The Cat at the Wall Read Online Free PDF Page A

to the kid’s face and gave the boy a dose.
    The boy breathed easier after that.
    The quiet seemed to calm the soldiers down. Simcha did another search of the little house, which involved scattering the City of Dreams all over the floor. Aaron took a sudden intake of breath at the sting of the alcohol swab on the bite wound. He seemed like a nice guy. I probably shouldn’t have bit him quite so hard.
    “Seven a.m.,” Aaron said into his recorder. “Discovered male child, primary school age, hiding in false floor. Child can’t or won’t account for himself. Location and identity of his parents is unknown.”
    I rubbed my whiskers against Aaron’s boot to show there were no hard feelings. He patted me gently, then patched up his wound. The two soldiers took up their posts again by the window, one with the rifle, one with the telescope.
    The fleas were still bothering me. I spied the boy’s hands tethered behind his back with plastic twist-tie handcuffs.
    I went up to him, meowed a couple of times so he’d know I was a cat and not a rat, then positioned myself so that his fingers were at my ears. I bumped my head against his hands, just so he got the message.
    As he got busy scratching the flea zones, he calmed down. He’d been crying a bit but eased off, and then he stopped altogether. I started to purr — for real, not just for show.
    It was a very peaceful scene. Through the window the sky changed from dark gray to silver to a rainbow of sunrise colors. I’ve seen so many sunrises since I became a cat, more than I ever saw as a human. But this one was special. The colors made the two soldiers look even younger, almost as though they could have been classmates of mine.
    I had a sudden memory of my mother, coming into the kitchen from the yard in the summer, fresh-cut flowers in her hands, dew on the petals and dew on her. I paid no attention to it then.
    People and flowers are freshest in the morning.
    Cats? We’ve usually been up all night, roaming around. By the morning we look grizzled and done.
    I purred and purred and felt my whole body relax.
    And then I heard the boy start to whisper.
    It was very faint, barely a whisper of a whisper. The soldiers probably couldn’t hear it. But I could. And I didn’t like it.
    I tried to ignore it.
    The words got into my brain anyway.
    He was speaking in Arabic, which, as I’ve said, I can understand now.
    I thought I was having a nightmare. I moved away from his hands and climbed into his lap to hear better. I still didn’t want to believe what I was hearing so I put my front paws on his chest and raised myself up so that my ear was right next to his mouth.
    “ Go placidly amid the noise and the haste …”
    I stood there and listened to him recite the whole damn poem. When he got to the end, he started again at the beginning. He spoke the poem as if it were just one long word.
    There was no mistaking what he was saying.
    He was reciting the Desiderata.
    He was reciting the punishment poem.

Seven
    —
    “There are many theories of punishment,” Ms. Zero said.
    “There is the belief that punishment should be retribution, that it should make the offender suffer,” she continued. “Others believe that the main purpose of punishment should be to help the victim feel better. Should a punishment be so terrible that it deters others from committing the same crime? Is punishment ever a deterrent or do offenders always believe they will get away with their crime?
    “We are going to talk a lot about this in the coming months because you will soon be in a position to make decisions about these things. For example, if we put someone to death for killing someone else, does that make us killers, too? I can see that a lot of you have things to say about that, and I promise that we will have that discussion another day, probably over the course of many days as you try to come to terms with the world you are inheriting. But for now, let’s talk about detention.”
    She took