It is now more than three years since I informed the reading public about our first cat—the tomcat Mackie Messer from Ischia outside Naples, found as an undernourishedproletarian kitten behind an Italian garbage can, adopted and reared on squid leavings and fishheads, smuggled across all European national boundaries and illegally broughtinto Norway, where he propagated his Neapolitan race and lived a splendid life in his new milieu, known and respected as the sovereign and virtuoso lover he developed into.  He was a Jascha Haifitz among cats.

Like so many other tomcats, however, he was overtaken by a tragic fate, and is today no longer visible to the earthly eye.  As Shakespeare would have put it: He is dead and gone, Ophelia, dead and gone.

Our next cat was Electra, today a mature woman and mother of many children, but once a trembling little midge of a terrified wild cat who had chanced to take refuge in the cellar at one of the farms out here in Enebakk.  We got her from the farmer, delivered in a cardboard box, and we promptly gave her the run of our very large, ancient house.  The house was in that stage of fruitful chaos known as renovation, and it offered a cool million hiding places for an itty-bitty kitten who had decided never again to have anything to do with people.  For several days afterward she was practically invisible, and stayed hidden under planks, in corners, and in holes in the walls.  She didn't touch the saucers of milk and didn't look at the fish we set out for her.  I think a fortnight passed before she took food, and at night lost sleep over the cruelty to animals going on in the house.  Had there been the slightest possibility of discovering her lair, or of getting hold of her, I would have long since taken her back where she came from.  But we couldn't get our hands on her.

(As a digression it occurs to me that I actually know a person who can catch mice with his hands: Our eminent humanist and philosopher Arne Næss can catch any mouse with his hands in the course of a few seconds.  He is more adept than any cat I've seen.  But he doesn't play with them; he just talks seriously with them and then lets them go.  I've seen it myself.)

But it was impossible to capture puss, and we felt like executioners and animal abusers for a long time.  It turned out, though, that she was beginning to eat a little at night while we were asleep.  That was a sign that her current neurosis was breaking up.  From then things proceeded step by step—one evening she came out from some hiding place in the wall and sat down on the floor and looked at us.  After about a month she could stay in the same room with us without being visibly disturbed.  But if you tried to get near her, she would disappear again for hours.  It was obvious that we must abandon any attempt to approach her.

But she ate well, and grew a little.

Now you mustn't misunderstand this: Puss was still just as afraid and just as neurotic; she didn't believe in security and our good intentions.  She had merely gotten used to us, and had doubtless realized that we weren't so nimble as she'd thought at first.  The fear was the same, and I was convinced that nothing could ever make a normal cat of her: She was a nervous wreck from the beginning, and I know that she suffered from paranoid compulsive thoughts; for example, that we mixed poison into her food or would someday drown her.  Nothing was further from the truth.

Then one day—after nearly two months—something happened in the house.  One evening I was sitting with a book down in the construction area which had already acquired the name “living room”, and I sat for a long time reading.  Then I felt something poking me.

It was puss.

She touched me carefully with her paw, and gently nibbled my shoe.  I pretended not to notice, and sat motionless.  At the end of half an hour she had examined me from sole to crown; she had strolled up my leg, sat in my lap, and been up on my shoulders.  She sniffed at my hair and left a spot in my book.  If I so much as moved a finger, she disappeared and waited a long time before continuing her investigation.  The very next day she ventured up to my wife, and then examined her.  Our child she kept away from.

Several days passed in this way: she sniffed at us, sat on us and cautiously scratched us, but if anyone moved, she disappeared like lightning.  Then all at once came the transformation.

Never in all my association with animals or people have I seen such affection! Puss was mad with love.  It was impossible to sit still as long as a second without being sat on by her.  She came like a cannonball from the most unexpected places, usually through the air, and clung fast, sitting or lying wherever she hit us -- on the shoulder, stomach or face.  There was no peace to be had from puss.

A change had occurred in the way the neurosis was expressed, in the symptoms of the disease—but this cat wasn't normal.  She couldn't be normal, for if beasts or men behaved in that fashion the world would quite simply cease to function; it would founder from love.  Founder in beauty, to be sure—but founder.

At the same time she acquired a new passion: Lying on pillows.  When she wasn't busy loving us to death, she simply lay on a pillow, day and night, around the clock.  She was in the process of lying herself to death.

Summer passed, and fall began.  Puss lay.  She lay through the autumn, unmoved by storm and rain.  She lay in chairs, on pillows, on people and in beds.  She lay and lay.  She was uncleanly to a degree which can be of interest only to psychiatry.  She howled like a cat if you put her out on the steps, she cried and whined at the mere sight of anything resembling nature.  She hated fresh air and got hysterical if she came in contact with rain.  She howled if through a misunderstanding she set her paws on the grass.  She was an unnatural and downright repulsive cat.  She was almost grown, too.

In the course of these months she was transformed from a wild Norwegian alley cat to a decadent silk-puss who could have been born at the French court toward the end of the 1700s.  This leap from barbarism to decadence she accomplished in a few days.  There was no question of touching any intermediate stage of culture.  Her need for love gradually abated somewhat, and by winter practically only the need to lie remained.  We gradually got the impression that she contrived to lie in several places at once.  Puss was lying everywhere.  There was nowhere you could sit without first looking to see that you weren't sitting down on the cat.  And you always did.  She never went out, and screamed like a lunatic at the sight of the snow.

In the late winter we gave her the name Electra because of the peculiarly tragic facial expression she had assumed.  Every time any of us had the misfortune to disturb her—if, for example, we talked loudly while she was resting—she would lift her head and look at us with her Electra expression.  She owned the house now, and we were bothering her.

When the first breath of mild weather came into the air, the miracle happened.  Electra woke up, sharpened her claws, stretched herself a couple of times, arched her back like a tiger and for a few days was once more utterly mad with love.  You couldn't cross the room in peace.  But she no longer lay.  One day a cat screeched outside the house.  Electra looked around with green, devilish eyes.  Then for the first time in human memory she went over to the front door and said: “MEOW!!”

“MEOW!!!” came the answer from outside: “MEOW!!!”

Electra looked up at us with a sleepy look and half-open mouth, like an embodiment of all the lewdness which has animated creation.  We let her out, and she went.

Five days later she came home again.

Her fur was shabby and her face ravaged.  She staggered as she crossed the floor.  She slept for two days, then awoke when someone called her from outside.

She didn't even look at her saucer of milk, but went straight to the door again, unwashed and unkempt.

“MEOW!” she said: “Let me out!”

Electra had become a woman.

Some weeks later there was a private occurrence in our family, and the world had one more human infant than before.  Electra was inspired and immediately paid a visit to mother and child—I think during the first meal they ate at home.  Electra lay down in the bed and began purring in a quite new and remarkably intense fashion.

“Æ ... ø ... æ ... r ... r ... !” said the newborn.

“Rrrrrrrrrrrr,” answered Electra.

It was the baby's mother who discovered that Electra had set up her own birthing room in the bed, and was in the process of becoming a mother at that very moment.  The rest of the litter came into the world in a large and comfy closet set up for that purpose.

From now on Electra was a new person.  She stopped eating at home altogether.  She hunted.  She was a wild cat again, but in an ennobled version.  She became the loveliest and wildest she-beast imaginable.  She became a leopard, a panther.  Mother and hunter over the earth.

Our place out here teems with mice, rats, and moles.  It was a bad time for them.  Outdoors you never saw Electra without one of them in her mouth—and her young ones got them served up in the form of warm, sweet mother's milk.  After awhile the kittens began to creep around in the hall outside the closet, and when spring came, they climbed out onto the porch and down the steps, out into the grass.  They were familiar with the world and with people from the first minute, and they've never known about their mother's angst-ridden childhood.  When they played in the grass, Electra lay and looked after them.  She lay in Egyptian immobility with half-closed eyes and watched over the swarming and squeaking life she had brought into the world.

Then she began getting mice for them.  If the kittens weren't outside, she'd come to them in the living room with a plaything, often splendid, lively specimens which had a hard and miserable time with mother and children.

There was nothing to be done about that.

My respect for Electra grew from day to day, but it was well into the summer when I began to love her.  The situation was as follows:

The young ones were playing in the grass, and in from the road came a big, very big and mean German-shepherd-like dog.  It didn't bark—it literally roared with rapture at the sight of four helpless kittens.  For a second it licked its chops, then it attacked.

What the brute didn't know was that Electra was lying on the porch.

I looked at Electra, and I can't say how it happened, but she wasn't lying there anymore.  She turned into air before my eyes.  It's a strange experience to see something become invisible.  I didn't see so much as a streak or a shadow in the air.

I didn't know that a dog can move so fast.  For half a second a howl remained after it in the air.  They were both around the corner long since, Electra like a jockey on its neck.  After a few seconds she came back, indolent and calm.  She went over and sniffed at the babies, then lay down on the porch, licked her fur a little, cleaned her claws with her tongue, and sank back into herself.  The whole thing must have been over in half a minute.

It can happen that dogs grow afraid of cats.  Now I know why.  I've never seen this bow-wow again, either in the neighborhood or in the rest of this valley.

That was last summer, and since then Electra has been like that.  Her stages on the way to maturity, from a deathly scared kitten and decadent silk-puss, have left no traces.  She is just a sovereign predator and a passionate mother.  Electra, as is fitting and proper, has two litters a year.  She is much too wild to be very cuddly, but she regards us with indulgence and we are allowed to live in her house.  She has a grown son who looks almost exactly like her, except that his fur is shorter.  All in all she has beautiful children.

We have four cats today.  The fifth one got sick and passed away.  That was Whitey, and it's strange to think that he has wings now.

Electra is often out cruising.  She comes home almost only to share the fruits of the chase or to give milk.  When all are well fed, she licks her kittens until they all go to sleep on top of each other in a big pile of cats.  She lies at the bottom and is happy.

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This page added July 1998, revised March 2002