I had prepared questions for a table and chairs. She did not sit down.
An Evening of Feeding
One hour with Eleni, who feeds street cats, and with seven places where she stops. I followed. I wrote down what I saw, what she told me, and where the record runs out.
date to confirm
Drag the map to walk. The base is painted from open map data for the streets, buildings and terrain of this part of Athens. The names have been taken off it. The seven marks are set deliberately off true, and the line is a broad corridor reconstructed from a photograph map and my own memory. It is not a route you can follow, and it will not take you to a colony.
The First Bowls
I had brought questions built for a table and two chairs. She answered them while checking bowls and counting heads.
Eleni came late and apologised before she had finished arriving. I told her it was two minutes. She was already looking past me at three cats.
I had asked her name three times before this. The first two times I heard it wrong.
a shopping trolley, the wheeled kind older women take to the market
a big soup spoon for getting the food out
Diet Coke bottles she had filled with water
a separate small bowl for each cat
She gave me their names in the order they were eating. Dum Dum, who was female, and who was called Dum Dum because she was a bit silly. Tapas and Fighter, who were quite old boys now.
Each cat had its own small bowl. Dum Dum had not worked out something about the bowls that the other two had. Eleni's explanation of it came apart in the recording. It involved ants. The ants got into the food, and the bowls were arranged in some way to stop them, and I have written down the fact of the arrangement without being able to describe it.
The pigeons I understood. The pigeons ate everything.
Feeding cats is not what she does for a living. What she does for a living is hers to tell, so I have left it out. It is the kind of fact that rearranges a person after you have already decided what they are.
Then she moved to the next cats. This was how the whole hour went. The questions had to learn to walk.
The Museum
Absence turned out to be something you read rather than something you take at face value.
A cat came out who had not been seen for several days. The volunteers had been worried about him. Eleni watched him for a moment and said he did not look hungry.
I asked whether he was hiding in the museum. She thought the officers inside might be feeding him. That was the whole explanation, and it was enough. A cat can go missing from one set of people because he has been eating with another.
I do not know where he had been, or whether anything had happened to him at all.
Two things could be true here and the recording settles neither.
I had assumed that if a cat did not appear, something had gone wrong.
The Cans
Too many cats for the number of hands.
Eleni opened cans and moved cats away from each other, trying to get a particular food to a particular animal while the others pressed in.
The names came faster than I could write them. Scarface. Risotto. Shy. Pasta. Stevie's mother. Handsome. There were more, and I have most of the spellings marked as uncertain in my notes, and a few I cannot confirm were names at all rather than the transcription machine inventing a cast. The cats did not wait for me to solve it.
They all have names. We know them one by one.
She recognised one of them straight away and called her Pasta number three. Five cats with similar colouring had been abandoned together around the middle of August, three years earlier, and the volunteers had called every one of them Pasta.
At the end, we didn't know. We just called them Pasta.
Five cats acquired one name, and the numbers came afterwards. Her naming had room in it for precision, for approximation, for affection, and for giving up on telling five apart.
She fed about a hundred cats in this area, she said, and another hundred on the other side, and across all the areas the work reached something like six hundred cats a day. I have not established what that last figure covers. All of them neutered, she said, all vaccinated, all fed every day.
Then she said the thing I keep going back to.
Our problem now is that we have a lot of old cats.
Handsome was twelve. In other colonies there were cats of fifteen. Every week, she said, one of the old ones needs something.
The neutering had worked. That was the point I was slow to get. Fewer kittens for years running means the cats who are left are the cats who have been there all along, and they are all getting old at the same time. The programme did what it was supposed to do, and what it produced was a hundred elderly animals who each need something on a different week.
See them grow old at my elder feet. Twelve years old.
The volunteers work by day. Friday to one person, Saturday to another, Sunday to a third. If someone cannot come, they swap. A call about an injured cat goes to whoever is responsible for that area, or to whoever is nearest. Everyone has work. Everyone has a family. The rota spreads the responsibility out. It cannot make a person appear at the moment a cat needs them.
The Empty Building
She had not expected them. They had not known the mother was pregnant.
Eleni stopped in front of an old building. Nobody lived in it. There were several like it in this area, she said, and cats got into them and found somewhere to be.
A mother cat was there with kittens. Someone nearby had already left food, and there was water.
So this is not common in our area. It hasn't happened for fifteen years.
She thought the last kittens had been Black Mama's, ten years ago or more, and then said again that this was the first litter in fifteen years. The two dates do not fit together and I have not resolved them. What was not in doubt was her surprise.
The kittens ate. The mother would eat afterwards.
Standing there, she told me about the terrace. Some years ago she had got up onto the terrace of a building that had been blocked off and found thirteen cats. Some were starving. Some were already dead. They had closed the building and told nobody. Black Mama had come to her abandoned with four black kittens, all with infected eyes, and the family was kept together in a crate through the treatment. Two of the kittens were adopted. Black Mama went back out with the other two.
The Flower Shop
A photograph that was not for me and was not for the record.
I asked what the shop was, which was a foolish question, because it was full of flowers.
The people who worked there liked cats and kept a few inside. Eleni had already stopped looking at me. There was a cat near the shop that she had been watching, and she took out her phone and photographed it. She said it was the sick one, and that she had to get it on Monday, and that she was taking a photo so she would know which one.
The photograph was so that on Monday she would find the right cat.
The Construction
Three tabby males who come out after the drilling stops.
Three tabby males used this feeding place. They were wild, Eleni said, and during the day the construction work frightened them, so they came later than the others. One of them came out while we were standing there. The other two did not.
A woman living above the colony had complained about the cats. She said they were dirty and that they brought cockroaches. Eleni said the cats chase the cockroaches.
Thirty years ago, when she started, people used to be much more aggressive about it. Take them to your home. Why do you feed the cats here. We don't want them. She thought the attitude changed once people noticed there were fewer sick and injured cats around, after the neutering had been going a while. It changed. It did not change everywhere.
I asked why she could not just move the three cats somewhere the neighbour would not object.
No, no, no. It is not easy to move cats.
You need crates, she said. You need ten to fifteen days at the new place, with the cat shut in, learning the smells of it and the other cats who are already there. If you let a cat go straight away it gets lost, and it has lost its feeding spot as well. And these three were wild, which makes being shut in worse.
These are three wild cats. How can I take them?
The Mascot
The two most photographed cats on the route, handed back to me as a single blur.
Near the end she pointed out the cats everybody in the area knows. Bravo and Constantin. Two cats, though my recording ran their names together closely enough that for a while afterwards I could not tell whether I had met two cats or one. I have since settled that it was two. I have not settled the spellings.
Tourists feed them and photograph them. Someone said they thought they had seen one of them on Google. I cannot tell from the recording whether that was me or Eleni.
At the beginning of the evening I had needed three tries to hear Eleni's name. At the end of it, my recording had taken the two best known cats on the route and given me back one animal.
The cats
Only the ones the sources actually support. Some of the names I heard that evening are missing from this list because I cannot confirm they were names, and one or two are missing because I can confirm the cat but not the spelling. A cat is not on this list because I saw it in a photograph.
There is one more cat on the route I would like to have listed. Eleni has fed him for thirteen years and he still will not come to her hand. She called him a naughty old boy. I did not get his name.
The End of the Route
I asked whether she had got especially close to any of them.
She said it had been a very bad year. She had lost three of her own favourite boys.
She fosters at home. Some of those cats are adopted and some are not, and the ones nobody asks for stay. She had a three-legged female, written in my transcript as 3DD, who died a year and a half ago. She had taken her in as an adult and thought she was over fifteen.
My wonderful three-legs.
She said she was the most active cat you could see, and that she was kind to every new cat brought into the house.
Earlier in the evening, at one of the stops, a cat had refused to come to her hand. She had called him a naughty old boy.
It's thirteen years now. He should have trusted me a bit.
She had fed him for thirteen years and he still would not come, and she said it the way you would say it about a person you had decided to keep anyway.
That is the end. I will go this way.
She asked me to mention Nine Lives Greece if I posted anything. Then she thanked me for caring about cats, which I had not expected, and which I have thought about since.
She pointed the way she was going. It was about a quarter to eight. Monday still had the sick cat from the flower shop in it.
How this was made, and what is wrong with it
The order of the seven stops comes from a working transcript of a recording made on the walk. The recording has not been checked against the original audio, so nothing here is a quotation. Every line in Eleni's voice is close to what she said and is marked that way.
The route between the stops is reconstructed. It comes from a photograph of a map with my own marks on it, from the streets I remember, and from the time the walk took. The map in this chapter shows a broad corridor and seven marks set off true on purpose. I have not published the starting address, the turns, or where any colony is.
There are no photographs in this chapter yet. There are photographs from the evening, and they are being reviewed one at a time before any of them is published. A station with nothing cleared gets nothing. A drawn plate, if one is ever added, will be labelled as a drawing, because a drawing is not evidence.
Eleni asked to be credited through Nine Lives Greece if I posted anything. That is a request about crediting. It is not permission to publish her address, her occupation, her photographs, or the locations she feeds at, and I have treated it that way.
Still open: the date of the walk and the length of the recording; what the bowls were actually doing about the ants; what happened after the carrier; what the six hundred figure covers; the spellings of most of the names; and whether the sick cat from the flower shop was collected on the Monday.