13 December

Temporary Cats

I couldn’t forget the day I found Oodacha: her name means “Lucky” in Russian because she arrived in the hall outside my second apartment in Blagoveshchensk, the Russian Far East on December 13, 2002. It was a Friday. I wrote:

Someone knocked on the door but didn’t answer when I asked “Kto tam?” There, miserable and scared, in the far corner of the hall, was a small tiger cat. While I watched, she pushed the door to the elevator room open, then huddled in the tiny corner by the elevator.

She and Skaska, “Fairy Tale,” a polite Siamese abandoned the previous winter with her sister at the school where I taught, became friends, though, like a number of my friends and me, they had little in common but proximity.

What I had forgotten was that, a decade earlier to the day, a feral tailless tuxedo kitten I named Pica Milagrita, “Little Miraculous Magpie,” began keeping company with someone I was also keeping company with. I wrote:

So we have a kitty for a little while. His kitty, in that he has the last word, and so far, pays the bills. But we’re acting like giddy adoptive parents, perfect timing for this latest cycle of mourning for a child I’m trudging through. It helps. I’ve never been all that particular about species. Here we have the best of all possible worlds, a tiny being who won’t turn our lives upside down, but will keep us company, entertain us, give us focus for our nonspecific tenderness.

Three years and a winter later, he said he wanted to be friends. I figured that included giving me a picture of Pica, the only thing I asked for. It didn’t. Eighteen years later, I’m still trying to give up hope.

As for Skaska and Oodacha, when I returned late to Russia, other people I knew nothing about were living in my apartment. They thought my cats were a nuisance, and when I got there, they were both gone. At least I’d taken photos of them.

People laugh at the idea of temporary cats, but it seems to me it’s all temporary, every single thing.