Kissinger's Labyrinth
Words of author (anonymity): There was a good post on Lepra about a guy who built a box labyrinth for his cat. That story somehow stuck with me, and in the end, I wrote this short tale.
Kissinger died on the evening of Monday, October third. In the morning, he refused to eat, dragged himself into a corner of the veranda, collapsed into a slanted sunbeam trapezoid on the floor, looked tiredly at Toyts, and seemed to fall asleep.
Toyts was busy all day and had no time for Kissinger, though he did glance at him, passing by with bricks for the “tea house” in his hands. Toyts hadn't seen Kissinger move, but the cat was invariably still in the sunspot, which, of course, didn't stay in one place.
The day was sunny, invigorating, and Toyts decided he'd manage to move all the bricks today – he'd resolved to raise the fence onto the foundation. It was long overdue. The stream flowing near the house was full of water; new sources seemed to have opened up, feeding it. Besides, on the foundation, the fence would be taller, and Toyts would stop seeing his neighbor with the vile name Miroslava. She was twenty years younger than Toyts but showed some kind of nasty interest in him. Nasty. A nasty woman, indeed. Toyts had no wife, his daughter lived God knows where, and he'd long since lost interest in “all that.”
He stood by the plum tree, ate three plums, wiping the bluish bloom from the fruit, and threw the pits into the stream. He'd have to cut some branches because Syomin no longer made moonshine, or did anything at all after his stroke. And Toyts's daughter hadn't eaten plums in a long time, and he had never had a wife.
For lunch, Toyts carelessly peeled small potatoes from the garden, boiled them in a pot, sliced half an onion without draining the water, added fatty Ukrainian sausage, and squeezed in a tomato. Kissinger lapped water from his bowl, opened his maw silently, walked past Toyts into the house, gently brushing his leg with his bony side. Kissinger had completely stopped meowing about five years ago, and Toyts had talked about it with Syomin, who had worked as a veterinarian until retirement. Syomin replied that he wasn't a cat doctor; he was a doctor for animals important to the state, ones that were eaten and shorn. “As for your Kissinger not meowing – that's because he got smart. And what's there to meow about with you anyway?”
Toyts thought Kissinger would go into his labyrinth, but the black cat flopped onto the rug nearby, glanced at Toyts, and opened his maw again. Toyts turned on the water and thoroughly, as always, washed the tin pot, spoon, fork, knife, and glass. He placed the dishes on the wire shelf, took his dried cigarettes from the radiator, went out to smoke on the veranda, and saw that Kissinger was dead.
He buried Kissinger under the plum tree. He didn't deliberate; everything just happened somehow, like a ball rolling into a hole on the shortest path. He emptied dried mint from a canvas bag, grabbed the shovel from the corner of the shed, and did everything quickly. Before putting the shovel back, he wiped it with a bunch of grass. He returned to the plum tree, sat on the chopping block, and lit a cigarette. Just then, the sun went behind the mountain, and evening instantly fell. In the nasty woman Miroslava's house, the windows glowed pink and yellow. The stream gurgled behind the leaning fence, and something small scurried in the grass.
The black rectangle of fresh earth would dry, then freeze, be covered with snow, thaw, grow over with grass, and no one, not even Toyts himself, would be able to say for certain where Kissinger was buried. And why even bother knowing who is buried where, be it cat or human. He finished his cigarette and flicked the butt into a mayonnaise jar. Kissinger's labyrinth – he needed to deal with that.
The labyrinth began with a wonderful cardboard box that Toyts's daughter, Olga, made for Kissinger. The black kitten would climb into the box through one of the two openings, rustle around inside, peek out, watching Toyts with gooseberry eyes. It was an exceptionally marvelous box. Toyts, who worked as a methodologist at a school, noticed certain abilities in young Kissinger – the kitten was terribly curious, and in this curiosity, tireless.
“We'll develop you,” Toyts said.
He drew a diagram of the labyrinth, a real, cunning one, with dead ends and branches. His wife had just left Toyts for that scoundrel of hers, and besides her belongings, she took her piano.
“Let it stay at your place for now, Toyts,” his wife pleaded.
“It won't stay long,” Toyts replied. “I'll chop it up with an axe today if you don't move it.”
He brought a heavy splitting maul with a green handle and laid it on the lacquered top cover. The axe looked very strange on the piano. His wife bit her lip and said nothing to him. Not that day, but quite soon, she moved it, arriving with two movers who deftly gripped it with straps and, grunting with effort, hoisted it onto the truck. The scoundrel wisely stayed in the car.
After his wife left, a lot of space freed up in the house, so Kissinger's labyrinth took the piano's place. Toyts brought home many cardboard boxes and spent a whole week building it, using up three rolls of tape. It turned out wonderfully, and Olga's box was now at the center of the composition.
“He's going to crap in there,” Syomin said, examining the structure with great doubt. “And you'll be tearing your hair out trying to clean it all up.”
“Kissinger goes to the garden for those matters,” Toyts replied. “A cultured animal.”
“Yeah, right,” Syomin said, “A week at most.”
Kissinger loved his labyrinth with all his heart and spent all his time in it when he wasn't hunting voles in the garden or sleeping in the sun. About a month later, Kissinger started coming to Toyts to sleep. He'd jump onto his legs, carefully make his way across his stomach, and lie on his chest. Toyts dreamed he was buried alive in a trench and immediately woke up.
“Kissinger, get lost,” Toyts said. “You smell like fish.”
But it was impossible to drive the cat out of bed; he kept coming back. One time, it dawned on Toyts – what if the cat was trying to tell him that the labyrinth had become boring? He sat over the plan and figured out how to change the labyrinth, cutting several new openings in the upper tier – Kissinger liked to peek out from there. The cat stopped coming to Toyts's bed, and that was wonderful.
He disassembled the labyrinth the next day and saw that the wall behind it was covered with old wallpaper, different from the rest of the room. Before approaching the labyrinth with a utility knife, Toyts thought wistfully: should he get another kitten? But the thought only came for a second; he imagined how much care would enter his life, and he wouldn't outlive his kitten, and who would take care of him? He had no wife, and she had died anyway. His daughter lived in America with that Ken of hers. Miroslava? No way.
Toyts detached the box that Olga had given Kissinger eighteen years ago. The old, dried tape came off easily, and the box suddenly fell apart in his hands, revealing its inside.
Toyts even forgot the right word in surprise. Petroglyphs. The right word was petroglyphs, rock carvings. Or was “cardboardglyphs” more accurate? If Kissinger's labyrinth was considered a cave, then petroglyph would do.
The drawings were carefully scratched out. How had Kissinger managed it? Well, if very carefully, trying... For some reason, the human in all the drawings was smaller than the cat, and some creatures, Toyts didn't understand at first, and then realized – mice.
“That's what it means to develop a cat,” Toyts said aloud.
He placed the box on the table and went to look for his phone. The phone was nowhere to be found, and then Toyts realized it was peacefully in his shirt pocket. Grabbing his cigarettes, he left the house and walked up along the stream, to the mountain where he got “Megafon” signal. Miroslava was standing in the garden with a bucket and waved to Toyts – he didn't reply.
The path never seemed to end, oh Syomin – Syomin, how unpleasant it was with your stroke, lying there, smiling with half your mouth, and yet how wonderfully I would have talked with you! But nothing wonderful, just a vet, but Olga – that was completely different, completely. Olga studied biology and worked with some sequencing, or some bald devil, out of ten words only one was understandable.
Toyts walked past a pine with upturned roots; everything around it was covered with rusty needles. He imagined a drawing of a man with a spear on the trunk, and suddenly Toyts was afraid he'd gone mad and imagined something that wasn't there. He stopped, looked at the trunk, and un-imagined the spearman. No one had gone mad; Toyts's brain was perfectly fine, Toyts's brain – my respects. His phone now had four bars, and he decided not to climb any higher. He figured it was already seven in the morning in Rhode Island, so Olga was awake.
“Hi, Kissinger died,” Toyts said.
“Dad... Wait, who died?” Olga replied from far, far away, and Toyts imagined her sitting in her kitchen in a bathrobe with Turkish cucumbers, disheveled, and the line of her cheekbone, inherited from her mother, a line he both loved and hated at the same time. “Oh! Kiss? The cat?”
“Of course the cat, who else?” Toyts snapped.
“Listen, well, he was very old. How old was he? Fifteen?”
“Nineteen.”
“That's very good for a cat. How are you yourself?”
“Not planning on dying.”
“Well, I wasn't talking about that! You're upset, you loved him so much.”
“Tell me, do you know what 'petroglyphs' are?”
“Of course I do, rock carvings. Why do you need them?”
“Kissinger drew petroglyphs in the labyrinth,” Toyts said, realizing that it all sounded idiotic, and Olga might well decide he'd lost his marbles from grief and loneliness.
“Drew with what?” Olga wondered. “Who drew? The cat?”
“With his claw, what else?”
“Dad, cats can't draw. Their neocortex isn't very developed for it. Chimpanzees draw a little.”
“Kissinger is not a monkey,” Toyts said. “You're a scientist, so accept it as a fact – I raised an intelligent cat. He didn't even meow lately.”
“And day and night the learned cat...” Olga said. “Dad, I believe you, but we need to find another explanation – absolutely.”
“Alright, bye,” Toyts said and hung up.
“What a cross woman?” he asked himself. “Stubborn, like me.”
He put a cigarette in his mouth, but then the phone rang – Olga. Toyts wanted to be spiteful and not answer, but then he did.
“I'm listening.”
“Dad, I just remembered, oh my God,” Olga said. “It was so many years ago. Anyway, father, I drew the 'petroglyphs' as a joke. With a compass, with a needle.”
“I don't believe you,” Toyts said.
“Daddy, Kissinger was an exceptional cat, but he couldn't draw. In that very box I gave him. With a compass. I drew you, the cat, and some mice. I think the mice were the biggest, and the little man was tiny. The cat and his human.”
The wonderful story crumbled. The diamond turned out to be bottle glass, the crown was made of foil, the cat was fine, but the little man had become completely foolish in his old age. The cat draws with his claw on cardboard – scratch-scratch.
“Dad, you're not upset, are you?” Olga asked.
“Why should I be upset?” Toyts replied. “I'll sell my moped, get a chimpanzee.”
They talked a little more about life, then it was time for Olga to go to work. You'd never get a call from her father, he was a difficult man; when her mother died – he didn't call, but when the cat died – here you go. Olga called Miroslava, her father's neighbor, every week to find out how he was doing. Toyts, of course, didn't know this.
Coming down from the mountain, Toyts drank some tea, carried the boxes to the iron barrel where he burned trimmed tree branches. The dry cardboard caught well, and hot smoke rose into the windless sky.
Toyts somehow quickly grew tired. He returned home and lay down for a nap on the sofa. He dreamed that Kissinger came and lay on his chest. In his mind, he understood it was impossible; perhaps his heart was just aching. But the dream happily confused him; the cat lay on his chest and quietly purred.
The cardboard in the barrel burned down. The drawings of the Big Man, the Big Cat, the Scary Slipper, the Simple Mouse, and the Flying Mouse all vanished forever. Everything that Kissinger had meticulously drawn on the inner surfaces of his labyrinth, not only Olga's box but every other box, disappeared forever along with the surfaces themselves.
And when Toyts dies, someone big, who teaches him and probably loves him, will dismantle his, Toyts's, labyrinth and see the absurd petroglyphs he had scratched out all his life.
It's Anonymity short-tale from some corner of internet (2023). AI-human translate from Russian.