I haven’t written yet about how I met Kali.
An acquaintance told me about a family who was selling – or giving away – Persian kittens; their Persian feline family had grown too large and they couldn’t keep all of them. I went over, and when I entered the apartment I was greeted by a funny, sweet, and intriguing scene: five or six snow-white Persian kittens with blue eyes were doing their best to run around – tottering, falling, and stumbling over one another.
In the middle of what I’d call the “feline room” stood a round table, about a meter in diameter, with a beautiful white Persian molly stretched across its entire surface. She looked furious, her gaze fixed upward toward the top of the wardrobe – where an enormous red Persian tomcat was looking down at her, visibly frightened. I asked what was going on, why the tomcat was up on the wardrobe looking down at the white molly with such fear. I was told that he was the father of the kittens, and he didn’t dare come down because the mother – the white queen – held him personally responsible for the disappearance of some of the kittens, several of whom had already been sold or given away.
I was told to look around at the kittens and choose whichever one I liked – free of charge. They were so beautiful they didn’t seem quite real. While I was standing there, staring at them in awe, something suddenly rolled toward me across the floor – a comical little bundle that looked like a cross between a fluffy ball and a scrap of dirty cloth, moving in the most ridiculous, endearing way imaginable. It arrived right under my skirt, grabbed hold of it, and promptly got itself thoroughly tangled up in it.
She looked like a miniature monster – honey-yellow eyes blazing bright, her fur an incredible tangle of every shade of dirt imaginable.
I said: “I want this one.”
Deal done. I disentangled the little monster from my skirt and took a close look at her — she was incredibly ugly and incredibly adorable all at once. I collected her papers, glanced at them, and burst out laughing at her parents’ names. The father: Copper-Constantino of the Whistling Willows. The mother: Rose of the Climbing Rose Alley.
That was it for me.
The origin of the father’s name lies in a Hungarian expression: “the copper angel whistling on the willow tree” — a polite way of swearing, or of expressing frustrated disbelief, similar to “Holy cow!” I imagine that was precisely everyone’s reaction upon first laying eyes on the colour and size of Copper-Constantino – hence the name. Rose’s name has a more prosaic explanation, though no less amusing: Climbing Rose Alley was simply the name of the street where the family lived.
And so there she was — daughter of Copper-Constantino of the Whistling Willows and Rose of the Climbing Rose Alley.