Read Felidae on the Road - Special U.S. Edition Online
Authors: Akif Pirincci
Felidae on the Road - Special U.S. Edition
FELIDAE
ON THE ROAD
(Felidae Part II)
Akif Pirin
ç
ci
A novel of cats and murder
Special U.S. Edition
FELIDAE
ON THE ROAD
(Felidae Part II)
A novel of cats and murder
Special U.S. Edition
First American
eBook-Edition
Copyright
©
2011 by Akif Pirin
ç
ci, Bonn, Germany
Translated from the German by Anthea Bell
© 1994
First published in Germany in 1994 by
Wilhelm Goldmann Verlag
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American
Copyright Conventions.
No part of this publication may be reproduced, transmitted, or stored in a retrieval system, in any form or by any means, without permission in writing from
Akif Pirin
ç
ci
Cover design by Ursula Pirin
ç
ci
©
2011
Cover illustration by Andreas Liss
©
2011
Contents
FOR CATS –
whether feline or human
.
'I will not again curse the ground any more for man's sake; for the imagination of man's heart is evil from his youth; neither will I again smite any more every thing living, as I have done.'
GENESIS 8: 21.
The Flood
.
CHAPTER 1
T
hey call it evolution. There's an invisible mechanism at work on this planet, they say, enabling the stronger to get stronger all the time and forcing the weaker into unconditional surrender. It's a law of nature, they say, and resistance is useless. The strong will survive and sooner or later the weak will be wiped off the face of the earth - that's what they call evolution.
But just who are all these weaklings doomed to perish? What are their names? What species do they belong to? Aren't they as much a part of this earth as the elect? Or are they simply anonymous, of unknown race, in-between stages on the way to final beatific perfection? Does the concept of nature conceal this melancholy fact? Is that the eternal law?
They call it evolution. I call it a crime.
Over the weeks that followed I was to learn a lot about this endless crime. But in the spring of this year, before it all began, I was lying on the yellow tapestry sofa in the living room without a care in the world. During the last few years the façade of the renovated old building had been overgrown by an ivy with delusions of grandeur, and it was gradually occupying the windows too. Consequently, only a few isolated sunbeams made their way like bright lances through the leaves and into the room, one of them falling on my head at that blessed moment of harmony like a spotlight. I lay majestically outstretched on the sofa, half dozing, half philosophising about the strange ways of the world, and I felt wonderfully comfortable. Life has certainly been good to me, I thought in all innocence. Here I lie, safe and warm, looking forward to stirring adventures this summer in the intricate setting of the gardens outside the back of the building.
This green oasis had long ceased to be a cosy garden-gnome sort of place and now displayed design trends of Babylonian complexity, with ornamental Japanese bridges surmounting artificial ecological habitats and paths paved by DIY enthusiasts in natural stone. In short, the former tenants - eternal students, folk who'd taken early retirement - had all been cast out of their idyllic surroundings, making way for people with peculiar-sounding double-barreled surnames: people who sorted their rubbish for recycling and collected signatures on petitions against anything and everything. Although they wore battered straw hats to do their gardening, like half-starved Asians, you'd have been wrong to conclude that they were on the breadline. Far from it, in fact. It was just that their bloated complacency had taken strange forms and they'd moved into these old-fashioned buildings
en masse
. And
we
had moved in with them, of course. You're bound to see pictures of us in interior decorators' plans these days. We dot the i's and cross the t's of the good life.
So in fact I couldn't have done better for myself, even if my companion does spot fashionable trends with the same fervour as a City baboon following the fluctuations of the Dow Jones index.
There's really only one thing to be said for this so-called companion, whose name is Gustav Löbel: he doesn't eat the same sort of food as me, so I'm spared undignified squabbles about fair shares of whatever's in the bowl. The man is an eccentric mixture of Dumbo and Doctor Dolittle. (The Dolittle bit because he insists that his inconsequential soliloquies are 'conversations' with yours truly.) The mere sight of this hot-air balloon on legs doing perfectly ordinary jobs about the home is enough to make a cat laugh. But laughter soon turns to exasperation, because you'd never think a man of forty-nine weighing twenty stone could be such a fool. Well, did
you
ever meet anyone who could break his nose and burn the palms of both hands while cooking spaghetti? There's no call to go into the details of this incident. Just picture any scene you fancy from a slapstick cartoon film where everyday situations maliciously turn to a choreographic representation of chaos. With simple souls like Gustav, this can easily deteriorate into a case fit for
Casualty
. Up to a few years ago his main source of income was writing trashy novelettes for women's magazines under the name of Thalila, a pseudonym which may be considered sheer creative genius when you think of the tripe he concocted under it. The pattern of these daft stories was always the same: mother of eight mysteriously suffering from frigidity consults gynaecologist who is the spitting image of Bela Lugosi; gynaecologist drugs mother of eight on the pretext of conducting a thorough examination; gynaecologist repeatedly rapes her, gives her a sex change and then has the nerve to claim in court that he did it under the influence of laughing gas, thus getting off with probation and winning the Nobel Prize next day. Got all that quite clear, have you? To be fair to Gustav, it should be said that he was far from deriving any kind of satisfaction from this activity. He did it just to earn our bread. As a professor of Egyptology, in a career parallel to this deplorable scribbling, he had the reputation of being an authority in his field. It wasn't a very big reputation at first, but then he published work which created quite a sensation and his fame grew. Finally he was able to give up the newly-weds harassed by their mothers-in-law entirely, and devote himself exclusively to his beloved mummies and me.
Which doesn't mean that our relationship became any easier. Relieved of the nagging anxiety as to whether the fee for the trash he'd just cobbled together would cover the next electricity bill, he had so much extra leisure time that he took to treating me like a New Age father persuaded, by dint of a cocktail of tax loopholes and obscure appeals from the feminist front line, to abandon a good career and try the maternal role for size. His earlier fits of solicitude had often made me wonder why on earth he ever got me instead of a comfort blanket. But now all the baby talk and the tempting offers of increasingly exquisite delicacies were really getting me down. A substitute, that's what I was, just a love substitute for this failure who knew nothing about the female form except from tedious nudist videos, and nothing about the female psyche except from those magazines he used to write for. A love substitute for a hermit whose odd life-style led him to indulge in some very peculiar rituals - like the irritating fuss he made over his thousands of pipes and brands of tobacco -and who ended every day with at least two bottles of French red wine, since the night hours showed him to himself in a particularly painful light. A substitute for children never conceived and friends who never knocked on his door.
Almost bald, afflicted with the worst stoop in orthopaedic history and an expression not unlike that of a melancholy hippopotamus going through the menopause, this exponent of petting as terrorism was getting to be more and more of a burden to me since he'd stopped providing escapist stories for sexually harassed secretaries. I've no objection to grooming in moderation, but the constant feeling that I was merely a compensation for an old professor's failures in life both saddened and irritated me. At this point you may well ask why, with so much smother-love lavished on me, I didn't just pack my things one night and move in with the busy yuppie a few doors up the road. All he'd have required of me would be to sit decoratively on his Le Corbusier chaise-longue during the champagne parties he threw.
Well, there weren't many reasons for me to stay, but those there were carried weight. First and foremost, the question of cultural standards. In human terms Gustav might be a total idiot, but his intellectual horizons were open to culture and scholarship, even philosophy on occasion, although unlike me he had never explored the gloomy depths of the likes of Schopenhauer. Of course there are others of my kind who are smitten with such things, but I well remember the delight I felt as a child when I sat on his shoulder, looking at the books he was reading until I had taught myself to read too and was infected by the same sweet plague. And I remember our orgies of Mahler and Wagner on his old Dual record player as we sat by the fire on cold winter evenings. Strictly speaking, then, it was a combination of intellectual compatibility and habit that bound us together. We both revered the intellectual achievements of civilisation, and we both hated all the ugliness daily created outside our four walls by devils in many forms. Habit, of course, can also mean stagnation. Yet who would seriously deny that once youth is over, any inclination to philistinism will attack every cell of a person's being like a tenacious virus?
So was there anything else to justify my staying with this Oliver Hardy of the educated classes? Love, maybe? Hm, well, it's difficult to give a straightforward answer to that. Think of those coy little maxims beginning 'Love is ... ', going on with the alleged evidence in remarks like '... when you can laugh all the same!' and printing a cartoon underneath showing a naked little couple holding hands in a nauseatingly sweet pose. I don't believe you can explain the phenomenon of love that way. Love's more like a constant flow of lava beneath the earth's crust; we are unaware of it until it suddenly erupts from volcanoes long believed extinct, surprising us with its unimaginable power. But I'm straying into metaphors, and I don't know if they really cast light on the curious relationship between me and my 'master' Gustav. Anyway, this part of my story is not the place for sentimental analyses of love in an old couple rather the worse for wear like Gustav and me.
