David Grossman - The Book of Intimate Grammar

Three cats loped by.

Aron felt so miserable he jumped up and ran after them; instinctively, like a child, with the persistence of a child. They slipped through a hole in the fence at the Wizo Nursery School, and Aron hid his ball under a pile of leaves in the hollow of a poplar tree and followed the cats, picking up two sharp stones as he chased them, till suddenly he recognized Mutzi-Chaim, and he held his fire. Mutzi’s mother had kittened her about two years before in the furnace room of the building project with everyone standing around to watch. Mutzi was the sixth and last of the litter, and she looked so puny coming out that the neighbors clicked their tongues. She’d be better off dead, in her condition, said mealy-mouthed Esther Kaminer, whose meaning was lost on no one. But Papa picked up the blind little kitten and hurried home. He put it in Aron’s hands for safekeeping, stuck a tiny dropper down its throat, and gently pumped. The dropper filled with a golden fluid and the kitten sputtered and started to squirm. It has to have a name, thought Aron, we have to name it right away. Papa repeated the procedure with consummate skill, while Aron racked his brains for a name. A name, is that all you can think about at a time like this, he chided himself, if you name the kitten you’ll get attached to it, but he couldn’t refrain from whispering Poppet, Kitty, Checkers (because it was black-and-white), Mitzi, when Papa told him to massage it very gently and Aron obeyed, slowly, with a palpitating heart, and finally he decided on Mutzi, a common name, too common, but there was no time, and Mutzi, Mutzi, he murmured, tenderly transfusing the warmth of his breath into thekitten, fervently blowing on it, as on a dying ember; suddenly the kitten heaved its tiny rib cage and lay motionless in his palm, and Aron’s heart stopped beating. It seemed to be struggling against some powerful force till finally with a mighty spasm, it jerked itself free, squeaked and wriggled, and began to breathe. Papa and Aron smiled at each other. For a week they dropper-fed the kitten, which, as it turned out, was female, and Aron decided to add the word “life” to her name, the way Minister Moshe Chaim Shapira did when he miraculously escaped from death.

She was a beauty, Mutzi-Chaim. Plump and graceful, black-and-white. Aron gazed at her affectionately, he hadn’t seen her for a very long time, they had parted on bad terms, long ago, it seemed, but he wasn’t angry anymore, he smiled at her and decided to head back, at his age cats weren’t that exciting anymore. But all of a sudden Mutzi yowled and rolled over, rubbing her neck voluptuously in the dust, and Aron realized that the other two cats must be rutty males, and he had to smirk as he watched them, the way their eyes never left her as she lay there licking her inner thigh. The pads on her paws were pink and puffy. The yellow tomcat howled in pain. Mutzi regarded him a moment, then licked herself all the way up her thigh, where suddenly her tongue met the other little mouth that opened there. Aron cleared his throat. He could feel their maleness bristle at the sight of her rosy penetralia. The big black tom approached with an almost martial rigidity of limb, slowly swishing his tail, till Aron could feel the panther-python movements winding around his waist. He kneeled down cautiously, parting the shafts of wild wheat to peek out at the cats.

For a moment they remained perfectly still. Evening sounds from the building project reverberated in his ears. Pots clattering, a song on the radio, water running in the shower; Edna Bloom on the telephone, talking to her parents in Hungarian, raising her voice till it cracked, as usual. Windows closed, blinds rolled down. Then the yellow tom leaped in the air and smacked the black one under the eye, and the two of them tumbled in the dust, fierce with the knowledge of things to come, ripping each other to pieces, howling and yowling, drenched in darkness, and Aron squatted and gasped with astonishment, even his recalcitrant ofzeluchi brain momentarily drank in the frothy blood his heart had been withholding so long. Presently the black cat surrendered and slinked away, sloughing off the disgrace of innumerable lost futures, and the yellow one, panting and prickly with the terrors of war, approachedthe female and started yowling in her ear. Mutzi-Chaim turned her head as though she wanted to think it over, but then she let out an identical yowl, how did she make that sound, he wondered, and again he envisioned Mutzi-Chaim in the early days, his lithesome kitten, poised like an elastic muscle with a triangular head you could hold in your palm, and he decided to raise her as a vegetarian, he wouldn’t let anyone feed her meat or bones, he had this idea, he wanted to prove it could be done, that you could prevent a cat from growing up carnivorous; he even thought of training her to perform with pigeons, to add a little variety to the Houdini act, but his parents laughed at him; Gideon was skeptical too, which made Aron all the more determined to prove that nothing was impossible, and for the next few weeks, or maybe months, he kept Mutzi-Chaim locked in the bomb shelter and fed her out of his own hands, and felt a surge of pride as she sidled up with eyes only for him, and rubbed against him though he hadn’t brought her a single bite of meat; and one day he came down to the shelter and found her gone — there was a hole in the ventilator grid — but he never lost faith in her, he defended her to tears whenever Mama and Papa teased him about the way she ransacked the garbage cans at night behind his back and feasted on chicken legs, and when he screamed that they were lying and pounded the floor with his fists, they laughed their heads off and said, Why don’t we conduct a little experiment, then: go call your vegetarian pussy and let’s find out, and he refused, but Papa opened the door and went “Pssss” and in she pranced with her tail held high, kitty-catting over and rubbing against his legs, purring loudly, and then Aron really blew up and told them to leave her alone, but Papa grabbed him, roaring with laughter, and pinned his arms down, and Mama exploded with hilarious gurgling noises, and then she took a piece of dripping red liver out of the refrigerator, he couldn’t believe it, she was about to waste a good piece of liver on a cat, and Aron screamed as loud as he could, Watch out, Mutzi-Chaim, it’s poisoned, but she scurried to the liver Mama had put in the saucer from the table service Gamliel and Rochaleh gave them for their wedding, and Mutzi-Chaim, humming electrically from her ears to the tip of her tail, grabbed the liver with her bare teeth, which looked different all of a sudden, and Papa let go of Aron, exchanging secret glances with Mama, and together they watched him approach Mutzi-Chaim, recoiling at the sound that came, not from her mouth, but from deep inside her, astrange new sound, like a throaty snarl; she had turned into a stranger, clenching the liver between fiercely bared teeth, her ears flattened ominously; and then she arched her back, crouched down, and slinked out of the house, and Aron burst into tears and ran around wailing that the Houdini act was ruined, till he bumped into something soft, his magnanimous Mama, who forgave him everything, and hugged him tightly to her breasts with pity, with love, effacing the memory of the arching cat and that awful sound he could hear again now, though it didn’t frighten him anymore. The cats’ ears were so flat it seemed as if an invisible presence were trying to strip them of their earthly guise, and Aron crawled forward, and the tall grass brushed against his face as the triangular heads of the male and Mutzi-Chaim came together and they yowled their gravelly song, so loudly Aron couldn’t stand it anymore. Suddenly Mutzi-Chaim veered around and Aron let out a shameful moan. At that she blinked with annoyance and streaked away, the male in pursuit, and Aron after them. An old woman playing with her grandchildren watched him from the sandbox, so he pretended to be a child, a child chasing cats, diving into the rosemary bushes, where he found them snuggling together like sweethearts.