Castrating Simba

One of the wool rugs was missing from the long marble corridor leading to my bedroom.

"He's pissing everywhere, now! The rug's drying on the balcony. Emily washed it, and it's hanging outside," Mama Hiam complained, crunching through a heart of raw lettuce. "He meows at night, all night, outside my door. I'm castrating him. Tomorrow. We have an appointment at 9am with the doctor, and we're going to castrate him."

Simba is a spoiled and reticent Turkish angora. He takes his meals in the kitchen but drinks only--ONLY--from the crystal ashtray that Hiam fills periodically throughout the day. Every morning, after a cup of Nescafe and half a red apple, she puts on a hospital mask and brushes Simba inside out, working his body like he was a rag doll. He's surprisingly okay with all the maneuvering, and it's only when she gets to his tail does he begin to resist.

It was Hiam's daughter who managed to coax her to getting a cat shortly after the war last summer. At first, Hiam rejected the idea altogether, I think in a stubborn effort to assert her self-sufficiency and comfort in solitude. She didn't need a cat, she wasn't lonely. Eventually, she caved in to the suggestion, and the rest is history.

She seemed disappointed when she returned from the veterinarian that morning. She was in the kitchen making kibbeh with Emily, and I overheard the dialogue from the living room.

"He didn't castrate him. Simba has psychology. You know what is psychology?"
"Yes, Madame."
"He says he keep Simba to examine him. But he did not castrate him. He did the echo, but no castrating him."