Vasily Vasilyevich Catov Yevgeny Bukhin (bio) Translated by Nora Seligman Favorov (bio) The cat was a light orange, as if he'd just emerged from a sea of sunflowers and made off with their bright colors, the same way he occasionally made off with the household frankfurters if his owners let their guard down. It wasn't that the cat was greedy. He was just big, and he needed more nourishment than your average-sized cat. Scientists tell us that even the sun has its spots. There were also spots on the cat's silky, sunny-orangish fur, and these spots were white. Some were on his back paws, and one tiny one on his nose, when raised sunward, dissolved into the general brightness. The cat pointed his carrot-straight tail up into the air, as if he were flaunting his manliness for all to see. At birth, the cat had been given an ordinary name, one very common among his fellow felines: Vasily. He had two owners: Varvara Mikhailovna, a matronly personage whom Vasily regarded with restrained respect, and the little girl Katya, who was of school age. With Katya, he was on a more-or-less friendly footing. The only problem was that the little girl was always trying to make Vasily's long, sunward-pointed tail even longer, which he found very insulting. Try as he might, he was not always successful at escaping the tenacious hands of the little girl Katya. The remaining members of the family were temporarily away, working on Five-Year-Plan construction projects and hastening the arrival of a bright future. The cat Vasily barely remembered them. Before the revolution, the apartment where the cat Vasily, the little girl Katya, and Varvara Mikhailovna lived had belonged to members of the exploiting classes, but due to the turbulent revolutionary events shaping the course of world history, nothing was known of its former owners. If the residents of the communal apartment where the cat Vasily lived had traveled by time machine to a distant past when the apartment was occupied by members of a class inimical to the working masses, they would have frozen on the threshold dumbfounded. The rooms would have recalled the vast halls of the Alexander III Museum, an impression heightened by the portraits of the family's noble ancestors hanging on the walls. [End Page 15] However, the fiery wave of revolution that swept across the length and breadth of the Russian Empire had brought the power of these oppressors to an end. To address the pressing housing shortage, the space had been divided into two communal apartments with a common vestibule. The sprawling rooms with fretted ceilings and elaborately patterned parquet were fitted with wooden partitions. Here, it is helpful to recall the special-occasion candy boxes that had once been lavished on the people around the March 8 International Women's Day holiday; these boxes followed an analogous principle of division into compartments, and each contained a fluffy, whitish-pinkish confection sold under the name "Zephyr." After the Seventeenth Party Congress, which went down in history as the Congress of Victors, the people began to be granted these Zephyr special-occasion candy boxes in conjunction with all Soviet holidays. Later, as the welfare of workers improved, the apartment's wooden partitions were covered in sheets of plasterboard and pasted with brightly patterned floral wallpaper. Workers and office personnel from the Red Putilov Works took up residence in the compartments. When Comrade Kirov, a faithful brother-in-arms to Comrade Stalin, was heinously murdered in Leningrad, the factory was renamed the Kirov Works. Living with his owners in one of these compartments, the cat Vasily enjoyed a blissful existence and assumed that it would continue throughout eternity. As if to confirm this assumption, the bells atop the Peter and Paul Cathedral chimed sweetly every day, a sound that echoed, in almost inaudible harmony, off the glass of the tall arched windows in every compartment. And when the Peter and Paul Fortress cannon fired at noon, the glass quivered in fright, and the cat Vasily knew to return home, as feeding time was approaching. It was usually the little girl...
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Feb 23, 2021
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