Chapter 00. The First Hand

Alexander sits down at the desk in the study on the first floor, and at once the house begins to listen. The wood answers him softly from every side: a floorboard gives beneath the chair, the wall creaks a little, and somewhere below the silence of the big room settles. The screen glows on the desk. Beside it, on its stand, the laptop waits patiently. The keyboard is still cold, yet the story is already here — in the air, in the lamp, in the cup that is not there yet but soon will be. I always know this moment. It is like the way a cat, the instant before a leap, holds still for a whole second and yet is already wholly in flight.

He had been a long time circling this book. He treats words with respect and with caution, and so he came to them in circles, by habit, along roundabout paths. It is easier for him to lift iron in the sitting room than to lift such a memory from the floor of his chest. Easier to set the wires, the tasks, other people’s requests back in their places. Easier to settle something technical, something hard, with a button and a result. But here — here is my voice, everything I saw and smelled and lived through in this house. It rustles in the rooms even now, on the staircase, in the evening air. He sits, looks at the screen, draws a palm across his face and is cross with himself for the wet in his eyes, the way men are cross who are used to keeping their backs straight even before an empty room. But the tears come all the same — quietly, and truly. Which means we have found the right place.

Before he begins, he always does the same thing. He goes downstairs, presses the button on the humming black box, and waits until the smell of coffee unfolds through the house like a warm towel. He pours, adds milk, lingers a second by the staircase, as though testing whether the memory will bear one more descent and climb. Then he comes back up with the mug in his hand. The house knows this route. So do I. For people it is, I suppose, merely a habit. For a cat it is already a ritual. Everything that matters must first find its repetition, or it has nothing to lean upon.

He sets the cup to the right of the keyboard, closes everything needless on the screen, and leaves a clean white space. Now it is allowed. Now the telling has its threshold. I come up to it from inside my memory as warily as I once came up to strangers’ hands: first by scent, then with the whole body. His fingers settle on the keys. My old fears stir beneath them, but they no longer bite. They only ask to be named rightly.

That day the cold reached the pads of my paws at once. November worked its way in, fine and stubborn, under the fur, under the skin, between the ribs. I understood almost nothing then. Understanding comes later, in any case; at first there is only the body. It knows where it is wet. Where the draught is. Where there is emptiness. Where there is no mother’s flank.

I lay beneath an old board against the wall. Above me darkened the crooked, peeling marks of the two-legged ones. Later I learned that it said “POST”. Back then it was simply a hard thing over my head, which gave no warmth but at least kept the sheer, direct cold off me. The wall smelled of damp, of old paper, and of something stale, as though somebody’s news had long been left here and forgotten. I squeaked. The sound came out thin, broken, almost papery. It is hard to believe in a sound like that. But I had no other.

Sometimes it seems to me that the first feeling in a life is not fear but lostness. Fear is already running about, scratching, looking for a way out. Lostness simply lies down beside you and makes the world enormous. Only yesterday there had been milk, fur, the close press of living warmth. Now the earth went cold beneath my belly, and in the emptiness behind the board the wind walked to and fro. I tried to curl tighter, as though out of my own self I might make a second mother, a second wall, a second deliverance. It did not work. I was too small even for that.

From above came a slow, lazy dripping, off the edge of something made of iron. Each drop struck the earth on its own, with a pause between. A good sound for waiting. A poor sound for hope. I listened to it and learned, little by little, the thing that later served me so well in the house: if nothing can be changed, you must at least remember how it sounds. A cat’s memory begins with rhythm.

Then light footsteps entered that rhythm.

Quick ones. With short halts, as if whoever was walking kept glancing down at his feet, then remembering something along the way. With the footsteps came the smell of food, of woollen mittens, of the cold off the street, and of something living, something of the home that will not fit into a single word. I lifted my head. At once it swam. The light in the gap swayed.

First the voice came. Not the sense of it, of course. To me these were merely warm pulses of air, with no threat in them. Then knees, right by the board. Then a palm, laid carefully down beside me. This matters. The world does not always snatch at you at once. Sometimes it first asks.

By then there was almost nowhere left to draw back to. But that, I suppose, was not the whole of it. Warmth came off the hand. Real, simple, unfeigned. And the smell of the food was real too. And the boy’s breathing over the board — quick, agitated — was real as well. In that instant the house had not yet opened to me with a porch, or a glass door, or a bowl, or a name. But the chief thing had already happened: in the cold there had appeared a point one could reach towards.

I stretched out my neck. Only a little. Just so much as is needed not for courage but for consent. And thou, first hand — thou didst not draw back. Thou waitedst. I nudged thee with my nose, and for the first time that day I understood — not with the mind but with the body: the story had not ended beneath that board.

Upstairs, in the study, Alexander sets down the first line. The house listens. The coffee goes cold. And I give him, at last, that very November cold, that board, that first smell of food, and that hand with which it all began. From here on it can be told in order.