Dmitri's Cat by Carla Sarett

I have been remembering cats I have known—I say "known," since I am not an owner of cats. Merely an admirer; since owning animals, plants, children has always seemed out of my reach or perhaps my inclination. 

Cats possess, more than other creatures, true mystery. They sleep most of their lives, motionless, and seem to be most themselves in sleep, far away from the routine in which they have been thrust by needy humans, hungry for any morsel of affection from their beautiful feline pets.  Even a brush of fur against the leg pleases the undemanding human.

And I have been thinking, also, of cat people I have known. Some of the cat people I knew briefly, fleetingly, and yet from their cats, I feel a kinship with them, a bond that persists decades later. 

Not every cat owner is a cat person. 
Cat people are a breed unto themselves.

I think of a man named Dmitri, one of my husband's two maternal uncles.  Dmitri's cat slept in the top drawer of Dmitri's desk; the cat hid from the other members of the household.

At that time, the household consisted of my husband's widowed mother and her two brothers, Constantine and Dmitri, and their long-time bossy housekeeper who came during the day.  In this country, such a living arrangement would be considered odd; but in Athens, it was unremarkable. Besides, the elder of the two brothers, Constantine, had led a peripatetic life and was often absent.  He held an important position in a large Greek city planning firm, and his job took him to Cairo, Damascus, Istanbul, Tangiers.  He was a tiny, fiercely energetic man, with no time for pets or, I suspect, people who disagreed with him.

But Dmitri, thin with elegant features and hooded eyes, was a different sort of person.  He had been sick as a young man, stricken by tuberculosis during the Second World War, from which he had never fully recovered.  And he had been rejected in love in his twenties—the shock of it had caused him to try to kill himself, although afterward, he remained best of friends with the man who married his love, and by extension, the love herself. 

His bad health prevented Dmitri from living much of what is called an ordinary life; although he did work, in civil service, as a structural engineer.  He rarely travelled, he ate the same foods almost every night (he believed zucchini were beneficial to digestion); he rose and went to bed at the same time—that is, except when he dined with his best friend and his wife, the lively woman Dmitri had not married.  I never saw him without a thin sweater.

His spare time, he dedicated himself to reading.  He had a vast, impressive library in Greek and French, he had read any classic one could name and many works of modern Greek poetry not available in this country.  While he read, his faithful cat sat quietly in his lap, and when Dmitri left to study to take his "daily constitutional," the cat returned to the top drawer, always faithful.  The cat was as quiet as Dmitri, and by her intense love for him, I 

knew Dmitri was a kind man.   

I wondered how Dmitri felt living with his more ambitious, wealthier older brother, so adored by the two sisters (another widowed sister did live separately, also in Athens.) The sisters hung on every word Constantine spoke, they repeated his advice, they never doubted his expertise. Dmitri must have known he was the more intelligent of the two—this I gleaned from a flash of amusement when his brother spoke, a faint, almost invisible reprimand to his brother's many grandiose pronouncements on this or that.     

Dmitri spoke no English (or at least not well enough to converse) and we communicated in French, or what I recalled of French.  I did manage to tell him that his cat was beautiful.  Since he was shy, even if my French were better than it was, we would rarely have spoken.  He stayed in his study with his cat and did not eat with the rest of the household, at least when I was staying there.    

I wondered if my presence in the apartment was disruptive to a man who lived such an orderly life. It was hard to tell. 

But before I left Athens, Dmitri gave me a present.  I still have it, on a bookshelf: it is a copy of an ancient head, and it has what Greeks call the "archaic smile," a stylized smile used in the Sixth Century BC and earlier: the almond eyes wide, the face still, the lips slightly upturned in an expression of contentment and reverie.  That smile is considered one of the first signs in ancient art of humanity, since nothing is more human than a smile. Yet, the archaic smile is elusive. It is a hint of a smile, nothing more, and yet something more—it's a smile a cat might make.

Dmitri hadn't spent any time with my husband and me; I didn't expect a gift.  He shyly pointed to the head and told me (in his perfect French) it resembled me. I suppose it wasn't only the smile that he saw—the long features, too, are like mine.  But he also saw my smile.  

He was a cat person.

Find more of my cat stories in  SPOOKY AND KOOKY TALES