bout de papier, Vol. 18, No. 2 (2001) — Summer 2001 // Été 2001, pp. 27–28
Hi there! My name’s B and I’m a Canadian — by ‘Binky’ Coghlan
Now I grew up on the wrong side of the tracks in Ottawa. I used to hang around late at night near the market, cruising for guys – I was barely out of my teens but I’d already had three or four brats. Then one day I got picked up by this little old lady, says she’s from the Good Shepherd’s or some place like that. Next thing I know, I’m in a cage in a pet shop in the Rideau Centre, with a dumb sign around my neck saying “Help! I need a new home!”
So along comes this dame – the do-gooder type, you know. She pokes her finger in and tries to scratch my nose (God, I hate that!); she fills in these forms to adopt me and – get this – she’s turned down! Turns out that she’s married to some guy in the Foreign Service, and the folks here don’t think that’s the right kind of lifestyle for a cat like me, that what I need is ’stability’ (whatever that means). What a joke!
She must have paid them off or something, ’cos soon enough I’m being carted off to their place in New Edinburgh anyway. Everything’s fine for a couple of years. I get to eat President’s Choice No-Name and, when they decide they can trust me, they let me out onto Ivy Crescent. I get to know all the other guys and gals in the neighbourhood, even a few FS cats – Clive, Sam, Lucy, and that fat old tabby at Number 29. Only thing is, I don’t seem to get the same oldurges I used to; Sam reckons it was probably something they did to me when they grabbed me and put me under, that day in the market.
Then one day I figure something’s up. There’s this big truck, carting away all their furniture. Then we go and spend a couple of days at Les Suites. I make a break for it, but the maid’s too fast for me; I gotta work on my escape plans. Next morning, first thing, they prise open my jaws – the indignity of it! They force a pill down me and I’m in the cage again in the back of a Blue Line taxi. It’s out to the airport – I’m feeling pretty groggy by now – and into the hold of a plane. I’m a Frequently Flying Feline now, of course, but can tell you that first flight to Newark was pretty darn scary – it’s dark, cold, noisy as hell, I was feeling sick from the dope and there’s this poodle whimpering away in the corner, saying we’ve all gone to hell.
At Newark they’re dumb enough to let me out for a moment. This time I make it half way across the lounge and I’m heading hell bent for leather for gate 16 when Mistress almost flattens me with a rugby tackle; back in the cage.
This time it’s seven hours, to Bogota. What a place! I’m still feeling dizzy from spending half an hour going around on the carrousel and really feeling the altitude when this guy in military fatigues starts peering into my cage and pokes me in the ribs with an Uzi: what have I come to? And over in the corner I can see her paying off the vet, looking furtive – seems there’s some papers I need but haven’t got. … Welcome to Latin America.
Mistress tells me it’s rough on the streets of Bogota and she may be right: there’s a few things I see from our 19th-floor living-room window that would make the fur on your back rise. And when Master had a reception one night and shut me up in the kitchen all night (said they couldn’t trust me in posh company – what nerve!), all the bodyguards for the ministers were in there, with their radios and their guns, drinking beer from Master’s fridge. They certainly had a few stories to tell! I peed on the shoes of one of them and he almost put me down the garbage chute – they’ve got their own word in Spanish for this, it’s called ’disappearing’ you.
So, three years in a luxury high-rise prison, and I figure I’m finally going to get back to Ottawa, with a few tales to tell Sam and Lucy. But no! He accepts another posting, this time in a place I’ve never even heard of (and where it turns out we don’t even have an Embassy, just some bogus thing called an Office; no status whatsoever). Ten hours on the plane, this time, but get to travel in the cabin. We’re just getting settled and it turns out the guy in the window seat is allergic to cats … ha, ha! They move him on, but notice that the woman in the aisle seat is dressed all in black – I’m moulting by now, and she’s not going to be too happy in a few minutes! Finally the film comes on. This time I’m ready. I make my move. I flex my forelegs and it’s out of the cat carrier and onto the cabin floor. I head for First Class – where else? – and I make it up to row 28 before they snag me. Foiled again.
Into a hotel in Frankfurt for the night, then it’s another eight hours on to this dump called Khartoum. I can’t believe how hot it is! We’re in the Hilton for a month and I daren’t even leave the room – it’s like opening an oven door every time they go out. And they’re all Muslim here, spending half the time fasting; how can a cat be expected to not eat for 12 hours at a time! Finally, we move to the SO. Sure, it’s spacious, and they do let me out (on a leash – they reckon the dogs round here are a bit rough) but I end up absolutely flat on my belly, panting.
The Foreign Service? Let me tell you. It may be a dog’s life – that’s what Mistress keeps saying, anyway – but sure as hell it’s not a cat’s life.
The Persian Cat Exfiltration — by Roger Lucy
This is a tale we heard from the station manager of a western airline, in the aftermath of the Iranian Revolution of February 1979.
Despite the best efforts of the diplomatic community to evacuate their nationals before the Revolution, and despite its disruptions to life, business, not to mention fears that the fall of the Persian Empire would culminate in a bloodbath of foreigners, there were still many westerners left in Iran after Khomeini took power. Nonetheless, the Revolutionary Komiteh (Committee) decreed that all non-diplomatic foreigners were to leave.
Extra flights were laid on to supplement the scheduled flights now resuming service into Mehrabad airport. The embassies’ skeleton staffs of essential (read: expendable) personnel worked flat out to shepherd their remaining nationals out of the country.
One nameless evacuee was a cat fancier and, of course, Persia is renowned for its cats. While in Iran, he had acquired a purebred Persian cat, a beast of ancient and exquisite pedigree, whose bloodlines could reputedly be traced all the way back to the time of Cyrus the Great. The cat’s owner was desperate to take his cat with him, but to do that required, of course, all sorts of paperwork. Despite their desire to see the ferengis’ speedy departure, and the general collapse of most bureaucratic institutions, what passed for the competent authoritie Empire were still insistent that all exit dor and customs paperwork be meticulously require is one thing, to obtain another. Wit full of the daily toll of executed politicia and officials, few were willing to put the to any document that might imply they t any way helpful to a westerner.
By whatever means it took, our intrepid obtained every document, stamp and signature he required. Documents, baggage and cat carrier in hand, he repaired to his country’s embassy compound to spend his last night in Iran, awaiting the convoy of buses that were to take him and his compatriots to Mehrabad Airport. The night was an unquiet one. Virtually the entire arsenal of the Iranian army had been looted and an emancipated population, used to long chants of allah akhbar, marg bar Shah, marg bar Amrika (God is great, death to the Shah, death to America).
In the cold grey smog of dawn, the buses came and took the evacuees to Mehrabad airport, past the chanting trigger-happy mobs, through the check points of all the local komitehs which had sprung up along the route, and at last disgorged them in front of the departure lounge. This was the fiefdom of yet another komiteh, one with the self-appointed task of ensuring that those leaving Iran were not taking anything with them that anyone might conceivably deem an irreplaceable national treasure, or worst still, try to smuggle out Iranian rials, a currency so debased by revolution that, as my East German colleague observed, people were even willing to exchange them for Ostmarks.
Through all this our cat-man forged undaunted, until he finally reached the check-in counter, handing baggage and cat cage into the care of the airline. Unencumbered at last, he proceeded through several more passport, customs and security checks, knowing that the hardest part was over. The station manager was a good friend of his and would ensure that his prize moggie would smoothly make all its connections so that they would soon be reunited in a land where peace, order and good government still meant something.
Well, man proposeth and airline baggage handlers disposeth. The cat was in its cage, atop a baggage cart wending its way to the aircraft. The cart hit a pothole, the cage bounced off, hit the ground and sprung open. The cat shot from its cage and vanished as cats are wont to do when cat cages are around. A couple of baggage handlers saw this and were devastated. At heart, Persians are a generous people and, if ignorant of the preceding saga, they did know that some cat lover would be very disappointed if all that appeared at the other end was an empty cage. Of the cat nothing could be seen, and her subsequent fate is unknown, but it was not a good time in Iran for those of Imperial heritage be they human or feline.
Fortunately, there is no shortage of cats in Mehrabad airport; in fact, the place is famous for them. They infest the place, scavenging rodents, food scraps and the odd unwary passenger. They bear little resemblance to those simpering long-haired Persian cats you see in toilet paper ads.
These beasts are big, they are verminous, to call them feral would imply that at some point in the distant past their ancestors had once been domesticated. One of them happened to be lounging beneath the wing of an Iran Air jet, and with great skill and dexterity, and without suffering fatal lacerations, the baggage handlers were able to snatch it up and stuff it in the cat cage. And off the airport cat went, to its new life in the west.
Our source could not tell what the cat fancier’s reaction was when he opened the cage at his destination to greet what he thought was his cherished pedigreed pet. Some things are best left unknown.
View the original scanned pages →
Originally published in bout de papier, Vol. 18, No. 2 (2001) — Summer 2001 // Été 2001, pp. 27–28. Read the rest of this issue →
