like houses, churches, schools, things like that. There were bridges made from toilet rolls and a castle with a drawbridge. Stop signs were made out of sucker sticks and red bottle caps. Toy cars and little army men dotted the streets along with tiny crocheted dogs, birds and mice. There was even a park with trees and benches.

Someone had worked hard on it. If it was a project for school, some kid was bound to get an A.

I kept sniffing.

I could smell the boy. He was hiding in the middle of the cardboard city. He was sweaty and scared and hadn’t washed in a while. He had wet himself, too. All his smells were making it very hard for me to tell if there was any food around.

He was having trouble breathing. I could hear it because I have fantastic hearing now. The soldiers couldn’t hear it because they were paying attention to the street. They kept up a whispered conversation.

“I’ll bet you there’s a terrorist in that house with the ivy growing up the side,” said Simcha.

“That’s not ivy. It’s sweet pea. Or honeysuckle,” Aaron said.

“Honeysuckle? Why would terrorists be growing honeysuckle?”

“You think terrorists would be more likely to grow ivy than honeysuckle? That makes no sense.”

Their argument was completely pointless and I tuned them out as much as I could. I settled down near the head part of the buried boy. I looked closely at the area and saw how he had managed to hide.

The City of Dreams was built over a trap door. The soldiers couldn’t see it because there wasn’t much light in the house, but I could. Most of the toy houses were loose on the floor. Some had been glued down over the trap door to disguise it. All the banging on the door the soldiers did when they were trying to get into the house must have alerted the boy and given him time to hide.

I noticed two things, then, almost at the same time.

One was an inhaler, the kind people with asthma use. It had rolled under a low table and was in a shadow next to a table leg.

The other was that the boy’s breathing had gotten much worse. Whatever oxygen was in that little hiding place, he was using it up fast. His noises reminded me of Colin, a kid with asthma who got locked in the art-supply cupboard in the second grade.

I already said that it was none of my business if a boy wanted to hide, and I believed that.

But when I heard him breathing like little Colin, I decided I should do something.

It took me a while to figure out what, because I’m not used to doing things for other people.

While I was thinking, the boy’s breathing got worse and worse, until finally I just started to howl.

I meowed and screeched and dug furiously at the trap door with my paws, scattering the loose cardboard buildings and making a great big fuss.

The soldiers finally shut up and tried to get me to be quiet. They threw things at me — socks, the packet of gummi bears — but I stayed where I was and kept doing what I was doing.

Finally, one of the soldiers came over. That’s when he heard the boy’s labored breathing and wheezing.

“Someone’s here!”

The two of them found the hidden door, yanked it open and lifted the boy out of his hiding place. They dropped him face down in the City of Dreams. One soldier pulled his hands behind his back and the other pointed a rifle at his head.

Six

—

Next came
a lot of shouting in whispers.

“Who are you? Why are you hiding? Where is the rest of the family? Who left you here on your own? What is your name?”

The soldiers asked the same questions over and over, their guns pointed right at the boy’s head. They blindfolded him and placed him so that he was sitting cross-legged facing the wall. His hands were cuffed behind his back.

“Who are you? Where are the others?”

The boy was having too much trouble breathing to answer. Being out of the hiding place and in the room where there was more air probably helped, but he still needed his medicine.

I kept waiting for the soldiers to figure out what was wrong with the boy. But they were too busy interrogating him.

The boy was seven or eight years old and very skinny. He wore cheap jeans that were filthy and too short and a long-sleeved red T-shirt with a rip in the shoulder. He sat with his head up and back, trying to gulp for air. I could see from the way his shoulders moved that he was putting his whole little self into the struggle.

I have to do everything, I thought.

I went to the little table and batted the little inhaler until it stopped at the foot of one of the soldiers.

They were still too busy screaming at the kid, so I raised myself up, found a spot on one of them above his boot, dug my claws in and bit him on the leg, right through his uniform trousers.

Then I zoomed back under the sofa to watch the fun.

The soldier I bit — who turned out to be Aaron — spat out a string of curses and pawed through the duffel bag for the first-aid kit. Simcha finally noticed the inhaler.

“Kid — is this yours?”

But he asked in Hebrew, which the kid apparently couldn’t understand because he didn’t answer. Plus, he was blindfolded, so he couldn’t see what the soldier was holding in front of his face.

“Aaron, do you know how to work one of these things?”

Aaron looked over. “My brother uses one. Shake it first. Does that cat look like it has rabies?”

“Ten giant needles, right into your stomach, Commander,” Simcha said. He shook the inhaler, read the instructions, held it up to the kid’s face and gave the boy a dose.

The boy breathed easier after that.

The quiet seemed to calm the soldiers down. Simcha did another search of the little house, which involved scattering the City of Dreams all over the floor. Aaron took a sudden intake of breath at the sting of the alcohol swab on the bite wound. He seemed like a nice guy. I probably shouldn’t have bit him quite so hard.

“Seven a.m.,” Aaron said into his recorder. “Discovered male child, primary school age, hiding in false floor. Child can’t or won’t account for himself. Location and identity of his parents is unknown.”

I rubbed my whiskers against Aaron’s boot to show there were no hard feelings. He patted me gently, then patched up his wound. The two soldiers took up their posts again by the window, one with the rifle, one with the telescope.

The fleas were still bothering me. I spied the boy’s hands tethered behind his back with plastic twist-tie handcuffs.

I went up to him, meowed a couple of times so he’d know I was a cat and not a rat, then positioned myself so that his fingers were at my ears. I bumped my head against his hands, just so he got the message.

As he got busy scratching the flea zones, he calmed down. He’d been crying a bit but eased off, and then he stopped altogether. I started to purr — for real, not just for show.

It was a very peaceful scene. Through the window the sky changed from dark gray to silver to a rainbow of sunrise colors. I’ve seen so many sunrises since I became a cat, more than I ever saw as a human. But this one was special. The colors made the two soldiers look even younger, almost as though they could have been classmates of mine.

I had a sudden memory of my mother, coming into the kitchen from the yard in the summer, fresh-cut flowers in her hands, dew on the petals and dew on her. I paid no attention to it then.

People and flowers are freshest in the morning.

Cats? We’ve usually been up all night, roaming around. By the morning we look grizzled and done.

I purred and purred and felt my whole body relax.

And then I heard the boy start to whisper.

It was very faint, barely a whisper of a whisper. The soldiers probably couldn’t hear it. But I could. And I didn’t like it.

I tried to ignore it.

The words got into my brain anyway.

He was speaking in Arabic, which, as I’ve said, I can understand now.

I thought I was having a nightmare. I moved away from his hands and climbed into his lap to hear better. I still didn’t want to believe what I was hearing so I put my front paws on his chest and raised myself up so that my ear was right next to his mouth.

“
Go placidly amid the noise and the haste
…”

I stood there and listened to him recite the whole damn poem. When he got to the end, he started again at the beginning. He spoke the poem as if it were just one long word.

There was no mistaking what he was saying.

He was reciting the Desiderata.

He was reciting the punishment poem.

Seven

—

“There are
many theories of punishment,” Ms. Zero said.

“There is the belief that punishment should be retribution, that it should make the offender suffer,” she continued. “Others believe that the main purpose of punishment should be to help the victim feel better. Should a punishment be so terrible that it deters others from committing the same crime? Is punishment ever a deterrent or do offenders always believe they will get away with their crime?

“We are going to talk a lot about this in the coming months because you will soon be in a position to make decisions about these things. For example, if we put someone to death for killing someone else, does that make us killers, too? I can see that a lot of you have things to say about that, and I promise that we will have that discussion another day, probably over the course of many days as you try to come to terms with the world you are inheriting. But for now, let’s talk about detention.”

She took a rolled-up poster off her desk and held it in front of us.

“Your Statement of Agreement already lays out the consequences for infractions such as tardiness and the incompletion of assignments. Detention in my class is something different. Detention will be given out in response to acts of meanness — bullying, unkind behavior and actions that are disrespectful of others.”

She asked two students up to the front to unroll the poster so everyone could see what was on it. It was a poem. A long one.

“This poem is called ‘Desiderata.’ It was written in 1927 by Max Ehrmann. Who would like to read it out for us?”

Several of the Bright Eyes shot their hands in the air. One of them went to the front and started reading.

“Go placidly amid the noise and the haste, and remember what peace there may be in silence …”

The poem went on and on.

I hated it from the beginning.

It sounded like something my grandmother would say. “Look for the good in people, Clare-bear,” she would say as we peeled potatoes together in the church soup kitchen. “If you look for it, I guarantee you will find it.”

She was crazy.

And the punishment poem was stupid.

“Be yourself …” Bright Eyes read. “With all its sham, drudgery and broken dreams, it is still a beautiful world…. Strive to be happy.”

It was probably the longest poem in the history of poems.

“Copying out this poem will do two things for you,” Ms. Zero said. “The act of sitting still and copying will give you a chance to calm yourself and perhaps reflect on your own actions. And the words of the poem will challenge you to think about who you are and who you want to be. So this is what will happen. The first detention, you will copy the poem once. If you get a second detention, you will copy the poem twice. You see where I’m going with this?”

She smiled and some of the class laughed. It didn’t concern me. I never got detention. All the teachers loved me.

“You can do the work at recess or after school,” she continued. “Or, if you have several copies to do, you can do them at home. Handwritten copies only, all legible, all complete. It must be on my desk by the start of school the next day. If it isn’t, one more copy will be added to your detention for each day it is not completed.”

Like I said, I never got detention. I was pretty and got good grades and was always careful to treat the teachers with respect, at least to their faces. I flew under the radar. The teachers all wrote nice things on my report cards, but my grades weren’t so spectacular that they singled me out as some sort of leader or something. The teachers were happy, my parents were happy, I was happy.

Toward the end of the second week in Ms. Zero’s class, I got my first-ever detention.

We were all in the gym for a guest speaker because the auditorium floors were being waxed. I hated having assembly in the gym. We had to sit on the floor like little kids, in straight rows, legs crossed, teachers sitting on chairs around the sides of the room like jail guards. Just like the soldiers who sit in the towers on top of the Big Wall, looking down on the people in the village. Just like me when I sit on the wall.

The theme for the school year was “Reaching Beyond Our Borders.” A bunch of assemblies spread out through the year were supposed to inspire us to get involved in the world beyond our school, or something dumb like that.

At the first assembly, this woman talked about poor kids around the world.

Her voice was kind of halting. I didn’t know if she was nervous or if she didn’t know her topic well enough or what, but it drove me crazy and I just wanted it to be over.

“I can make her freak out,” I whispered to Josie. My whole crew was sitting together, as far away as possible from the Untouchables.

“Don’t be mean,” Josie said, but I knew she was daring me.

It was all very simple. Mostly I just smiled. I looked right at this children’s rights woman and smiled through her entire speech. Not a real smile. The sort of smile my mother called a smirk.

Sometimes I would raise my eyes a bit, as if I was laughing at some hair sticking straight up out of her head.

Sometimes my eyes would go to her shoes, and I’d pretend to whisper to Josie, all the time smiling as if something was hysterically funny.

It worked. I knew it would. I’d done the same thing in church when I was bored, to supply teachers I didn’t like, and to soccer coaches, too, just for fun.

The speaker raised her hand to smooth down her hair. Then she looked down at her shoes to see if one was untied. And she lost her place in her speech.

“According to UNICEF, there are seventy-seven thousand children around the world who are not in school … no, I mean seventy-seven million …”

She had to look through her notes, and she knocked them off the podium. They flew across the gym floor. A couple of the Bright Eyes helped her gather them up, but she had to take a moment to put them in order and then find her place again.

The rest of her speech was a mess. The students started to fidget and even the teachers stopped paying attention. She finished in a rush and hardly anyone applauded.

“See?” I said to Josie.

“You’re not very nice,” she said, but I could tell she was impressed.

Back in the classroom, Ms. Zero stood at the front of the room and was silent for a long time, even after we took our seats and got settled.

No one had been given a detention yet.

Then she said, in a quiet voice, “Clare, please write your name on the side board.”

I didn’t quite know what was coming, but I had a bad feeling that I was in trouble. I wanted to protest, but that would have gone against my practice of not appearing to disagree with teachers. I went over to the chalkboard as if it was a regular everyday thing, but my heart was beating fast.

“Beside your name, put a multiplication sign, then the number one.”

I did that.

“On my desk, by the start of class tomorrow morning.”

That was all she said.

I hung back at lunch time, feeling the need to at least pretend I didn’t know why I was being punished.

She didn’t even wait for me to speak.

“Your behavior in the assembly was disgraceful. I have nothing more I want to say to you right now, and there is certainly nothing I want to hear from you.”

She didn’t even give me a chance to talk. Like I said, she hated me from the start.

I stayed in after school to make the copy. I almost didn’t. I almost left when everyone else did, but at the last minute, I decided to get it over with.

“I’ll be right out,” I said to my crew.

They went off together down the hall, talking and laughing and having a good time without me.

I counted the verses in the stupid poem. Seventeen. I slogged through it.

If you compare yourself with others, you may become vain or bitter, for always there will be greater and lesser persons than yourself.

On and on it went.

Ms. Zero worked at her desk the entire time I did the detention. She didn’t speak to me and I didn’t speak to her.

Finally I copied out the last two lines:
With all its sham, drudger
y and broken dreams, it is still a beautiful world. Be cheerful. Strive to be happy.

I handed my work in to Ms. Zero.

“Thank you,” she said.

She didn’t even look at me. She didn’t even ask me if I’d learned anything.

My crew was gone by the time I got outside. I was late getting home. I told my father I’d stayed behind to help the remedial class. He said he couldn’t ask for a better daughter.

Strive to be happy
, I thought, as I flopped down on my bed. I’d be happy if I never had anything to do with that damned Desiderata again.

And now I had to hear that same stupid poem coming out of that stupid little boy in the handcuffs.

It was not very nice. It was not very nice at all.