Yesterday, my cat died. I can't get it. The summer of 1989. A small place in southern Attika, Greece - that kind of tiny village virtually untouched by anything that happened after 1965 and that never sees a tourist. Just that one backpacker per week, and, from time to time, some travellers who know a member of a local family. The local my parents and I knew: a physicist who fled the Greek dictatorship, studied under Felix Wankel and later got stuck in our neighbourhood. The travel: by car through Austria and the then-Yugoslavia, all along the Autoput, then measuring through Greece until hitting Loutsa. Five weeks of vaccation to go.
People didn't use trash cans. They hung their refuse sacks high in the trees the evenings, garbagemen would collect them in the mornings, but hat one day they ran late. We heard this strange and weak chirping and tweeting the very moment we left the orchard in front of the house. It wasn't a bird, but what was it? A cat, two or three days old, dumped into a refuse sack. With all her remaining forces she managed to draw a hole into the sack, but was unable to escape through it. Locals wouldn't have cared, weird German travellers certainly would. So did we. We washed her and took her to a vet where she received vaccine and where we learned how to feed her.
Frankly, the quesion what name to put into her vaccine documents catched us by surprise. Before our local friend, now interpreter, could explain, that Old Man in the corner already broke his silence, calmly said in fluent German: "Artemis would be a fine name, too", and fell silent again - the name had already been written down. Three weeks later, the drive home - with her in an open basket on the back seat.
In the night on yesterday, she started to scream and to drool. Rapidly, her forces left her. She didn't appear to be herself any more. At 03:00 she died of what the vet assumes to be a stroke, after just hours of suffering.
Postscriptum: The same day, Anabelle and Armin married at Ana's family home in Goa, India, in a traditional ceremony. Contrary to inital plans, I have been unable to attend. The irony of life.
