On their fourth morning there they went as usual to the beach, skinny-dipped, returned home, and left again for the harbour. The waiter at the cafe remembered them—the generous tips Miu always left didn’t hurt—and greeted them warmly. He made some polite comment about how beautiful they looked. Sumire went to the kiosk and bought a copy of the English newspaper published in Athens. That was their only link with the outside world. Sumire’s job was reading the paper. She’d check the exchange rate and translate and read aloud to Miu any major news item or interesting article she happened to come across.
The article Sumire picked to read aloud that particular day was a report of a 70-year-old lady who was eaten by her cats. It happened in a small suburb of Athens. The dead woman had lost her husband, a businessman, eleven years before and ever since had lived a quiet life in a two-room apartment with several cats as her only friends. One day the woman collapsed face down on her sofa from a heart attack and expired. It wasn’t known how much time had elapsed between her attack
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and her death. At any rate, the woman’s soul passed through all the set stages to bid farewell to its old companion, the body it had inhabited for 70 years. She didn’t have any relatives or friends who visited her regularly, and her body wasn’t discovered until a week later. The doors were shut, the windows shuttered, and the cats couldn’t get out after the death of their owner. There wasn’t any food in the apartment. There must have been something in the refrigerator, but cats don’t possess the necessary skill to open fridge doors. Starving, they devoured the flesh of their owner.
Taking an occasional sip from her coffee cup, Sumire translated the article in stages. Some bees buzzed around the table, licking the jam a previous patron had spilled. Miu gazed at the sea through her sunglasses, listening intently to Sumire.
“And then what happened?” Miu asked.
“That’s it,” said Sumire, folding the tabloid in half and laying it on the table. “That’s all the newspaper says.”
“What could have happened to the cats?”
“I don’t know …” Sumire said, pursing her lips to one side and giving it some thought. “Newspapers are all the same. They never tell you what you really want to know.”
The bees, as if sensing something, flew up in the air and with a ceremonious buzz circled for a while, then settled again on the table. They returned to their jam licking.
“And what was the fate of the cats, one wonders,” Sumire said, tugging at the collar of her oversize T-shirt and smoothing out the wrinkles. She had on a T-shirt and shorts and—Miu happened to know—no underwear underneath. “Cats that develop a taste for human flesh might turn into man-eating cats, so maybe they destroyed them. Or maybe the police said,
‘Hey, you guys have suffered enough,’ and they were
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acquitted.”
“If you were the mayor or chief of police in that town, what would you do?”
Sumire thought about it. “How about placing them in an institution and reforming them? Turn them into vegetarians.”
“Not a bad idea.” Miu laughed. She took off her sunglasses and turned to face Sumire. “That story reminds me of the first lecture I heard when I entered a Catholic junior high school. Did I ever tell you I went to a very strict Catholic girls’ school for six years? I attended an ordinary elementary school, but I went into that school in junior high. Right after the entrance ceremony a decrepit old nun took all of us new students into the auditorium and gave a talk on Catholic ethics. She was a French nun, but her Japanese was fluent. She talked about all kinds of things, but what I recall is the story of cats and the deserted island.”
“That’s sounds interesting,” Sumire said.
“You’re shipwrecked, washed up on a deserted island. Only you and a cat made it to the lifeboat. You drift for a while and end up on this island, just a rocky island with nothing you can eat. No water, either. In your lifeboat you have ten days’ worth of biscuits and water for one person, and that’s it. That’s how the story went.
“The nun looked all around the auditorium and she said this in a strong, clear voice. ‘Close your eyes and imagine this scene. You’re washed up on a deserted island with a cat. This is a solitary island in the middle of nowhere. It’s almost impossible that someone would rescue you within ten days. When your food and water run out, you may very well die. Well, what would you do? Since the cat is suffering as you are, should you divide your meagre food with it?’ The sister was
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