“There was a [non-Jewish] woman who was suspected of being an estrie, and she would attack people. She appeared to a Jew as a cat and he hit her. The next day she asked him to give her some of his bread and salt, and he wanted to give it to her. An old man said to him “Be not overly righteous” (Ecc. 7:16). Where one has an obligation to others, one must not exhibit excessive piety, for if she lives, she will harm people. Thus the Holy One, blessed be He, created her for you as a test, just as he created Amalek for Saul and punished him for letting him live.” Sefer Hassidim, Siman 1466
—for Elizabeth Rose Shaffer
In the days when the Shevet Sofer still reigned in Pressburg, there lived an estrie, if an estrie may be said to live. The Sages, perhaps, will permit us to say this one did, for she had befriended the zogerin of the Schloßstrasse synagogue and was there often, with brown hair in a neat chignon tied only on itself, learning and asking blessings of all who would give them. Wherever she could lend a hand, it was lent: organizing the library, serving on the women’s aid committee, and even, amidst the latest of the community’s crises, joining the search for Reb Darel’s youngest daughter, who, like a princess in a Nachmanian fairy tale, had been missing seven weeks.
It was exhausting work—or would have been for a mortal—but what will one not do for a chance at salvation? Who can sleep the short nights of this world when she is so keenly aware of the long night to come? Thus, when the synagogue doors were locked and the quarter’s windows dark, the estrie was still up: at the cemetery, praying on the graves of tsadikim; or in the little room she rented on Mikulášska Street, studying Hebrew and Talmud; or in the alleys behind the music halls at three a.m., kicking at piles of trash.
In one of these alleys, on one of these small mornings, she saw for the first time the piercing, gold eyes of a black cat following her from a high fence.
“Aren’t you a pretty thing?” smiled the estrie, voice low and soft as she offered up a hand with her smell. “I’ll bet you know where the rats are hiding. Care to show me the town?”
For a moment, the Angora just sat, but then she started, and the two wandered together through the dry chill of January, the soft sift of the last evening’s snow. It was beneath the bridge by St. Michael’s gate, that the estrie found her quarry scuttling through leaf litter outside a burrow. At the loudest rustle, her head snapped right, her hand flew over the buttons of her blouse, and she was gone.
Where she had stood, an odd-eyed white shorthair sat atop a pair of leather shoes peeking her up through a crumple of skirt and shirt and shawl, apron strings and satchel straps. The shorthair shook her head, coiled her shoulders, and leapt from the dress’s open collar, crashing into frost-slicked leaves and running a large, brown rat to ground over three metres. In the shadow of the bridge, the paws that held the rat—struggling—to the soft soil swiftly became a pair of pale human hands that snapped the creature’s neck with a practiced motion.
It was a cold night, and the estrie hurried back to her things, bending at the waist as she stuffed the warm little body into her satchel and picked up her clothes. The sense of being watched spun her around, but it was only the black cat—great, golden eyes fixed on her with intent somehow more than animal—and the estrie held her gaze coquettishly as she turned and resumed gathering her things. “You like what you see?” she teased, wriggling her skirt to her waist and then turning back toward the cat as she drew on her blouse and did the buttons up tight to her chest. It was a cold night.
The shawl fell plentifully around her neck. The strap of the satchel snugged to her shoulder. “Thank you for dinner,” curtsied the estrie. “You earned the show. Don’t look at me like that; Rav says, ‘Whatever may not properly be done in public is forbidden even in the most secret chamber.’ Ladies dress in their chambers all the time.” With a shrug and a chuckle, she scrambled up the bank and passed under the gate, moving briskly toward Mikulášska Street with snow-silenced cobble eating her steps until the Old Town Hall struck four.
At her door, the estrie had again the sense of being watched, but this time she did not turn. “You walked me home,” she observed, rummaging around the rat for her key. “That was sweet of you. Perhaps you hoped for a nightcap? I’m afraid I don’t keep milk or cream.” She left the key in the lock and crouched down, facing the cat with lips pursed in thought. “Does that not dissuade you?” Her full brows knitted. “Hmm . . . What are you to do with me? The Gemara permits maintaining a black cat, but the white one is forbidden. I could keep you, but surely you would not keep me.”
The cat cocked her head.
“Very well,” surrendered the estrie, and the two went inside.
The estrie’s room was sparse, with little for the curious cat to explore, yet it held her attention the little while her hostess needed to pull saucer, bowl, bottle, and knife from the cupboard. The saucer she filled with water for her guest, and the bowl with blood from the rat for herself, laying both on the floor with a flourish.
“Join me,” she laughed, and again was gone. The odd-eyed white cat stepped out of her clothes and moved toward the bowl.
“Who are you?” demanded the black cat. No words were spoken, but the utterance was written in the curve of her back and the holding of her ears in a way the estrie had not seen before.
The white cat stopped, flicked her tail, and stretched her shoulder just so. “You are no cat,” she observed.
“And your answer is no answer,” the black cat tossed her head. “Perhaps you do not know what becomes of a door closed between a cat and the hen she chases?”
One odd eye of the white cat narrowed. “My name is Priva,” she slinked. “But it is you who require greater explanation.”
“Were I not a cat, you should have it,” licked the Angora on her paw, “lest I seem selfish by receiving yours without recompense. In this form, however, you may forgive my need to keep secrets for my own protection. Indeed, perhaps you will be so good as to treat it as a generosity, as it will spare you some trouble not to know, and the Gemara holds that, ‘For a cat, saving itself is also considered like saving others.’”
“You are Shoshana,” stepped the white cat. “Reb Darel’s daughter.” Her nose twitched.
“This makes earlier somewhat awkward.”
“Please don’t let it!” swooped the black cat. Then, with as much pout as a cat can
manage, “How did you know?”
Priva’s blue eye flashed beside her brown. “Among women, only a zogerin, a rebbetzin, a rabbi’s daughter, or I would quote Talmud so.”
“If you are none of the three,” the black cat’s tail twitched wryly, “you must tell me of
the secret, fourth thing.”
“What can I tell you that you have not already seen?” Priva took a lap of blood from her bowl, as though she were not starving, but only seeking to prove a point. “Everyone is looking for you, you know.”
“I know, but half the books in this room are in Hebrew and rats aren’t kosher, so I’m guessing we’ve both got secrets.”
“That’s why I drink as a cat. You think this would touch my lips as a Jew?”
“Are you not a Jew as a cat?”
Priva fluffed her tail. “Can a cat be joined to a covenant?”
Shoshana did not even look up from her water to render judgement. “If you thought yourself, in any form, so light a thing that a small rope would suffice, estrie, you would not have taken halakha upon you. But since you felt the need of a device for greater security, R. Ḥananya holds that it is not a burden and must be worn even on the Sabbath.”
“And if kashrut would starve me?”
“Talk to a priest?”
Priva rose on the tips of her claws. “What kind of rabbi’s daughter are you?”
“By your reasoning, none at the moment.” At last, Shoshana lifted her face from the saucer. “I am a cat.”
The question burst from Priva like a cat’s sneeze held far too long. “But how?”
Shoshana’s eyes half closed in satisfaction. “You are not the only one who reads Hebrew,” she looked at the books on the desk, on the cot, in the corners of the floor, “or interests herself in kabbalah.”
Priva’s eyes grew only wider, as though their blue would rival the sea and their brown swallow the earth. “Lo aleynu,” she shivered, no stronger than a whisper, but curiosity soon got the better of her, and she stepped slowly toward the black cat, reaching gingerly toward her with an outstretched paw. “But why?”
Shoshana swatted the paw away. “It’s lovely! Why should I sit in my father’s house, waiting to be sent to another man’s to keep his accounts and conduct his business while he walls himself behind his books, when I could sleep in, go where I please, see any show in town, and devote myself to the books in me?” She lay down. “Besides, it’s research.”
“Research?”
“For my novel.”
“Your novel?”
“Yes,” Shoshana nodded. “Like Hugo. You know Hugo? Mine’s about Benjamin.”
“What does being a cat have to do with Benjamin?”
The black cat shifted her shoulders as though it were obvious. “‘Benjamin is a ravenous wolf,’” she quoted. “How better to understand someone who spent time as an animal than by doing it myself?”
Priva collapsed, rolling with laughter. “You really don’t do anything halfway, do you?she exclaimed, and then her eyes took on a great seriousness. “I love that about you.” She grew quiet, then snickered.
“What?” asked Shoshana, a smile in the arch of her hips.
“I’m just thinking of all those Christian princes getting themselves turned into frogs for being assholes and expecting everyone to feel sorry for them. And here you are, cat by choice, beholden to no one! It’s marvelous. But . . . oh!” Priva turned suddenly upward, as though the thought were weighty enough to ballast her. “This is a risky business. Suppose you are out in the town, and everyone is taken with your beautiful coat, and then all hands are to pet you, and someone kisses the top of your head between your ears—as sometimes old women do when a cat has charmed them—and then . . . POW! True love’s kiss, and you are human again, and your easygoing days are over.”
Shoshana stretched with a cackle. “Ha! I shouldn’t worry. I have been so favoured by more than one passerby in Hviezdoslav Square, but what are they to me?”
“Then I shall not pity you,” acknowledged Priva, “until the day writing a novel takes thumbs.”
“Pah,” rose Shoshana. “Sufficient unto the day is the evil thereof.”
“You quote Jesus?” The white cat raised an odd eyebrow.
The black cat switched her tail in disappointment. “And here, I thought you knew your Talmud! But evil or otherwise, day is breaking, and I have sleeping to do. Is there a chance of crossing paths with you again tonight?”
“If you find yourself in the Pálffy Gardens,” offered Priva, resuming human form to reach the doorknob, “I should think so.”
And Shoshana—with a last look at the naked woman sheltering behind the door from the cold—departed into the night.
The next day was the longest Priva remembered living (if an estrie can be said to live) in a long time. The pressing matter around the shul remained the whereabouts of Reb Darel’s daughter, and while it was comforting to know that she was well, it was difficult for Priva to keep that to herself for the comfort she knew it might have brought the old rabbi. At the day’s end, anxious to get home, she quite literally ran into her friend, the zogerin, rounding the corner of the building, for Priva’s eyes were on the winter sunset and the zogerin’s on the ground, searching—as she explained with an apology—for chicken tracks.
At home, the estrie left her studies early, fitted herself with shawl and satchel, and strode briskly toward the Pálffy Gardens, trying to guess which part of them might draw Shoshana’s interest first. Had she still human legs, Priva thought it might have been the riding hall, but, as she didn’t, she decided to start at the linden.
The gardens brought a familiar comfort to Priva—a hope tinged with sorrow. When the palatine planted them, they were laid out in the French fashion, for which an estrie’s nature afforded little sympathy. It was not until they became an English garden that they held her attention, gesturing toward the wild and inchoate. Now—open to the public and neglected by the city—the gentlefolk of Pressburg shunned them as derelict and dilapidated, leaving them a haunt for the town’s poor and dispossessed, but Priva had never understood how this was not a feature.
The English garden differed from the French by cultivating the illusion of natural landscape: open spaces and thickets, fake grottos and faux ruins. Now the thickets truly grew of their own accord, and the ruins were quite real. Once, members of the gentry had paid salaries to professional hermits to inhabit gardens like this and complete their rustic air; now, men and women genuinely lonely squatted in them for free, and their service was despised. Strolling through these gardens, tossing a Heller from carefully manicured fingertips into a cup where she could, she was quite proud of her human form, and quite sure she would never understand the spirit the world expected to lie beneath it.
The black cat was, indeed, on the remains of the linden’s scaffolding, admiring the bare and spreading branches against the night sky with eyes that flashed like fallen stars in the meagre light. By instinct, Priva offered a knuckle. She scarcely had time to reconsider the appropriateness of the gesture before the cat was happily rubbing the corner of her mouth on it.
“Ah,” she whispered. “So we are really going to do this alley-cat style.” Shoshana gave her a reproachful look, then stared her up and down. “Oh, are you disappointed I’ve come like this? I’ll change soon enough. Let’s find somewhere out of the way with something to catch.”
So they set off—the strange, scholarly woman and the black cat that seemed both to follow and guide her. It was again a cold night, when many who slept in this park during warmer months sought more sheltered nests elsewhere, and it didn’t take long to find a littered spot among the hedges where the rats played. Again, Priva slipped out of her clothes into her cat’s skin. Again, she ran the most ponderous rodent down and trapped it beneath her claws. But before she could shift, Shoshana wriggled. “Wait! I have questions.”
The white cat’s odd eyes glared at her. “Can they not wait until the work is done?”
“Why do the work this way at all?” asked Shoshana. “Why not come out as a cat in the first place and carry it home as one?”
Priva pushed harder with her forelimbs, arching her back. “Because then I’d have to bite it.”
“Does it disgust you so, even as a cat? Why feed on rats at all, then?”
“Do you take me for a Countess Báthory?” The rat began to slip free, but the pads of the
white cat’s paws lengthened into encaging fingers, and then it was done. Priva rose. “I will answer your questions over dinner if you join me. I have something more for you tonight.” The black cat hesitated, perhaps picturing the pile of bodies six hundred high that an estrie might well create, or perhaps just immobilized by imagining the older woman, whose skin glowed in the moonlight now as she dressed again, as the Tigress of Židovská Street. When they returned to Priva’s room, her promise was made good in a saucerful of cream purchased for the occasion, and she slid comfortably back into her cat’s skin once her own bowl was prepared. But before putting her tongue to it, she lolled her head and slunk of her tail: “‘It said to them, “If the snake would bite without a whisper . . . I would not bite unless it was said to me from heaven: ‘Bite!’”’”
Shoshana, paused above her saucer, tipped her head. “But why?”
“Because,” began Priva, who now dipped her tongue, so that it dripped red as she
finished, “I am more than the hunger of unfinishedness.”
“This I know,” affirmed the black cat, mouth now white with cream. “But do you truly
mean to say you would bite nothing at all? The snake could tell you there are other reasons to bite—other kinds of hunger.”
A slyness crept through Priva’s spine, but her tone was even. “Then heaven can send me manna, or else I shall have to regard that, too, as the business of men.”
Shoshana’s eyes laughed. “Do you think manna likelier to fall at shul? Is that the business you are about?”
The white cat’s head perked. “What of the shul?”
“I saw you there today.”
“So your business is following stray cats around?” Priva’s tail flicked with teasing mirth.
“No. I make it my business, from time to time, to climb the tree that grows up past my
father’s office to make sure he is alright.”
Priva sobered. “You are a good daughter.”
The black cat’s shoulders rolled. “Others would disagree.”
“Others are fools,” proclaimed Priva calmly. “It should not be this way—you in disguise merely to live and devote yourself to letters as any man might do, me begging blessings, unable to name the curse I beg them for! There is no future here for those like us.”
The black cat lowered its eyes, like gold seeking to be reburied.
“Come with me.” The words escaped Priva as though they might rhyme with shekakha lo ba’olamo.
Shoshana’s eyes rose and narrowed. “With you?” Her head shook. “With you where?”
“Breslau. The Reform is strong there. Maybe there, the rabbis can be convinced to find a place for us.”
“I . . . oh, Priva.” Shoshana’s tail curled at her feet. “If all who want change go, who will make change here? Who will care for the ones who cannot leave?” She looked down at her paws.
“Who will care for my father if his health should fail? It is hard, but change will come, even to Pressburg.”
“And if it doesn’t?” asked Priva, drawing closer. “Will you die as a cat? And I live as a secret?”
“Not forever,” assured Shoshana. “But also not yet. Give it time.” Before Priva could object, the black cat nuzzled at her face. “I must apologize for speaking in my teacher’s presence,” she mewed, “for one who does is liable to be punished with the bite of a snake.”
“Give it time,” Priva purred back. And they did.
For seven weeks, the black cat and the white roamed the city together in small hours, watching stars and trapping rats and trespassing on church properties. For seven weeks, they dined together on blood and milk, laughing and philosophizing and debating the prospects of Pressburg. And for seven weeks, they separated by day, with the black cat off about her naps and her novel and her check-ins on her father, and the estrie attending to prayer and study and work at the synagogue.
But on the night of the seventh Sabbath, Shoshana did not appear in the Medical Garden as agreed, and the next morning, when Priva arrived at the shul, a small crowd was gathered at the base of the tall tree that grew past Reb Darel’s window, gazing into its highest branches. The zogerin stood arguing with Mrs. Bíró, the gabete. “What is going on?” Priva asked.
The zogerin fumed. “There’s a cat stuck up the tree.”
Priva closed her eyes and pressed her lips. “What colour is it?”
“Not you, too!” the zogerin exploded.
Priva scarcely had time to look confused before Mrs. Bíró erupted, “See! See! Any damned fool knows to ask if it’s black. It’s a mora! A witch!”
“It’s a cat!” yelled the zogerin. She turned to Priva. “Don’t encourage these superstitious Tschuschen.”
“Arrogant labancok!” cried Mrs. Bíró. “We are shaking that cat out of the tree or we are shooting it down before it fills the place with witches or worse.”
“Where is Reb Darel?” asked Priva.
“Didn’t you hear?” snapped the zogerin. “He was called away Friday on important business. To Sečovce or Studénka or Szendrő or some damned place.”
“That’s why she’s up there . . .” muttered Priva.
“We were left undefended!” Mrs. Bíró nodded with satisfaction.
The tree began to shake.
Priva shoved her way to the midst of the crowd, where a group of young men had the trunk in their grip. “Stop it!” she screamed. “You’re scaring her!” The men froze.
“Her?” one of them asked. “How do you know it’s a her? Is that your cat?”
Priva looked from the shimmering frost on the ground and the dry, curled leaves the men had brought down to the clenched ball of black fur some thirty feet in the air. Her expression opened. “I think I’m hers, actually . . .”
“Keep shaking!” demanded a voice from the crowd. The men went back to work.
“Stop it!” Priva yelled again, but no one minded her. “I said, ‘Stop!’”
The men went on with their shaking. A stone whipped past Priva’s head, and she turned to see a boy reloading his slingshot, the exasperated zogerin throwing up her hands.
Where Priva had stood, there was only a pile of clothes. A white cat raced up the side of the tree, clawing deep into the bark as it shook and trying to keep to the back as stones flew. Her head span and her arms ached, but the black spot at the top drew closer until she stepped out onto the highest limb.
The spot did not move.
Priva crept low to the branch, speaking in staccato movements of her shoulders. “I’m getting you down, and we’re leaving.”
The spot said nothing.
“It’s not too far.” Priva’s voice was gentle even as the tree thrashed. “Not for a cat. You
just have to relax.”
The spot waited.
Priva closed her eyes and listened. The men yelled, and the stones whistled, and then
there was a gentle whisper. She stepped forward and took the scruff of Shoshana’s neck in her teeth.
And where the spot had clung to the branch, there was nothing, but below that the broken limb of the tree was in free fall beside a young woman with golden skin and blackest hair and a white cat wrapped about her like a tallit.
“You came for me!” she whispered in the cat’s ear. “I knew you would! Now shift.”
Priva’s eyes widened as though they might swallow the rapidly approaching crowd below, but she dared not speak in her teacher’s presence.
Now two women were falling with arms around one another’s necks. Shoshana’s fingers wove up into Priva’s loose chignon.
The estrie’s odd eyes searched the young woman’s. “What are you doing?” she breathed.
Shoshana smiled like a blooming rose. “I am setting us both free.”
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Rozalija Grace, UE, is a Canadian writer and translator with roots in Russian Alaska and Franco-Ontario. Her poems, short stories, and essays (in English, French, and Russian) have been nominated for the Pushcart Prize and featured in Room, Rust & Moth, So to Speak, and elsewhere, while her translations of early Soviet poetry have been nominated for Best Literary Translations. She currently serves as a poetry editor for Psaltery & Lyre and lives in the Pays-d’en-Haut as the fiancée of a great American novelist. You can read more at her website, rozalijagrace.com, and on Bluesky @rozalijagrace.com.
FINALLY took the time to read this!
This is really quite good!