The Day Franz Didn’t Come Back

 

 

In the end he did what he always did. Went off by himself, rooted around, came back later, a day, two days later, old leaves sticking to his fur. Just appeared at the front door or came through the cat flap and began eating, wolfing the food in the bowl as if he hadn’t eaten for a day or two, which he probably hadn’t. We never really found out where he went on his wanderings – this was in Kentish Town in London – as a young cat. At weekends and during the long holidays I think he liked the playground of the school opposite the house. There was even a mulberry tree there. (The main building had originally been an asylum for elderly governesses) And he must have gone to the lane along the railway viaduct with its workshops, shuttered or in use. A little, not so little black cat with very bright eyes.

 

Of the two boys of Kalman’s litter who survived (Kalman was likewise black, but smaller and with longer hair), Franz was his father’s true son. The Wailer, as we called him, was one of the few unneutered cats in the neighbourhood and his agonised cries echoed round the nighttime streets and backyards of Kentish Town. The Wailer was a Bombay Cat, large and black and short-haired, with a powerful head and high hind legs, and the cries of the Bombay Cat do sound agonised, are no domestic mewing, except that Franz neither cried nor mewed, instead emitting almost silent pleas. Franz was neutered when he was a few months old, but he seemed to have inherited the wandering inclinations of his father, even if they were not pursued with the same dramatic urgency.

 

Later, in Hungary, in calmer middle age, Franz would lie by the little pond in the garden in Battonya, ready to pounce at the first sight of frog movement. But it was no more than a little game in the summer heat of the Hungarian plain, because I never saw him catch one.

 

We had called him Franz, after Kafka. As a sort of joke I liked to call him Frank or Frankie, just as I sometimes referred to Frank or Frankie Kafka. (Franz’s brother was called Schwartz or Schwartzie and I sometimes call him the Big Black – he’s bigger than Franz and has the Wailer’s massive head – and in my mind I’m thinking of the Big Lebowski.)

 

He did what he always did, wandered off, rooted among the leaves, did his lone cat thing. Before we went to market in the afternoon I saw him among the damp brown fallen leaves and scrubby grass of the next yard. I called to him through the mesh fence, but he didn’t turn his head, eased forward a little on his stomach. I knew then, really, that he was drifting away.

 

Franz had been diagnosed with a thyroid problem months before and as it got worse had stopped eating as he should. Now water had got onto his lungs which caused breathing difficulties and he hadn’t eaten at all for two or three days and no longer wanted to be touched. It must have been with his very last strength that he jumped onto the windowsill, dropped down into the garden and pushed under the wire fence.

 

When he hadn’t come in after nightfall and it began to snow, we looked for him and found him in the other back yard, though not in the same place where I had seen him earlier. His eyes were open, the pupils dark, deep and motionless, the mouth stiff and agape from the effort of breathing in the cold air. He lay stretched out, the first snowflakes of winter on his fur. (In sunlight it showed shades of dark honey, it wasn’t a uniform black.) There was still a little warmth in the body, but his claws were extended, he had become thinner, smaller, was no longer Franz or Frankie.

 

He did what he always did, went off alone, rooted among the leaves, but this time he didn’t go far and went as far as anyone does, man or beast. He was fourteen years and nine months.

 

 

 

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