Column | A dog from Poland

In front of the vet’s door was a cargo bike in which a black and white spotted dog was sleeping completely motionless. Strange, because the street around him buzzed with bustle. Mopeds whirred, passersby passed by.

The dog’s owners, a man and woman of advanced age, were inside the waiting room, which was also where the receptionist’s desk was located. I had to be there to buy kibble for my cat. It has such a refined taste that it only falls on exquisite, hard-to-find brands. The way she eats is less chic: there’s no tasting, let alone chewing, it’s revelry as if death is on her heels. You also see it in people, especially men, usually not the nicest.

The woman stood to read a bill mounted on the wall. “What a pity, all those runaway cats,” she said sharply to her husband. “You see these kinds of notes everywhere.” I stood next to her and read:Our beloved cat Willie has gone missing”, a phrase I lovingly added to my English vocabulary.

Unfortunately, you rarely read on such notes how it was possible that the beloved cat could have run away without a trace. Left the front door or skylight open by accident? Or put the cat out too optimistically in a crowded neighborhood where all the streets and sidewalks look alike?

I got into conversation with the dog’s owners. They turned out to be real animal friends. That is quite different from loving your own cat or dog. They had received this dog a year and a half ago through a foundation that campaigned for stray dogs. It came from Poland and was already deaf and blind before they took it, a wretch that no one looked at anymore. They had five other stray dogs that they kept in a run near their house. “We used to have eight,” said the woman. “We always take them out together. We also had a cat who could put a dog to sleep.”

I asked what was wrong with the dog in the cargo bike. “He’s finished,” said the man, “he’s going to get a sleep injection in a minute.” Business words, but they didn’t sound like that.

Moments later, when the vet arrived, the man went outside to lift his dog from the cargo bike. The animal barely moved and made no sound. Because death is by definition silent, there was a deep silence as the man carried his dog into the treatment room and his wife followed. The receptionist asked me softly if I wanted to come back later to collect my kibble – she had to assist now.

Fifteen minutes later I saw the man with an empty cargo bike returning from a neighboring cafe, his wife smoking a cigarette, about ten meters behind him. It seemed a perfectly normal scene, without any tragedy. Someone should thank them.

In the evening I was standing at the window when a cat jumped onto an empty boat along the quay. willie, our beloved cat† The cat wriggled with its front paws on the tarpaulin over the boat, found a hole and crawled into the interior. Could he still go back? I held my breath. I had to keep an eye on it or else it could be his death. Ten, twenty minutes passed. Then his cup finally appeared in the small opening. He was still alive. He does.