Who was this man, anyway? A plump, not particularly intelligent man in his mid-forties who wrote affectionate Christmas and birthday cards to his so-called friends who might visit him once every ten years; a man who had invested all his faith in the pharmaceutical industry in the hope that it would discover a wonder drug for his advancing baldness. He was the ideal victim of insurance agents; he had had a total of three or four unhappy sex episodes in an unhappy sex life with wretched creatures picked up during late-night visits to singles' bars, women who would empty his wallet before slipping away early the next morning while he was sleeping off his intoxication.
And now, somehow, he had managed to get his hands on this joint. It was one of the great successes of his life, and the sorry state of his existence gave me pause for reflection; in view of his drab life, I began to resign myself to my fate. Didn't everything, after all, have an order, a purpose, a higher meaning in this world? Yes, of course. Destiny, that's what it was all about. Or as a Japanese assembly-line worker would say: the way things are is the way things are, and the way things are is good.
But enough of philosophy; Gustav was no Job, and there's no point in making him out to be one. Thus, while my friend composed further odes to the splendor of our new quarters, my gaze drifted from him to the bathroom. Both the door and the large rear window were open, and I seized the opportunity to inspect the back side of the building. I streaked past Gustav, entered the bathroom, and sprang up onto the windowsill.
The view was simply heavenly. Before me lay the navel, so to speak, of our neighborhood. Theneighborhood consisted of a roughly two-hundred-by-eighty-yard rectangle framed by the previously mentioned paragons of turn-of-the-century residential respectability. Behind them,directly in front of me, an intricate patchwork of variously sized gardens and terraced lawns spread out, enclosed by high, weathered brick walls. In some gardens there were picturesque arbors and summerhouses. Others were fully overgrown, with platoons of climbing plants creeping over the dividing walls into adjacent gardens. Where feasible, miniature ponds had been laid out, tokens of the latest fashion in environmental awareness, only now squadrons of neurotic urban flies hovered over them. There were also rare varieties of trees, grossly overpriced bamboo sunshades, neoclassical terra-cotta flowerpots with reliefs of copulating Greeks, batteries of environmental garbage cans, beds teeming with marijuana, plastic sculptures—in short, everything that the heart of a well-to-do property owner might desire who didn't know what else to do with the money he saved by cheating on his income tax.
Joining company with the above were the sort of garden idylls you would expect to see in a Pink Flamingo Horror Picture Show. These ghastly scenes were obviously the work of people whose hunger for fashionable trends could be satisfied entirely by the Sears Roebuck catalog.
The situation was a little different near our house. A dilapidated balcony with a hopelessly rusted railing hung directly underneath me, under the bathroom window, about two feet above the ground. The balcony could only be reached through the bedroom, though I suspected that the bathroom window would serve as my customary gateway to the outside world. Under the balcony sprawled a broad concrete terrace that looked as though it functioned as a ceiling for a basement extension too. Owing to sloppy work, the terrace was shot through with cracks, and unfamiliar vegetation jabbed up through its numerous crevices. Another rusty railing had been installed fifteen feet or so away on the edge of the terrace to prevent sudden falls into the small garden below it in the middle of the night. In the center of this garden, which was wholly overgrown, an extremely tall tree grew; it looked as if it could have been planted in the time of Attila, the Hun, and was stripped bare of foliage—this was the fall season, after all.
Then I discovered something else in my field of vision: an extremely unusual member of my own species.
He was squatting down in front of the terrace railing and staring down into the small garden. Although he could easily compete with a medicine ball, as far as body size was concerned, I noticed right away that he had no tail. Not that he was born that way—someone must have cut that priceless part off. At least that's how it looked. He was clearly a Maine Coon, a tailless Maine Coon.2 It is difficult for me to describe the color of his coat, because he looked like a walking palette whose colors had long since mixed together. The predominant color could definitely be said to be black, but there were shades of beige, brown, yellow, gray, and even spots of red, so
