Drugi jezik na kojem je dostupan ovaj članak: Bosnian
By: Lea Stanković, Communis DDB Beograd
When Ekrem asked me to write something about my pets, at first I thought he had sent the mail to the wrong address. Many friends of Communis are aware that my father, Ivan Stanković, founder, owner, and now former director of the agency, literally has a menagerie of four cats and two dogs in his home.
As I no longer live in the parental home, I don’t think I am “informed” enough to write about all the members of the set – “basic info, their characteristic traits, habits, how they get along, etc.” as Ekrem asked.
In addition, I’m not a fanatic when it comes to animals – I don’t share info about cats who are looking for a home or lost puppies. In fact, I enjoy lecturing my older sister about her excessive concern for George, a mutt she adopted the year Prince George was born, and after whom it was named.
Accordingly I can assure you, that in my heart, there is room for only one cat.
Cikca, or Ciki as she is now known, came into my life in the summer of 2009, at the Moment cafe, near the parental home in which I no longer live.
I had just returned from Moscow, and on the ‘animal’ side, we had just lost three cats in short succession to a combination of malignant diseases and accidents that can only befall cats. We had ‘only’ four dogs! Cikca was strolling around the café – only a few months old, and some guys shooed her away just at the moment (aha!) when I noticed her. She did not resist when I picked her up, and I hastily called the rest of the family to see if we could take her in! They immediately came to see her, and within 10 minutes Ciki was with us in the house, wrapped in a towel, lying on her back, totally relaxed while we cleaned her from fleas.
The rest, as they say, is history. Neither Ciki, nor I can forget her ‘noble’ origin. This is reflected mostly in the fact that she eats relentlessly, and is now more of a bear than a cat. She doesn’t go out unless she really needs to, she refuses to engage in classic feline activities such as hunting, except when it comes to creepy crawlies, such as worms, which do not require a lot of effort. And I – according to members of my family – do not miss a chance to remind her of who it was that found her (I).
Of course, a cat wouldn’t be a cat if it didn’t behave entirely as it suits her.
So Ciki doesn’t hesitate to bite and sometimes ignore me – her savior. Once when I was away for two weeks, and came home only for a day, which of course she didn’t know, she decided to demonstratively ignore me, turning her ass to me and closing her eyes whenever I tried to call her. All this (I assume) fell into the water when I went off again the next day, and after returning from that trip, she changed her tactics – she greeted me, as it were, with wide open paws!
On the other hand, sometimes she surprises me with her affection. In our family we are very fond of her slow, lazy gait, which ends with an extremely ungraceful fall on her side if we say “Come on, Ciki, TUP”. Actually, in her case it’s more her stomach than her side, which must be followed by scratching. Her gifts and tokens of love are unsurpassed – from a dead mouse that appeared one night on the table in my room, to a variety of bathroom items that sometimes proudly appear in the morning on the kitchen counter, displayed as trophies.
Despite her being an ungrateful snake, I’m a major advocate for her rights and the admiration she deserves. While for years now her enemies have, without hesitation, called her fat, and question the uniqueness of the patterns on her fur and the magnificence of her beauty, I claim that such a cat can’t be found anywhere. With the other members of the animal household she practices a policy of peaceful coexistence. Although at one time she was close to Keto, a tomcat who came to us from Voždovac immediately after her, with the third and fourth cats (Giros from Zakynthos and Buvara from my younger sister’s kindergarten) she wasn’t overly excited – you could say that she rather pretended they weren’t there. She’s equally uninterested in dogs, except for one occasion when, after our German Shepard Bel had surgery, she slept next to her head all night, while the dog was waking up from anesthesia.
Although you could hardly ever meet a cat who so appreciates her living conditions – which changed so drastically that fateful day at Moment – Ciki still allows herself one bit of eccentricity – she despises fish.