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against the moon. A bat would better suit these sinister times. I think of the message I would send her if I could, imagine her unrolling it from the canister when the exhausted pigeon taps on her window: In trying to stay close beside you, I have put great distance – an entire war – between us. But now I am coming home. Keep this bird for my dinner if you can.
    The tomcat should have returned by now. He promised he would be back before daylight. Colette always says there is a sad and suffocating difference between a room where a feline presence has a moment ago been reigning and the same room empty, and I feel that in this trench: a cold absence where the tomcat should be. It is clear to me what has happened and what will happen, but I cannot bring myself to move. Not quite yet, not with my soldier’s feet beneath my belly. I will imagine movement instead, and perhaps these thoughts will take form and lead me towards the destiny that I sense is crouched waiting for me, not in the unreality of Paris but here in this trench.
    I will wake the tomcat’s adopted soldier from his slumber, and wait until he listens with enough concentration to hear the tom mewling from the mudlands in which he is trapped in wire. The soldier will crawl out to him without thinking of the dangers. The other soldiers will wait anxiously for his return, listening to the tomcat’s cries, sick at the thought of the helpless creature in pain. As the sun begins to shade the sky a pale lemon, the soldier will return, shuffling on his stomach with the blinking tomcat tucked under one arm, both of them so covered in mud they could be two bits of the same mythical beast.
    I will be waiting on the parapet, waiting for the tomcat, waiting for the sunlight, waiting for the moment a German sniper will mistake my glorious fur for a carelessly uncovered soldier’s head, take aim, and fire. My own soldier and his friend will bring my body into the trench and grieve above me, and when my vision blurs they will look just like Colette and Missy dressed up as men. I will hear Colette saying that she and I must be curious until our final living moments, we must be determined to observe everything around us, that ‘Look!’ must be our final word and thought, and I will know that I have made it back to our little apartment, the one she and Toby-Chien and I used to share on the rue de Villejust, and I will know that I am almost home.

 
    RED PETER’S LITTLE LADY
    Soul of Chimpanzee
    DIED 1917, GERMANY

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    When I come home late at night from banquets, from scientific societies, or from social gatherings in someone’s home, a small half-trained female chimpanzee is waiting for me, and I take my pleasure with her the way apes do. During the day I don’t want to see her. For she has in her gaze the madness of a bewildered trained animal. I’m the only one who recognises that, and I cannot bear it.
    Franz Kafka, A REPORT TO AN ACADEMY
    Â 
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    Frau Evelyn Oberndorff
    Tierparkallee 55
    Hamburg
    June 13th, 1915
    My dear Evelyn
    Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â I know you said not to write to you, not ever again. But time has passed, and a war has been started, and Herr Hagenbeck told me in no uncertain terms that I should write to Hazel care of you, that she has come a long way since your husband began working with her, and it would be appropriate now for me to be in closer touch with her. ‘She is being prepared to become your wife, in due course,’ Herr Hagenbeck said to me, in that manner he has of making one feel unaccountably guilty. He also gave me the distressing news that Herr Oberndorff has gone to the front. I am truly sorry to hear it. I am even more sorry that in his absence, Hazel’s training has fallen to you. It cannot be easy. And here I am making it worse, asking you to read this letter below aloud to her.
    Yours
    Red Peter
    Dear Hazel
    Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â I chose this name