The Way the Peonies Bloomed in Springtime
Yes, it was the year Camille died, but it is the cats that I remember. White, almost shapeless, as shadows, descending upon our apartments like ghosts in a fog, slender, still, and pale, we did not know why they arrived, where they came from, why they chose our apartment (of all places) to settle. They had no master, and behaved in the fashion of masterless cats, fearful and aggressive, or else unaccountably tame and demure, running when we came too near, sniffing our fingertips, eager, content. It was not a few days after the long passing of winter when the first of them began to arrive, a matron and her kittens. They looked at us, well, at Amy, steady and indifferent, though, when she approached, the cats hissed and bared their slender teeth, and she knew to withdraw.
That spring was calm. Winter had been thick and steady and the last of the snows had vanished. There was to be little rain, though the ground was rich and well-watered from winter. Amy was new at the apartments. Our gardener had left and she had moved in and assumed the gardener’s duties. She had a ground floor apartment, with a door onto the courtyard, next to Camille’s. She wore her hair in a knot and her clothes were crisp as bed sheets, and as soon as the snow had thawed and the air had warmed a little she began planting peonies and tulips in the garden. The first time she spoke to Camille was the day he asked if he could draw her, and she sat still and quiet on a bench beneath the quaking tree while he sketched her in charcoal in his black-bound book. For a while, they didn’t speak, save to say, “Hello,” in the mornings, as they stood and the cats rubbed against their legs.
The cats became Mr. Dragonfly’s obsession. When they first arrived in a trickle, he gazed at them with scientific vigor and when they arrived in waves and masses he could be seen in his apartment window with a notebook feverishly tallying the cats he did not recognize. He was a dealer and collector of coins and stamps. His currency was hypothesis. Some mornings we awoke and went outside and found him on his balcony with his hands wrapped around a cold cup of coffee, his notebook by his side, fingers bent and cold tabulating facts. He had been up all night. He stood by the railing, watching, thinking.
As the spring wore on the buds on the boughs unfurled and each day seemed to bring with it new calm and vigor. Camille brought out a book to Amy one morning as she tilled the soil and they spent the day together on the bench examining the sketches he had made of her from his apartment. She saw herself in pastel, ink and charcoal, standing, kneeling, her gloved hands buried in the earth or parting branches for trimming. Each hair had been delicately rendered, her face’s freckles brought forth as pebbles seen under water. Camille smiled, weak, and frail.
“They must expand from the apartments, in wave,” Mr. Dragonfly deduced, “Like a flood, through the streets. We don’t feed them. We don’t have mice. There are no birds. What do they eat? What do they drink? They must go out, then.” He spent nights outside, maintained a careful count, his eyes on the cats as they wandered on the eaves and balconies, up the trees and under the bushes in the dim glow of porch-lights, eyes ablaze with analysis, intent, and the lights of his house on well into the morning, when, standing on his balcony, he (blurry-eyed but vigilant) proclaimed, “It can't be! The cats—not a single one of them has left the courtyard in the last ten days!”
The afternoons warmed like wet stone in sunshine and the grass sprouted in the cracks of the courtyard stones, the clouds as cold and beautiful as dew-soaked leaves on a misty morn. Amy began to pet the cats, those that would approach her, and even a few that didn’t, though they scratched and bit and she collected many cuts across her arms and hands. Camille held them, her hands, looking, examining, and in the weeks that followed he brought out sketches of her hands and her arms covered in cuts, and then sketches of her, in her entirety, each fresh cut in its proper place on her arm. She laughed at his fixation, wiping away a few stray hairs from her blouse in a single, delicate motion.
Dragonfly's determination mounted. And, aware of the stealth of cats and their ability to slip away without being seen or heard, reappearing with equal silence, he began interrogating shop owners ten blocks in all directions to see if they had been leaving out food for the animals. They listened, they listened to him closely, as he described the cats, the tide of cats, and they paused and thought and then said that, now that they came to think of it, they had not seen, or heard, any cats in a very long time, and, they added, none of the cats they had ever known matched the description of the unanimous white animals that populated the courtyard. There were dogs, though, that ate everything left in the alleyways. The dogs had always lived in the alleyways, and, (many of the shop owners thought) would be there for a very long time in the future.
The garden sprouted. The green shoots broke through the ground and began to grow thick and full, though flowerless. Amy filled the garden with her diligent presence, and it never grew so lush as it did that year. Camille now left his apartment to do his sketches, sitting on the garden bench beneath the cat-laden willow, glancing up, catching a faint and fleeting smile from Amy as she went about tending the soil, her face half-hidden by foliage, laying down crushed eggshells to deter the snails, filling the birdfeeder in case any birds did dare to approach the apartment garden that year. She spoke to Camille in his sadness, as he illustrated a portrait of Amy kneeling in the soil.
One day Dragonfly left to sell his current stamp collection. He had finished with this one, and was moving on to the next one. “A collection of South American stamps,” he decided, and it seemed the cats were no longer a presence in his thoughts, though, on occasion, we watched him as he tried to approach one and found he could not, or would not. The ubiquitous kittens grew and they huddled and played in the nooks and corners, never more accountable than they had been before. The landlord bought a small water fountain and its trickling filled the courtyard, and Amy began to put bowls of food, fresh water and milk out for the cats who gathered by her door each morning and evening to eat while she and Camille picnicked in the garden, his book, now almost filled with sketches, clutched to his side. The garden came to fill the courtyard with its presence, it was impossible not to smell the greenery on the air, hear the high leaves stir when the wind was up, or when the cats were silent in the night.
In April a van from the arrived from the pound, white as only paint can be. From our apartments we watched the men from the pound dash through the courtyard collecting the mewling, hissing, clawing cats as they spat and ran and attacked, ferocious, unforgiving, as they were dragged away and forced into cages in the back of the van. The men took all afternoon to do their work, stopping now and then to rest and remark upon the absence of people. We were there, for the most part, watching distantly from well behind our windows. And even though Dragonfly was home that day, his blinds were shut, and his television staid off, and not a sound issued from his apartment. The nights, for a while, were silent, free of midnight howls.
One day, Camille smiled at Amy as he left the apartments and walked out to the street with his portfolio, stopping to tie his shoelaces for the last time. That morning was cool, and bright. The winds were high, and it was wet and clear, as if it had rained the night before. He wore a thin jacket. The first bird arrived that afternoon. A nightingale, that, while we breathed into our pillows, pierced the calm of the night.
That spring when the peonies bloomed they were white, like hospital beds.
(originally published in 7Mondays, (c) Sean McDonell)
