Only the Animals Page 3

  ‘And he them. I’ve seen a driver refuse to leave his team of battery mules when they became entangled in barbed wire. He died with them.’

  ‘Why are so many of them missing their tails?’ I asked.

  ‘When they’re starving, they eat each other’s tails.’

  ‘Colette would adopt them all,’ I said. ‘On the spot. She’d take them back to Paris to live with us in the apartment. She kept an adopted baby tiger for a while, until it grew too big.’

  A mule at the back of the pack had spotted a uniformed sergeant among the soldiers and promptly took a big toothy swipe at his backside. By the time the man had turned around to spot the culprit, the mule was innocently trudging forward and the sergeant could not accuse him without losing his dignity.

  ‘He probably did that just for our benefit,’ the tomcat said, ‘to remind us he is more than an object of pity.’

  My skinny soldier brought over scraps from his meal for me and the tom.

  ‘Don’t eat any of it,’ I said.

  The tomcat looked offended at my suggesting he would take the food. ‘I have my own adopted soldier. But you should eat what he’s offering even if you’re not hungry. You might be the only thing keeping him alive until he’s rotated out of the front line and can get some rest.’

  I looked up at the young man. He’d been hurt in the advance, not badly, but his shoulder was bandaged. He has made a friend among the other soldiers, who helps him bind his feet and dress his wounds and who sleeps close beside him in the cold nights. I do my best to cement their friendship by enduring the other boy’s well-meaning but suffocating hugs. He must only have owned dogs in his life, for he has no idea of the subtleties of what cats like, of our necessary distance.

  Glowing in the Dark

  ‘Come on,’ the tomcat said to me once all the soldiers except the night sentries were asleep. ‘I want to show you something.’

  I was enjoying myself on the parapet, having tormented a rat for a while by letting it think it was about to escape and pawing it back, and finally eaten it. ‘I’m too full to move,’ I said. ‘Almost too full to talk.’

  He turned to go and I felt bad, and lonely. ‘I’m coming,’ I said, dragging myself up and stretching out my forelegs.

  ‘Good,’ he said. ‘You won’t be sorry, Kiki, I promise.’

  ‘As long as you know nothing’s going to happen between us,’ I said archly. ‘I’m not really a fan of toms in general.’

  ‘I know,’ he said. ‘You were my main rival when I was trying to seduce she-cats in the rue de Villejust.’

  ‘Really?’ I said quickly, before I could hide my surprise. It was too late then to keep up my superior act. ‘It’s just – well, I haven’t been very lucky in love.’

  ‘Who needs a lowly she-cat’s love when you are an author’s muse?’ he said. ‘That would be enough for me.’

  Most – but not all – of the time it is, I thought. I followed him along the edges of the trenches, passing the quiet dugouts, moving towards the outer boundary of the line. It was a new-moon night, and very dark.

  ‘Here, kitty, kitty,’ one of the sentries said as we passed him, and he looked so relieved at discovering he was not entirely alone that we let ourselves be petted for a moment.

  I could smell dog very strongly as we neared the next sentry point, and soon afterwards saw a massive, shaggy Berger de Brie just like the ones Colette had admired on a trip to Avignon with Missy. He was tied to a listening post on the firestep, so that he could just see over the edge of the trench. After growling faintly at us, the dog turned away and stared back into no man’s land.

  ‘His job is to sniff out Germans who might be raiding our line,’ the tomcat whispered. ‘They’re starting to train these dogs in the Vosges. He’s one of the first out here. Many of them can’t master the trick of not barking to signal danger, but this one is the king of the low growl.’

  The dog growled again and the soldier said quietly, ‘Okay, boy, I’ve seen the cats. Ignore them.’

  The dog growled more loudly, his nostrils dilated, his body tilted forward.

  ‘Let’s move away,’ the tom said. ‘I think he’s trying to signal something else.’

  We melted back into the trench.

  Once again the dog growled, not moving his eyes from the direction of the German lines.

  ‘I’m getting the commanding officer,’ the soldier said to the dog, his breath visible in the overnight freeze. ‘So this had better not be about those cats.’ He left through the side warrens of the trench, and after a while returned with an officer who had clearly been sleeping in his uniform.

  For a while the commanding officer stood and observed the dog’s growling, his expression showing nothing but scepticism. ‘You said there were cats,’ the officer said.

  ‘Yes, but he turned around to growl at them,’ the sentry said. ‘This is different. He’s been focusing on that same point – to the left, ahead of us – for a while now.’

  ‘I am not a believer in using dogs at the front,’ the officer said. ‘They’re good for morale, but bad for strategy. Nothing but wartime pets.’

  ‘Sir, I’ve never seen him like this before,’ the sentry said. ‘Could we send up a flare? It might be somebody wounded and left for dead, trying to make it back to the trenches. Or it could be a raid.’

  The officer rubbed his eyes. ‘Send one up,’ he said. ‘Then I’m going back to bed.’

  ‘Sir, we should wake our men, in case it’s a raid,’ the sentry said.

  ‘Go on,’ the officer said. ‘You wake them. They hate me enough already.’

  The sentry went from soldier to soldier, rousing them with a squeeze on the shoulder. They were alert instantly, accustomed to being woken at night, and were soon lined up along the edge of the trench with rifles ready. In a quick, skilled movement, the sentry fired his flare pistol. The flare rose into the sky, a beautiful firework illuminating the ghoulish line of our trenches beneath it, and not far away, crouching in no man’s land, five German soldiers instinctively turned their young faces towards the light and froze. The dog’s whole body was trembling but he had not let the frightening pop of the flare gun distract him. The soldiers in the trenches opened fire, and did not stop until the flare’s light began to dim as it floated back to earth on its miniature parachute and the officer called for a halt. Three of the German soldiers were dead. The other two had their faces pushed into the mud, hands up in surrender.

  The flare’s last light showed the officer looking stunned. ‘The dog was right,’ he said to the sentry. ‘I will make sure he is mentioned in my dispatch to headquarters tomorrow.’

  ‘After Paris was saved,’ the sentry said, ‘we heard that a pigeon who’d carried a message crucial to our victory was awarded the Légion d’honneur.’ He was chatty now in his relief that the dog hadn’t been wrong. ‘But the medal kept falling off from around his neck, so they sewed bands with the colours of the medal’s ribbon around the bird’s leg.’

  The officer gave orders, and the prisoners were led away. The dog was still quivering.

  The tom and I waited until the men had gone back to sleep, everyone except the sentry. We moved closer.

  ‘You two almost got me in trouble,’ he said, lighting a cigarette behind his helmet to keep its glowing end unseen across the lines.

  The dog didn’t bother growling this time. He looked exhausted.

  ‘We hear you might be up for a medal,’ the tom said to him from a cautious distance.

  The dog put his head on his paws. ‘I can finally run away and go home to my master and my sheep in Avignon without dishonour,’ he said.

  ‘But what about the parade in Paris?’ the tomcat said. ‘Haven’t you heard? Any animal who’s awarded a medal will be invited to be in it, once this war is over. It could be your grand moment!’

  The dog closed his eyes. In the stillness the sentry’s cigarette smoke moved upwards in an almost straight line.

  ‘Let’s go back to
our trench,’ I whispered to the tom.

  ‘No, not yet. I have something to show you.’

  ‘I thought the dog was it,’ I said, following the tomcat out of the trench.

  ‘He was the side-show.’

  For a long time we prowled in silence, until we reached the final dugout at the edge of the line where a solitary soldier sat up awake, bent over a letter lit by a greenish-blue glow. I couldn’t understand where the light was coming from until I saw the jar beside him, filled with glow-worms.

  ‘They give these jars out sometimes, the night before a major offensive. They’re supposed to be used for reading maps and battlefield plans. But he hides his jar during the day, and feeds them slugs to keep them alive,’ the tom said. ‘He stays up late, rereading letters from his sweetheart.’

  ‘How do you know who they’re from?’ I asked.

  ‘Sometimes he whispers them aloud,’ he said.

  I thought of how enchanted Colette would be by this little scene, and of the faraway look on her face while she writes by lamplight, the only time I feel she is entirely lost to me. We used to come home from the Palmyre at the place Blanche after a supper of onion soup and small steaks, me beside her and Missy in the booth while they ate. At home, Colette would melt chocolate in a saucepan and dip a piece of rye bread in her cup. Then she’d call me by one of my pet names to sit on her lap in front of her writing desk: ‘Come hither, Light of the Mountainside,’ she would say, or, ‘O little one, striped to the utmost, come warm my legs.’

  I would go to her, and watch her closely as she slipped into her own mind to write. Sometimes she’d emerge again to read aloud to me a paragraph she had written. There is one from La Vagabonde that I resent, for it makes clear how far away from me she is in the deepest act of writing:

  To write is to sit and stare, hypnotised, at the reflection of the window in the silver inkstand, to feel the divine fever mounting to one’s cheeks and forehead while the hand that writes grows blissfully numb upon the paper. It also means idle hours curled up in the hollow of the divan, and then an orgy of inspiration, from which one emerges stupefied and aching all over, but already recompensed, and laden with treasures that one unloads slowly onto the virgin page in a little round pool of light under the lamp.

  I used to wait there faithfully in the lamplight for her to return to me, but now – after this – would there be any nostalgic treasures left for her to unload onto a virgin page? Who would let her dwell on the comforts of autumn in Burgundy, or the idle imagined chatter of her pet dog and cat? There could be no room for frivolity in Paris, or anywhere, after this winter. And no room for me.

  Sulphur and Orange Blossoms

  In the night, my soldier lay beside his friend, hand in hand. I think they are in love but hide it from the other soldiers. I saw the very moment the air chose to glaze the world with frost, and it felt wrong to have witnessed this, as it had felt wrong to peek behind the curtain of the music-hall stage before Colette was fully in character, before her eyes had been ringed with blue grease. In the coldest part of the night, just before dawn, I came down into the trench and lay across my soldier’s feet to keep him warm until the stand-to-arms.

  For breakfast, the soldiers have been given boiled eggs. Poor Fufu – how her mouth must have been watering as the kitchen hands boiled egg after coveted egg! I thought of Colette’s habit of eating hard-boiled eggs with fresh cherries. There was a whiff of sulphur in the trench as the soldiers rolled the eggs between palms to release their shells, and it took me in a sensory instant back to the Alpine trip she and I made between her performing tours to Brussels and Lyon. We stayed in the Hôtel des Bains and every morning when she led me for a walk in the park we could smell the sulphur rising from the hot springs where people came to take the waters.

  Not Colette – she doesn’t believe in bath cures, though she is fascinated by the self-involved neurotics who do. We would walk through the gardens, past the beds of geraniums and blue cinerarias, and behind the scent of orange blossom there was always lurking the uncomfortable smell of sulphur. We’d stop at the dairy stall in the park for fresh milk, which she would season for me with a pinch of sugar and a pinch of salt, and on our way back to the hotel the children and their nannies would call to me, ‘Puss on the lead!’ and want to give me things: balls with lead pellets inside them, or little pieces of stinky cheese. Such innocence! In them and in us.

  I didn’t mind being away from Paris, but I worried about Colette when she fell in with an odd couple staying at the hotel, as she tends to do, interested by their unhappiness. They in turn wanted to adopt her and me and were proud to be seen seated at her table in the dining room, the wrong sort of exhibitionist pride that comes from being seen in public with a person considered somewhat scandalous by society. I endured their company, and waited and longed for the morning she would finally grow bored of them and be ready to return to Paris. When she pulled out her suitcase I jumped into it as she was packing and joyfully kneaded each layer of her clothes with my claws. She knew exactly what I was doing, of course, for she spoke the words out loud. ‘You are imploring me to blaze a trail just wide enough for my feet and for yours, a trail that will be obliterated behind us as we go,’ she said. ‘Isn’t that right, Kiki, you whiskered tiger, fierce gatekeeper of my heart?’

  Turtle Derby

  The tom woke me early this morning, quoting Colette. ‘The cat is the animal to whom the Creator gave the biggest eye, the softest fur, the most supremely delicate nostrils, a mobile ear, an unrivalled paw and a curved claw borrowed from the rose-tree,’ he said.

  ‘I’m sleeping,’ I said.

  ‘Did you know,’ he continued, ‘that the Persians used to let cats loose on the battlefield when they were at war with the Egyptians? Since the Egyptians worshipped us, they’d always surrender rather than hurt the cats.’

  I hissed at him and his anecdotal tinsel, wanting him to go away. No more silly little diversions, no more make-believe that I am still stretching out at my leisure on Colette’s divan, no more creature comforts. We are at war now, all of us.

  ‘I have news,’ he said. ‘I heard the soldiers talking about the sentry dog this morning. He made it safely hundreds of miles home. And when his master – who is apparently very loyal to the war effort – reported his return, the commander-in-chief not only awarded the dog a medal but gave him an honourable discharge from service!’

  I felt terribly jealous of the dog all of a sudden, reunited with his master and his sheep.

  The tom seemed to sense this. He changed tack. ‘Do you like Colette’s baby girl, Bel-Gazou?’ he asked.

  ‘What self-respecting cat likes a human baby!’ I exclaimed.

  ‘Is she a good mother?’

  I hesitated. She is ambivalent about the role and has been from the start. She mused to me one summer evening, as we sat on the balcony and looked out across the pastel rooftops of Paris, ‘How can I ever be a mother who happens to have written a book? I will always be, at heart, a writer who happens to have birthed a child.’ I said nothing to the tom, not wanting to betray her secret: that she loves me more than she will ever love Bel-Gazou. I do not demand as much of her, and Colette, like all writers, is selfish with her time.

  ‘I shouldn’t have asked,’ the tomcat said. ‘I’ll leave you alone.’

  I thought for a long time about the dog’s journey home, trying to imagine each stage of it, and wished I were a dog so that I could survive the same journey back to her in Paris, even if she no longer wants me, even if she has become serious in my absence, along with all those who have glimpsed the godforsaken future.

  Eventually I went to find the tomcat in his trench. He made room for me next to him. We watched the soldiers bet on which mud turtle would win the slow-motion race they had been started on, from one side of the trench wall to the other. Three small turtles were plodding forward along the racing lanes the soldiers had created for them. A fourth was marching around and around in a determined circle, wear
ing a deep groove in the mud. And a fifth had somehow hoisted another turtle onto its back, and was winning the race.

  Its preternatural strength reminded me of another trivial scene from years ago, before Colette’s improving literary reputation allowed her to shift from music hall to theatre stage. She would take me with her to the Olympia or the Wagram Empire, or wherever she happened to be performing that season. I would lie across a spotlight in the wings until it became unbearably hot, watching each act from the darkness. One night I watched a sixteen-year-old girl, whose stage name was Jawbone, lift between her teeth a kitchen table with an enormously fat woman sitting on it.

  The boredom on the faces of the soldiers betting on the trench turtle derby dissipated, to be replaced with alarm. They scattered, standing to attention. A shadow was thrown over me and the tomcat. Somebody was standing in our sun at the entrance to the trench. I glanced up and saw Henri the sergeant, squinting as he tried to figure out exactly what he had caught the men doing.

  ‘I heard about the dog,’ he said to one of the soldiers. ‘Was it the guard dog of this trench?’

  ‘No, sir,’ the soldier said. ‘Several down along the line. But we gave it treats,’ he added hopefully.

  ‘Give a dog treats when men are starving?’ he said. ‘Shame on you.’ His eyes had adjusted to the sunlight, and he now focused on us: two feline forms crouching in his shadow. ‘Get these pests out of here,’ he said. ‘They’ll spread disease.’

  My brave, thin soldier stepped forward and tucked us under his arms. ‘Sir, they catch the rats that bother us at night. And they lift our spirits.’

  In the direct sunlight, I knew my fur would give me away. Henri had jealously listened to Colette go into raptures about my varied colours and stripes too many times for him not to recognise me. I looked into his eyes and he stared back at me, and I knew I’d been discovered.

  ‘If I see those cats again, anywhere near these trenches,’ he said, ‘I will personally shoot them, then shoot any soldier found to be harbouring them.’ He took another long look at me, letting his malice bubble up into his gaze.