Café Boris and the dead cat dance

Boris was marking up a chalk sign in his café, listing the flaws in each of the café’s dishes.

It epitomised the logic of life at Café Boris. Boris loved the money that customers brought but hated the customers, or at least, so he said, though he never seemed happier than when he was telling customers how much he disliked them. He was constantly trying to find ways to get rid of the tourists that came to his café en masse, but every effort he made to get rid of customers, made the café even more popular. People would literally travel half way round the world to be abused by the famous Boris.

As for the list of ‘today’s revolting food’, it proved a massive hit, tourists desperate to have chicken ‘so dry you will choke on it’ and borsch ‘so rich you will probably die’. Their tweets, texts, blogs and emails whizzed round the world so that no sooner did the ‘menu of disgust’ go up than a picture of it would be posted on the local tourist information centre, with which Boris had regular standing rows for consistently promoting his café.

Boris was interrupted in his chalkage by Sergei, a violinist and local musician of some renown, for his performance with the ladies if not with the violin.

“Yes, what is it?” asked Boris, “Can’t you see I’m busy. If I don’t finish explaining how bad the food is someone might make a mistake and order something from the menu. They shouldn’t, the food here is dreadful.”

Sergei smiled, clearly a fan of Boris’ daily pantomime.

“I am here to do you a great favour,” he said, “I am offering to play for you, tonight, at the café. I will bring in many fans.”

Boris looked at him like he had once looked at the American couple he overheard discussing how much they should tip him. “Tip, you shouldn’t leave a tip,” he had told them, “not for me, not for this place. The food was disgusting, the service dreadful, and look around you. This isn’t your clean-tabled American restaurant with smiling waiters, you should leave no tip, in fact you should demand your money back.” The American had filmed the entire tirade on his mobile phone and left a $100 tip, saying that it was worth every dime. A youtube posting of incident is available and has had over 100,000 hits.

To Sergei he said, “Why would I want you to play. You bring customers? I hate customers. You make noise, you want people to dance, to be happy. This, my friend, is not that type of café. Try another café, or another country.”

At that moment Andrei, one of the locals, came rushing up. “Boris,” he said anxiously, “there is something wrong with Boris.”

Boris looked perplexed by this statement. “You speak like a modernist writer,” he complained, “if you want to criticise me do not do it in the third person, just me what you think is wrong with me.”

“No, not you, you fool, Boris the cat. He is not moving.”

Boris was the café’s cat. He had strayed into the café one day a couple of years previously. He called the cat Boris so that, when strangers came in the café asking for Boris he could simply point them to the cat. Strangely Boris had shown great affection to the cat, taking him in as a stray. It was the only time he was known to show affection, sometimes he would sit the cat on his knee, stroking it, and share with it the woes of his world, which mostly related to how much stress and hassle his customers caused him.

“Of course he isn’t moving, he’s sleeping, he’s a cat, that’s what cats do, sleep, steal food and sleep some more. They are like Russians.”

“Well I’m a Russian,” said Sergei, “and though I may be lazy at least I make an effort to breathe.”

At these words Boris rushed over to the cat, which was lying in its usual basket in the corner of the café. Holding it in his arms and testing it for breath, he confirmed that the cat had indeed ceased to breathe.

“My lovely Boris,” he said, holding the cat lovingly to his chest. “How can he be dead? Nobody gave it their food did they? Cat’s shouldn’t eat food from this café, it’s poison. I don’t eat it, the cat doesn’t eat I, even the rats don’t eat it.”

Sergei walked over to Boris.

“I may be able to help,” he said.

“Help? How? You can fix a dead cat? What are you, a cat doctor?”

“No, I am,” at this point he took off his hat for dramatic effect, though this didn’t work as he dropped his hat on the floor, fumbled with his violin as he tried to catch the hat, and took several seconds to retrieve the hat and regain his dignity and balance. “I am a member of the dead cat dance orchestra.”

“The dead cat dance orchestra?” said Boris. “I have never heard of it.”

“You wouldn’t have. As far as the rest of the world knows we don’t exist. We maintain the ancient mystical practices, of music as a form of magic. Our pride and glory is the dead cat dance, music that can wake a cat from the dead. It is a mystical ceremony and ritual, that can bring a stiff, dead corpse of a cat dancing back to life.”

“What nonsense,” Boris said, “you are trying to scam me. You think I am a simple peasant man who believes in witchcraft and dancing cats, but I a practical man of business. This,” he gestured to the café, “does not run on hoxy voodoo, it takes sweat, hard work, my very soul.”

One of the regulars, Yuri, interjected. “I have heard of this music, a ritual that can waken the dead back to life. They say that a body that has decided to die can change its mind if the right music is played to lure it back.”

Others in the café agreed, some citing instances of relatives and friends who had been bought back to life by the mystical music of which Sergei spoke.

“We must be quick, though” Sergei said, “we have but a few hours during which the magic will work. I will get the band together for tonight, at 7.30.”

“This is all too suspicious,” Boris said, “you come in here asking for a gig tonight, and now you say your magic music act must be performed here tonight. You think I don’t know that this ‘dead cat orchestra’ is the same rabble of musicians you were planning to play with anyway?”

However, Boris looked at the dead cat in his arms and for once in his life gave up to hope. “All right, one night only, but if you don’t bring the dead back to life you will be banned from my café.”

The music began promptly at 7.30. Tables and chairs were moved away to allow space for dancing and a throng of people were there to witness the promised miracle.

The band wore masks, Sergei was identifiable underneath the face of leopard, but the rest of the band; a bear on mandolin, an eagle on accordion and a cockerel on flute and trumpet, were unrecognisable. “It is to retain the mystery,” Sergei said, “people must never know who is it has this magic gift for returning life.”

“But we know you, Sergei,” Andrei had said, “Any time we want the mystical, anonymous musicians we just ask you.”

“Ah, but who am I?” Sergei asked, from behind the leopard mask, and before he could be reminded that he was Sergei, and had already answered to that name, he began to play.

The music came from a million places. The audience regonised Ukrainian and Russian standards, such as Ty Zh Mene Pidmanula and Hopak, but they were not played in the traditional style. There were influences from Turkey, arabia, Africa, even western pop, but it wore every influence fleetingly as each sound danced frantically onto the next. The music was impulsive, people who never dance, danced, people who never sing, sang, vodka flowed like only vodka can flow and the café was, for once, the very centre of entertainment in all Luhansk.

During this festivity Boris sat in the corner with the prostate body of Boris the cat on his lap. Every few minutes he would look down on it to see if it had begun to dance and the saddened scowl remained etched on his face.

By midnight the dancing had become a frenzy, the small space of freed floor packed with bodies. Vodka, brandy, beer and wine flowed, the music became ever more frantic, the musicians never pausing. Nobody left to go home, if anything the mass of bodies grew as passers-by came into Café Boris to ‘join in the fun’, something which had never happened before.

In the blur of bodies, alcoholic haze and musical delirium a new body moved. After the gig at least a dozen witnesses would swear that they had seen Boris the cat dancing amid the throng. Certainly something happened to the cat, its body was not to be found in the basket at the end of the night.

Whether or not the cat really came back to life is disputed still and a regular topic for argument in Café Boris. It is the sole, single argument in which Boris does not participate. If it returned to life, however, it took the opportunity to move on and was never seen again inside café Boris. For years afterwards the café’s regulars would see the cat going about its business in other parts of the city, but it never came home.

“Who can blame the cat?” Boris said on one of the few occasions he discussed it, “it nearly died tasting the food in this café, why would it chance returning. If only you customers were half as sensible you would not come here.”

One miracle certainly did occur, however. Boris, the café owner not the cat, joined in the dancing and was seen by many reliable witnesses to be smiling and laughing as he did so, the first time his teeth had been seen in all the decades he had run the cafe.

The dead cat orchestra would become a regular Friday night feature of life at Café Boris, though Boris the cat has never made another appearance at the event and the mystery of his apparent resurrection and disappearance has never been solved.