My Two “First” Cats

If you think living in a "Schloss" is romantic, try carrying all your groceries up 96 steps.

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After the war, housing all over Europe was woefully scarce due to ‘certain events’ that had taken place during the early nineteen-forties. We, my mother, father and I, had moved into my grandmother’s city apartment that was already crowded with my aunt, her two sons, and a lodger with her son.

Things apparently deteriorated between my mother and her feisty mother-in-law (they later came to adore each other). During one of his food-foraging bike rides into the countryside, my father secured one single room (no electricity, no running water; meaning no indoor plumbing) on a small (very small) farm way out in the country (I schussed to school on tiny skis in the winter). Curiously, I never had a pet during those four years which were heaven for a small child, but must have been unimaginably arduous for my mother trying to keep her family clean and fed by cooking on a two-burner kerosene stove.

After about four years, you’d think we had climbed our way into the upper echelon of the nearby city, as climb we did. Ninety-six steps into a cavernous tower room of the town’s impressive “Schloss.” Not only was it in the middle of town, but the church was right next to it—its enormous bells at the same height as our windows. Funny, what one gets used to.

One evening—completely against my mother’s strict edict, I am certain—my father pulled a little kitten from his pocket. She was immediately given a saucer of warm milk. It might as well have been Ex-Lax. My parents went to the cinema, and I installed my pitifully miauing Susie in bed with me. I was an extremely good sleeper because I never woke up as my parents changed my nightgown, practically hosed me down, and freshened my sheets. Mother put the kitten out to roam the marble halls and hoped she would realize what the cardboard box with ripped newspaper was for.

Anyway, Susie had one really bad habit: She would dash out the open window, press herself along a narrow sill, and then jump onto the gargoyle-head and into the gutter that ran along a very steep tile-roof. Luckily, I did not try to rescue her the same way. Instead, from the hall, I climbed up to a dormer window and shook a blanket down to her. I also had a piece of salami on a string to entice the obstreperous kitten to climb up to me. I had to lean way out as my back-end dangled above the hallway floor barely keeping me in balance. Finally, Susie clawed her way up far enough so that I could grab her. Relieved, I took her back inside.

She never looked back as she dashed straight out that window again. In my haste to rescue her, I had left it open. Dumb? True. But I was only ten.

It was not long until Susie vanished somewhere in the thicket of the large park behind the “Schloss.” I hope she found someone who could take better care of her. It took another twenty years and a job transfer to the States, before I got my second first cat, Puang Bombo. He was a wonderful Seal-Point Himalayan whose name translated into “Honorable Polstergeist.” You can well imagine why I only called him Bombo.