Birute Jonuskaite
There is a fire of nasturtium that lies in the eyes of cats. I agree with Lesmian: the redness of the nasturtium is truly fiery – inspirational, dangerous and fiery – while its leaves are a luxuriantly healthy green. That is until the small, repulsive larvae appear in great numbers.
All the flowers from mum’s garden, found in the space surrounding the house that comprises the mosaic of my childhood, were interesting to me in their own way, with certain memories clinging to them, encoded in my brain according to colours and smells, connecting me with the name days of people close to me, with holidays, or with particular family events.
Peonies stand for the end of the school year. With their enormous white and pink heads, they represent huge bouquets for everybody, even for the teachers one liked the least – after all, there were a couple months of freedom ahead.
Dahlias stand for the beginning of the school year. The rigid blossoms, seemingly crammed with petals, went only to the class teacher. During all of those eight years, there was not one female teacher who was also a tutor. There were only male tutors in the following order: a bent-over, deaf bachelor; a crazy half-wit alcoholic bachelor still searching for a wife; and a well-kept bachelor who flirted with everyone, but who loved boys. You wouldn’t have brought those happy dahlias to any one of them yourself, but mum would order you to, and she would pick them herself. It was no skin off her back as the whole area near the fence was full of them. In Lithuanian one says that the woodpecker is colourful, but dahlias even more so.
Lilacs stand for the violet name day of my mother. Isn’t it for this reason that she died so young? After all, violet is the colour of sorrow and anxiety. The Crucified Christ is covered with violet tulles before Easter while the priests wear violet garments…
Lilies stand for the white, sweetly fragrant anniversary of my cousin’s death – an aberration of fate: he was run over by a train on the eve of his eighteenth birthday, in July, right as they were blooming.
Rue stands for first communion, and a crown that never seems to stay on my head. So what if the back of my head is still not particularly sinful; my hair is thin and short, and even with a number of hairpins I can’t manage to keep that somewhat heavy green halo on it. It slides to one side, then the other, while the hairpins stick out like the thorns of a briar patch.
Before chrysanthemums had come into fashion, the violet, dark blue little suns that I now know to be called blue felicia were used on All Saints Day and All Souls Day, and it was as if all the constellations had fallen from the sky onto the graves. Pansies also stand for graves, graves and more graves. From spring to autumn, in all possible colours and on all possible occasions, we come to weed them and water them on feast days. It’s an occasion to ask about grandparents, none of whom I ever saw.
Sage was one of my mum’s favourites: the little red soldiers of Napoleon, and that’s all.
Snapdragons, which we knew simply as dragons, stand for the awfully funny lips of rabbits in all warm colours. ‘Make one, make one, don’t you know how to make a crown out of dragons?’ the children would say, annoying one another. It was an enormous source of shame if you didn’t know how to weave them together.
Cowslips make me think of the sunny shores of the lake. Smelling of wild strawberries, they are always close to hand; you only needed to snoop around a little among the tall grass to find them. During a sweet hour or so of oblivion, you would stretch out among the bent grass and tear the yellowish bells off the cowslips one after another, and suck and suck with your eyes closed, disappearing beyond the borders of dad’s fields, beyond the border of the blue lake, even beyond the nearby forest. You are suspended somewhere in the most pleasant point of the universe, light and formless, able to become anything you want, floating between strange galaxies, feeling no danger at all, no fears whatsoever, neither the flow of time, nor a feeling of belonging to a planet, community, or family of some sort. You don’t even care about the ants climbing up your legs – even those brown ones that painfully pee on you. Cowslips are the harmless narcotics of childhood summers, leaving only an unforgettable love for sunny colours.
Marsh marigolds belong to the same category. A cold wave of air would rise from the earth. All puddles would turn to stone at night, and in the morning it would be impossible to break them, even with the hardest of shoe heels. And in the evening the ducks quacked loudly in the swamp belonging to the neighbour Jankauskas; the lapwings (pewits) just having flown home, greeting everyone. I would put rubber boots on and head straight for the huge puddles and ditches from which each year they surfaced from the water. You would find yellowish little clouds and would immediately wonder how to reach them, how to pick at least a little bouquet without falling in all the way up to your knees with your boots on. You would either manage to do it, or you didn’t. You would march home victoriously with dry feet, or in shoes smelling of swamp, because you had a fistful of flowers, full of dampness, the very first flowers to conquer the departing winter despite their fragility and tendency to wilt quickly. You needed them as proof that it has already started, that you are bringing it home and that the entire house will wake up and will overflow with spring.
***
If it was only the fire of nasturtium that burned in the eyes of a cat, it would be a cat that walked alone and returned in the night only when the consequences of war become unbearable: torn ears, swollen eyes, wounds festering over its whole body. Who knows if it is due to such an ability to make use of freedom that the Egyptians embalmed cats after they died, burying them in enormous necropolises and mourning them just as they did people. Who knows whether that is why killing a cat was sacrilege to them, and a degenerate who did just that was sentenced to death.
Why was a Sphinx built in Giza in 10,500 B.C.? Perhaps they knew something we don’t know today? Perhaps they understood something essential? That’s what I ask my cat, Geisha, in whose eyes I most often see a calming tenderness. And just so I would fully believe in her, the cat begins to purr.
Before Geisha, there had been various cats in our house. Generally, they aroused contradictory feelings in me: love and anxiety. Warm, soft and pleasant strokes, blissful purring on long winter nights somewhere near your feet, your side, or even on your lap. But it’s enough to look into the eyes of these animals and feel how everything inside them is totally the opposite: a proud independence, worthy of respect, their form and their elegance when they move. So where does this insurmountable feeling of danger come from? The feeling that the cat will sneak up and attack, that it will become a huge black panther? That in the night it will crawl into your bed, or the bed of your child, and suck the life out of you or him? In contrast to a dog, you can never trust a cat – who knows what century that belief, alive and well, comes from. Dogs rip, bite and tear the faces, shins and arms of their owners, maul their small children, but the harm cats do to people is never reported. So why does their gaze scare us? Maybe a legend somewhere in my subconscious that gives me no peace is responsible, a legend about a Sphinx that lived on a rock near the road to the city of Thebes that would offer a riddle to travellers, and those who could not solve it were torn apart? Do we still fear that we will be unable to solve the riddle? Did this question torment the painter Gustave Moreau, who depicted The Triumphant Sphinx with the elegant face of a proud woman adorned with a crown?
Geisha was nothing like a big-eyed, big-eared, wrinkled cat-sphinx. She didn’t have any documents showing her lineage, but according to my small daughter, she had ‘a pedigree’. Perhaps it was her genes which determined that when growing up in a flat – a rather small, enclosed space – she was affectionate and tidy. Even when she was young, she didn’t crawl up the curtains, didn’t push the flower pots off the windowsill, didn’t pee on the carpet, on the bed or in someone’s shoes. Rather, she would lap up water from the sink or tub, and not her own dish. She particularly liked to take part when the children had a bath. They splashed around in the tub, giggling with delight at all the foam, and she’d sit on the edge and, it seemed, could not look away. Or she’d walk on the edges of the tub, back and forth, back and forth. Her curiosity would even get the better of her, and she would slip and fall into the water.
She slept in the funniest of poses: with her legs stretched out, two to the front and two to the back, just like a piglet. One paw would cover her eyes and she would twist all around like a little number eight. All four legs were raised and curled up into a little ball in such a way that at first glance, you couldn’t distinguish her head from her tail. She walked extremely gracefully – in a way only Russian blue bloods can – and her smooth fur allowed her to express herself in the most refined, cat-like shapes. She was a flirt – a quiet, elegant flirt. She would reveal her voice only in very exceptional circumstances: when she was left alone for a long period of time, she would give a few meows in greeting to those who had returned. Otherwise she would meow when she was very hungry – for instance, when she didn’t get frozen sprats for three days or so. ‘What, am I going to live with just dry food?’ she complained angrily, having gone to her little dish for the umpteenth time to find nothing. But these complaints stopped when we moved from the flat to live in a house. She discovered mice and little birds. That was a new dessert.
She was of course confused at first by the increased amount of space. Going outside for the first time in her life, she still didn’t understand what freedom meant. The appearance of any other animal – be it a dog, a cat or even a crow – frightened her. She hurtled toward the tree like an arrow and got to the top in an instant. You had to coax her patiently for a long time to come down. She didn’t stick her nose outside for a few days after such adventures. But one day, just as I opened the door, she shot out to the yard like a bullet.
She didn’t come back for three days. We had almost gotten past our stage of mourning when she reappeared acting as if nothing had happened, but looking at her gait, you could see it was much freer and somehow full of satisfaction and self-confidence, I understood that Geisha’s way of thinking had totally changed. She had become the master of her house and her territory. She went past the other cats like the new Lithuanian elite went past people living in a landfill. All she was missing was an Armani purse on her shoulder and Swarovski crystal in her hair. And perhaps she had them – who knows what style-cats like. She was like an elegant, pretty girl who had just married well – to a good, rich, older man, of course. She even stopped being afraid of our bitch dog. Our wolf-dog bitch was of a meeker type and tended to get along with all living creatures, thus the appearance of the cat most likely amused rather than annoyed her. She would run up, smell the cat and then run off. But if that smelling lasted a little bit longer, Geisha would smack her on the nose in such a way that the poor thing cowered in pain. When the cat, having jumped on the windowsill, sat in its favourite sphinx pose, it raised its head high and educated the bitch with the glare of a queen: no familiarity whatsoever, miss! Don’t stick your nose where you don’t need to! You’ll get the white bow-tie on my neck dirty!
However, spring, like the marriages of trophy wives with old men, has a happy beginning and… a much more serious end. She walked around the yard for a whole month like Musetta from La Bohème wearing a sexy costume and high heels made by the famous Lithuanian designer Juozas Statkevicius. Geisha started becoming lazier and slower, snoozing on the chair and hiding under the tablecloth for days on end. She would go outside only to perform the necessary duties. It seemed that she started to become disinterested in the world beyond the borders of the house. The round, flirty eyes full of devilishness lost their nasturtium fire; anxiety churned in them more and more often. Every touch, and now she needed them more and for longer, was cause for long, monotonous mantras.
After some time, she hardly left my side. It was summer and each morning I went to the nearby lake to swim. Geisha went along. She sat on the shore and waited patiently until I finished swimming and got out of the water. We would both return home and together weed the gardens, walk and pick strawberries. She rubbed up against me, jumped on my neck, poked me with her nose, and in the evening when I sat at the computer, she tried to lie down on my lap. The cat constantly underfoot sapped my patience. Her walking between my feet led to ‘accidents’ on more than one occasion: dishes would run out of my hands, I would spill soup on myself, step on her tail or paw, but she still refused to stop.
Geisha’s last, fateful day was in the beginning of August. I was weeding the strawberry patch. The cat didn’t only snuggle up to my legs and my gloved hands – she would always approach me from the front, look straight into my face and meow. She meowed like she was crying, with an undisguised fear; she meowed like never before, full of an unspeakable concern. Then I remembered my fateful day – when I laid next to screaming women for an entire day. They were also afraid. They also felt pain.
The box lined with soft little blankets had been prepared long ago. Emergency medical care had also been prepared, in the form of my daughters and me. I tried to explain all this to Geisha, but she was not put at ease. She accompanied me to the house with the same ear-splitting meowing, most likely lamenting her situation in the name of all the works of God of the feminine gender. She begged for help. But how could I help her?
We talked. She meowed, I told her about my experiences, the experiences of my girlfriends, I tried to joke around, said that it’s like that for all of them, that it will pass, that we are able to endure everything, that I won’t leave her – just so she wouldn’t worry and concentrate better on the unavoidable process. I worked as a cat psychologist until 2 am. She didn’t want to be alone for one minute in the little box, which to me appeared so comfortable, safe and sufficiently spacious. If I sat next to her and petted her, it was fine, but if I got the idea to snooze on the sofa and pulled my hand away, the cat screamed even louder and jumped on my lap. I had to endure until the end, with one hand on her back, and that’s how we awaited the first kitten.
Then she fell silent and calmed down. Raising her head, she very clearly told me to go away: I’m not afraid anymore. I will continue on my own. Thank you, you can go to bed.
In the morning, there were four little ones in her cosy embrace. I never saw a better mother than Geisha. She would have ripped to pieces any intruder who would have thought to harm her children, just like that Sphinx of Thebes. She even changed her eating habits because of them. She started eating meat, chewing it with a mouthful of her favourite grass in the yard; she tried soups, cheese, pancakes – everything we offered her. Like the wisest of dieticians, she chose only what a nursing mother needed so the children would grow up to be healthy and strong. And that’s how they grew up before going on to other owners, and when the next spring came, Geisha once again became an elegant flirt, eating only dry food, tinned cat food from the shop and frozen sprats.
And that’s how it is every year, and that’s how this work of God amazes me with her wisdom and sacrificing motherhood, her passion and independence, with her fiery furry and audacious elegance, her tenderness and savage hunting instincts (even when she wasn’t hungry, she would bring home small birds and mice and put them near the door on the welcome mat). What awed me most was the fact that everything fitted together harmoniously – everything that is within us, from the most amazing to the most horrible, all basic instincts, all of the most beautiful shapes and the most secretive depths. Maybe that’s why cats arouse such anxiety in us? Maybe that’s why they make films about cat-people? Maybe that’s why there are so many of them in all sorts of artwork? What is it that cannot give us peace? How did it happen that what was once the defender of motherhood and home, a protector from demons and other bad spirits, became the embodiment of the devil’s works and witches’ spells during the Middle Ages? The fate of cats and of women accused of witchcraft was the same – they were burned in town squares, and not just in any old town but in 16th century Paris, where live cats were thrown into the bonfire in the Place du Châtelet. The cats will burn, thus the seed of the devil will as well? Why do we spit, even now, when we see a cat, especially a black one and all the more if it has the gall to cross our path?
Witches perceived more than the average person. Perhaps cats discern things better? And those who see, know and understand more – for them it’s easier.
So what is it in the eyes of cats that bothers us? Is it the flame of nasturtium, or something that has been interpreted in various ways over thousands of years, but which is still an unsolvable riddle?
Translated by Jayde Will from Birute Jonuskaite, Kregzdelaiskis, Vilnius: Versus aureus (2007).
Birute Jonuskaite (born 1959) is a prose writer, poet and essayist. She was born and raised in the village of Seivai, in the Punskas region of Poland and studied journalism at Vilnius University. After graduating from university she lived in Poland, Lithuania and Canada. She returned to settle in Lithuania where she now works at the Lithuanian Writers’ Union. She is the author of the novels The Great Island (Didzioji sala, 2 vol., 1997–1999) and The Tango of White Zippers (Baltu uztrauktuku tango, 2009), the short story collections The Bridge of Grass-snakes (Zalciu tiltas, 2002) and Zip Me Up (Uzsagstyk mane, 2011). Jonuskaite has also translated poetry, novels and essays from Polish into Lithuanian. She has been awarded several literary prizes and her work has been widely translated.