All that day I waited for the kitten to show signs of improvement.
I sat outside the study house, keeping out of the way, moving into the shade when the sun grew hot, moving into the sun when the shade grew cold. I kept my rucksack close. I drank from the water skin when my throat felt dry and ate from the provisions when my stomach grumbled. I bided time by looking through the book. It had become familiar to me now. The object—its smell, its stitches, the rustle of its pages, its heft—and its contents. Even if I couldn’t read, I’d gotten to know what was coming next. When I reached the page with the petals, I knew it would be followed by the one with blood. When I reached the last staircase in the back, I knew it would unfold to show a pair of hands drawing each other. It had become like a song whose words I didn’t know but whose tune I could hum.
When dusk fell, the woman came to the door of the poultry yard and said, “It’ll get colder. Better come in,” and I did. I spent the night next to her and the kitten on the platform above the masonry stove. It was snug up there, with a feather bed to cushion us, and the stove a kind of sponge that held heat and returned it all night long.
I woke feeling fresh, and stretched so luxuriously that it put me in mind of the kitten, the rapturous, almost boneless look of her when she lengthened her body and arched her back.
Yet this morning she lay limp among the rumpled bedclothes. There were greenish bits of crust on the cloth by her face, a dark yellow stain by her tail. I lifted her carefully. She mewed a feeble rebuke. “You’re my company,” I whispered, holding her so we were eye to eye. “And I am your Ani.”
The door opened and a young woman swung in with a basket on her arm. She was the one from the day before, the one who’d brought greens and potatoes. She stood looking around, spotted me up on the platform, said, “Hello, you’re not Dora,” and went over to the big blond table, where she began unpacking what she’d brought. I hung my legs over the side of the stove and watched. Today it was leeks and walnuts, and a burlap sack of something she spilled onto a plate. Lentils. She began sorting through them, removing a little stone every now and then.
The old woman came pushing through the back door with a slingful of chopped wood. “Morning, Viv,” she said, greeting the young woman, and they chatted as they went about their work, the one called Dora stacking wood by the stove and the one called Viv now beginning to crack the nuts, which she’d spread out underneath a cloth, using a rolling pin. Dora hadn’t closed the door all the way behind her, and a brown-and-gold-speckled hen came bustling in. Viv said, “No, you don’t, Missy!” and Dora went and shooed her back into the yard and then latched just the lower half of the door, pushing the top open wide and letting in breezes brisk enough to make the ample under-garments flutter on the line.
Something about all this solid goodness—the muscled brown arm of Viv as she pounded the rolling pin and the way Dora’s gait was like the hen’s and the hen having a name and the name being Missy and the lingering warmth of the stove beneath my thighs—made me mad.
They were not mine, all these good warm things. They didn’t belong to me and I didn’t belong to them.
“What are we going to do about the kitten?” I demanded from the top of the stove. I could hear that it was rude.
Viv kept on whacking walnuts through the cloth. I had the idea she was holding back a laugh.
Dora looked up at me. “A good morning to you, too.”
All night I’d lain beside her girth, her warmth, her smell of camphor and salt.
I looked down at the kitten, lolling across both my palms. When first I took her from the stable, she’d fit in one. “She’s pooed liquid in the night.” I could hear how absurd I sounded. It came out angrily, almost accusingly.
Dora gave a tut.
“What are we going to do?” I repeated. My voice was angry, but I was near tears amid all this goodness where I didn’t belong.
How strongly I felt it!
I belonged to a one-room dwelling with no windows. I belonged to walking through the snow. I belonged to a mother who died in a cave. I belonged to what the Captain himself had called “just a way station, just a lost and found.” I belonged to a stolen kitten and a broken bicycle and not being able to read. I belonged to being alone.
The tears were for what I lacked. The tears were because there must be a reason for it. Surely it must be my fault.