THE DISAPPEARING CITY
Sun Leigh looked up at the sky in surprise. It wasn’t raining. Neither was there in the air that special after-rain smell which he could make out always and unmistakably. He shoved his hands into the pockets of his nylon jacket and waded through the puddle. God knew where it had come from. Sun Leigh got tired when he had to search for answers, therefore he accepted things as they were, without analysing them. This puddle had to be the consequence of rainfall, yet there had not been any rain. So what!? Even such a foreign world like the one in which he had ended up a few months ago could not stir inside the small Chinese man the desire for asking questions. He never asked why he had been given a feminine name either. Because of the name he had been mobbed at school and he had taken turns in loathing his classmates, his parents, and himself. He had decided to flee to another world where his name would be incomprehensible; feminine or masculine. Now his days began with the arrangement of plastic heartlets, starlets, and tiny bells – all of them imitations of millefiori – on his stall; above the stall he hung cardboard carnival masks. The days ended with his last cappuccino, his stroll across Piazza San Marco - abnormally empty beneath the night sky - the narrow streets with the tiny bridges where he used to get lost, and at last: the hostel. The people, with whom he spent the night in a room as narrow as a closet, changed every other day. Sun Leigh had lodged there since last spring. Yesterday, it was the middle of December. He should have bought a warmer jacket because, no matter how much he huddled inside this nylon one, the wet coldness plastered him with feelings of abandonment and solitude.
Hey Mister, do you wanna take this kitten?”
Sun Leigh had just crossed the square and was walking along the street with the boutique shops. After a hundred meters had to turn left, then walk past the hotel with the blue flowers, past the tiny workshop for masks, and then the final walk in the labyrinth of tiny bridges and mossy stones. His routine trip was intercepted. Once stopped, he doubted he would be able to find his way. The mechanism of the automatic movement screeched, swished, perhaps torn in two and Sun Leigh stood still. The girl stood in front of the Gaultier shop window. This fact, surely, did not have any special meaning for Sun Leigh. But a fragment of his mind noticed that the golden dress behind the shop window would look quite alluring on the blond shop girl from the drug store, near the hostel, who sold him mint drops and magazines.
“Would you take it?“ The girl’s outstretched hand held something that Sun Leigh could not see clearly in the dim light. It looked like a kitten.
“Why fancy giving it to me?” The Chinese spoke coarsely, even somewhat rudely. “Can’t you see that I’m not a local. What am I to do with this kitten?”
The girl, encouraged by the fact that he had at least stopped and, moreover, that he was speaking Italian, declared with the sweetest voice in the world.
“You will save him!”
“And what makes you thing I’m nuts about saving stray kittens?”
“Because it is soft and beautiful.”
Sun Leigh looked around helplessly. The light streaming from the Gaultier boutique took on a sapphire hue and the golden dress with the baroque lace corset seemed to rustle behind the glass. Its story was that allure can make someone’s fear from the endless darkness more bearable. Sun Leigh didn’t get the story of the dress because he kept himself away from any interpretations. He did however recall a pair of eyes. They had just as much blazing sapphire-gold in them. He remembered the contempt with which those eyes had once spoken to him: “The way things are going, you are about to ask me out to tea. Don’t even think about it, Sun Leigh!” The owner of the eyes had thrown the flower he had given her into the gutter and his hope for happiness - into the general inaccessibility of the Universe. Anyway, this had happened “far, far away” which for him was an equivalent of “long, long ago”. White light poured out of the shop window of the boutique, and Sun Leigh saw the kitten clearly. He tried to stop the tide of softheartedness. Tides of softheartedness and loathing were his bitterest enemies.
“And because you are a good man… If not, the high tide will carry him away.” As though the girl with the caramel voice was ironizing his own fears.
“What high tide?”
The fluffy bun in the palms of the stranger stirred and the next moment it was already a proud owner of a beautiful head. At first Sun Leigh thought that the kitten was wearing a mask. A miniature replica of the cardboard faces he used to hang over his stall every morning. Its muzzle looked like it was made from two small lily leaves. Lily leaves were its eyes and its ears as well. Its body was grey suede with a drop of black ink on its nose. It looked very delicate and self-possessed at the same time.
“Tomorrow, sometime before noon the high tide will come.”
The strange girl kept on floating on the sapphire light. The kitten almost melted away, as if carried away by the high tide. Only the gentle strokes of her little hand, enveloped in a lace glove, suggested that it was still there, in her palm. Then Sun Leigh looked up at her face for the first time. Her copper coloured hair was brought together with a shimmering green ribbon. Her face was transparently white and impervious. An exotic European face. Sun Leigh didn’t have much knowledge of these faces. They looked like bewildering relief maps to him. He got lost inside them. The blueberry lipstick on her lips transformed her pallor into a mask. At times, she seemed to have a face, at times – there was none. She wore a long, black, mink cloak. She might pass for a woman or a child. As if whole centuries lurked inside her eyes. Sun Leigh felt the coldness getting more piercing under his nylon jacket. He had never come across eyes so old.
Since the time he had moved here, he had been hearing stories about the water gushing out of the gully holes – this water turned the squares into enormous puddles. Because of that self same water he kept a pair of rubber boots under his bed, but he had not had the occasion to put them on yet. He had pondered over the question of how he was going to put together his stall if something like that really happened.
The beautiful face smiled.
“What high tide?” Sun Leigh repeated the question because he wasn’t sure that the stranger had got him the first time.
“You speak Italian so well, and you don‘t know what a high tide is?”
His skill with languages might be called phenomenal; normal people did not possess his gift – he had learned this from personal experience. People usually began to speak their mother tongue and made big efforts to learn one other language which they called foreign. There were no foreign languages for Sun Leigh. He discovered this for the first time when a few tourists entered the tea shop once owned by his father, and a little boy addressed him. Little Sun Leigh chatted to him in front of the dazzled eyes of his father who, pale as a sheet, asked his son when the two of them were alone: “How in the world did you manage to learn French?” Then, well after midnight, his body shivering all over, his father asked him to read paragraphs in English, German, Italian, Spanish; whatever books he had found in the bookshop of his friend, asking him to repeat the paragraphs, comparing the texts with the Chinese translations. There was no doubt that Sun Leigh understood each and every language spoken in the world. His father who had struggled to speak French during much of his life because of an obscure love for France, kindled by a wrinkled French postcard, decided that he had discovered a gold mine. On his part, Sun Leigh decided to hurry up with his escape plan. The loathing he nurtured for his parents for having given him a woman’s name, softened a bit by the discovery of those drawers inside his head, where the world languages were lurking. Whenever a foreigner pulled out one of those drawers, the words poured out freely.
”I know the meaning of the word, but I don’t understand what exactly will happen. Will I be able to put my stall together?”
“Your stall? No, not tomorrow… tomorrow the sea will flood and cover everything… it will take away the stalls, the tables in front of the cafés, the homeless kittens… Only the birds will be happy… Local birds love the high tides.”
A group of loud Spaniards walked by. Sun Leigh grasped the meaning of several of their words, yet he couldn’t get what exactly they were talking about. One of them must have won something, then an ice cream waffle horn was mentioned, and there was apparently something very funny in that ice cream waffle horn because everybody burst into laughter when it was mentioned. They walked past them, taking no notice of them: him or the strange girl with the blazing copper hair, the green ribbon, and the vison cloak. Sun Leigh was accustomed to his own invisibility, but this time he was really concerned. Even frightened. Suddenly, he was very cold. He shivered inside his nylon jacket. He fished in his pocket for the box with the mint drops and nervously put one into his mouth. The idea of offering a candy to the strange girl flashed across his mind.
“I don’t like mint.” She spoke like a disappointed child. “Are you taking the kitten?”
Sun Leigh slowly put the box back into his pocket. He relished the mint flavour. The tall blond English woman grew mint grass in porcelain crates. She lived two houses away from his own. The only nice thing he could remember from his former life. He had rescued her dog just when the torrent was about to carry it away, and then they became friends. Perhaps the only friend he had ever had. It looked like he was destined to rescue little animals from the fury of the aquatic element all his life. Would this new encounter begin a new friendship. He fixed the stranger with his eyes.
“You will take it, right? I would like to save it, but I will not be able to. Not this time. I won’t hold up against the high tide. I don’t have enough strength any more. I will go out with the tide.”
Sun Leigh understood all the words perfectly and couldn’t construe a meaning from them. And as he was beginning to get tired of this meaningless situation, and as he was getting colder and colder, he put out his hands, and the girl with the caramel voice put the purring fluff into his palms.
“Thank you” was the last thing he heard from her and as it usually happens in such strange encounters “in the next second there was no trace of the copper hair, the green ribbon and the black vison cloak”. And, logically, Sun Leigh had to ask himself, if a girl with copper hair, green ribbon, vison cloak and caramel voice had ever existed. What actually happened was that he tucked the kitten warmly under his jacket and concentrated on his feet to help them find his way home.
The next morning he had to put on his rubber boots in order to go out and buy milk for his little friend and a pizza for himself. Nevertheless, he got soaking wet. Although the boots reached the middle of his thighs, the water poured over their edges. At first he decided that the city would sink by midday, so that there wasn’t much sense in buying anything to eat. Then he peaked through the shop window of a small bakery, and he saw two women there - they sat there chatting; one of them had chocolate on her upper lip. All that was left of the chocolate glazed cake before her was a barely visible islet of chocolate with a rugged coastline. The islet floated in a pool of cream, whereas the women floated in sea water, 10 cm deep. It looks like everything keeps going, Sun Leigh comforted himself. Except that he couldn’t put together his stall. He tightly cuddled the suede muffin, tucked under his jacket and tried to hurry up, as much as someone walking in water can hurry. So this was the high tide? Eating cake while the water keeps rising, covering your ankles entirely. For a moment he envied those two women who had something so much more important to talk about than surviving a high tide. They spoke so vehemently. A pity that he could not hear what they talked about through the glass window. Or were they just pretending? The thought struck Sun Leigh’s mind: everyone around was just pretending. Some of them pretended to be tourists who continued to click with their cameras. Others - pretended to be locals. He had already begun to make them out well enough - the locals. By the way they walked, by the way they scurried about, by fragments of telephone calls overheard by him. Folks kept strolling busily in the high water, pretending to be either tourists or locals, they hurried, took pictures, talked over their telephones as if they were absolutely sure of the happy end, of the peaceful retirement of the water. And why the hell were they so sure?
Sun Leigh was about to get absorbed into some big, yet vague, questions. He still vaguely remembered that he had gone out for milk and pizza. Now he only felt the need to keep walking into the high tide. He patted the head of the kitten, realizing that, perhaps, it was not him keeping the animal warm but vice versa. Perhaps those people knew something big. Surely, they had gone through this before… Maybe they had a lot of confidence in the stern laws and the precedents of nature. But did they not realise, they were still moving along the edge of an abyss? The high tide was this edge. Couldn’t they see that the world had bent over and was looking down at the bottom - the bottom where the sea water once and for all engulfs this ghost city. The bottom… Sun Leigh wondered how the word had come to his mind… then it came home to him… he had seen the word last night…in those eyes…the girl with the caramel voice, the copper hair, the green ribbon and the vision cloak. What if this time the water refuses to retire? What if this was the last time? Would that woman still eat up the last morsel of her cake? And push the plate away, contented, following the story of her friend with half-closed eyes? There, at the bottom. Would the cameras go on clicking? Down there at the bottom… Would the bistro owner adjust the board with the daily menu? Down there at the bottom. Would those arms as thick as loaves of bread continue to hang out freshly washed bedsheets, printed with blue flowers? Down there at the bottom…
The kitten stirred and Sun Leigh feared that it might slip out of his hands and disappear forever. Now, everything you drop, you lose it forever. A key, a piece of paper with an address scribbled on it, a grey kitten - everything was precious and had to be held tightly, stashed away in a secure place and kept safe… Just before he entered the shop to buy milk, Sum Leigh saw a green ribbon on the water. His eyes searched fiercely for the girl. He knew it was hers. She had said that she would not hold out against the high tide, that she would retire with it. Sun Leigh understood Italian perfectly, but he didn’t understand what she had told him, not what was happening now. Where would she retire? And why?
“Signorina, your ribbon!”
Sun Leigh turned around with a jerk and saw a scrawny youngster holding out the wet green ribbon to a chubby girl who was standing right in the middle of the high water and was trying in vain to tame her voluminous, rebellious hair with the help of a hair clip. Her small bag hung from her neck, so that her hands could operate freely, the rims of her high green boots were just above the water. Further above the boots, her plump and long thighs were squeezed inside woollen leggings the colour of medlar. Her ski jacket was the same colour. She looked perfectly equipped for high tides. Her well-rounded face was glowing. Maybe her excellent suntan gave the face such a radiance or maybe the glow remained there even when she got sad or angry. Only a slight stiffness of the lips betrayed her vexation with the useless hair clip. Sun Leigh had seen such an expression on the faces of other girls before, and he thought they lived in strange worlds. But he wasn’t thinking like that now. He felt the sharp discrepancy between the green ribbon and this strange chubby girl. If the girl reached out and touched the ribbon, the world might crack, something terrible might happen and the high tide might never subside; he saw all of it. The kitten purred from under his jacket and settled on his breast. Although Sun Leigh had no idea what causality and synchronicity was, he instinctively jumped at the youngster, grabbed the ribbon from his hand and shouted: ”No!”
The girl was so startled that she dropped the hair clip and it splashed into the water, while her hair went wild. It was incredibly long. Its tips got wet. Sun Leigh clutched the satin band, the youngster rubbed his three-days beard, observing with quiet patience the outburst of the shorty Chinese. An Englishman, a first-timer in Venice, was vexed at the fact that the three of them didn’t move and spoiled the composition of his beautiful frame. “There are more Chinese in Venice than in China,” he muttered, and at last he decided to shoot. He looked at the result, telling himself that the three bummers didn’t look so bad on the picture, even brought a kind of liveliness into it. He strutted towards his next object, leaving behind him an agitated trail in the indifferent waters of the high tide. Sun Leigh snapped out of his stiffness, moved his fingers along the satin and heard the warm laugh of the girl. “Is it yours? I’m glad you found it.” She was speaking in French. Her face was glowing and the tips of her hair were floating in the water; she looked like she was going to dive into the tide any moment and disappear. “It belongs to a girlfriend of mine,” muttered Sun Leigh in French. “I’m quite sure she is beautiful. A band like this can belong only to a beautiful girl,” said the youngster and winked at the girl present. He spoke French with a heavy accent. “Boys, do you want to have a bite of pastry? I could die for Venetian pastry. I am Marion.” “Lorenzo,” the youngster introduced himself. “Sun Leigh,” the Chinese stretched out his hand. “What a lovely kitten!” exclaimed Marion and tried to caress it. Sun Leigh jerked involuntarily, then felt abashed. He realised that he was being rude.
He shoved the green band in his pocket and took the kitten from under his jacket. He placed it carefully in Marion’s hands. He assured himself that this would only take a little while. Besides, this girl who exhaled a flavour of ripe wheat would never harm a little grey kitten. Marion caressed it. Her hand moved rhythmically. The tips of her hair moved rhythmically in the water. The world swayed peacefully into a long forgotten softness. Sun Leigh imagined how he sprinkled this scenery with the plastic heartlets he sold at his little stall and even smiled. “You go for pastry. I don’t have time now.” He tried to be polite and kind. “There is something peculiar about this kitten, Sun Leigh,” said Marion as she handed it back to him. “As though it came from another place and time. Come on, Lorenzo, let’s give those Venetian pastries a try.” The two of them smiled and waved goodbye to him. He watched them going away into the high tide. The flavour of ripe wheat was fading. He stared at the kitten. “Do you really come from another space and time?” He felt the satin band inside his pocket. He placed the kitten under the nylon jacket again and strolled off in search of milk for the kitten and pizza for himself. He felt an irresistible longing for a piece of dry land, where man was not surrounded by reflections and where each step forward did not meet so much resistance.
Stephania woke up and at first she didn’t know where she was and what she had to do. Such seconds of disorientation in the morning filled her with panic. She closed her eyes, trying to relax, then slowly started to remember. I am Stephania… I wake up in my bed… Yes, yesterday I came back from New York, yes… There, the designer of the new showroom had done a perfect job… Now I am in my own bed… What time is it… the jet leg… Must I go to the office… We have high tide today… The rats… She couldn’t fall asleep for a long time… listening to them, running… the way they ran during high tides… She even dreamed of them… Enormous running rats. Stephania snapped open her eyes. Alessandro had not come to pick her up from the airport yesterday. That’s how it was going to be from now on. He would not come to meet her at the airport. He would not wait for her at home either. Her eyes glided over the splendid lines of milky white, beige, and light pink Venetian glass over her bed. The Barovier & Toso chandelier was her grandmother’s heritage. She had worked for this company for seven years the last two of them – as a marketing director. All that time Alessandro had been part of her life. Because of her he spent half his nights in Milano, the other half - in Venice. Stephania was resolute about not living anywhere else but in the city in which her ancestors had been living for centuries. She travelled a lot but could not imagine not coming back to Venice in the end. Alessandro had been begging her, telling her this was madness, a kind of mindless obsession; this city, he told her, already belonged to the tourists and the Chinese fakes; he insisted that everyone of the locals was leaving, that there was no ground for her obstinacy, that their love was at stake… All this time, in her mind, shades of coloured glass had been mingling, floating away, sinking down; images of mossed masonry, dilapidated wooden jetties… sinking reflections from coloured glass… muddy currents… the pink of the stones and the pink of the glass. And she remained adamant all this time. Now there was no need to defend her Venice any more. When you are alone you need not defend anything. Except your loneliness.
She stepped with her bare feet on the pony carpet - she liked the lavish luxury - it made her feel like she was running on the edge - and pulled up the wooden blind. A moment before she did it, she relished the peculiar light of the days when the sea flooded the city. Tightening the belt of her robe, she decided to warm up on the cross trainer for fifteen minutes then take a shower, then make herself a fresh juice – provided there was any fruit in the fridge - then put on her high boots, and then pay a visit to the office, despite everything. She didn’t feel like staying at home today, although Paolo had told her to rest. Over the telephone she had reported to him how the opening of the showroom had proceeded and he was content. The fake goods were flooding the market, causing prices to slump, yet still, their sales were good. Was it a kind of a superficial snobbery or an aristocratic pretence, but some people still preferred the originals.
When he took the aqua bus for Murano island, it was already after one p.m.
Sun Leigh fed Felix with some milk – that’s how he named the cat with the purple muzzle. He ate a piece of pizza. It was tasteless. Sun Leigh rarely paid attention to what he ate; all he needed was the sensation of hunger to disappear because this sensation made him nervous. Sun Leigh feared his nervousness. The high tide made him nervous too. It crossed his mind to go back to the hostel, cuddle in his bed – his only private territory, place Felix at his side and read today’s newspapers. He didn’t have to assemble his stall today, so he could spend the day reading. He had his excuse. He bought books very rarely, but he liked newspapers. He didn’t get much of what he read; this foreign world seemed a mysteriously nebulous place to him, but the fact that many things took place at the same time, that sometimes there were follow-up stories, which denounced the initial ones, that news itself got obsolete in a matter of hours, all this was very amusing to him. Stacks of old newspapers gathered dust under his bed. He cherished the thought of going back to the hostel for a while, but he did not do it, after all. He decided to walk in the high tide water a bit more. He wasn’t sure whether he himself took this decision or someone else decided instead of him, but he knew he had to obey. The water had risen two centimetres more. Walking in it was getting harder. He took the aqua bus to Murano island at five to one. He had visited the island a few times already, and was dreaming of owning a little shop there - a place to sell his heartlets and cardboard masks.
“Be careful of what you buy. On the island there are two or three places where you can buy true Murano glass. The rest is cheap imitation.”
Sun Leigh turned in the direction of the voice. And saw the longest legs he had ever seen in his life, legs clad in black leather trousers and high black boots. He lifted his eyes and reached the fluffy golden hem of a short leather coat. At that moment the woman laughed, apparently in answer to something that the American standing next to her had said, and Sun Leigh didn’t dare lift his eyes higher and look at her face. What he could do was to touch the satin band inside his pocket, and somewhere in the neighbourhood of the golden fluffy hem of the short leather coat he saw the copper hair, the green ribbon, the black vison cloak, the crimson lipstick… and he heard the caramel voice.
“Can I sit by you?”
The vision disappeared.
“Of course, Madam”.
He saw her peroxided hair, her not exactly beautiful, yet magnetic face. She emanated haughtiness. Her gaze seemed to pass through things and her eyelids, sprinkled with golden dust, had a curve that gave them a somewhat tired and distracted expression. Sun Leigh had seen its likeness while leafing through a Botticelli album in a tiny book shop. He was beginning to think that his visual memory was getting extraordinarily sharp.
Stefania took off her black leather gloves and fished in her bag for her telephone. She was on her way to the office just as she had done for the last seven years, yet now she felt completely altered. As though fog was dividing her from the world, altering the shape of everything around her, making everything elusive and mystifying. Had she made the biggest mistake in her life? Did she really want this? Was it something irreversible? Was she entering a new stage of her life? Or just squandering her years and opportunities? And why must she ask herself those trivial questions that myriads of confounded people do in the first place?
She found her telephone at last, and sent an SMS to Rozana, writing her that she was back, offering to see her tonight at Vincenzo’s. Then she dropped the telephone back in her bag and stared at the opaque waves. The sea looked like an obscure desire. Sun Leigh quietly observed the slender woman sitting next to him. He was just sitting there: grey, bashful and crouching and looking so plain in his shabby nylon jacket, so foreign, so enmeshed in the absurdities of a city that every now and then sank into the sea then popped out of it; he sat there stroking Felix’s head. He knew that she was local. Her gestures, her intonations, the special kind of self-assurance showed her deep bonds with this place. There was, as well, a certain nervousness and sadness. He knew that she didn’t notice him, and if she happened to glance at him, he would arouse no interest. He pushed his hand deeper inside his pocket and nearer to the satin band, and while doing this he fingered a plastic heartlet. He smiled in his mind, opened his fist and stretched his hand toward his fellow traveller.
“Is this an imitation like the ones you mean?“
Stephania sprang from the whirlpool of questions and saw a palm with a pathetic plastic millefiori on it.
“No, I meant far better kinds of imitation…”
She didn’t even look at the man who was showing her the gimmick. Someone was trying to be ironic or was just looking for a way to start a conversation. She didn’t feel like responding with irony, nor speaking with strangers.
“Well, let me give you one vulgar imitation as a gift.”
The stranger spoke Italian very well and Stephania was astounded to see his Asiatic face. One of the many peddlers who sold souvenirs from Venice.
“Splendid kitten.” She changed the subject and Sun Leigh observed how her face maintained its haughtiness as she reached over to pet Felix. He took the kitten from under his jacket for the stranger to enjoy it. For a second time today he felt attached to someone. The first time it happened when he placed the kitten in Marion’s hands, and now this. The plastic millefiori was forgotten.
“It was given to me by the strangest creature I have ever met,” Sun Leigh didn’t know why he was telling her this, yet something urged him to talk. He could not keep last night’s memory inside himself any longer. He could not afford seeing the black vison cloak, the copper hair, and those eyes as old as the world, over and over again.
He saw how the face of the woman sitting next to him became haughtier and more distant. He felt awkward. They sat in silence for the rest of the trip.
Before stepping out of the boat, the woman turned sharply to him and said:
‘Won’t you give me that vulgar imitation after all?’
Stunned, Sun Leigh handed her the heartlet. Stephania nodded and disappeared in the crowd.
The high tide had flooded the atrium of the 16 century palazzo that housed the showroom and the office. Thank God, that the interior, where the furnaces were and where the glass was blown, had always been spared by the sea. For more than four hundred years the same thing took place there. Matter was being transformed by melting. The fiery reflexions flickered across the men’s faces. Their virtuosity played with the still flexible, melting forms that shimmered, threatening to flow down, attracted by Earth’s gravitation. However, the self-assuredness of true craftsmanship interfered at the critical moment, taking control of form. Amongst countless eventualities the experienced glassblowers chose one finality – the one they thought closest to perfection. Stephania felt happy every time she came down here. This time however, she didn’t go to the furnaces. She flew past the showroom - the resplendent chandeliers were reflected in the water covering the ancient floor mosaics - and ran up the stone stairway. On the walls shimmered the baroque frames of the portraits of the ancestors. Her own ancestor was over there, on the left side of the sliding glass door. Stefania stared in disbelief. How was it possible? And why had she chosen him of all people - a stall peddler selling cheap imitations to the tourists? In the right corner of the portrait stood an inscription: Maria Grazia Barovier 1745. She wore a black vison cloak, she had blazing red hair tightened with a green band, and a little grey kitten was cuddling on the armchair beside her. “The world is a place full of incongruence and irony,” thought Stephania. She took out her mobile phone and dialled Alessandro’s number.
The water was beginning to ebb when Sun Leigh took the aqua bus back to Venice “Tomorrow perhaps, I will be able to go out with the stall,” he thought. “But what will I do with this kitten? I should have given it to the haughty lady.”
Translated by Hristo Dimitrov / Edited by Tom Phillips
The Bulgarian text first appeared in ‘The Disappearing City’, Vesela Liutzkanova publishers 2011
