I’d lived on Taha Hussein Street in Cairo for six months before I ever met the people next door. Their house was a big old place a bit back from the road. It was surrounded by a tall black fence and shaded by magnificent arching trees, their smooth, pie-shaped leaves nearly touching my balcony across the drive. In the mornings before the heat rose, I’d sit there with a coffee watching a man four stories down raking the dead leaves, the hem of his long gallabiyah tinged red by the ground. There were no flowers or grass on the property, just shrubs and trees and dirt. The house itself was a big block of a building, two stories high with large windows that were always shuttered.
Perhaps the most striking thing about the place, though, were the cats. There were cats everywhere. Sprawled on the dirt, perched on the stairs, eating, preening, clinging to that place like moths to a lamp.
The woman of the house was called Mena. She was 62 and a Sagittarius.
“Sagittariuses don’t forgive,” she’d said the first time I met her. “We remember everything.”
On that first meeting, she’d invited my friend and me into the house. Inside, it was like a museum. The ceilings had been painted in elaborate mosaics and the floors were layered in oriental carpets. A dry fountain of a naked woman stood in the entranceway and spinning coffee tables centered two living rooms.
In the hallway, there was a series of ancestral portraits, and one of Mena herself. It had been painted when she was young, and she was luminous, her eyes beckoning from the canvas and her hair running over her shoulder like rain. She had been traveling in Italy at the time, she told us, and had just lost the love of her life. At that moment, her husband walked past us, his face sagging like rumpled cloth, apparently accustomed to her round-about slights. He was from the older generation, Mena said, the one that appreciated real art, unlike Egypt’s nouveau riche who lived in modern compounds on the outskirts of the city.
It was a few weeks after meeting Mena that I first saw the kitten there. He was dragging his back legs behind him through the dirt, his fur a thin black and white, his face pulled and gaunt. I wished I hadn’t seen him, but I had.
I called Mena to ask if she was already treating the kitten. She’d run an animal shelter before retiring several years before. But she said she hadn’t noticed the sick animal. So I offered to take him to the vet if she could care for him after. I lived with flatmates who had long since drawn the line at my cat-sitting.
A week later when the kitten lay dead in Mena’s house, I wondered if he ever should have been saved at all.
The vet said the kitten’s partial paralysis could be nutritional and, if so, medicine would cure him. He had no broken bones. In his pet passport I named him Roger. When I called Mena to arrange to bring him over, she didn’t pick up the phone, and when I called the next day, she said she was away. So the kitten stayed with me for a while.
Maybe Roger didn’t want to be saved; he would hiss like a banshee when I so much as looked at him, and he sat all day in his box, angry and scared into misery, a creature you didn’t want to see. Poor Roger, he wasn’t cute anymore. Giving him his medicine was a tortuous affair. He would try to run from me, his limp legs dragging behind him like twigs while my heart crumpled.
Finally, Mena returned and I could take him there.
“And why don’t we just put him to sleep,” she had said to me on the phone when I called.
I thought of him in my bathroom, curled in his box, his pet passport, his little skeleton in the vet’s Xray exposing a thin spine. Mena’s animal shelter had had a fetish for PTS, a friend involved in Cairo’s animal rescue scene later told me: putting to sleep.
It was nighttime when I took him to her in a cardboard box. There was no light at the entranceway and the cats gathered around me, gliding past my legs like a gossamer sea. One hissed as I entered, trailing me up the broad stairs.
Against my protests, Mena let Roger out on her porch. He immediately dragged himself under a big concrete mold of a woman.
“In his own filth,” she remarked.
We sat in her museum in the half light. Mena’s eyes were big and flitting and her strong voice commanded attention, her hair was still long like in her youth and her arms were thick.
She said Roger would be too much work to care for and he should board at the vet’s where they would have better luck giving him his medicine. We’d give him a week, she said, and if he wasn’t responding to the treatment, we’d end it. I didn’t agree. She said she hired a woman who came over and did it. It was quick, she said.
But Roger was far under a pile of bricks when we went to get him, his little dead legs splayed in his wake. Mena’s househelp—the man in the long gallabiyah—was tasked with getting him out of the crevice after we could not. I begged him to be gentle, please believe me I did. But when Roger was finally extracted, he was terrified, panting like a wounded thing, like his breath was a storm that might suddenly quiet. Mena was sitting back, relaxed. She had spent a lifetime working with animals, but her hands were clean.
I’d bring the kitten to the vet that night, let him stay there a few days so he could get good care. I would go home quickly to get my purse, I said. My phone battery was about to die so I left it with Mena to charge before I went.
In less than ten minutes I was back. Mena was pooch pooching at the kitten in his cage, but as I approached she got up from her armchair and went into another room. When I looked into the cage, the kitten was dead. Still and limp, stretched out as though in a deep sleep. But Roger didn’t sleep.
“He’s dead, I think,” I called out in a small voice.
“Oh, I’ll get you another charger,” she replied perkily from down the hall.
“No,” I said. “The cat.”
The man in the gallabiyah buried him. That little body joining the other little bodies surely already there in the back garden.
“Do you want to go with him?” Mena asked me before the man took him out.
“Why?” I said. It was dark and everything was over.
“To make sure it’s really dead,” she replied. “It’s for the best,” she said to my sad face.
I went home and I cleaned the bathroom he’d lived in, cleaned it over and over.
tararachael 