After that day she changed a few things in the apartment.
She didn’t slam doors. She didn’t suddenly drag the vacuum cleaner into the middle of the room. When someone came to visit, she said it with a new sense of self-awareness:
– Wait a minute, but slowly, because of the cats.
At first it seemed strange to her to speak so openly about someone’s delicacy.
Then she thought about how long she had lived with too little gentleness.
About six weeks after they were introduced, she had to take Anka to the vet because he kept shaking his left ear. Nothing serious, it later turned out. But that morning, Marta saw for the first time what it meant to Arl when his brother disappeared from sight.
As soon as she took the carrier out of the closet, the apartment fell silent.
It didn’t calm down. It went silent.
The kind of silence in which every little sound sounds like a warning.
Anka allowed himself to be placed in the carrier with outraged dignity. Arlo stood in the kitchen doorway, too close to appear calm, too far away to react.
When Marta closed the apartment door behind her, she didn’t hear a single sound from inside.
This was almost worse.
The visit lasted less than an hour. Just irritation, cleaning fluid, nothing more. Despite this, Marta was back sooner than she’d like to admit.
When she opened the door, Arlo was standing right behind it.
Not nervously. Not loudly.
He looked first at her, then at the carrier, then at Anka. Only when his brother left did his whole body seem to collapse back into itself.
Anka pretended the whole thing was a scandalous inconvenience. But when Arlo pressed his muzzle against his shoulder, he stopped and let him have it.
Marta crouched down next to him.
“Easy,” she said quietly, not really knowing which of the three she was talking to.
In the following weeks, something in the apartment softened.
Not the furniture. It was the same. The couch was still worn, the carpet unpleasant, the kitchen cabinets old. The way Marta moved through these rooms had changed.
She no longer went through them just to do something.
Sometimes she stopped.
She sat down without immediately thinking about her next chore. She left the light on, even though she had previously almost automatically turned off every switch behind her.
There were evenings when she sat on the couch, Anka at her hip, Arlo at her feet, and for the first time in a long time she didn’t feel like she had to spend the rest of her life frugally.
Then came December.
She used to love Christmas. Not for the presents or the big gatherings. More for the feeling that the world slowed down for a few days. After the divorce, not much of that remained.
The year before, she spent Christmas Eve with a sandwich and turned on the TV just so the apartment wouldn’t be completely silent.
This year she bought a small string of lights on her way home from work.
No big deal. No Christmas tree. No baking sheet. No fresh start with fanfare.
Just warm window light.
As she unpacked the lights, Anka sat on the center of them, as if to personally ensure that nothing was hung without his supervision. Arlo watched the cord as if it were a particularly suspicious animal.
Marta laughed so hard she had to sit on a kitchen chair.
Later that evening someone rang the doorbell.
She opened the door and saw her neighbor across the street. Until then, they had only bowed to each other. A slender woman with short gray hair and the cautious friendliness often found in people who have been alone for too long.
She was holding a plate in her hands.
“I made too many vanilla croissants,” she said. “And over the past few weeks, I’ve sometimes seen two cats in your window.”
Marta still didn’t know why that particular sentence moved her so much.
Maybe because there was nothing significant about it. No curiosity, no shoe-picking. Just the simple fact that someone had noticed life outside her window.
She invited her neighbor inside.
The woman initially lingered by the door, like someone unsure if they’re truly welcome. Then Anka came in, glanced at her, looked at his plate, and clearly decided the guest could be admitted conditionally.
Arlo stayed a bit to the side.
They were drinking coffee. A neighbor told them that her husband had died three years earlier. Marta mentioned, almost casually, that her marriage was over. Neither of them made a big deal out of it.
Maybe that’s why it was good.
At one point, Arlo jumped onto the couch and lay down next to Anka, as if in his own language, agreeing to the evening. The neighbor watched for a moment, then said:
– Sometimes you need another creature to keep the pain from taking over the entire room.
Marta nodded.
There was no need to say more.
Since then, the neighbor has been ringing the doorbell occasionally. Once with soup. Once with a piece of cake. Another time simply because she found a small felt mouse outside her building, clearly made for cats, and decided it « definitely deserves a good home. »
From the beginning, Anka pretended that the mouse was beneath his dignity.
At night he carried it stealthily around the living room.
Just before Christmas, something happened that shocked Marta more than she expected.
She came home from work, opened the door, and immediately felt something was wrong. Not much. Just minor things.
A bowl of water was partially under the table. A pillow was on the floor. And Anka didn’t come to the door.
Arlo stood in the hallway, tense as a wire.
“Where is he?” Marta asked immediately.
Arlo turned and ran a few steps. He stopped, looked at her, and continued walking.
Marta followed him into the bedroom.
Anka was sitting under the bed.
Not deep. Only partially hidden. But it was so unusual for him that Marcie immediately felt cold. She fell to her knees and called his name.
He didn’t leave.
He just stared at her. His eyes were narrowed. His left front paw was slightly tucked up.
She didn’t need anything more.
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