The fog in Moscow was awful, and the heat was worse, but he might have stood it all had it not been for the loneliness, and the cats.
The fog itself was a toxic inorganic thing which had rolled down from the atmosphere once the heat had thickened it. He had made his way home from work with a sleeve held over his face. All day he had watched others do the same from the high vantage point of his office window, but by now the air was so dense that none of the scurrying bundles could be seen even from across the road. Now and again in front of him he would catch a flash of the back of a shoe, and at other times a head would rear briefly out at him as he felt his way along streets which, unfamiliar to him at the best of times, were now still more so. He considered, when he became actually afraid, shouting into the dense air, asking for someone to confirm his position. But mostly he was calm, and unworried. He was fascinated by the infinity of his white blindness. Because he could not see his own hand in front of his face, his eyes were sending him messages of an immeasurable distance.
Stumbling off the edge of a curb he landed hard, right on his side. He had never fallen like that before, from such a small height. This was what it was like to be old, he thought, everything defeated you, a curb could kill you, navigation was an embarrassment, and finding your way back to your own home felt like an impossible dream. The fog was yellowish and smelled faintly and unpleasantly of the sea. Handling the inconvenience of foreignness was not usually a concern of his; being mildly disconcerted by even simple tasks like buying fruit was, honestly, a bit sexy. It was why people travelled, and it was one of the reasons he travelled. But now an anonymous catalyst had precipitated a reaction in the air of Moscow, and now nobody could see a hand held up before their faces. He must emphasise that: nobody could. It was just vanity that made the whole thing feel like a psychological experiment directed at him.
When he found his way back into the flat it was to be treated to the smell and sound of heatstruck cats.
The cats, which were hairless, and three, and apparently suicidal, were his principle source of irritation in a city where as yet he knew nobody of his own species well enough to irritate him personally. The cats, and their upkeep, were a burden of precisely half the price of the flat, weekly, or at least this was the opinion of his landlord ,who managed to irritate him only in absentia with emails of a pedantic style and content.
Initially, this had seemed to him to be a misjudgement on behalf of the owner and one which, in deference to the man’s superior stupidity, he felt no compunction not to take advantage of. However, as it had turned out, keeping the psychotic trio of cats alive had turned out to be a job so time consuming it impacted on his time spent earning the other half of the rent. The cats, in his absence, would instantly pine, sicken, bicker, do themselves and the furniture great injury. Left unsupervised they would embark upon all kinds of neurotic and un-feline activities, chewing wire cables, attempting to drink bleach and once, memorably, gouging an eye on the television aerial. He and the cats lived on the sixth storey of a block, and the cats were either unaware of this or eager to test the theory that they must always land on their feet, because no window could be left open without the cats trying to make a break for it. The only reason that they had not all died within a week of his having moved in was their habit of lining up in front of the window rather than going at it all at once. The simple solution to the fact that the cats all had a death wish was to keep the windows closed. However, to do this in the middle of the most stifling Russian summer since records began would have killed them all anyway. He had no option then, but to spend the greater part of his free time in the flat intermittently shooing them out of whatever room they had (inevitably) followed him into and airing it out, one at a time, all the way round the flat. It hurt the cat’s feelings a great deal to have this done to them, and exacerbated their complex feelings of attachment to him in lieu of their owner. As a result, the task of getting them out of each room became, in aggravating stages, more and more difficult.
His opinion about the cats was complicated because , although it was painful to admit it, the time, energy and attention they required bled off a little of what, alone and working in an office full of people half his age, he had in abundance with little chance to expend. He hated the cats, and he loved and needed the cats, and he hated that he loved and needed the cats. They were also objectively repulsive looking. They slept, lined up, at the end of his bed.
He felt less than usually ambivalent about them today however; as one of the unfortunate effects of the heatstroke was that they had thrown up and voided their bowels all over the flat. Thank God, he thought, that a cat can hold only so much in itself at once. Nonetheless the mess was impressive, the stink overpowering and the fog actually seeping in through the edges of the window panes. He himself briefly caved and was abundantly sick in the sink. He had the fog, and the foreignness, to thank for the fact that he neither broke down nor completely lost his temper. Had he come back to his home in London to find it stifling and full of sick cats for whom he was responsible after a hard day at work (in a suit) he would never have kept it together. As it was, he simply proceeded with his usual rounds of the house, cleaning up the partially digested contents of the cats as he went and opening the windows, even though all that that achieved was to let in an eruption of boiling, polluted fog, which turned the atmosphere in the flat a grotesque shade of sulphur. Once he had done this, he assessed the cats, who seemed to be not quite dead. While he was loath to do it, he saw little option but to consult the babushka who lived on the other side of the landing, who loved him in strange bouts, even though he was too too skinny, and who was a great dispenser of advice on all things cat (she herself had two marmalade specimens with evil eyes of china blue).
He let a puff of yellow smoke out into the hallway behind him and shut the door on the unnerving silence of the three cats. He crept over and knocked, addressed his question in a defeated voice to the capricious bosom (stifling, alien, like the fog) into which his face was instantly pressed.
‘Towels, damp towels!’ came the answer, after clucks and gasps of sympathy and distress (on behalf, he suspected, of the moggys). She wanted to talk to him today, she wanted to discuss the fog and the doorway to her nest was already half open. Through it he could see the clutter of her cushions, which were made of carpet the colour of blood, and spangled with mirrors. The table, which rattled when you sat at it, was covered in thick black paint and the shelves clustered with rows and rows of delicate and dusty china cups. Here and there were little curls of yellow, steeping through the edges of the windows as they had across the way. He had no real objection to the company of the old woman, but he thought her flat smelled overpoweringly of rugs lived on by animals. And so with surprising swiftness he got himself back over the landing and through the door, this time leaving only the faintest tendril of brimstone hanging in the hallways, and began the farcical task of wrapping up the landlord’s cats.
They took great exception to his coming at them with wet towels, and each used all of their (thankfully depleted) strength and cunning with great determination in an effort to avoid the treatment. They lashed their tails feebly but with insectile malice, they hissed from the back of their throats and laid back their naked rat ears. He gripped them mercilessly between his knees and, as they stretched their ancient necks longingly towards the ultimate blankness outside the window, he swaddled them like horrible babies.
He had used large bath towels, so he had to prop them up to stop the cat’s heads from hanging down from the bulk of the wrapping at uncomfortable angles. The dampness did indeed seem to be having a beneficial effect on the cats, who had stopped retching and rolling their eyes. He was not certain that they were not just too exhausted even to exhibit their symptoms.
Three stiff cocoons lined up on the sofa, staring balefully out of the window. Two things occurred to him. The first was that for the first time since he had first arrived in Moscow he had presented his cats with an undefended trajectory towards the open window, face on, but that, wrapped up as they were, he was exposing them to a kind of torture of feline desire. The second was that, should he choose, now, to launch the cats himself, one by one, out of the window, it was almost impossible that they would not smash their skulls open six storeys below.
He eyed them, as he stood by the window. He let it be known, in his expression, what he was contemplating. Just you watch it, from now on, he was saying to the cats. Just you be careful now.
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