The Death of Abramovich

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Abramovich was the name of a cat who lived with my wife’s brother. I don’t know who gave the animal that name. Probably because he was all plump, well-fed, big-faced—in short, content with life. And once, they were going away to the south for a couple of weeks and asked us to take the cat in for that time. We agreed—my wife and I had had a cat before who got lost during a trip to the countryside and was never found, so we loved cats.

It should be said that by then our family was still very young—we had been married for only a year, and my wife had just given birth to our first child, a baby girl named Vika. We didn’t have our own home, and we didn’t want to live with our parents, so we had to rent an apartment. A one-room place had been enough before, but after the baby was born we decided to rent a two-room apartment closer to the city center. When Abramovich arrived, we had been living there for no more than five or six weeks, and Vika was only four months old.

My wife immediately noticed that the cat was behaving restlessly in our apartment. He ran back and forth, then huddled in corners, refused to eat Whiskas or drink milk (though he eventually did eat). At home he wasn’t like this at all—just lazy and lying on the bed all day, my wife said. I explained that the cat was simply not used to being in a new place, so he was anxious. After that, we stopped paying attention to him—especially since we had enough problems of our own with the baby: in recent weeks Vika had been crying frequently for no apparent reason.

At night, Abramovich woke us with loud meowing. He was in the living room. When we came out of the bedroom, we saw that the cat was clearly not himself. He was running back and forth on the couch; his fur was bristling, green eyes gleaming, claws out. He was staring into the corner of the living room where the TV stood. I was in a bad mood—besides the baby not letting us sleep at night, now the cat was disturbing us too. I grabbed Abramovich by the scruff, carried him into the kitchen, and shut the door. He sat quietly there until morning.

The next morning he made a scene again: as soon as he came out of the kitchen, the cat bared his teeth—this time at the wardrobe standing on the wall opposite the TV. He lunged at it, hit the door, recoiled, hissed, and lunged again. That was the first time we felt uneasy: we remembered all those stories about cats sensing the presence of evil spirits. I carried him back to the kitchen—Abramovich calmed down, ate, and used the litter box. In general, he behaved like an ordinary cat. But as soon as we brought him into the living room, he began to meow and struggle as if mad. Interestingly, each time he snarled at different places—as if the object of his hatred kept moving around the room.

That day he slept in the kitchen, and everything was fine. But on the third day, either my wife or I forgot to close the kitchen door tightly, and late at night I woke again to the cat’s frantic meowing. This time he sounded so desperate that I immediately understood something was wrong.

He stood in the middle of the room, arched, staring without blinking at the couch. When I tried to pick him up, he sprang away from me and lunged at the couch, but then cried out loudly as if in pain and ran back to me, into my arms. The couch was completely empty… I felt the cat trembling all over in my hands. He was sent back into “exile” in the kitchen, and I shut the door firmly behind him.

In the morning, as soon as he came out of the kitchen, Abramovich dashed across the living room and began frantically scratching at the closed door to the room where my wife and I slept and where Vika’s crib stood. My wife and I stood watching the frantic cat, and a chill ran down our spines: by that point we no longer doubted that the cat could see the “inhabitant” of the apartment that we could not see. We were horrified by the thought that “it” might be in the same room as our daughter. We cracked open the bedroom door, and the cat darted inside. As we feared, he immediately began to snarl at the baby’s crib—more precisely, at its foot. Vika, meanwhile, was sleeping peacefully. Without a word, my wife and I carefully lifted the crib and moved it to another spot, and Abramovich continued to hiss at the now-empty space.

That night was the cat’s last. Out of habit, we locked him in the kitchen and went to bed. During the night, my wife went to the kitchen several times to get water for the baby. The cat slept the whole time on his litter tray. In the morning, around seven, I went into the kitchen and saw that the litter was scattered all over the floor. The tray itself had been thrown into a corner, and the cat lay curled under the table. Abramovich was dead. We found no external cause of death. It didn’t look like someone had attacked him or that he had fought with anything beforehand—besides, we hadn’t heard anything during the night from the bedroom…

The cat’s death made a terrible impression on us. Just a few days later, we moved to another apartment. The landlords were puzzled, but we told them nothing. After the move, Vika cried less at night—I don’t know whether it was connected to the fact that we left that apartment and its invisible “inhabitant.” But Abramovich’s sudden death was clearly strange. Who knows—maybe the cat, by his death, saved our daughter’s life. If we hadn’t moved out in a hurry, perhaps it might have happened to Vika… But I try not to think about it.