With breakfast over, I walk up the stairs to the second floor study to write for a couple of hours, my study being the only place I have been able to write consistently, looking out to the nearby hills, Mount Ascension to the southeast, and Mt. Helena to the west.  My cork bulletin board on the bookcase next to my desk displays postcards from a few of my favorite places: the Grand Tetons; the Madison River in Montana; and Canyon de Chelly. There is also a postcard from the Hemingway Museum in Oak Park, showing Hemingway with his favorite cat on his lap, a black cat with some white markings, named “Boise,” a stray he found at the Ambose Mundos Hotel in Havana and took home to the Finca. He named Boise after the US Navy cruiser.

Seeing that postcard reminds me suddenly of my own cat, Katya, who is outside. I quickly go downstairs to check on her, and find her, as usual, yelling at the back door to get in. From the time we took her in off the street in Belarus, eight years ago, she has been high maintenance, bossy and vocal.

I open the back door, and she comes in fast, her tail up, and her raspy voice going non-stop.  I have been especially nice to her lately, since she is recovering from lymphoma. She is on prednisone, and in remission, but there is no telling how long she will be okay.

Sheri and I got Katya in 1999 in Minsk, while serving in the U.S. Embassy where I was the acting Ambassador. We first noticed her in the Embassy courtyard in April, as Belarus was emerging from a long winter.  She appeared one day on the compound, like a lot of other stray cats. One of our guards claimed she jumped over the wall from the Russian Embassy next door.

But this stray was special. She was the femme fatale of cats, a European shorthair, the typical Russian cat with snowy white fur and patches of gray. But, she was the ultimate model, not enough gray to take away from the overall white impression, like a birch tree on the snowy Russian steppes.  Seeing birch trees would remind me of her.

She was thin and had a kind of Natalie Wood cat face, with slightly oriental eyes, pure white, distinct lips turned up at the corners, a beauty mark near her nose, and those famous bright Russian eyes.  Hers were jade, and laser-like, locking on you with great intensity when she wanted something.  It was like the world stopped still, no sound, no movement anywhere, noting but her, frozen, communicating a most important message directly to your eyes. She was the most determined animal I had ever seen.  She was determined to get food and wouldn’t stop bothering people until she got it. And need food she did.  We discovered later that she was pregnant.

She walked with beautiful, quick ballerina movements, almost like dancing, making those fast short steps as if on the ballet stage, almost on tip toes like Anna Pavlova playing “Giselle,” the beautiful country girl.  When she walked slowly, she sashayed.  She had a beautiful voice, raspy when most serious, and otherwise very loud and soprano.  And, it didn’t stop.  It went on and on, sometimes almost like a siren.  A local newspaper at the time had an article about several performing cats that had disappeared from the Minsk Animal Circus, which was located near the Embassy, leading me to wonder if she could be one of those?  She certainly acted like a prima dona.

I first heard about our new stray at my desk in the front office, when one of the staff said to me, by the way, “have you seen the new cat on campus?”

“No, but there are always strays around.”

“No, this one is unique.  She accompanies people along the sidewalks, talking to them loudly as they go along, walking beside them and looking up, begging. There is something interesting about her.  Maybe it’s her determination to get fed.  Half the Marines and your secretary, too, are feeding her.  Look behind Post One, you’ll see open cans of cat food on the floor.”

“This is the first time anyone has mentioned a particular cat.  Usually the Marines are quick to drive them off.”

“Not this one, this is their first defeat.”

The next day, I got the treatment when I left the chancery building to walk across the annex.  With her walking beside me, I could tell she was a real survivor.  There was something about her that got to me. On the second day of her following me around the compound, I called my driver and asked him to pick up the cat and take her to my apartment. My secretary was happy the entire day, on the phone, telling everyone.

Sheri didn’t know about our new cat, our first pet, until she got home. We named her Katya. She was Sheri’s first pet, and a few months later Sheri nursed her to health, using vodka to clean her stitches after a bad spaying operation at the local clinic. Thereafter, Katya became devoted to Sheri. Each morning, I would wake up to see Sheri at the bedroom desk in Minsk, doing paperwork, and Katya would be sitting on her lap, facing Sheri, eyes in a trance, kneading on her.

Katya loved anything from the table, but she also ate crusts of hard bread and even old potato skins, revealing her background in the alleys during Russian winter. She was a bit wary of people, probably having been chased.  For some reason, she didn’t like closed doors in the house. We would learn over time she was fearless with other cats, even toms, never giving up her territory her yard.  Screaming at them with her loud voice, the sound always stopped them.  She had no doubt relied on that scream on the streets. She was serious and didn’t play with cat toys.  We gave her a ball, but she stood on it with her back feet, looking confused.  Life had been serious. I admired her for that.

As she got older, and I began to take her to the vet for her regular check ups and vaccines, surprised to find she would give me love bites on my knuckles when we got home, knowing I was helping her.  At some point, I started taking her on walks down the street. She loved these walks, without a leash, and would start across the yard towards the sidewalk when I called out to her, “pa shli,” or “lets go” in Russian. As a show of appreciation, she would rub against my leg as she passed me, leading the way. I always spoke to her in Russian.

It was shortly after we moved to Montana, that Katya came down with lymphoma, falling off a table one day, unable to get up, gasping for air.  I carried her to the vet, who cut her open to explore, finding swollen lymph glands.  She was dying, and I devoted my full attention to her, being home and not working.  Sheri and I force fed her after her chemotherapy, after she had stopped eating. That went on for seven weeks, but she finally started eating on her own.

Sitting at the dining room table now, after finishing my work upstairs in the study, I see through the hallways that Katya is lying in her donut-shaped cat bed on the library floor near the bay windows. She has lost weight.  I walk over quietly and look down at her as she lies on her side, eyes closed, sleeping.  Her legs are extended over the side of the donut, and are crossed. The white fur on her side is ruffled, what is called “rough coat.”  And, there are bare patches of skin on her forelegs where the fur has been shaved to place i.v.s, and on her stomach where she had been cut open.  The sun catches her face.  She has throwing up a lot lately. I can see her sides moving, breathing deeply, but, at least, her nose and nostrils are not flaring. I have to watch for that because the doctor said if she started having breathing problems we would have to put her down to avoid her having breathing panics.

I walk back to the dining room, proud of my little girl from the streets. Hemingway must have felt the same way about Boise.    (October 2007)