Secrets of the Cat_ Its Lore, Legend, and Lives - Barbara Holland [75]
People are eating from paper plates what looks like cat food; in their cages cats are not eating what looks like the same stuff.
I come to a pair of young Singapuras and stop to stare. I’ve never seen one before, and they give the whole hall a momentary zoolike feel. They have slick lion-blond fur, ticked like an Aby’s, and cross-looking dark lines running down beside their noses like cheetahs. Natives of Singapore. Small but dangerous-looking; something you’d bring home as an orphan from the jungle only to have it turn savage later and eat your left arm. They’re asleep, but they sleep alertly. If I woke up to find one of these curled on the pillow beside me, I expect I’d scream.
Shorthair kittens are being judged in ring 3, a ring being a stainless steel table in front of a bank of cages. The judge is holding up a white Oriental Shorthair by each end, like a length of ribbon, and discussing it quietly to herself; I think she says she’d like to see it lose a quarter of a pound. How? From where? Cut off one of its enormous ears? There’s no cat there to reduce; it’s narrow as a newt, an albino snake with albino bats for its ears. It’s hardly wider than its own tail; where does it put its dinner? Every mouthful must leave a lump. Its head is shaped like a log-splitting wedge; its legs are thin as pencils. I try to imagine it taking its place in the semicircle of barn cats around old Mrs. Reid, who was Finnish and milked by hand, and catching its squirt of milk when its turn came. Try to imagine it catching a mouse, or even a spider.
The judge puts it back in its cage next to a black sample of the same thing, the insides of whose ears are pure white, like a black satin smoking jacket lined with white silk. All these cats are like something else besides cats, exaggerated beyond cathood into artifact.
In the next ring a judge returns two Persians to their cages, held on high in each hand like a giant’s orange fur mittens.
My judge picks up a plumey feather and walks along the cages waving it at the bars. Some jump for it, gaining points, I suppose; others merely stare and look offended. The kitten in the last cage screams like a rusty gate: a Siamese. The only Siamese in the class. She continues to yowl after the judge moves on, as if suddenly fed up with the proceedings, reminded by the feather maybe that there are better things to do.
Once focused on her, my eyes don’t want to leave, and I stand there gaping and tracing over her shapes, drawn in brown-black ink on cream-colored paper; the precise coil of her thin, dark tail against her creamy hip could not be improved by all the calligraphers in Japan. As she sits there shouting at no one, her furious little profile is a bone-and-fur reconstruction of what every unborn creature must hope to look like, sooner even than a swan or a luna moth. Probably she was a saint in some earlier round of things, as the Birman cats are said to embody the souls of dead priests, and the purity of her first life, dedicated to constant contemplation of some single perfect truth, is reborn in these lines and colors. There’s nothing luxurious about her, nothing lavish or extra; she’s an ink drawing, not a painting, and I lace my hands behind my back not to accidentally touch and smudge it. If she were mine, I’d probably forget to feed her, or feed her on drops of honey like a hummingbird. Herb tea in a painted porcelain cup.
It dawns on me that one of the two men standing beside me owns her. I slide him a sideways glance: an ordinary mortal sort of man. His companion is saying, “I remember you said you were pleased with her refinement.”
“Refinement"? Well, yes, if that’s the best word we can find. “Refined,” as in gold.
The two men have their catalogs folded back and make marks in them, apparently understanding something from their pages. I open my own copy. To me it’s an Arabic train schedule, a Coptic stock-market report. “JB MC PM BM, AB AB AB AB. BR/OW. (NE) 0.11. SGC