Miriam had left for the fitness centre at half past six. If she had noticed the devastation she would certainly have woken me up. I rang her mobile, and left a message on her voicemaiclass="underline" that she mustn’t be alarmed when she got home and opened the living-room curtains. Alarmed and well, she phoned right back.
‘The cats …’ Her agitated voice. ‘Have you checked to see that they’re inside?’ From the unmistakable sound of grating pedals I could hear she was on her bike. ‘For all we know they’re buried under the ivy … squashed.’
Tygo, more than Tasha, had a tendency to climb up the golden rain in search of prey, a sort of play-hunting, quacking as cats do at an unreachable nest.
‘Hang on,’ I said. Now I was uneasy, too, and went down the stairs, phone in hand, to the pantry, calling the cats’ names all the way. They were curled up as usual in their basket. ‘Safe and sound. Both of them inside.’
‘Oh, thank God.’ Miriam wept with relief. ‘I was sure we’d lost them. Nothing would surprise me now. I got right on my bike.’
We would never know if the cats were out back when the whole thing came tumbling down, and had managed to reach the safety of the cat flap in the nick of time.
Miriam and Tonio had gone to Lanzarote for New Year’s 2002–2003. I stayed at home, because of course something required urgent completion. Miriam had admonished me to bring the cats inside on New Year’s Eve before the fireworks started, and lock the cat-flap so that Cypri would not panic and run into the garden, where the noise of the explosions ricocheted even more against the walls.
It was one of those flaps with a variety of settings, and I misjudged the procedure: the cat could get out but not back in again. When I returned early that morning she was nowhere to be found indoors. I rang Miriam in Lanzarote, who was already having breakfast with Tonio at the hotel. In her forgiving voice, she piloted me along all of Cypri’s possible hiding places. The cat was fifteen-and-a-half, and had diabetes. I wondered out loud if she hadn’t crept under the half-rotting wooden fence to die. Her voice choked, Miriam kept urging me on from the other side of the world, with Tonio occasionally chirping in his encouragement.
‘Just keep calling her name.’
Had we ever told Tonio the role Cypri had played in the run-up to his conception? Maybe not, but he had always regarded her as his personal pet, from the moment that he, still a baby, lunged at the cat, who was curled up next to him on the sofa, in order to pet her. He lost his balance and fell on top of her, and paid dearly for it: a blood-drawing swipe, complete with a throaty hiss. Neither of them took umbrage; it was as though the incident served as mutual hazing, because from then on they were inseparable.
‘Cypri … Cypri …’
Finally an answer, thin and plaintive. The cat had got her head stuck between two bars of the basement grating. Finding her flap locked, she had tried to get into the house this way, ignorant of her diabetic swollenness. I still had the mobile phone on, so Lanzarote could follow every step of my rescue mission. Only once it was successfully completed did I get read the riot act for my irresponsibility and negligence. Tonio also joined in mocking my stupidity, giggling with relief.
‘So Adri, got any New Year’s resolutions for 2003?’
3
The sad part about having dogs and cats is that they only last, on average, a decade-and-a-half. Those who cannot live without a house pet are confronted with this fact four or five times in their life. Pets are far more loyal than people. We don’t lose them to unfaithfulness, but rather to their life expectancy.
If I look at the lives of my contemporaries, it seems as though their existence more or less corresponds in relationships or marriages to the number of house pets. A human love affair has, on average, about the same longevity as your typical dog or cat — except that now, the relationship with the pet ends with its death, and the end of a marriage with the death of love.
Cypri died a year-and-a-half later, just shy of seventeen, as a result of her illness. I was working in Houthem-St. Gerlach, Limburg that spring, so that this time I was the one to follow, by mobile phone, an event taking place in our backyard: Cypri’s burial.
Shortly before that (it was May 2004), Tonio had phoned me excitedly with the news that ‘finally, something actually happened in boring old Amsterdam Zuid’. On the way home from school, he noticed on the Apollolaan a small crowd gathered near red-and-white police cordons, behind which men from the forensic team could be seen combing the area.
‘A liquidation! They’ve bumped off Willem Endstra. You know, the underworld banker. Just like that, in front of my school!’
And then he informed me, less wound-up, of the death of his cat. They had taken Cypri to the vet, where she’d been put to sleep. Before they took her body back home, Miriam and Tonio went in search of a suitable coffin. At De Gouden Ton, Miriam asked for two bottles of Bordeaux, ‘in a box, it’s a present.’ Since she could not keep the real aim of the packaging a secret, the salesman took the two bottles back out and gave her the box, complete with wood shavings, for nothing. ‘You can always come back for a good Bordeaux sometime, ma’am.’
Cypri had leaked profusely during her last days, so the vet advised them to line the wine box with a plastic garbage bag.
‘We’re going to bury Cypri next to Runner,’ Tonio said. Runner, his Russian dwarf hamster, for whom he, years earlier, had composed the brief ‘Requiem for Runner’ together with his guitar teacher.
So I witnessed the funeral by telephone from South Limburg. Miriam and Tonio took turns relaying the proceedings.
Tonio: ‘She’d been letting everything go the last few days … and now she’s lying on the garbage bag, and now it’s all dry.’
They slid the wooden lid onto the box, which, said Miriam, fitted the cat to a T. I listened to the hushed discussion between mother and son. ‘D’you think the hole’s deep enough? So the crows can’t get at her?’
4
The two Norwegian forest cats, Tygo and Tasha, were Tonio’s only heirs … and that was it. They were his choice, as tiny kittens. Tygo and his sister Tasha …
After Cypri died, Miriam was against getting another cat for the time being, but once Tonio had seen pictures of Norwegian forest cats online there was no stopping him. He scoured the internet until finding a cattery in Veghel, North Brabant, that specialised in this particular breed. In the summer of 2005, a year after Cypri’s death, he put on his sweetest, most seductive face and managed to convince his mother to drive him to Veghel, where according to the website a litter had just been born. With their second visit, shortly thereafter, a silver-grey cat and a rust-coloured tomcat, brother and sister, caught his eye as they rolled and tussled with each other. Tonio’s choice was already made, but they had to stay with their mother awhile longer. He kept in contact with the cattery via internet, monitoring the growth, week by week, of his little Norwegians.
The day he could fetch them approached. Now he only had to con his old man out of 425 euros per cat, and the adoption would be complete.
So on a Sunday in November, Tonio, with an ironic kind of pride, carried a cardboard box full of fluffy joy in from the car. Tygo and Tasha (they’d been named weeks earlier) stretched out on the kitchen table after the journey, only to curl up in a bread basket, where they fitted perfectly. Tonio photographed them from above. They lay there harmoniously, head to tail, melted like a yin and yang sign into the contour of the basket. It is framed and hangs on the wall, alongside a recent portrait of Tonio that Miriam has turned, for the time being, to face the wall.