Memories of the past: different houses and different cats
Illustration from the book about Chuk and Huck - “The cat flies into a snowdrift.” She, you see, was punished for stealing something from the table. But it didn’t occur to me that they should have been fed better. It never even occurred to my cat to “steal” something from the table, because they were always full, and they had nothing to steal from it - all the food is stored in the refrigerator!
“Here is a forest house.
In huge felt boots, in one shirt
and with a cat in his hands the boy jumped out onto the porch.
Fuck! – the cat flew head over heels into a fluffy snowdrift
and, awkwardly climbing, jumped on the loose snow.
I wonder why he left her?
She probably stole something from the table.”A. Gaidar “Chuk and Gek”.
In huge felt boots, in one shirt
and with a cat in his hands the boy jumped out onto the porch.
Fuck! – the cat flew head over heels into a fluffy snowdrift
and, awkwardly climbing, jumped on the loose snow.
I wonder why he left her?
She probably stole something from the table.”A. Gaidar “Chuk and Gek”.
History and culture. The previous material about our little brothers was dedicated to dogs. Now it's time to talk about cats.
In general, the history of any country is also the history of its domestic animals, the history of how they were treated at different times, the history of their lives. If I were younger, I would write a book “The History of Cats and Dogs in the USSR.” On documents and memories. But, alas, my age does not allow me to take on this matter. According to the plan, I need to write 6 more books, and “cats and dogs” do not fit into it. So maybe some of the VO readers will be tempted by this idea? And let this material be included in this book of his as one of the chapters!
So, cats are in the USSR, or rather, in the city of Penza, and even more accurately, so as not to generalize, in my immediate environment. And...from my earliest years, cats have been featured in it. True, the first cat in our house did not belong to us, but to my grandfather’s sister Olga, who lived in our house on the “other half”. She owned two rooms, a porch, a large barn, where under the floorboards I found a rusty carbine from 1917, and part of the garden with its own toilet.
Since she was the wife of first a tsarist Cossack officer, and then... a white officer, my grandfather, when he quarreled with her, called her “White Guard ...”, and she was his “red-bellied commissar” (the belly of the case was really big!) and “ red-bellied bastard." That is, they had a very brotherly-sisterly relationship.
And then there was a cat living at her house. Big and beautiful. I sat on the railing of her porch with the hostess. But since our families had the same relationship as the Montagues and the Capulets, I considered it my first duty to treat this cat in every possible way. And when her owner didn’t see this, he threw apples and stones at her. Fortunately, due to my youth, and I was then 5-7 years old, I never got into it. But she was very afraid of me!
In general, at that time on our streets (God forbid I say that in the whole country) the “own yard” rule strictly applied. Remember Gaidar’s Chuk and Gek... The movie says directly: “...he drove someone else’s dog out of the yard with stones!” Here we are too, as soon as a strange cat came into our yard, we boys immediately began throwing stones and carrion apples at it. It’s good that we had bad tires and practically no slingshots, otherwise they, the poor ones, would have suffered even worse.
And then her cat disappeared, and the harmful old White Guard woman accused me of her death, which was a complete lie. There was a terrible family scandal that ended strangely. Literally two days later we found a strange cat on our porch, a large, white-gray one, who... asked to live with us! Whose he was, where he came from, is unknown. But...he came, sat on the porch and meowed pitifully.
He began to live and live with us, but his fate was sad. Ringworm appeared on him. Grandfather saw this and said that we will all go bald if the cat is not limed. There was no talk of taking him to some veterinary hospital; I had never heard such a word in 1961. Therefore, despite all my pleas, my grandfather simply took him by the hind legs, hit his head on the corner of the barn, and the cat stopped living. They buried it under an apple tree as fertilizer.
After that, we didn’t have cats until 1968. Then my grandmother gave me a gift: my mother and I returned from Bulgaria at night, and a completely colored, black, white and red animal came out to meet us, squinting half-blindly - a small fluffy kitten!
They named the kitten Fluff, and he turned out to be a lovely, graceful cat, an excellent hunter of mice and rats. We used to sit with the whole family on the porch in the summer and look into the garden. Which had a calming effect on us all, and Fluffy was sitting next to us. And then he goes to the garden. There we see some kind of “fluttering” in the grass, a loud squeak, and now she is already walking back with a huge rat in her teeth. Moreover, the rat’s head was usually chewed out. Later I learned that cats need purine. And it is located in the brains of mice and rats!
Fluffy cat. Photo by the author from 1975!
We fed Pushka well: we gave him milk and minced meat. But with regard to everything else, we are not far from the pure hillbilly of the beginning of the century. We didn't have any trays at home. There was no “cat door” in the doorway of the house. Therefore, even in winter, in frosty weather, when she spent the whole day at home by the stove on a banquette (surprisingly, this banquette is still intact in our house, although we bought it in the same 1968!), she did all her business on the street . She walked up to the door, asked, and was let out into the cold night.
True, our cat was not stupid; she immediately ran along the path in the snow to the fence, and from it to the roof of the neighbor’s house, where there was a hole into the attic. It was there that she spent the night and communicated with her fellow tribesmen.
Well, in the summer, for me and for her, there was no greater pleasure than spending time in the coolness of a wooden house built in 1882. I would sit in a chair with a book by Mine Reid, having mixed myself “cobbler with sherry” from the novel “Quarteron,” and she would sit on my lap.
It’s interesting that she immediately recognized my young wife as her mistress and obeyed in the same way as everyone else, and slept on her lap in the same way.
But in 1976, our house was demolished for the construction of a neighboring research institute, and... do you think we took the cat into our new apartment in a stone high-rise building? “Well, where will the cat live? How will you get her used to living in an apartment?” - all the people around us told us, and we... listened to them. They were stupid in their youth, they didn’t know much...
That is, the cat should have remained in its native ashes? The question of how we would go there to feed her was discussed. But then, fortunately, our neighbor, who knew about her rat-catching abilities, took the cat. And when Pushka was handed over to her, she understood everything and... stayed with her to live. Moreover, when in 1980 we returned back to the city from the village and came to visit her, she was still alive, although she lived a rich cat life and brought beautiful kittens. The hostess doted on her, fed her liver, and gave her boiled meat especially for her.
In general, we were very glad that in her old age she ended up in a kind of “cat sanatorium” and died surrounded by care and affection.
Pussy the cat and her kittens. Photo by the author
Then our daughter wanted a cat. And... she brought a white fluffy kitten from a friend - an Angora cat, which we named Pussy. She lived in our house for 19,5 years and... at first she went for a walk outside, fortunately the door in the entrance did not close even in winter! And if it was closed, then when people saw a cat at the door, they immediately let it in.
But then she was almost killed by street dogs, and we put her in a “home prison” - they didn’t let her go beyond the roof of the store. By the way, she herself never came down to the ground again. And when she needed cats, she stood on the edge and shouted loudly: meow-meow! And the cats came! They crawled along tree branches, climbed up a steep brick wall, clinging to cracks in the bricks with their claws. I would never have believed this if I had not seen it with my own eyes.
The author's desk from those distant times. Pussy the cat really loved to lie like this and be present when I wrote my books and articles. The typewriter on the table is a Yugoslavian-made Traveler de Luxe, very convenient and reliable. It was purchased in 1980 and worked until 2005, when it was replaced by a laptop. All my books, my doctoral dissertation, articles and letters, as well as TV show scripts were written in it, and it withstood all of it. The “Moscow” portable machine was purchased in 1977 and irreversibly “ended” just three years later!
For natural needs, she had the roof of the store, where, by the way, we set up a real flower garden, in which it was both shady and cool for her. But in winter, her toilet served as an ordinary photographic cuvette, in which, along with the sand that cats tend to scatter with their paws, lay torn newspaper paper.
They fed her... from their table, but also gave her minced meat and - especially in the hungry 80s - “cat porridge”: a mixture of boiled small fish with bun crumbs. We only learned about the existence of special cat food in 1989, when our daughter began corresponding with a girl named Gemma from England.
My daughter wrote to her about our cat Pussy, and she sent us not only Mars and Snickers, but also canned food for the cat in a package of gifts. But we didn’t understand this right away, but only when we read the letter, and before that we were very surprised - why did she suddenly send us some canned food? We were just wild back then, with all our higher education, needless to say... Then I thought: we’re flying into space, but we can’t make canned food for cats. But this is so, casually, “we were just chatting in the kitchen.”
The Author and Poussey in 1998
And then Pussy got sick, caught a cold while sitting in the window, and we took her (progress, however!) to the city veterinary hospital, which we already had in the city at that time. But it turned out that this building is of the most vile kind imaginable, most similar to an old barracks, and they mainly do rabies vaccinations, “and treating a cat is nonsense, she’s a cat.”
Well, after this reprimand, we returned home and started giving her human medicine, greatly reducing the dose, and cured her. And Pussy lived with us until 2005! Even our granddaughter managed to get to know her, but age took its toll, and one unfortunate day she died, and, fortunately, very quickly, literally in two hours.
For my granddaughter, this, of course, was a blow. But this is how she became acquainted with death, and this is also important for raising a normal person.
To be continued ...
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