If They Could Only Understand Us...

By Irina V. Zaslavsky

Micky is a Siamese cat. His owners left him behind in Moscow when they went on a long business trip to New York City, taking with them their son and a pet dog whom Micky loved so much he nearly died missing them. After Russian customs officer twice refused to allow him leave the country to join his family, he decided to get there on his own. Running away from home, he went to the local train station to learn how to get to New York and from that moment, his adventure began. During his journey he met many different people, cats, and dogs. From those encounters, he came to the conclusion that people could solve, or even avoid, a lot of their problems if they could understand animals.

• Language: English
• Publisher: AuthorHouse
• Release date: Jul 29, 2019
• ISBN: 9781728320809

Irina V. Zaslavsky

Irina V. Zaslavsky, has her PhD in demography from Moscow State University where she worked as a researcher and lecturer, and always dreamed of writing. In the 90s she became a US citizen. She published several articles in newspapers and later started to write short stories. The “if they could only understand us…” is her first novel. Irina and her husband live in Cleveland OH with a rescued American bulldog and a stray cat.

Book preview

IF THEY

COULD ONLY

UNDERSTAND

US…

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IRINA V. ZASLAVSKY

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AuthorHouse™

1663 Liberty Drive

Bloomington, IN 47403

www.authorhouse.com

Phone: [phone]

© 2019 Irina V. Zaslavsky. All rights reserved.

Illustrator: Konstantin Moshkin.

copywrite number: 1-6288283291

No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted by any means without the written permission of the author.

Published by AuthorHouse 01/17/2020

ISBN: 978-1-7283-2082-3 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-7283-2081-6 (hc)

ISBN: 978-1-7283-2080-9 (e)

Library of Congress Control Number: 2019910605

Any people depicted in stock imagery provided by Getty Images are models,

and such images are being used for illustrative purposes only.

Certain stock imagery © Getty Images.

Because of the dynamic nature of the Internet, any web addresses or links contained in this book may have changed since publication and may no longer be valid. The views expressed in this work are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the publisher, and the publisher hereby disclaims any responsibility for them.

CONTENTS

61828.png Moscow Courtyard

61828.png Kiev Railway Station

61828.png The Express Moscow-Kiev

61828.png Kiev

61828.png Three Men and a Cat in the Same Boat

61828.png Odessa

61828.png Port

61828.png Ship

61828.png Cruise

61828.png Cathouse

61828.png Istanbul

61828.png New York

61828.png Manhattan

61828.png Central Park

To my son Alexander

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MOSCOW COURTYARD

"M icky! You stay at home!"

Olya grabbed the Siamese in her arms and put him on the low vanity in front of the mirror. The girl sounded like a police sergeant escorting the criminal to an interrogation. Micky tried to jump over her leg, but she gently shoved him back inside the apartment and shut the door. He sat down on the rug and stared at the door, upholstered with artificial leather. The lower corner of the upholstery was ripped. When he was young, he naively thought that by tearing it, he could escape from the apartment and go outside to the courtyard.

Micky sighed heavily and turned around. He saw his own reflection in a large mirror on the wall: a sad Siamese cat, sitting before a closed door. The room beyond had a balcony, from which he was sure he could escape and run away from the apartment. He walked to the door and pushed it several times with his front paws, trying to open it, but nothing happened. As he had expected, Olya had locked this door. This escape route also was closed off. Why is Olya such a bore? he thought.

He felt all his energy drain from him and looked again at the reflection in the mirror. A gloomy, deflated cat looked back at him. The blue eyes on his dark-brown face were lifeless, and their empty gaze showed no interest in living. The cat’s whiskers drooped with his mood, as if he were a very old cat. Yes, I feel like a decrepit cat, although I’m only six years old. Certainly, anyone would look old when they are unhappy. And how could a cat be happy, staying in a locked apartment alone all day, instead of roaming the courtyard like any normal cat would do? What’s wrong with walking a little in the fresh air? I am not going to run away, and I know how to come home. A lot of my friends are waiting for me outside. What am I supposed to do all day?

The sound of Olya’s hurried footsteps on the staircase died down. She is probably talking with the concierge. A long minute went by before the door of the main entrance to the building thundered shut, echoing throughout the stairwell. Silence fell all around him, as if the whole apartment were a refrigerator that he was locked inside. He had once been locked in the refrigerator, so he would remember that silence forever. Better not to recall it.

Now he would have nothing to do but wait for Olya to come back in the evening. I simply cannot understand why she does not let me go outside. The weather? It’s nice. Fleas? Where did she see fleas? And why would a car hit me? What a mean girl! She has ruined my mood for the entire day.

He again took a deep, sorrowful breath and pondered how to fill up this day and not feel so abandoned and lonely. He thought about watching TV and trotted along the long hallway to the kitchen, with a weak hope that maybe Olya had left the TV on.

Naturally, she had turned off the TV. She must have a fire phobia; she never leaves home without unplugging all the cords from the outlets. Nothing ever came of it. He recalled that several days ago, Olya had rushed back home like crazy after leaving for work, just to check whether she had turned off the light in the bathroom.

She behaves like an old woman who’s afraid of everything—thieves, fires, floods. She is only nineteen. What will she be like in her thirties? No, she will never change.

A day in the empty flat was usually very long and boring. Micky jumped up onto the kitchen table and sat down in front of the dark TV screen. He wondered what a lonely cat like him could do in an empty apartment that didn’t even have mice, cockroaches, or flies to catch. Eventually, he concluded that only the TV could save him from chronic depression. Even the news broadcast from around the world, which was usually pretty dull, suddenly seemed very interesting to him.

The good times when he could watch TV ended when his masters left Moscow to go on a business trip to America. Unlike Olya, they always turned the TV on when they left the house, so he had never become bored. He never felt lonely watching TV. When soccer or hockey was on, he could even participate. Lying comfortably on the top of the TV, he would try to catch a ball on the screen with his front paw before the players passed it through the goalposts. It was like hunting for a mouse. Sadly, the sports programs were not very popular with his owners, and he was rarely left alone to watch them. But some of the other programs weren’t so bad. He never noticed time passing when he watched his favorite programs about travel, science, discovery, or especially animals from around the world. He found these programs very educational and got a lot of useful information from them for everyday life.

For example, yesterday, during the dinner, a cheerful man with a thin moustache talked about traditional medicine and plant remedies. Even Olya was very interested and listened to him without making any mocking comments.

Micky looked longingly at the dark TV screen that reflected a white tablecloth, a blue cup, and a sitting cat with a long white neck and brownish ears and legs. He squinted at the cup beside him and then at its reflection on the screen. From a distance, the cup looked much smaller, as did a crystal plate with a cake on the other side of the table. On the screen, the golden crust of the cake looked dark, as if it might be burned. He stretched out and took a small bite of the cake. The crispy morsel tasted strongly of bitter apples and butter. His mouth began to water. He knew he shouldn’t eat something so sweet. Olya had again put too much sugar in the cake. He twisted his paw, trying to get rid of the sweet taste, and jumped down to drink some water.

The water in his bowl was warm and tasteless. The boiled fish in the dish next to it was still hot, as it had only just been cooked. He would eat it later. He looked at the tray holding his bowls and took a deep breath. Nowadays, it was safe to leave his food on the floor. Not so long ago, his fish would not have lasted on the floor for even a second. His dog, his small dog, or sobachenka, as everyone had called her, would grab it and gobble it down in the blink of an eye. After his owners took his dog to America, Micky’s food tray was moved from the windowsill to the floor between the cabinet and the sink. Olya needed more space on the windowsill for her stuff. He drank more water and sniffed the boiled cod. It had a strong odor of bay leaves. Disappointed, he sat beside the plate, wondering why Olya always added this herb when she boiled fish for him. With an anguished sigh, he decided to punish her by not eating her fish. He wasn’t hungry anyway.

Micky shook himself and dried his whiskers, not knowing what to do. Lacking any ideas, he decided to sleep in his personal place on the windowsill, where he liked to nap or sit, looking out. He was almost ready to jump up when he realized that his favorite pillow was occupied again. Olya had piled her textbooks and even some bones, which she had brought home from the university to study human anatomy, right on his pillow. She had failed her anatomy class at the university, and so all summer long, she had been studying the terminology and structure of the human skeleton to prepare for the next exam in early September. Every evening until midnight, she would sit in the kitchen and study this important subject. She claimed that it was easy to study in the kitchen because she could drink hot green tea without taking a break to boil the water. She worked so hard that by now even Micky, who had no plans of becoming a doctor, had learned the Latin names of all the bones.

Last night, she had studied the human head, so she had brought home a skull, or cranium in Latin. It now rested on the windowsill on Micky’s favorite spot. No one but Olya had ever put stuff on his spot. More than anything, he hated it when she put human bones on his pillow. They left the awful smell of bleach on his pillow, and he would have to knock it to the floor until she figured out that it needed to be laundered. This morning, like the one before, she had been running late and couldn’t spare a minute to move the pile of books, notes, and pencils from the sill, leaving barely any room for him to sit and look out the window.

There was a little space on the windowsill next to a potted cactus. He could fit himself there, but the cactus, with its sharp spines, was a very dangerous plant. If he so much as brushed against it, its prickles would stab painfully into his skin. Micky needed to sit near a cactus only once to remember forever its spines. In his opinion, the universal sign for danger should simply be a picture of a cactus. He would never set foot on the balcony again if Olya set this cactus at the door.

Olya had placed the human skull in the corner of the windowsill, next to a potted geranium. There was quite enough room for him between the flower and the skull, so he jumped up on the sill, avoiding the detached yellow lower jawbone balancing on the edge of the sill. The skull looked pitiful. Its original owner must have worn this skull for many years, probably more than a hundred. Only one dark fang remained on its upper jaw. The skull was so smooth that the shape of the window was reflected plainly on its temple.

Micky sat beside the skull and dared to smell it. To his surprise, the cranium did not smell human. It carried a lot of different scents, but the odor of food that strongly penetrated the bones had almost replaced the scent of medicine. Students like Olya probably studied its anatomy in the kitchen, while boiling or frying fish, potatoes, or cabbage or even making onion soup. Maybe it was a tradition among the medical students to study in the kitchen and leave their stuff there, but Olya did have her own room for studying.

The edge of the eye cavern of the cranium smelled like fresh flowers. Inside the eye socket, he found some geranium petals. He sneezed several times to clear his nose and moved closer to the potted plant. During the night, it had developed several new buds. Their tender pink petals turned to the window, searching for the sun that, after a long August morning, still looked like a small golden coin in the sky. Its rays did not have the strength to drill through the city’s smog to warm the new blossoms.

The cry of crows from outside drew his attention from the skull. Two gray-black crows sat on the fire escape of a building at the opposite end of their yard. Every day during the previous week, the crows had held a class on this ladder, exactly when the clock on the Kiev Railway Station tower struck nine times. The fire escape ladder looked like an exclamation mark on the brick wall of the ten-story building. The crows used it to train their young. At the end of the summer, they came here to teach the youngsters to fly down from the heights of the ladder. The lesson started from the first rung of the ladder and then progressed gradually, step by step, to the very top and then to the roof, from where they dived straight into the sky. The young birds learned how to master the height and maneuver in the air, and they trained their wings to launch from the different altitudes.

Everyone usually passed this course very easily, but one particular young bird was especially slow and scared. During the entire week, he had advanced only four steps up, and his poor teacher, a thin bird with dark beak, almost crawled out of its feathers, trying to force this youngster to jump up from the ladder. The student acted like a complete dummy. Yesterday, it had mastered only one step and refused to move up. After each step, it cried brokenheartedly until the teacher gave it a treat.

These crows behave just like people, Micky thought. My owners allowed their son, Shorty, to watch TV only after he showed them that he had finished his homework. TV was his reward, just like a piece of bread is for that bird.

This morning, the little bird displayed obvious progress. They started from the first rung. The teacher jumped up on the rung above, looked down, and, with a firm croak, ordered the bird to follow him up. The student looked up at him but then turned his yellow beak down, pointing to where a building concierge had scattered breadcrumbs on the pavement. The demanding cry of his teacher prompted the young bird to move up quickly. The teacher immediately jumped to the next rung above and, with the same tone, commanded the young bird to follow him. As soon as the youngster reached the next step, he cried out as if he were a winner announcing his victory to the world. With every cry, he opened his yellow beak and flapped his wings, demanding a reward. They accomplished four rungs in this manner, but then the young bird refused to take the fifth one; he no longer listened to his teacher. All his attention was focused on the scattered pieces of bread below, and the pigeons were quickly snapping them up. The teacher was probably getting hungry too. He flew down to have a snack, picked up a small piece of bread, and delivered it into the young bird’s hungry mouth.

The seventh rung was the last one the student conquered. He refused to continue, despite the teacher’s urgent tone, demanding that he obey and press on. Sitting alone on a rung, with his yellow beak down, the youngster cried so pitifully that Micky felt sorry for him. In Micky’s opinion, it was unfair to force the chick to fly on an empty stomach. What kind of teacher is this? Doesn’t he understand that a student with an empty stomach can’t absorb the knowledge?

The sound of traffic interrupted the professor’s instructions. At first, it was unclear what he’d said, but after he repeated himself several times in a hoarse voice, the poor young bird flew up to the next rung of the ladder. The monstrous teacher immediately, without any provocation, jumped over and settled on the step above, again demanding that the student to move up. But instead of jumping up, the student, with a harsh scream, plummeted like a stone onto the iron roof of a cellar entrance below and sat there, frozen, with his yellow beak opened wide in silent protest.

Two gray crows appeared out of nowhere and gracefully landed on the ground next to the scattered food for birds. They slowly hopped over to the flock of pigeons having breakfast, picked up the biggest pieces of wet bread, and flew with them to the roof of the cellar entrance, where the young bird was sitting motionless. They stuffed the bread into his yellow mouth, said something to the teacher, and flew away with their youngster. The teacher flew away in silence.

When they disappeared, Micky sighed with relief, as if he had been the one taking flying lesson. He felt tired and was ready for a nap, but a loud bark from Chapa announced that she was out for a walk. Chapa was a very noisy, medium-sized black poodle who loved to chase pigeons. As soon as the front door opened, she dashed from the porch of the neighboring apartment building and attacked the flock of pigeons having breakfast.

Masha ran after her, skipping merrily along a driveway. Masha was a friend of Shorty’s—they went to the same school. When Masha was six years old, she wanted to be a ballerina and became a picky eater to try to stay thin. Her grandmother had other plans for her. She sent her to study French and bought her Chapa. She thought walking the dog would give Masha an appetite. It didn’t help.

Hopping on her toothpick-thin legs, Masha headed straight to the swing set at the children’s playground, not noticing that Chapa, having scattered the birds, was eating wet bread. Most of all, Masha loved to swing. Swinging for her was like a ballerina’s morning exercise. She could spend hours on the swing, and her faithful little dog, instead of walking around and sniffing things, would sit patiently, watching Masha fly high above the trees.

Aunt Dusya, the concierge from their building, said that Masha’s family was going to Israel, where Masha would serve in the army. What kind of a soldier could such a girl make? Slim and small, she looked like the first green sprout of grass in a pot on a windowsill. Micky couldn’t imagine Masha with a Kalashnikov rifle in her hands. She could hardly hold a toy gun when she played with Shorty and his friends.

Micky’s heart sank as he thought about Shorty; it was almost the same way he thought about his sobachenka. How he longed for them! He took a deep breath and prepared to take a nap, but suddenly, he heard the balcony door open. He jumped down and ran into the living room. Had Olya forgotten to lock the balcony door?

A gust of morning wind had opened the door to the balcony. The cool air filled the living room with the odors of the street. His heart was bursting with joyful hope. He twisted and dashed straight through the forbidden room to the balcony.

The courtyard had seemed like a vast wild forest when he had walked through it, but now, from the eighth-floor height, it looked like a small, cozy square. The narrow driveway across the yard connected his buildings to Masha’s. In the center of the yard was the children’s playground, surrounded by lilac bushes and trees. The dense tops of chestnut trees completely blocked out the swing, so he could not see Masha. He could only guess that Masha was still swinging by the rhythmic creak of the chains and Chapa’s joyful barks.

Below, in front of the entrance to his building, a yardman was sweeping the sidewalk. His broom picked up a bunch of dry leaves and dragged them along the pavement. They rustled in disapproval, as if they did not want to be piled up. Some of them escaped the birch twigs of the man’s broom. The light breeze coming from the street grabbed and scattered them around, compelling the yardman to come back and sweep them again and again. From the eighth floor, the man looked like a dwarf.

A loud bang made Micky twist. He raised his head and saw that the frame of a small window had dropped down and was now shut. This small window was not far from their balcony. Every floor of their building had a window located in the corner half-floor above the balconies; it provided light and fresh air for the building’s staircase landings. A janitor usually wedged a stick under a frame to keep the window open. Now the stick had fallen down, or someone had taken it away.

This window had been opened when Micky stepped out on the balcony. He also had seen through the kitchen window that it had been open all morning, and while he was watching for yardman like an idiot, someone had shut it. He hadn’t taken advantage of this opportunity! I would be strolling outside now, if I had seized the chance immediately. This open window was his only way to freedom. The loss of this last hope brought him acute anguish. Tears even came to his eyes.

He put his head through the balcony’s bars and leaned out to check the window of the floor below. It was open but only slightly, leaving an extremely narrow space for landing. He did not like this window. Last time, when he tried to jump on that narrow windowsill, he’d lost his grip and almost plummeted to the ground. Fortunately, that time he’d managed to make a leap in the air and land on the balcony below.

He threw a last glance at the slammed window above, took a deep, sorrowful breath, and was about to jump down when suddenly, just like in a movie, he saw the closest window was opened by a hand in an enormous orange rubber glove. As it pushed up the frame, another hand in the matching orange glove propped it open with a rather thin wooden stick and then disappeared. Now, a thin plank kept the frame of the window wide open.

Everyone recognized these rubber gloves—the cleaning lady wore them when she was washing the stairs. She usually opened every floor’s window to ventilate the landing.

The smell of bleach filled the balcony. The odor spreading from the window was so repulsive that Micky sneezed several times, but in that moment, he would happily have smelled it a thousand times over if it meant the window was really open. His heart pumped fast from excitement; he had gotten the freedom and independence he so desired. Instead of spending all day alone in an empty apartment, as he had done the entire week before, he now had a chance to roam outside all day!

He had no doubt that he would make it to the window, although he understood that this trick was dangerous. It had been fatal for the cat that lived here before him. It had happened many years ago, long before Micky was even born. Olya had told him this story many times, explaining why she did not allow him to go out on the balcony. She was scared that he, who had used this way to escape several times, could kill himself too. For this reason, she always kept this balcony door locked. When the nights were very hot, Olya slept in this room with the balcony door open, but she expelled him from the room, as she had done last night. He’d had to sleep on the floor in the hallway under the door, waiting for opportunity to sneak into the room. How had she forgotten to check whether the door was locked? That’s what she gets for studying all night and not getting enough sleep!

The strong blast of wind swept through the balcony toward the small window. Micky froze, fearing that the frame would fall shut, but the stick held up, and the frame remained open. He had to hurry to take advantage of the moment and escape before it was too late. He flexed his body and, quickly, without thinking about the risk, leaped up on the narrow banister of the balcony. Balancing on the iron rail and never looking down, he quickly picked the shortest way toward the window and calculated his landing. It was quite a narrow space between the frame and the stick that supported it. He had to jump straight under the frame onto the inner windowsill. The most important part was not touching the thin stick holding the frame half-open. If he touched the stick even slightly, the heavy frame would drop down and push him, plummeting him down to the ground from the eight-story height.

He gathered his four paws together in one spot; then, with all his strength, he pushed his hind legs off the railing and took off into the air like a bird. Avoiding the unstable stick holding up the frame, he landed on the inner part of the windowsill and moved quickly to the wide rim for better footing.

The stairwell smelled like an animal hospital. The new cleaning lady always added bleach to the water when she washed the staircase to disinfect it. She was obsessed with hygiene. From the narrow windowsill he could see her strong hands flashing back and forth, pushing the bleach-soaked mop. Her long industrious arms reminded him of a wind turbine he had seen on TV. He decided to wait for a while until she moved down to the next landing.

Everyone called the new janitor Raya. She was the yardman’s wife. Two years ago, the yardman had returned from vacationing in his native village with a new wife. This was she. Despite having lived in such big city as Moscow for quite some time, her attitude toward the local cats was still the same as in her village. She hated domestic cats and dogs because, in her opinion, they were useless; all they did was shit, make a mess, and spread fleas, worms, and other parasites. She used to tell Aunt Dusya, the concierge, that if animals did not catch mice or give milk or wool, or if they couldn’t be eaten, they had no right to exist. She said that dogs and cats in their village worked hard, just like people, but in the city, they were parasites themselves because they did nothing but eat and foul the area.

Tall and bony, this woman was the complete opposite of her short and round husband—and not only in appearance. She was constantly dissatisfied and evil, while to her husband was always cheerful and friendly. Before she came from that Godforsaken village, he had lived alone with a fluffy little dog, named Zhuchka, who was very kind and always wagged her tail joyfully when she met Micky and other dogs.

Aunt Dusya said that Raya missed her native home, and this was why she was sad and angry. In Micky’s opinion, this woman was sad and angry from her first breath and therefore hated the whole world. Her eyes, small and quick like a rat’s, burned with hatred when she saw the four-legged residents of their building. The first time he ran into her on the stairs, she hit him with a wet rag. He assumed it had happened by accident while she was washing the floor, but the next time they met, the woman convinced him otherwise by threatening him with her broom. He immediately learned that it would be better to stay out of her sight.

The residents of the apartment building were afraid of her too, possibly feeling guilty for having useless domestic animals, so they tried to avoid meeting her and never went on walks with their dogs while she was working. Aunt Dusya asked her to clean the staircase at the time of day when most of inhabitants had already gone to work or out shopping.

Leaning against the windowsill, Micky waited until Raya had finished washing the stairs and had gone to the next floor. He patiently listened to the forceful movement of the wet rag, and as soon as he heard that she had relocated the bucket to the floor below, he soundlessly crawled along the wall on the wet floor to check where she was. The loud slaps of the wet rag on the stone steps were so violent that he stopped at once. He backed away and sat down behind the elevator shaft.

The swishing sound of the Raya’s mop reminded him of the sea’s waves. He watched the waves once on the Baltic Sea during high tide, where the waves hit the shore with tremendous strength and crawled back, as if asking for forgiveness. Except this woman would never back down and apologize.

After jumping on the concrete windowsill, his front paws burned as though he had landed on a hot stove. He had just begun to massage them when his keen ears caught the soft flick of a door’s lock. He halted, stretching his neck to listen. The sound was quite familiar; it was the lock of their neighbor’s door. Recently, his wife had lost the keys to their apartment and a locksmith had installed a new lock that was almost soundless, compared to the previous one. The door across the hall from their flat opened. If Micky’s thinking was right, he might have a chance to come down in an elevator and not have to wait for Raya to finish cleaning the staircase.

This neighbor called himself a night owl because he liked to work during the night and then slept throughout most of the morning. He said that he hated mornings because all of his life, he’d had to wake up in the darkness, before sunrise, and go to work feeling sleepy. Eventually, he earned a position that allowed him to get up when the sun greeted him.

Micky loved this man and fully agreed with him that the hustle and bustle of the early morning ruined the entire day. He considered his next-door neighbor to be the best human being in their apartment building. From Micky’s point of view, this man belonged to that unique group of people who had the ability to understand the souls of animals and sympathized with them. Micky thought that this man was somehow a part of the animal world.

The man sincerely loved Micky too. Actually, he loved all living things, even the cockroaches running around in his kitchen. He never crushed them and never used chemicals to exterminate them. When they became too nasty and occupied the breadbasket on his dining table, he caught them with a glass jar and emptied it from the balcony—from the eighth floor! But they always survived. Some of them went to live in a spa salon on the first floor of their building, but the majority returned to the man’s kitchen.

With a few big steps, the neighbor hurriedly crossed the landing and was just about to step on the flight of stairs when he must have sensed that someone was watching him. He raised his eyes and saw Micky on the top step of the flight going up. In their building, the elevator stops were located between the floors. The man’s foot froze above the edge of the step, as though someone had disconnected the battery moving him forward. His shiny black shoe reflected a