Felidae on the Road - Special U.S. Edition (30 page)

'Francis, my son!' she cried, sobbing, and I burst into copious tears myself. 'Forgive us! Forgive us, my son! Forgive us!'

'There's nothing to forgive!' I called back. 'May God forgive you - or all the innocent creatures you've butchered, if you ever meet them again. I came here to curse you, but now I know you were cursed already, long ago. I don't wish you luck, but I don't wish you hell on earth either. Go in peace, and show respect for life!'

'If you don't want to wish us luck, then remember us in your prayers, Francis. Goodbye, my son!'

A hesitant wave, a hobbling jump, and she too had gone over the top of the hill. In the place where she had been standing a moment ago there was now nothing but the light of the bloated moon, and another dark cloud slowly drifting over it.

'The best prayer I can say is to wish all living creatures free from pain,' I whispered, and I stayed there for quite a while, gazing listlessly at the silvery moonlight. So my vision of death hadn't come true in the end, which seemed to show that Ambrosius was right in saying the hypnotic seance and its alarming effects were just a conjuring trick. Of course the death I'd seemed to see predicted could still catch up with me somewhere similar at a later date. But I felt very strongly that it would happen either here and now, or in some section of my life which was entirely unknown to me.

Still feeling affected by recent sad events, I longed for nothing but the safety of the cave in the Fossilised Forest. From this day on, that lonely spot should be my protective capsule against the filthy stink of the world. I would meditate there on the last mysteries of life, in intensive conversation with my atrophied instincts. Nor would I cease from trying to discover who created everything, probably including evil.

I turned my eyes away from the moon, which was shining as if it had been polished, and wiped the tears from my eyes with my paw. Then I turned round, and was shot ...

... and died.

CHAPTER 8

D
iana had arrived too late. Her last efforts to find the murderous rabble before they disappeared in the direction of Scandinavia had not been altogether successful. Presumably the satellite pictures had shown the unusual migration movement, and despite the filthy weather Diana had immediately set off after the Wild Ones. But instead of getting the whole bunch of them in her sights, somewhere offering a good vantage point, she picked off just one, and that one a red herring.

The red herring in question was a certain detective by the name of Francis who had just decided to change his profession to that of hermit. Was? Had? In fact, in my present state time no longer meant anything. And a bullet from Diana's gun had landed me in that state. A case of mistaken identity with what you might call dramatic consequences. I hadn't even really registered being hit; I just noticed a sudden quivering in my body before my paws momentarily left the ground, and then my legs crumpled like the limbs of a rubber doll. I tumbled over on my back, unable to move.

Everything else happened just as it had in my vision of death, or rather almost, for unlike that brief scene, with which we're already familiar, this one had a sequel. While I lay there in enforced immobility, obliged to watch the moon shining behind dark clouds with my eyelids half closed, the pain began, and it was bad. I felt as if all my nerve endings had been shifted outside me, and some inspired sadist was scrubbing them with a wire brush. All I wanted was a quick death. I squinted down at myself out of the corner of one eye and saw that I was losing a lot of blood. A pool of it had already formed around me. Then an involuntary twitching went through me; it couldn't relieve the pain, but it did take my mind off it to some extent. After a while the twitching stopped too. At the same time, so did everything that had once been of any significance.

As if they'd turned off the torture machine, all my pain suddenly vanished. Violet swathes of light surrounded my body, giving it a bright aura. What a wonderful feeling, being permeated by this magical light as if by water from a sacred spring. I didn't have long to wait for the next miracle. I found myself rising very gradually from the ground while rotating slowly round my own axis. There was something infinitely pleasing about all these gentle movements. When my face was fully turned to the ploughed field I could see what was happening down on earth. But nothing much seemed to be going on. There lay Francis in a broad furrow of the field, with a bleeding wound in his belly, twitching with pain. All of a sudden he opened his eyes and went rigid, like a phased shot in a film. So I'd been able to witness my own death from outside my body. How exciting!

I floated onwards and upwards, moving further and further from the corpse, and the smaller the husk of Francis down on earth looked, the more unimportant and trivial were those little problems and notions that had given him the illusion of life for an infinitesimally short time. You have to be old, I thought, you have to have lived a long time before you realise how short life is. And whatever happiness you've had, there's never really any denying the pain that life entails. My fearing death so much all the same only went to show what a will to live I'd had: I was nothing but that will, I'd known nothing else.

Suddenly I became aware of having been appointed arbitrator in a heated debate. That struck a familiar chord too; after all, I'd already heard those voices arguing vehemently during my vision of death. However, this time they weren't engaged in a proper dialogue, but symbolised two opposing forces in my soul. One force insisted on the power of the will and on life, the other on the pointlessness of all earthly things and on deliverance. It seemed that I didn't have much time to make up my mind, because by now I was so far from the field that the bleeding figure of Francis looked no larger than a tiny dot. As I rose to the firmament at the leisurely pace of a hot-air balloon, I saw Diana emerge from the darkness and stride across the field towards the corpse, her gun lowered.

Although I was so far away, I could see the burning question in the open eyes of my corporeal counterpart. Francis was looking intently at me. Come on, mate, he seemed to be saying, make up your mind, don't keep me in suspense. I thought about it. My hovering motion was like being asleep but fully conscious, soothing and rapturous at once. The world below was a dark spot, full of warriors fighting point-lessly in an unjust war with no prospects of either victory or peace at the end of it. And yet ... and yet there were still a few knots I'd have liked to untangle, a few things I'd have liked to try, a few parts of life I'd have liked to live ...

No! What was over was over. I'm letting go of you, life, I cried, I'm turning away from you. And as my cry died away in the depths of the sky I found I could not only float on upwards but also fly in all directions, as naturally as a happy dreamer. I flew over poor dead Francis, who had come to a pretty silly end when you stopped to think of it, I flew over fields and meadows, I cut capers, I performed breathtaking aerial acrobatics with all paws outstretched. The earth raced by below me at incredible speed, giving me one last look at all those who'd once meant something to me. I saw the Wild Ones padding silently and thoughtfully towards the northern forests in the grey light of dawn. I sailed down, almost touching them, and they all raised their heads at once with a bitter smile, as if they felt my soul near them. But my swift flight allowed no lingering. Many kilometres further on, in a rocky landscape, I saw Eight the lynx on his way north too, and I hoped with all my heart that he would have enough strength left to cross the Arctic Circle and reach his beloved Canada. When he became aware of my spiritual presence he stopped and glanced up, and he too smiled, but not bitterly like the Wild Ones: he smiled as you might at an aviator friend who's just performed a particularly daring aerial manoeuvre.

Sad at heart, I said goodbye to him and steered a course for the forest. The red light of morning turned this tamed jungle to a magnificent sea of flames, its busy inhabitants visible against that bright background. Such a thing was impossible in the normal way, but I could make out every single one of them with amazing clarity. There they all were: wandering spiders, forest crickets, Roman snails, rhinoceros beetles, hornet clear-wings, butterflies in breathtaking variety, wasps, spotted salamanders, leaf frogs, sand lizards, slow-worms, hedgehogs, bats, rabbits, beavers, marmots, yellow-necked mice, badgers, raccoons, pine martens, wild boar, deer. And above them, as if offering me their services as aerial pilots, swarmed the forest air force: buzzards, falcons, hobby hawks, woodcocks, turtle doves, eagle owls, long-eared owls, nightjars, spotted woodpeckers, wrens, nightingales, robins, blackbirds, bluetits, finches, starlings and ravens. The sight of them filled me with great joy, and I wished them and any others who had escaped my excited gaze all the luck in the world.

Then I flew over the house in the forest, which still contained the corpse of Ambrosius although his soul had flown. Soon I'd meet that soul again in a happier place and engage in passionate discussions of spiritualism with it. I'd be at a disadvantage, of course, Ambrosius having known a lot more about the subject than me while still alive. After passing the gigantic cage from the environmental project, which would surely be so overgrown by plants some day that it really would merge with its surroundings, I came to the Fossilised Forest. But the sight of this ominous monument to human stupidity only made me feel angry, so I let myself fly down in the healthy part of the forest and straight into the drainpipe through which I had once clambered out of the sewers. Like a ball whizzing aimlessly about in a games machine in an arcade, I spent some time flitting through the labyrinthine windings of the sewage system, which was as clammy and funereal as ever. I finally found the Company of the Merciful in an apparently endless branch of the sewers where they were hunting rats in a pack, like fishermen of prehistoric times. I saw Saffron, Niger, and all the other grubby, blind cats splashing stormily in the water and regularly emerging with prey in their mouths. It was a pity I hadn't been able to bring them the news that there would be no more serial murders. However, they all stopped catching rats as I flew overhead, and preserved a solemn silence. I was obviously still present to their minds, at least as a distant memory or a salutary premonition. I blessed them all and then left the sewers at the main inlet.

High above the city, I saw the old building where Gustav had his little ground-floor flat, and at last, at last I saw my home range again. I immediately prepared to nose-dive, but the closer I came to that familiar spot the more clearly I saw a heart-rending scene. Gustav was standing on the terrace looking out sadly over the garden. He then broke into miserable sobs. There was no mistaking it: he was mourning his lost pet, whose silent absence was stronger than his invisible presence here in his place of origin. My old friends were in view, playing in the nearby gardens. I saw old Bluebeard the cripple, Kong the local tyrant and his two bodyguards Herrmann and Herrmann, the eccentric Jesaja, the bewitching Nhozemphtekh, my companion of so many nights of steamy passion, and several more of the old gang.

You shouldn't have hurt my feelings, fat slob, I told Gustav from the spirit world, near tears myself. You ought to have known love can't be parcelled out just like that. I loved you the way you were, with all your faults and revolting habits (like your nasty way of smacking your lips and gargling whenever you took a sip of wine). But you betrayed our friendship for a deceptive vision of domestic bliss. No human being deserves to keep an animal unless he understands that he himself is an animal at bottom, so he should treat us the way he treats his own kind. But let the veil of oblivion fall on your sins, my dear Gustav, and may the memory of our happy days together console us both for adversity. So farewell, strong guardians of the range, and my spineless friend too! God in his infinite goodness will reunite us some time, when earthly existence no longer weighs heavy on us and the ridiculous difference between species is no more!

As I spoke these words of farewell - or was I only thinking them? - I shot up to the sky like a rocket, and out of the corner of my eye I could see that the mournful figure of Gustav, and my former friends too, all raised their heads as if a signal had been given and looked sadly after me. At lightning speed, I broke through the troposphere, the stratosphere, the ionosphere, the exosphere, the chemosphere and finally the atmosphere, the familiar topography of earth losing its outlines faster and faster and merging into a vast blue globe veiled by white vapour. How amazingly lovely and peaceful the planet looked when you saw it from afar like an inter-galactic explorer. Weightless, free of all cares, I circumnavigated the globe in breathless flight until continent after continent was racing by below me, and the circle finally reached completion above that part of Earth where the triumphal march of the Felidae once began: Africa. It was time to say farewell to this strangely contradictory world now, for I suddenly felt a mysterious power drawing me into the depths of the cosmos. I sketched a goodbye wave, turned my back on life once and for all, and plunged into the sea of stars.

Faster and faster, myriads of suns and planets shot by me, revealing fascinating views of their burning, desolate, icy, fluid or green surfaces, until the speed of my flight was such that the stars became mere streaks of radiance. Suddenly, right in the middle of this hypnotic panorama, a dazzling, sparkling light appeared, getting bigger and bigger. Within a fraction of a second it filled my entire view, and I plunged into this tunnel of light with joyful awe. Stars, glowing and dimming, flowed through this magic tube of radiance and kept me company in my swift flight. After a while I could finally make out the end of the tunnel, where the light shone even more brightly. The closer I came to my journey's end the more clearly I could see vague movements which finally crystallised into figures permeated by light. Light-filled figures grazing in meadows of light, climbing trees of light, hunting prey made of light, leaping up hills of light and resting on cliffs of light. Before me stretched a literally paradisal landscape full of golden lakes, silver forests, shining mountains and valleys. And like a Noah's Ark of outsize dimensions and illuminated by billions of floodlights, it was entirely inhabited by animals in angelic form. I knew where I was: in the Eternal Hunting Grounds!