Felidae - Special U.S. Edition

Egyptian goddess Bast. Every free minute he worked on it like mad. Unfortunately he only crept toward his goal inch by inch, as he had to interrupt his studies continually to write these horrible hack epics to support us. And now that the new apartment was making additional demands on our budget, recently he had stooped so low as to supply teen mags with "real exciting" how-I-got-my-first-menstruation-and-pimples dramas. The very worst production he had ever put down on paper was a sleazy four-page piece of rubbish with the sensational title "My Principal Raped Me Six Times in His Office" (subtitle: "He Forced Himself Upon Me Six Times! The Loathsome Act Took Place Six Times!" To carry the portrayal of this injustice to an extreme, I might have added "And then I gave birth to sextuplets!"). But no matter how much he prostituted himself for good old mammon, his heart never ceased beating for the mysteries of ancient Egypt. The cult of the goddess Bast, to a great extent unresearched, was to be the subject of his fourth book, and so he had the latest studies made by Egyptologists and museums sent to him. He would sit for countless days and nights over these monographs, inscriptions, and photographs of wall paintings. Writing this book was a particular pleasure for him, since the religion relating to the goddess Bast, the symbol of maternity, fertility, and other feminine virtues, was closely connected to the worship of my kind; thanks to excavations, it is known that the goddess was often depicted in the form of Felidae.

And so, during the brief pause in the renovation, Gustav was once again sitting at his desk and sweating over his hieroglyphs when Bluebeard and I entered the living room to inform him at full volume of our desire to leave the house. At first he shook his head resolutely, mumbling a few horror stories about my kind in his well-known baby talk, about how, for example, they perished in blizzards. Eventually, however, he relented and opened the bathroom window.

When we were outside, I drummed into Bluebeard's head again and again the necessity of getting tough if Joker refused to talk with us. Then we went our separate ways, and I waded on through knee-deep snow over the walls toward Pascal's dwelling.

While breathing in the icy air and letting the white garden landscape work on my mood, I remembered my romantic entanglement that morning. "I'm not a member of any race," she had said, and: "Someday everything will become clear all by itself." She had shrouded her race in mystery, and made as if she were an oracle by saying that it was old and new at the same time, and different. What was that all supposed to mean? There is no such thing as "no race"; every one of us belongs to a race. It is an undeniable fact of life. Bluebeard's comment that "they seldom want to have anything to do with us" surprised me even more. As chance would have it, the whole thing fit pretty well with the theory of a killer race. But to hell with all these theories—something in me made me resist the idea that the divine creature I had encountered or those like her were killers. Yet I couldn't say what made this idea seem so wrong. It was just something deep down inside me. Had I, by chance, fallen in love? Or was my unerring instinct once again putting in its two cents worth? Finally, I cut these speculations short by telling myself that apprehending the murderer was out of the question before a motive was established.

At last I arrived at the old building. Done up like a yuppie town house with its snow-covered roof, brightly lit windows, and picturesque, smoking chimney, it now looked like an advertisement for Irish whiskey. Unfortunately, the back door was shut this time, so I had to roam around the entire house on the lookout for a gap to squeeze through. After a long search I discovered one in the long side of the building where there was a basement window and a narrow gravel path leading down to the street. Compulsively perfect as people like him are, Pascal's owner had found an ideal solution to ensure his darling's freedom of movement. Far down in the wall an entrance especially designed for my kind had been added that superbly complemented the highly modern interior, of course. Plastic blades, arranged like interlocking fans, served as a door through a plate-sized hole rimmed with a steel ring that gleamed like polished silver. You only needed to bump your head lightly against them, and they would open automatically like a camera aperture, closing shut again after you had gone through the hole.

I trotted right up to the study, but instead of Pascal, this time it was the master of the house himself sitting at the computer. I was tempted to take a closer look at this fashion junkie with his Karl Lagerfeld ponytail swinging from the back of his head, but Lord knows I had a lot of other problems on my hands.

I finally found Pascal in the nearly empty living room with the two genitalia paintings on the walls. He was napping on a large, scarlet-red silk cushion with golden-colored decorative cords and tassels hanging down majestically from each corner. The entire room was illuminated by only three tiny halogen spots sunk into the ceiling, which cast circles of light on the parquet floor.

The sight of Pascal made me spontaneously think of a graying, tragic king in a Shakespearean play. And it was true that Pascal led a regal life under the protection and loving care of his very well-to-do master. Involuntarily I had to think of all the abused and oppressed animals kicked around in this world who had not been as lucky as Pascal: animals human beings tortured just for fun; animals human beings bought as playthings and toyed with a little until, weary