It stood on the threshold, meowed, and jumped up onto my lap. I’d forgotten all about it. I couldn’t remember everything. Besides, truth be told, I never liked it. It was lazy as the day is long, and you had to force it to go out mousing, it would hardly ever go of its own accord. And when it came back it would be all hungry and bedraggled like it had been the one being bitten by the mice, and it would look at me to get me to toss it a crust of bread at least. It would have just laid there by the stove and slept all day. There were times it drove me mad when the mice were running wild in the barn, and the cat’s in here sleeping, maybe even enjoying a nice dream. Though I don’t think cats have dreams, because if cats do then other animals must, horses, cows, dogs, pigs, chickens, geese, rabbits — why would a cat be any better than them? If all of them had dreams every night on the farm, with all those animals and on top of that all those dreams, a man would go mad. It’s enough that people dream, sometimes even that’s too much.
Often it would sleep all day and all night, and still not want to wake up in the morning, not until I’d lit the stove and it felt warm enough. And even then it wouldn’t hop down right away. It would stretch and arch its back, stick its tail up in the air then curl it underneath, till I lost patience, I’d grab it by the scruff of the neck and force it to get up. Or I’d take it straight to the barn and bolt the door, this is where you belong, damn you. Can you smell mice? Then go catch some. But sometimes it’d be less than half an hour before it was back scratching at the door again. And how could I not let it in. Sure, it was an idle one, but without a cat the place felt somehow empty, just like a farmyard feels empty without a dog and cows, fields without a horse, the sky without birds. Come evening, it’s nice just to hear purring from something that’s alive. You listen to the purring and it’s like someone was sleeping in the other bed, or like mother was kneeling way over in the corner saying her prayers.
I thought it would have disappeared in the two years I was gone. I wouldn’t have minded much. And here it’d even grown fat. If it wasn’t for the fact it was a tomcat, you might have thought he was about to have kittens and that was why his belly was so big. Even his meow was deeper. And his tail had gotten all bushy, like a fox’s. His head had almost become one with his body. It was hard to even believe it was my old cat. But how could I have not known my own cat? He was dark gray with green eyes and half his tail was white. No one else had a cat like that in the whole village. I stroked his back, and it was like stroking sun-warmed grass.
He sat in my lap like a loaf fresh from the oven and I could hear the mice playing inside him. He must have had a good bellyful, because I could feel beneath my hand how they were stirring in him, jostling about, running amok. His big stomach was just swelling and settling, swelling and settling. And he was purring somewhere deep down. You could have been forgiven for thinking his stomach was the only living part of him, while the rest of him lay in my lap, lifeless and contented. And the hand I was stroking him with was like the sky over that dead contentment of his.
He even stank of mice. Maybe he’d had so many of them for my benefit, to make up for all his years of idleness. And I felt bad that when I was in the hospital, whenever anyone asked if I had a cat I’d said I used to, but it was so lazy I’d put it down.
Though there wasn’t that much talk about cats. What kind of a creature is a cat that you’d want to talk about it. It’s gray or black, a hunter or a lazybones, that’s it. There’s more to say about dogs, or pigeons. And most of all about horses. When it came to horses, if one person started talking about them, all of a sudden everyone was talking. This kind and that kind, old ones, young ones, workhorses, horses gone bad, black ones, grays, bays, sorrels, chestnuts, tows, dapples, roans. Sometimes we’d talk all day about horses. Because everyone had more to say about horses than about themselves, more than about their own children and their wives and their farms, more than about the rest of the world. Made no difference whether it was all true or not. You didn’t have to believe it, you listened along with everyone else. Because when you’re stuck in bed, and in some cases you’ve got one foot in the next life, it makes no difference whether you believe what you’re hearing or not. There were times they’d turn the lights out for bedtime and people would carry on talking about horses in the dark, as if the horses were lying down for the night between the beds, each one by his owner.
There was one guy that was a lawyer on the ward with us, other than him it was all farmers from the country. But he liked listening too. Not just about horses, about any animals. Even if he was reading his book, when someone started talking he’d set it aside and listen as if what was being said was more interesting than what was in the book. His bed was next to mine, to the left. He had something wrong with his spine, and he was visibly going downhill. But he never complained of being in pain. It was just that he couldn’t sleep much, and he’d wake up way early in the morning. Then he’d wait for me to wake up as well. If I so much as reached my hand out of the sheets in my sleep, I’d hear a whisper, muffled like it was coming from inside the earth:
“Are you awake, Mr. Szymon?”
Ever since I was in the resistance I’ve been a light sleeper, plus I had plenty of sleep in the hospital, so I would have heard a mouse. Besides, I used to wake up early myself, before everyone else. I’d just lie there with my eyes closed, but my head would already be full of thoughts. I sometimes even thought about him, how his breathing was so shallow, how that was death breathing inside him.
“Did I wake you up?”
“Not at all. At home I’d be up and about already.”
“What would you be doing?”
“There’s no shortage of things to do. The animals will need feeding. They’ll all be squealing and lowing and neighing and cackling so loud you never know who to see to first. The worst are the pigs, they won’t eat things raw so you have to cook it for them, and they’re the biggest eaters of all. On a farm, Mr. Kazimierz” — because that was his name, Kazimierz — “the day doesn’t begin with the sunrise but with the animals being hungry. The sun’s only just starting to come up when the animals have already been fed. In here, we don’t do anything but laze around. It’s neither living nor dying. There’s no telling why we need to go to sleep, or why we have to get up.”
I knew that he liked hearing about the animals, and I often brought the subject up deliberately, because I felt it helped him. So he would ask right away:
“Do you have a lot of pigs?”
“There’s a good few of them, Mr. Kazimierz. Sows, I’ve got two of them. With a good litter there can be as many as twenty from one of them and twenty from the other, and I don’t sell any of them, I raise them all myself. When you go in to feed them there’s no room to even put your feet. It’s all white as can be, like the floor was covered with lilac. And once they latch on to the teats, all you can hear is sucking, suck suck suck. Sounds like someone was threshing corn far off, or like rain dripping down the walls. And the sow just lies there in the middle of all that lilac doing nothing, you’d think she was dead. Her belly’s wide open, her eyes are half closed, and she’s barely breathing. And the young ones, they’re squealing and scrambling all over her and jockeying around her teats. They’re stubborner than puppies. But you need to know that not all teats are alike, even though they all belong to the same mother. Some have more milk, some less. Some are firm, others are limp. And the piglets aren’t born equal either, there are sickly ones, fussy ones, greedy ones. The greedy ones can feed from three teats in one sitting. And they fight for the teats like no one’s business. It’s just as well they don’t have claws, cause they’d be covered in blood. And the sow is just a big heap of flesh, meekness itself. The most she’ll do is kick one of them if it tickles her too much, but otherwise she’ll just lie there till they’ve sucked every last drop out of her.”