Global Eyes, Feline Edition

Soon: a tank column

My concentration just wasn’t up for it today. My beautiful cat is in the cat hospital, where she just had surgery to remove a tumor—and with it, her leg.

So far, so good. They called me this morning to say she’s already eating and complaining that she wants to go home.

She’s eighteen years old, so the decision to put her through this wasn’t easy. I wasn’t at all sure it was a kindness to her. Not at her age. But her veterinarians (I got a second opinion, and a third) convinced me that her health, apart from the tumor, was excellent, and the amputation could well be curative. We won’t be sure until the results of the biopsy come back, but they convinced me she has a real prospect of enjoying her life for a while longer.

Just letting her be wasn’t an option. The tumor was too painful. It would soon be agonizing, and then it would kill her. And cats, they assured me, adapt quite well to life on three legs. They told me that these days veterinary pain control is a marvel. (They use fentanyl, as it happens. The drug may be a scourge, but when a creature you love is in pain, you’re nothing but grateful for it.)

So I surrendered her to their ministrations. Yesterday was awful for us both. The way she cried when I left her at the hospital just about did me in. But she’s past the most dangerous part, now, and she comes home tomorrow.

Poor girl. She’s a beautiful, sensitive, timid cat. She was completely feral when I found her, a hopelessly lost kitten hiding in the drainpipe below my apartment in Istanbul. It took ages for her to trust me. After I brought her home, she hid behind the refrigerator, coming out only at night to gobble down the hamburger I left for her. When I tried to coax her out from behind the refrigerator, she hissed and spit hysterically, arching her back, with her fur sticking up, trying to make herself look ferocious. (This wasn’t very convincing, seeing as she was a four-inch tall kitten.)

Everyone told me that I shouldn’t force it. I should give her as much time as she needed. But one day I came into the kitchen to make her a burger, and as I was cooking, I felt eyes on me. I turned around, and yes, it was her. She’d poked her little whiskered face out from behind the refrigerator. She was eyeing me with awe and terror.

We looked at each other. I could somehow tell that she was lonely. Of course she was. She’d been separated—God knows how—from her mother and her littermates. She’d been alone for weeks, hiding first in a drainpipe and then behind a refrigerator. She wanted to be held and comforted. But she was just too frightened that I meant to eat her.

Some instinct prompted me to ignore everyone’s advice. She’d been behind that refrigerator long enough. I got a towel, pulled her out, wrapped her in the towel so she couldn’t scratch me, and cuddled her against my chest. She hissed and screamed. She weighed no more than a box of Kleenex, but if she’d been my size, she would have killed me—she was wild-eyed, and desperate to get out of my grasp.

I don’t know why I persisted. I just had an instinct. As I held her, I began to sing to her, but then it occurred to me that perhaps she’d like a cat song better. I walked over to my computer and Googled “purring” with my free hand. I found an MP3 titled, “Cat purring” and pressed “play.” The room filled with a rumbling sound. I kept rocking her and then, all at once, she gave in to her longing, stopped struggling, melted into me, and began purring right back, staring at me in wonderment with big, grey eyes.

She’s never stopped. She has the loudest purr of any cat I’ve encountered. Unless she’s deep asleep—or terribly upset—she purrs all day long, so loudly you can hear it in the other room.

I’d always assumed she would live the longest of my cats. I didn’t have a good reason for thinking this except that one of my neighbors in Istanbul, when he saw her, said, “Bunun gibi kediler uzun süre yaşarlar”—“Cats like that live for a long time.” Cats like what, I wondered? Shy cats? Fluffy cats? White and grey cats? The phenomenon is unknown to modern veterinary science. But I liked to think she came from a celebrated line of fluffy white and grey cats known for outliving everyone in that neighborhood. (That said, her mother never came back to find her, so her mother was either an an exceptionally feckless parent or an exception to the rule.)

Besides, she so much wants to outlive her brothers. She only has two, now. She used to have four brothers and two sisters. When we lost the others—Toshiro, Mo, the Smudge, and then Daisy—Suley and Zeki palpably grieved. They were distraught; they were diminished—as I was. Suley, Zeki, Toshiro, Mo, and Daisy were littermates. They’d never gone for a day without each other. The way Suley and Zeki and looked at me when I came home from the vet with an empty carrier—they were stunned, inexpressibly sad. They knew. It broke my heart even more than it was already broken.

Not Féline, though. She was delighted. Every time one of her rivals died, it was as if she was reborn. She’d never asked to live with a litter of kittens, and she especially didn’t ask to live with those fat, slovenly lunatics. Fouling her favorite litter box! Revolting pigs, they don’t even bury their ordures properly! Hogging her favorite bird-watching windowsill! She’s been plotting against them since the day I brought them home. Every time they waddle over to her on their short, stubby little legs—“Hey, Féline, that smells like cat food! Yum! I love cat food! Wanna share?”—I know exactly what she’s thinking: Outwit. Outplay. Outlast.

I can’t honestly say that I would have preferred it was me who had to lose a leg—no, I definitely can’t say that—but I can say that I would have preferred it was me who had to go through the pain of it. At least I would have understood it. But Féline, my poor girl, she’s just completely bewildered. Nothing in the architecture of her walnut-sized brain would allow her to understand why one day I scooped her up, put her in a bag, took her on a nauseating ride a moving box, then left her in an evil-smelling torture chamber with bright lights and strangers who violated her orifices and stuck her with sharp needles. Still less could she grasp why suddenly she woke up in pain, feeling funny, with only three legs. Or why she’s now in a cage with a cone around her head, surrounded by other howling animals she’s never seen before and never wanted to see.

Mind you, she’s a cat. However miserable this ordeal must be for her, she’s sleeping right now. That’s what cats do. And when she wakes up, she’ll be blitzed out of her mind on fentanyl.

So there’s no reason, strictly speaking, that I couldn’t work right through this. I told myself so firmly this morning. But I just couldn’t concentrate, and I’m not going to keep trying to force myself. It’s pointless. I just keep thinking about my cat.

I’ll pick her up tomorrow and spend the day helping her to settle in. If all goes well—it should—I’ll be back on the job tomorrow evening. Then we’ll talk about tanks: Abrams and Leopard 2s, to be specific.

Until then, I’ll just miss my cat.

Féline, writing Global Eyes