Doris Lessing - On Cats

One evening, he did not come. Nor the next. Grey Cat waited for him. She sat watching the door all evening. Then she waited downstairs at the door into the house. She searched the garden. But he did not come, not ever again. And she was never again friends with a cat. Another cat, a male cat who visited the cat downstairs, took refuge with us when he became ill, a few weeks before he died, and lived out the end of his life in my room–her room; but she never acknowledged his existence. She behaved as if only I and she were there.

I believe that Rufus had such a friend, and that was where he was going off to visit.

One evening in late summer he stayed on the sofa by me, and he was there next morning in exactly the same position. When at last he got down, he walked holding up a limp and dangling back leg. The vet said he had been run over: one could tell by his claws, for cats instinctively extend their claws to grip when the wheel drags at them. His claws were broken and split. He had a bad fracture of a back leg.

The cast went on from his ankle to the top of his thigh, and he was put into a quiet room with food and water and a dirt box. There he was happy to stay overnight, but then wanted to come out. We opened the door, and watched him clumsily descend the stairs, flight after flight, to the bottom of the house, where he swore and cursed as he manoeuvred that sticking-out leg through the cat door, then hopped and hobbled up the path, and swore a lot more as he edged himself and the leg under a fence. Off to the left, to his friend. He was away for about half an hour: he had been to report to someone, feline or human, about his mishap. When he came back, he was pleased to be put back into his refuge. He was shaken, shocked, and his eyes showed he was in pain. His fur, made healthy by summer and good feeding, looked harsh, and he was again a poor old cat who could not easily clean himself. Poor old ragbag! Poor Calamity Cat! He accumulated names as Butchkin does, but they were sad ones. But he was indomitable. He set himself to the task of removing his cast, succeeded, and was returned to the vet to have another put on, which he could not take off. But he tried. And, every day he made his trip down the stairs, to the cat door, where he hesitated, his leg stuck out behind him, then went through it cursing, because he always knocked his leg on it, and we watched him hobble up the garden through the puddles and leaves of the autumn. He had to lie almost flat to get under the fence. Every day he went to report, and came back exhausted and went to sleep. When awake, he laboured at the task of getting his cast off. Where he sat was white with bits of cast.

In a month it came off, the leg was stiff but usable, and Rufus became himself, a gallant adventuring cat, who used us as a base, but then got ill again. For a couple of years this cycle went on. He got well, and was off, got ill and came home. But his illnesses were getting worse. His ear ulcer would not heal. He would return from somewhere to ask for help. He would put his paw delicately to his suppurating ear, retch delicately at the smell on his paw, and look helplessly at his nurses. He gave little grunts of protest as we washed it out, but he wanted us to, and he took his medicaments, and he lay around and allowed himself to get well. Under our hands, his tough, muscled body, a strong old cat, in spite of his ailments. It was only at the end of his life, his much too short life, when he was ill and could hardly walk, that he stayed home and did not attempt to go out at all. He lay on the sofa and seemed to think, or dream, when he was not asleep. Once, when he was asleep I stroked him awake to take his medicine, and he came up out of sleep with the confiding, loving trill greeting cats use for the people they love, the cats they love. But when he saw it was me he became his normal polite and grateful self, and I realized that this was the only time I had heard him make this special sound–in a house where it was heard all day. This is how mother cats greet their kittens, kittens greet their mothers. Had he been dreaming of when he was a kitten? Or perhaps even of the human who had owned him as a kitten, or a young cat, but then had gone off and abandoned him. It shocked, and hurt, this ultimate sound, for he had not made it even when he was purring like a machine to show gratitude. During all the time he had known us, nearly four years, several times nursed back to health, or near-health, he had never really believed he could not lose this home and have to fend for himself, become a cat maddened by thirst and aching with cold. His confidence in someone, his love, had once been so badly betrayed that he could not allow himself ever to love again.

Knowing cats, a lifetime of cats, what is left is a sediment of sorrow quite different from that due to humans: compounded of pain for their helplessness, of guilt on behalf of us all.

the old age of el magnifico

chapter thirteen

A week before our cat had his front leg or, rather, his whole haunch taken off, he raced down seven flights of stairs, then bang crash through the cat door and along the garden path to the fence at the end, to see off the enormous grey tom who visits our gardens from across the reservoir. His screeching howl of defiance was such that when he returned, calm, victorious, to my bed at the very top of the house and sat looking over his territory, emptied of all cats but himself, and then over the fence to the wide green field that is the reservoir–the Victorians put their water underground–I said to him, as usual shaken by that voice of his, But Good God Butchkin! That is the most intolerable yowl.

Butchkin? Not The Magnificence? It was like this. Seventeen springs ago a cat called Susie gave birth to her kittens in the roof space near my room. She was a friendly civilized cat, so she must have had a good home, but had lost it, and was living rough, sometimes fed and sometimes not by the ladies at the lunch centre, had given birth to at least two sets of kittens anywhere she could find a corner–once it was under a lorry–and those kittens had not survived. She was not an old cat, but she was tired and frightened. Mother cats who have had many litters, not having been rescued by kindly owners with an operation, may acknowledge their enormous belly that squirms and bulges because of the vivacious load inside, with unmistakable weariness. ‘Oh no , do I have to go through all that again?’ This cat was given food, safety, a place in the roof where no other cat could even approach, but she was a reluctant mother, though dutiful.

When kittens first open their little hazy bluish eyes and see the humans towering over them they may hiss and defy, before becoming companionable cats, but among Susie’s kittens was one black and white scrap who opened his eyes, saw me, climbed unsteadily off the old blanket on to the floor…then on to my leg…up my leg…my arm…my shoulder…clinging on with his tiny prickles of claws, got under my chin and cuddled there, purring. This was love, and for life. He was the biggest kitten, the boss kitten, and from the start took command of them all, even washed and chastised them, while his big mother lay stretched out, watching. He was like a father to those kittens, or even a mother. Susie did not seem to care for him more than the others, or disapprove of his bossiness.

There is a mystery about the birth of those kittens. There were seven. One, a white kit–and it is painful to think how beautiful a cat he would have been–she pushed out of the nest, and it was found dead a couple of days later. Unless it was born dead, unlikely, since all the others were so lively. And she pushed out another, too, a little tabby. I left it for half a day, cold and unfed, thinking I must stop my sentimentality, grieving about nature’s choices: if she had thrown him out then who was I etc. but I could not bear it, hearing his feeble mews, and I put him back among the others, and there were six thriving kits. Susie, then, had an ambiguous attitude to those kittens. Seven, she had clearly thought, were too many, and even six were. She had not been prepared to mother more than five kittens, and certainly when the six were rampaging around my room one could see her point.