cat ghost

I have a cat ghost. I heard her single meow for the first time yesterday.

While I was reading a tape at night, someone said clearly “I-u” in the silence of the night.

I don’t have a cat. Neighbors don’t have cats. There is no cat on someone else’s balcony. No cats in the whole house.

However, it was.

“I-u.”

And it’s hiding somewhere in my apartment. Oh, and one more thing: he didn’t say “meow”, he said exactly “me-u”.

I went around the whole room, kitchen and hallway. The ghost of the cat did not appear, did not run, did not pass through the wall. It just meowed sometimes.

It was only later that I realized what it was.

A few months ago I bought an old Nokia model (I had something like this when mobile phone communication was just gaining momentum and smartphones were not yet in nature: neither iPhones nor Androids), button, cheap. I bought it to use as an mp4 player but it is impossible to listen to music on iPhones – it eats up a lot of charge.

I charged it, walked with it, then put it in the far corner, next to the tee on the extension cord. It’s charged, I took it off so it wouldn’t draw electricity, but I forgot to pick it up from the ground. So he was discharged a few days later and started meowing.

“I-u.”

Lord, how many ghosts are in our lives.

It happens like this: a person from the past, from a very distant past – and you sometimes do not even want to remember, although you remember, but then he died and everything changed.

While I’m alive, I don’t want to look for or even think about it for a second: it seems that all this distant life was a series of drunkenness and fights. But then it died and you realize that now it’s just you, your memory, your space, a very strange space and this space isn’t empty, it’s filled with something again. Like the footprint of a boot on soft clay after a rain. It is filled with a long, old, stagnant life, a guilt with no one to share it with (the person is dead). Now you are the only one: you are one for all and you are responsible for everything.

Because from today this is your hole.

No, no, insults are of course not forgotten. Other people’s guilt is inexhaustible. But from now on, only you carry it all. And you do not forgive because you did not ask for it, but still somehow it was given to yourself. Like a ghost cat.

What was luxury, storm, waterfall, gold, tiger – for some reason everything was abandoned, left, fell into desolation, meowing from the corner.

… On July 30, 1502, the navigator and explorer Christopher Columbus met for the first time with representatives of the Maya tribe, the descendants of an ancient civilization, and it is strange that he was not surprised how such a powerful civilization could once fall into decay.

Europeans who came to the New World during their expeditions to the depths of the continent often passed through ghost towns, but for some reason they wrote about them very carefully in their expedition reports.

It seems that no one asked: why are they overgrown with grass? What happened? Civil wars, water scarcity, climate change, epidemic, conquest?

Petersburg had once grown like this. Viktor Shklovsky wrote about 1921: “There was no grass on Nadezhdinskaya, and the entire Manezhny lane was overgrown with grass, and a horse lane went around. There was also a lawn next to the Alexander Column in the Palace Square. People would come and graze the rabbits and bring them with them in baskets. They played gorodki in front of the Hermitage: there was one last pavement.

Renamed Leningrad, however, St. Petersburg was cleared of bushes, but the ancient Mayan cities were not.

Although people remained there, they even settled somewhere nearby. So the lack of water, the epidemic and everything else has nothing to do with it. Why didn’t they finally return to their cities? On your calendars?

Speaking of calendars.

As you know, in the legendary Mayan calendar, which was painted hundreds of years ago and ended in December 2012, it is unlikely that there were firing squads in an unknown country on another continent on July 30, 1937. would be introduced. Compared to the entire bloody history of mankind, this is so insignificant that of course not.

But in this land unknown to the ancient Indians, a scientist was found who made a successful attempt to decipher their language. The scientist was friends with Lev Gumilyov until the arrest of the latter, and the mother of the arrested friend (Anna Akhmatova) even gave the young scientist a winter cap.

He, Yuri Knorozov, they claim, and he once said: “I am an armchair scientist. You don’t need to jump over pyramids to work with texts. And this language was deciphered without any pyramid.

we came here
deep into the forest
nobody will see
what did we come to do

This is just one example of the ancient poetry of the Maya tribe.

How good is that. From there, we left the abandoned ancient cities so that no one would understand why we were leaving.

“But even we didn’t know that our language would be deciphered in many, many years by a scientist who is depicted holding a cat in his arms on a monument erected in Mexico.”

In the photo of this monument, Professor Knorozov is very reminiscent of a cinematic supervisor: a sullen look, poorly compressed lips, nodules, neatly combed hair; The Siamese cat has clamped its owner’s arm and cuffs, and is also looking at the frame with blue eyes.

So that’s where the invisible cat in my text came from. He knew how to finish this text, but I did not. Meow!