A Story

  A story

When Stevenson woke and saw the cat sitting on Pyotr’s bunk, he knew he was going to die. The cat gazed at him, then began to groom itself, lifting one white paw to rub over its black face. Its whiskers were white.

“Why did you come back?” Stevenson said. The cat stopped licking its paw. “To tell you about Pyotr,” it said.

“What about Pyotr?”

“They shot him 27 minutes after they took him away.”

Stevenson remembered. The guards came, two of them, wrapped in heavy coats, their rifles slung over their shoulders. “Come!” motioned the taller one, the one they’d labelled Mutt. Jeff, the shorter one, helped Pyotr stand up. Then they guided him tenderly through the cage door into the passageway. Jeff turned back and carefully locked the gate. The cat had watched the small procession move away, then it hopped off Pyotr’s bed, squeezed between the bars out into the passage, and followed. Its tail stood straight up, the tip waving from side to side, its ears laid back.

Stevenson considered the cat’s precision. “How do you know it was 27 minutes?” he asked. "There’s a clock at the far end of the passage,” said the cat. "You can’t see it from here. It showed two minutes past 6, it took me two minutes to return from where I watched the shooting. Then it showed 31 minutes past. 31 minus 4 is 27.”

Stevenson followed the cat’s calculation with some difficulty, and had to do it over in his head. He knew there had been a time when he wouldn’t have needed the cat to explain the arithmetic. But now he felt as if he was observing the world through a thick fog which occasionally thinned out and even parted for a few seconds. Thinking was an effort, like walking through soft sand that slipped away from under his feet.

The cat resumed grooming itself. After a while it occurred to Stevenson that there was something he didn’t know. “Why did they shoot Pyotr?” The cat gazed at him for a long moment. It seemed to Stevenson that she pitied him.

“They shot him because he was a traitor,” she said.

“How was he a traitor?”

“He told the truth.”

Stevenson frowned. This was a puzzle he could not solve.