‘I left my body very early. I hovered over it and watched. I re-entered and waited for the light.’
ZANZOUN
Melissa first made contact by e-mail in February 2009 from her home in Cairo. Her first language was Egyptian Arabic, but her English was beautifully fluent too.
‘Is it possible for you to alleviate my suffering by giving me news from my beloved cat Zanzoun? She died from a snakebite, during my absence, in agony, which lasted probably for two to three hours. She was a beautiful Egyptian Mau and had only been with us for two years. In that short time she had become mother to two kittens and grandmother to two more. I am so sad that at the time she needed me most I was away.’
Soon I was sitting with the picture of a jet-black cat in my hand, looking into her vivid pale green eyes and black iris slits. She still looked like a kitten, due to her slender size, but there was something slightly different about her: she didn’t have the feel of the many British or American cats I connect with. Zanzoun was slightly distant, even otherworldly.
I took up my pen, connected with her, then began noting initial impressions for Melissa:
‘Zanzoun comes across as very athletic, agile and fast.
She was a wonderful mother and very attentive to her kittens – washing them, feeding them and encouraging them to be independent.
She was also a great hunter and able to catch lizards.
There are two homes: one is a block of flats in a city and the other is rural and open.
The flat is very smart, a very large one-floor flat, white or off-white, and has large square tiles on the floor. There is a view over the city from a balcony with a metal rail.
Zanzoun was very affectionate. She adored and respected you. She loved to rub her cheeks against you. She said she claimed you as her own.
She liked to watch what you were doing. She completely trusted you.
She was too adventurous for her own good – it used to get her into trouble.
She liked to sleep on your bed when you were away, because of your scent.
She was also fun and had a mischievous side.
I was amazed when Melissa replied the same day, despite the communication issues of rural Egypt. Although not every detail was correct, the majority were, and Melissa felt I had been able to connect with her Zanzoun.
I’m always interested to hear about an animal’s past and how they came to be with their guardian, but I wasn’t prepared for the story Melissa revealed in the comfort of a private members’ club in central London more than four years after I’d sent her Zanzoun’s communication.
‘I asked God for the black cat – the one type of cat I’d never had,’ she told me. ‘I used to be scared of black cats because I was told that people used them for black magic. They’re not popular now, but they were in antiquity. All the ancient black cats were revered. And a completely black cat is very Egyptian.’
She told me that Zanzoun’s mother had literally dropped her at her door. She had carried Zanzoun and her sibling up a metal spiral staircase all the way to the seventh floor of the Cairo block of flats and could have left them at someone else’s door quite easily, but had chosen Melissa’s.
Thoughtfully, Melissa placed a cardboard box there to make sure the kittens didn’t fall down the stairs.
‘I was supposed to leave for England, so I said to our housekeeper, “Please look after them.” She wanted the other kitten and I was very happy about that because I thought all the more reason for her to look after the kittens when I wasn’t there. But of course she didn’t sleep there at night and I couldn’t take them into the house – they were too small, the mother was completely wild and I couldn’t put my own cats in danger. I left hoping and praying that God would protect them.
At the end of the week I had the terrible feeling that something had happened to my Bengal cat, Tutsi.’
Melissa called her housekeeper to enquire whether anything had happened to him.
The housekeeper said, ‘No, he’s fine, he’s here, everything is well.’
‘What about my Siamese cat, Lady?’
‘No, she’s fine too.’
‘What about the little kittens outside and their mother?’
‘Well, I think the mother has taken them away and the box has gone.’
When Melissa returned to Egypt three days later, there was nothing there: no box, no kittens and no mother.
‘I was exhausted when I got back from London and I was so tired the next morning I decided to have a nap. That’s when I had the weirdest dream. I dreamed that the mother had taken her babies and they were drowning. I saw one of the little kittens in black sand and I picked it up. Then all I could see was a blue heart-shaped balloon or cushion-like object floating on water. I felt sad and there was very strange music playing, which I can’t put into words. I woke up really startled and thought, I have to go down.’
Downstairs, Melissa asked the doorkeeper, ‘Do you know anything about the kittens?’ Hearing a noise, she added, ‘I can hear a cat meowing!’
He replied, ‘Oh yes, that cat has been meowing there for three days.’
Melissa exclaimed, ‘Really! Why?’ but she was already moving down the stairs to the spot where people stacked up their rubbish to be taken away. The rubbish had been taken away, but a single piece of wood had been left leaning against the wall. Zanzoun was underneath it. Her back half was just lying limp: from the waist down she was paralyzed.
‘I picked her up. I was so upset. I held her close to my heart and said, “Don’t worry, I will look after you.”
Eventually the housekeeper found the other kitten alive and healthy. I don’t know what happened to the mother.’
When the vet examined Zanzoun he said, ‘Look, I don’t want you to get your hopes up because I think the kitten will probably die within two weeks. I suggest you leave her with me, because it’s not going to be a nice experience for you.’
Melissa told him, ‘God brought that kitten to me and she’s my responsibility.’
She took Zanzoun home and looked after her. Zanzoun was given pills to help the nerves to reconnect. And she didn’t die – she thrived.
‘I was doing healing on her and had no idea if it was working or not. I was putting my hands on her and saying, “God, please channel the energy.” In the end, though, she was using her back legs, which was a complete miracle. She could stand up on them and the only thing she couldn’t do was move in a complete line – she was more like a sidewinder.’
Zanzoun was about nine months and fully vaccinated when Melissa took her to her country home in Siwa. Her Siamese, Lady, just ignored her, but the other cats took to her because she was still young.
When she was about a year old, an admirer came calling, a rural cat.
‘I had never seen anything like it,’ Melissa shared. ‘I mean, the courtship that went on between those two was just incredible.’
The rural cat was about the same age as Zanzoun and his right front leg had been broken and badly reset so it was permanently turned in. Zanzoun didn’t notice – she thought he was wonderful – and he certainly didn’t act as though he was handicapped.
‘He used to jump about 20 feet from the top of the house to the ground. I have never seen another cat do this. He was really a Superman cat,’ Melissa stated. ‘He always landed on his four paws.’
One meaning of the name ‘Zanzoun’ is ‘Ethereal beauty’ and the rural Romeo certainly agreed with that. Behind the wooden door he would talk to Zanzoun in screechy cat language and she would answer him from her position on the other side.
Melissa said to her housekeeper, ‘We’ll have to be very careful, because I don’t know if Zanzoun can have kittens. It might harm her to do that.’
She contacted the vet for advice. He informed her, ‘Yes, I think she can have kittens.’
Melissa wondered whether having kittens would straighten Zanzoun’s spine and stretch the nerves back into place.
The vet replied, ‘Well, you should do what you feel and see what happens. It should be OK. She’s survived so much, it should be all right.’
Melissa told me:
‘I don’t think I could have stopped it anyway. That cat managed to find Zanzoun wherever she was. He would climb anything to reach her. He even got up on the roof. I had to take her back to Cairo after a while because it was getting very awkward with him around all the time, but obviously they had got married.
I wanted to be there for her when she fell pregnant, but I wasn’t there. I wanted to be there when she had her kittens, but I wasn’t there then either, because of commitments to my animals on the farm. I’d told the staff to let me know when it happened and I’d told the housekeeper, “Whatever you do, don’t pick the kittens up with your hands because you will put your smell on them and then she might reject them. You must put a glove on if you have to handle a kitten.” I had prepared everything before I left for Siwa, including a big birthing basket. I’d got all the leaflets about cats having their young and I knew all about it.’
It appeared that Zanzoun gave birth to the first kitten on Melissa’s bedroom floor as she was making her way to the basket. The second kitten was born in the basket. The first one didn’t move and Melissa’s husband thought she was dead, so he told the housekeeper to get rid of her.
The housekeeper said, ‘What! The lady would never say such a thing. You can’t possibly do that.’
Instead she picked the lifeless body up with a glove and gave it to Zanzoun, and the kitten survived. For this act of kindness Melissa called this black kitten Safa, after the housekeeper. The second one, who was a Mau, was, though also a female, named after the housekeeper’s brother, Rafa.
Giving birth didn’t affect Zanzoun’s disability one way or the other – it was just the same afterwards. But she was a fabulous mother and kept the kittens with her all the time.
When they were old enough to walk and had completed their injections, including for rabies, Melissa asked her husband to bring them and their mother to her in the country, as they were needed to keep spiders out of the house.
‘One year we had 36 spiders in our country house and they were the size of tarantulas. One day I was thinking about killing one because I was scared for the kittens. I was looking at him as I had that thought and I felt he read my mind because at that moment he cowered and I heard, “Please don’t kill me, please don’t kill me.” It was horrible. So I didn’t kill him, I put him in a glass, released him in the garden and told him, “Don’t come back, you’re in danger. Don’t come here.”
I think that everything that lives has a soul and that animals don’t need you to talk to them – they read your thoughts. Insects do, even ants. It’s incredible.’
When her husband pulled up in Siwa, Melissa felt something wasn’t right.
‘I don’t feel that Zanzoun is with you,’ she said.
‘She’s under the seat in the car,’ he said. ‘The housekeeper saw her there.’
‘I don’t feel she’s there,’ Melissa stressed.
The housekeeper said, ‘Well, she must have run out when we opened the door.’
‘Zanzoun, Zanzoun, Zanzoun,’ Melissa called, worried that it was getting dark. ‘I can’t feel her.’
Then it suddenly dawned on her. She turned to her husband.
‘When did you open the door?’
‘When we filled up with petrol.’
‘Which petrol station were you at?’
‘There were two. The first was just outside Cairo and the second was at the halfway point.’
Melissa knew immediately: ‘The halfway point – that’s where she is!’
‘My husband was very tired and I couldn’t ask him to drive again. Yet it was hopeless trying to sleep and I lay wide awake worrying. I thought, The longer she’s out there, the less chance I have of finding her.
At 2 a.m. I got up and woke our housekeeper, because I was mad with her. She was the one who had told my husband, “Yes, I can see her. She’s under the back seat.” I didn’t care if she was tired too, she was going to have to come with me. It was very foggy as we climbed into the car.’
The housekeeper said, ‘We’ll never find her.’
Melissa retorted, ‘Don’t say things like that. Wait until we’re there.’
‘To make matters worse, during our drive there was a terrible sandstorm. I thought, Oh my goodness, what is happening? Everything is trying to stop me from going to Zanzoun. I don’t care. I’m going. I just knew I had to be there as soon as I could.
We arrived at the petrol station after four hours’ solid driving and then spent two hours looking for Zanzoun. I wasn’t going to leave until we found her.
What I wasn’t aware of was that the owner of the petrol station had told his guys, “Just say anything to this woman – she’s completely mad, she’s come here to search for a cat.”
They told me, “Actually, there was a lady who came and she thought it was a cute little thing and she took it.”’
Melissa believed them. She thought it was a sign from God that Zanzoun had found a better place than she could offer her. With a very heavy heart she prepared to leave, but before she went she told the garage people, ‘If you find her, call me and I will give you a reward.’
It was about noon and they had been driving home for about two hours when Melissa’s mobile rang and she heard a male voice say, ‘We’ve found your cat.’
‘Where is she?’
‘It has crossed the road and it is near where the tank is.’
There was a military tank nearby that had been abandoned after the Second World War on a rectangle of land that divided the sides of a dual carriageway.
Two hours later, when Melissa arrived back at the garage, the men said, ‘Look, it’s over there by the tank. We’ll fetch it.’
Zanzoun was sitting in the shadow of the tank until the man started towards her, then she ran further away.
Melissa replied, ‘No, don’t go. I’ll get her. Don’t go.’
Still one of the men kept walking towards Zanzoun, because he wanted the reward.
Terrified she would try to cross to the other side of the carriageway and get run over, Melissa shouted, ‘No way! You’re going to kill my cat. If you do, you’ll get no reward. So you come back here.’
With the threat of no reward, the man stopped dead in his tracks.
Melissa crossed to Zanzoun, who sat quietly waiting to be picked up, just as she had when she was a kitten, scooped her straight up to her heart and returned to her car.
‘I took her back home, which took another four hours. I was wearing a white blouse and when I arrived home I realized there was red on it. I believe the men had tried to catch her and they had grabbed at her so hard she had been bleeding. When I had held her over my heart, her blood had marked my blouse.’
Despite all this, Zanzoun recovered well from her ordeal. She was so happy to be back home.
Everybody else thought Melissa was mad. People kept saying, ‘I would never go all that way for a cat!’
She simply replied, ‘She’s my cat.’
It wasn’t long before Zanzoun and her kittens grew up. Her firstborn, Safa, was large and very sensible, and her second daughter, Rafa, was very rough. In less than two years Melissa had actually three generations of cats in the house:
‘Safa had two kittens, a female we named Pandora and a male we named Zuka. The male disappeared the day we decided we were going to have him neutered. I felt him tell me, “No, you’re not doing that to me. I choose my freedom.”
I told him, “You’ll be so much happier if you have the operation. You’ll have an easy life, less fighting – just look at the cats who are torn to bits.” But it seemed I couldn’t convince him. The country vet works with cows, goats and horses and doesn’t think cats are worth bothering about. Our nearest vet who knows about cats and dogs is eight hours away in Cairo. He came to neuter some of my other animals, but Zuka didn’t reappear and present himself.
When the vet had left, I still didn’t know where Zuka was but I said to him, “The vet’s gone, you’ve missed it.”
I heard him repeat, “I choose my freedom.”
I never saw him again.’
A year later Melissa and her husband made another trip
to England.
‘When I left, I told the housekeeper never to leave Zanzoun in the garden,’ she said. ‘She always had to come in.’
Sadly, it didn’t work out that way.
Melissa explained, ‘The local people were terrified to go into the garden to get her when it was dark. They were scared of ghosts, devils and jinns.’
Jinns, also called genies, like the one that comes out of the lamp in the story of Ali Baba, can be mischievous spirits but can also be neutral towards humans or even benevolent. They have free will, just as humans do.
Nevertheless, Melissa recalled, ‘The guards at our house in Cairo would pee in the front doorway rather than walk 40 feet away because of their fear of the jinns. They were terrified they would come into their body and possess them.’
So, when Zanzoun was in the garden and darkness fell, the housekeeper was too scared to go out and look for her.
On her return from England Melissa rang her when she was in the car travelling back to her Cairo home.
‘So, how are my cats?’
‘Oh, the cats are fine.’
‘How is Zanzoun?’
‘Oh, she is right in front of me. Zanzoun is right in front of me.’
‘But she wasn’t. The housekeeper had left her out all night. She’d thought she would get away with it because Zanzoun would be waiting by the door the next morning. But the garden is full of vipers and a cat who hears the movement of a snake will be interested. And Zanzoun was handicapped, so not in total control of her movements.’
The next day Zanzoun was discovered in the garden.
‘That morning I saw it in my coffee cup,’ said Melissa. ‘Just as people read tea leaves, I read coffee grounds, and I saw a black cat there. I wasn’t happy about that.’
She rang her Siwa home.
‘How is Zanzoun?’
Sobbing, the housekeeper replied. ‘She is dead. The gardener found her.’
‘I went to the country the next day, which was as quickly as I could get there. I was on fire, absolutely on fire. I was in so much pain I didn’t know what to do – it was as if it was oozing out of me, a burning feeling. It was a huge reaction, completely over the top, but I am over the top in my love for animals.’
Melissa’s niece had consulted me about her own missing cat and she passed her my contact details. After sending over my first impressions of Zanzoun for her to verify, I e-mailed the full communication:
‘In the communication there is a quiet superiority and wisdom, as if Zanzoun knows things. I feel you were together for a reason. To me, Zanzoun feels like a magical animal; she has special powers. I also feel her destiny was to have a short life. She knew this and that was why she lived life to the full.
Zanzoun wants you not to worry. She pictures herself hunting in long grass, almost panther-like. She now has great strength and speed and she is with a white cat who has longer fur.’
Melissa replied:
‘Everything you said was mind-boggling. Zanzoun described my home in Cairo and my garden in the countryside. She described her human father coming in from work wearing a suit and the big tiles on the floor. She told you I had a grown-up daughter and son who both lived away from home, which is true. How did she know that? Or should I say how did you know that? How did you get that from the cat? I thought the first thing you would say when you communicated with Zanzoun was “That cat was handicapped”, but as I read your communication I realized that Zanzoun never thought of herself as handicapped. That was a revelation to me. She never saw herself as handicapped at all.
I had previously said to myself, “If Zanzoun is truly a magic cat,” as I felt she was, “then she will have her opposite, yin and yang, to receive her at the other end.” This was a thought that came to me. I thought it was completely crazy, but now I know she is with a white cat, it does make sense.’
The vet decided to have Zanzoun’s body autopsied. Melissa hadn’t requested it and felt he was just keen to make money. She told me what happened when she returned to her country house:
‘They had already buried her by the time I arrived. I felt that it was maybe better that way, because with the poison she had been totally blown out of proportion.
I visited the spot where the accident had happened and I noticed there were areas where the sand was different, as if something had rolled over on it. This upset me no end, as I felt the poor cat must have been in agony. The vet told me, “Yes, she would have died in absolute agony because the poison made her liver and kidneys split.”
Then you wrote that Zanzoun wanted to explain how she had died.’
Zanzoun had given me a message for Melissa:
‘I did not have the agony he spoke about. That was not me, it was my body that stretched and contorted while I waited outside. I left my body very early. I hovered over it and watched. I re-entered and waited for the light. It came quickly and a man walked out to me and gestured for me to go with him. I went. He had a kind energy.’
Melissa said:
‘The things that you said made me cry for ages afterwards. Every time I told the story I was in tears. I knew she had been bitten on the head, but you also told me she had been bitten on her left paw. The vet had missed the second snakebite, but both the gardener and housekeeper told me she had been bitten on the left paw and they had found her with her left paw in her mouth.’
Zanzoun had more to say to Melissa:
‘Tell Melissa I love her and not to worry. Tell her to look after the kids and I will come by to see how they are doing. They will look up to me, into an empty space, then you’ll know I am there.’
Melissa acknowledged:
‘This is exactly what happened. The kittens and I were on my bed and then suddenly they both looked up at the same spot in the air.
That cat gave me so much and I absolutely adored her.’
This story shows the lengths people will go to for their animals and that the deep bond of unconditional love is not broken by death. Zanzoun teaches us that animals can thrive despite disability, that there is more to dying and death than meets the eye, and that cats are loyal too, as she communicates to soothe the soul of her devoted guardian and replace her agony and guilt with love.
In the final part we explore living life with love. This is the message animals repeatedly give their guardians and one they wish to share with the world. The first chapter begins with a golden retriever named Geneviève, but also involves a rook named Borvis and a wild rabbit named Pears.