Another Sign of Spring

Jimmy the cat, at 17 years old the Elder of Katzenstraße, is prowling the garden, examining the undersides of shrubs, nose to the ground. Jimmy hates the cold and snow. For months now, he has contemplated the world from a window sill atop a radiator. More than the emergence of a groundhog, his willing exploration of nature must announce the coming of Spring.

The Queen of Katzenstrasse

Saturday night, three families from Katzenstrasse gathered in a kitchen for a evening of warm friendship. Our neighbours across the road, Sigrid and Gerard, who with their eight-year-old daughter had recently returned from a week in Barcelona, cooked a pan of paella and made sangria. Hannes and Edith, their neighbours next door were there, and Himself and I were made to feel very welcome.

With Tom Waits and Bob Dylan playing in the background, conversation around the candlelit table flowed with the wine until late in the evening. In German and in English, as well as my own stammering ‘Germlish’, talk ranged from the merits of analog over digital recordings, the romance of tube-powered electronic amplifiers, Barcelona hotels and cafes, American policy toward Cuba, the Tea Party movement, theatre, pregnancy and birth – I now know the German for a Caesarean Section is Kaiserschnitten – emigration and immigration, languages, lineage and ancestry.

Sigrid and Gerard, Edith and Hannes, were very kind to move so freely between German and English, switching fluently and frequently between the two, so Himself and I could join the conversation. Himself is better at German than me. I recognise some percentage of words in any sentence, but their sense lies just beyond my grasp, tantalising and mocking me. I can tell by the context what's being discussed, but sentence by sentence, I don't understand it.

The German speakers, on the other hand, were interested in the differences between American, Irish and British English. We discussed words that have different meaning in each culture. ‘Bold’, for instance, generally means courageous or audacious in American English. In Ireland, however, a ‘bold’ child is one who ignores or challenges adult authority. Or one might be ‘as bold as a dog’ and behave contrary to community standards. These usages clearly share a common source, but the nuances of their meaning have shifted.

We talked about cats, too. For cats were among the assembled. Jimmy, the ancient cat of Sigrid and Gerard, came in the sliding door, wandered toward his dish, and ate briefly. Then he stood at the door to be let out again and, not long after, stood looking in the glass door to be let back in. Jimmy, at 95 in human terms, limps with arthritis now; he sometimes stands stock still for minutes on end, as if wondering why it is he has come into the room, what it is that has now slipped his mind.

Hannes’ and Edith’s Mona, the queen of Katzenstrasse, was there too, threading her way between our feet and majestically inspecting the room. An established member of the household next door, Mona is famous for making herself at home in Gerard’s and Sigrid’s house as well as in ours. Nearly daily we have found her on our step, pressing herself against the door frame as we fumble with the key. We are used to her presence most mornings at the bedroom window as she waits on the deck over the garage, ready to curl up on the bed at our feet. That very afternoon we had returned from the grocery market to find her on the doorstep. We unlocked the outer door and then, seeing Sigrid in the street, stopped to visit with her.

‘Die Katze wartet,’ she said, greeting us.

Indeed, the cat did wait. When we climbed the stairs with our groceries after chatting briefly, we found Mona, regal and serene, reposing on the chair outside our flat door. She came in with us and settled on the cushioned breakfast bench. She was still there, three hours later, and we had to carry her downstairs to put her out when we left the house to join the dinner party.

At dinner, Edith told of the fish Mona had brought into the house that afternoon, bait stolen from one of the fishermen on the lake behind the house. Hannes recalled finding another fish, still flopping, on the living room floor. He took it to the lake and tossed it in. Moments later, Mona returned and laid the same fish at his feet. There were tales, too, of her gifts of the creeping, fur-covered things from the wood next to house.

Himself and I reminded Edith and Hannes of the week they were in Rome over the summer. Mona, always ready to be held and cuddled, presented herself at the door even more frequently. We left the bedroom window ajar each night; each morning we would find her, a grey lump at the end of the bed. Waking, she would catch at our feet moving under the covers, capturing toes with teeth and claws. At breakfast, she found her place between us on the breakfast bench and, rolling onto her back, graciously presented a wide, white belly to be caressed.

Telling these stories, we joked that Mona must be surprised to find her three families assembled in one room. ‘What are you doing here?’ we imagined her saying. When she went through the sliding door and out into the darkness, we bid her goodnight. ‘See you, Mona!’

Near midnight, the dinner party broke up and, saluting each other with pecks on both cheeks, we said goodnight. The fledgling friendship between us, the foreign recent arrivals, and the long-time friends and neighbours, had strengthened. We parted, promising to meet again soon, the next time at our house. Discussing the evening the morning after, Himself and I remarked on how thoughtfully the others had included us by speaking both English and German. And we recalled with great pleasure the liveliness and intelligence of the conversation.

It was Gerard and eight-year-old Olivia who found Mona, on Monday morning sometime about 8. She had probably darted out from behind a wall just as a car pulled away. The car couldn’t have been going fast, not from the end of the street. The driver, whoever it was, probably doesn’t realise he or she hit the cat.

I saw Gerard from our kitchen window as we were eating breakfast. He was standing at a ground floor window staring uncharacteristically into the street. It turns out he was considering phoning us with the news, but he decided to wait until my husband came out of the house on his way work so he could tell him in person. My husband rinsed clean the site with our garden hose, then came back into the house to tell me.

As with all news of sudden death, there was that instant, lasting seconds or microseconds – who can say – of a kind of dual reality; I was momentarily numb and dumb in that short space during which the apperception of a piece of information I didn’t want to acknowledge as other than fiction gradually became real. Mona would never again jump onto the breakfast bench beside me or stand on the step arching her back into the door jamb or knead my stomach as I petted her or stare into the bedroom window, waiting to be let in.

On the street, I stood with Edith and Gerard staring down at the place in front of our house, now washed clean and terribly empty, where Mona had lain. Behind us, Hannes busied himself with the shovel. Our eyes were raw and our expressions wondering. How could this have happened? Katzenstrasse is a safe street, remote from traffic and, with its wood and nearby lake well stocked with fish, a kind of paradise for cats, as Gerard remarked. How could Mona have been hit?

Mona, the queen of Katzenstrasse, was bold in both the Irish and the American sense of the word. It was as if, more than most cats, she acknowledged no master or authority. She moved between the three families in the three houses with an attitude of entitlement, secure in her welcome in each. She found her way onto the deck beside our window and waited calmly until we let her in. Once inside she headed to her favourite spots. If we sat next to her, she calmly inserted herself onto our laps and nudged her head into the crook of an elbow, her front paws kneading away. I kept a towel for her on the chair in the living room where she liked to watch as I did my morning stretches. Then, when breakfast was over and Himself had left for work, she’d sleep for two hours or more as I worked.

Mona was round and soft, obviously well looked after, so we didn’t feed her. But if she was in the kitchen as I prepared a meal, she would jump down from her favourite perch on the bench and weave her body between my feet, loudly meowing. If I had meat out to thaw and left the kitchen, she would boldly jump onto the worktop and seize it, once wrestling the plastic-wrapped treasure to the floor. She was audacious in going after what she wanted.

Mona was our first guest in the house, and she knew it intimately from the time when the previous tenants, a family with children, had welcomed her. She frequently ran up the stairs to sit at the attic door, waiting to be let in. We’re not sure what attractions it held for her. Jacob, the man who carved the doors and ceilings of walnut and cherry, had his workshop there. Himself often joked that she was drawn there by his ghost. Maybe now, he says, Mona’s ghost is there along side Jacob’s.

Perhaps her ghost will keep us company. This morning, though, we were aware of the empty space between us on the breakfast bench. The sun shone through the window behind me in the office, but Mona did not leap up to sit in its warmth. The chair next to my yoga mat was empty too, the grey towel folded and pointless beside it. And each time I pass the bedroom window, I look away from it, not wanting to see the blankness there.

On Monday morning, as Gerard, Edith and I stood in the street remembering Mona, we recalled with a smile our joke the night of the dinner party, when all three of her families were gathered in the same room.

Edith said, ‘Maybe she decided her work was done. Maybe she thought, “I’ve brought them together now, put them in one room, pointed them toward friendship, and that’s enough.”’

Perhaps she’s right. Mona did draw us together. Sigrid and Edith take care of each other’s cats when they travel; the first real conversation I had with Gerard and Sigrid was about the strange grey-and-white cat who came into our house with such assurance. The friendships grew when I was able to look after the cats when both families were away on the same weekend. By making herself at home in our homes, she wove three households into a community.

Now, with Mona’s death, our shared sadness draws us together even more. As our friendship flowers, the dinner party will be just the first of many evenings of shared conversation and laughter. And when we meet, we’ll remember the queen of Katzenstrasse.

‘To Mona. Prost.’

Katzenstrasse Autumn

Autumn has brought beauty and melancholy to Katzenstrasse. The wood at the end of the street is a tangle of brown trunks.  Through them, I can see the bronze litter of beech leaves carpeting the ground. Just in front of them, the leaves of the quince tree still shine bright yellow. A sweet gum tree blazes crimson and copper next to a slate grey roof. Beyond the bare trees, beyond the field to the south, the bulk of Untersberg, hidden all summer by a dense fence of towering trees, now can be seen blue on the horizon.

I’ve been turning over in my mind why these scenes are so moving. There is in the contrast of the bright warm colours laid against a background of neutral browns and cool blues and greys an emotional charge, like the striking of a minor chord, that moves in a particular way. Seen by the weak light of short days, the charge is potent.

It was late in the afternoon one day a week or so ago that I got off the bus at our stop, the last one on the route. The light was soft brown, as it is so often these days, filtered as it was through the veil of the trees, their slender twigs forming tracery like that of cathedral windows. Another woman had gotten off just steps ahead of me, and I followed her as she turned right at the corner. I lengthened my steps to keep up with her as we passed under gold of the beech leaves along the street. When she turn left at my turn, my curiosity was piqued. Usually I walk from the bus alone, for few come as far as my stop and fewer still head in the same direction as I do.

We approached the field; its strips of brown earth and alternating green lay under a light dusting of the morning's snow. In the middle distance, white steam from the Stiegl brewery smoke stack rose against a silver sky; Untersberg's bulk loomed blue-grey in the distance. When she turned right at the small wooden shrine that stands at the edge of the field I hurried after the woman. There are only a handful of houses lying in this direction; I didn’t want to lose sight of her. More and more it seemed the woman must be a neighbour of mine, yet I didn’t recognise her at all.

Her boot heels tapped the pavement, my own echoed hers. She passed the three houses on the right; she didn’t turn into the street on the left. When sheat last turned down Katzenstrasse, I quickened my steps even more, lest she disappear before I could see where she went.

At a gate about four houses along, she stopped and turned toward me. As I approached, she spoke to me, some friendly query, I supposed.

‘Es tut mir leid,’ I replied. ‘Ich spreche nur ein wenig Deutsch.’ It’s my standard reply, trotted out now in shops, on the bus, in the street, in doctor’s office: I speak only a little German.

I could see comprehension in her eyes as she nodded her head in the direction of our house at the end of the street. She knew who I was. Then, without a word, she turned away from me, into her gate, leaving me standing in the street.

Before she could go, I stuck out my hand. ‘Ich heisse Lorraine,’ I said, and she stopped long enough to take my hand and tell me her name. We managed to smile at one another, and parted then with some faint warmth between us. Still, it shook me a little. She is a woman near enough my age, not unlike me in dress or manner, and yet the barrier between us was as great as that.

Hands in my pockets, I continued under the thickening light toward our house at edge of the towering wood. Mona, the grey-and-white queen of Katzenstrasse, met me at my doorway. She ran lightly ahead of me up the red stone stairs and waited at the carved wooden door. Once inside, she jumped onto the cushioned bench in the kitchen and, purring, set about grooming her smooth, clean fur.

In the gloom of the autumn evening, it was good to have her company, someone to talk to.

Katzenstrasse

In a country dominated by dogs, we have moved onto a street full of cats – Katzenstrasse. There are no dogs on this street, our neighbours tell me. That’s odd, given that dogs are everywhere in Salzburg, on the street, in shops, even in restaurants.

One cat, a large – no, bluntly, fat – dark grey-and-white cat with a delicate face and small pink nose, considers this flat an extension of her house across the street. She followed us up the stairs on Sunday as we brought our suitcases in and went directly to the kitchen, rubbing up against the table. From there, she went to the bedroom, as if she expected to find something, or someone, specific there. Back into the kitchen she came and sat, calmly watching. In fact, she didn’t run down the stairs and out the door until my husband, sitting in the office at the end of the long hall, loudly and unconsciously cleared his throat.

When I awoke at half six Monday morning and pulled back the curtain by the bed, I saw a pair of pale gold eyes, just on the other side of the glass, inches away.

Let me be clear. The flat is on the first floor – the second story by American reckoning. The cat was sitting on the flat roof of the garage, a kind of terrace accessible from the bedroom through a pair of glass doors next to the bed. I didn’t know how she got onto the roof, but she seemed to know I would be on the other side of the curtain.

The cat stared, mouth stretched wide with the plaintive cry I knew from hard experience. I let the curtain fall back and turned in the bed. Minutes later, I looked again. She was still there.

Himself had retreated from my thrashing and duvet snatching in the night to the spare bedroom, so I was alone. With full knowledge of my guilt, I opened the glass door. The cat came in. Soon she was an immobile, heavy and tightly wound knot next to me, secure in the peaceful down of the duvet.

Himself would not be pleased, I thought.

She followed me into the living room when I got up for my meditation. It’s a large room, now cluttered with our furniture and still-to-be unpacked boxes. She wandered the room, thrusting her body into the legs of each chair and table she met, crying pitifully when I ignored her. I settled her half on my lap, half on the sofa – she is too fat to fit comfortably on lap alone – as I began my meditation, concentration diluted by her heavy, soft stillness.

It’s been nearly four years now since we had had to let go of our cat, Puisín. A remarkable cat, intelligent, exceptionally brave and loyal, she was 16 and had reached the point of wandering the house crying in the night. She cried too when she was picked up, her joints knobby beneath her withered flesh. So I called the other Lorraine, our vet, who came to our house, and I held Puisín in my lap, stroking her long marmalade-coloured fur as her body relaxed for the last time.

That may have been the last time until this week that I had held a cat. The year that followed was the year the house in Ireland was finished; the summer following her death was a blur of selling the California house, packing or giving away all we owned and moving to Ireland. In Ireland, my mother-in-law’s dog Sally took a more-than proprietary interest in our house, having long seen the site as part of her jurisdiction. Besides, we didn’t want to be in thrall to litter boxes, yet an outdoor cat, I feared, would be a neat snack for the foxes, badgers, hawks and owls of the countryside.

The cat nuzzled my arm, pushing its face into the wide sleeve of my dressing gown. It had been a long time since a soft but demanding, tightly knotted creature had pressed itself insistently into my outstretched legs or onto my lap, pinning me in place.

My mind wandered, skirting the forest of irrationality, sidling into the wood of superstition. Perhaps this was someone making his or her presence known. Perhaps it was Jakob, the craftsman who had carved the walnut, cherry and oak that panel the walls and ceiling of this flat. Moving here, we acknowledged he may be looking over our shoulders, exhaling dusty breath, keeping watch on his creation. Was he making his presence felt more substantially?

‘It certainly knows this place,’ said my husband over breakfast a little later, as the cat roamed the kitchen.

It jumped onto the seat of Jakob’s carved cherry breakfast nook.

‘Hey! Get off!’ He brushed it off the bench. ‘Maybe it used to live here.’

Would we now be buying cat food? Surely the cat was too clean and well fed to be homeless.

I got some of the story the next day when, taking out the rubbish, I got talking with the neighbours across the street. (Many people in Salzburg speak English to a greater or lesser degree, but this couple met as part of an exchange program between the University of Salzburg and Bowling Green State College, where for a year they were enrolled in American Studies, so they are more articulate in English than most. Yesterday they left for Vienna for the long weekend, and already I miss them.) The owners themselves of a 17-year-old cat called Jimmy, they told me the wanderer belongs to their next-door neighbour. The cat is named Mona, and she has a sister, as shy as Mona is bold, named Lisa.

Yes. You read that right: Mona and Lisa. Someone has a sense of humour, I suppose one could call it.

Mona is friendly and adventuresome by nature, and it turns out the last occupants of our flat were a family with children, a girl, 8, and a boy, 6. Mona had been welcome here and the children had played with her, so she was, in fact, re-visiting a favourite place.

Perhaps we should have been more welcoming, because she hasn’t repeated her early-morning call. But no doubt our familiar will be back. In a street that’s home to about 20 cats, my neighbours estimate, Mona is well known for her wandering into flats and making herself at home. In fact, as I came out of the furnace room the other day, she was half way up the stairs before she saw me, turned and ran out the door.

Or maybe that was Lisa, the shy one. Who can say?

As for Jakob, I haven’t entirely left the wood. When he makes his presence felt, I’m sure he has no need of the corporeal.