Roxie the cat was having trouble eating her dry food. That was the start of it. She would try to swallow the little nuggets instead of chewing them, and when she tried to quench her thirst at the bowl beside the kitchen door she would slurp up the water like she was an old woman making her way through a bowl of hot tomato soup.
She ended up on the bench in the vet’s surgery. He said she had tumours in various places, including one on her jaw. There was nothing he could do. The following day I returned for the grim procedure of putting her to sleep.
When I was about six, I had a cat that needed to be annihilated by the vet for reasons I have forgotten. I can still see the big biscuit tin in which the vet placed her, with a wad of cotton wool, and I can still hear the sound of her last terrible gasps as whatever chemical in the wad of wool took its course inside the box.
But things have changed. When I got to the vet last week, little Roxie was sitting on the bench, purring at my touch, although a little drowsy, like someone after a good steak and a bottle of wine.
I rubbed her back and talked to her as the vet injected her rump. There was no stress. Gradually her head drooped and I placed her sideways and watched her inhale each final breath, like an oarsman crossing a river.
When it was over, we wrapped her in a blue blanket and put her back in her basket and then I left by a side door, slightly embarrassed of my cargo as I passed through a waiting room full of sick dogs and cats with their agitated owners.
The burial When I got home I opened a hole in the earth and placed incense at the base, and rose petals, and laid her in a sleeping position, all curled up with one paw over her eyes.
And when I had covered the earth over her, I put a few flowers on top, and the sun was slanting across the fields, and it would have been hard to convince me that the little creature did not have some kind of soul that had returned to the greater core of being that constitutes the entire cosmos.
But I didn’t mope around for long, because I wanted to catch the Ryanair flight from Shannon to Warsaw later that day.
I don’t know why I find Warsaw consoling. There’s something about the dry, cold air, the promise of snow in the sky, the lavish and beautiful street decorations and lighting that makes it a wonderland for a melancholic human at Christmas time.
A bastion of empire
I got myself a room at Hotel Bristol, a bastion of empire. I know the British never actually invaded Poland, but there is something in the poise and stylish swagger of the “Englishman abroad” that suggests they could have done so easily if they had wanted to.
I remember someone explaining to me once that an English man may swagger down any street as if he owns it, whereas an Irishman invariably staggers the streets of the world as if he couldn’t care less who owned them.
Hotel Bristol is a marble-halled palace of luxury. The lounge has black walls and soft lighting so daylight doesn’t penetrate. I couldn’t resist sharing a glass of wine with a woman called Mariola who was sitting on her own.
She could see I was a tourist and she asked me if I was enjoying Poland. I said I was on my way to the Monastery of Jasna Góra to see the icon of the Black Madonna.”
“Ah,” she said, with a big smile, “you are Irish?”
I admitted I was and then she frowned.
“I am not sure about God,” she said, “but I still believe in angels. Have you read the Irish writer Lorna Byrne?”
I admitted that I had not.
“She writes about angels,” Mariola continued. “Although I don’t like everything she says because she says that cats have no souls. And I think that my cats must have souls.”
I was silent for so long that Mariola got worried.
“You look like you have seen a ghost,” she said.
“It’s just a huge coincidence that you should mention cats,” I said.
“Why?”
So I told her about Roxie, and how I had buried her, and neither of us could speak, so we just sat there in the dark, for a very long time.