“We've learnt to appreciate and respect and love someone who's different from us. It is very easy to accept and love those who are like us, but to love someone different is very hard, and you helped us to do that.”
A beautiful story for children. But it’s not only children who need beauty and role models and a moral compass. Fairy tales show us who the heroes are and where the dragons lay in ambush for the unwary. Adults should also take note and be reminded about selflessness, compassion, the joy of companionship. Most of all, I think we need a refresher course in honour : we are only as good as our word.
a promise is a promise.
Zorba, a big, fat, and black cat from Hamburg, makes three promises to a dying seagull. That seagull is dying from straying into an oil patch from an illegal tanker dump, but that’s another discussion.
Zorba promises to take care of the egg left in his care by the dying gull, promises not to eat it and promises to teach the hatchling how to fly. Zorba is alone in his apartment near the port of Hamburg, since his young master is away on vacation, but he doesn’t know the first thing about gulls or flying. He needs a little help from his friends, the port cats.
So we will meet Secretario and the Colonel, who live in an Italian restaurant and speak in a silly Hollywood Italian accent. Also Einstein, il professore , whose residence is the amazing Harry’s Port Bazaar and who likes to consult his encyclopedias for answers and SevenSeas, the world traveller with the exotic stories from far away ports. These four bachelors brainstorm the ways Zorba can keep his promises to the already dead gull.
“We will all go. The problems of one cat of this port are the problems of all cats of this port,” the Colonel declared solemnly.
They have adversaries, of sorts, like Matthew, a chimpanzee with a drinking problem, and a couple of stray cats as bullies. But the main issue is how to take care of the egg, and later of the chick. There is a lot of humour in the dialogue between the cats and a lot of ingenuity in their solutions. Like all good fairy tales, there is a sense of wonder. My favorite part is the description of Harry’s Port Bazaar, an incomplete list of its hidden treasures included here:
In the three houses, joined by narrow stairways, there were nearly a million objects, among them, some worthy of special note: 7200 hats with floppy brims that wouldn’t be blown away by the wind; 160 wheels from ships dizzy from sailing round and round the world; 245 ship’s lights that penetrated the thickest pea soup fogs; 12 engine-order telegraphs battered by the ham hands of irate captains; 256 compasses that never veered from North; 6 wooden life-size elephants; 2 stuffed giraffes posed as if surveying the savanna; 1 stuffed polar bear in whose belly lay the right hand of a Norwegian explorer; 700 fans whose blades, when they whirled, recalled the fresh breezes of dusk in the tropics; 1200 jute hammocks that guaranteed a perfect night’s sleep; 1300 marionettes from Sumatra that had performed nothing but love stories; 129 slide projectors that showed landscapes in which you could always be happy; 54000 novels in 47 languages ...
Yet, the problem of teaching about flight when you are earth bound is about to defeat the feline caregivers, no matter how many articles from encyclopedias they read. Zorba and his friends may need to break one of the strictest taboos in the animal world, and talk back to their human masters. It’s a sort of Hail Mary pass, because experience has taught them humans are not to be relied upon: they lie, they cheat, they kill, they destroy the very nature that nurtures them
... in general, humans are incapable of accepting that a creature unlike them could understand them and try to be understood.
But a promise is a promise, and maybe some humans are not beyond redemption. Especially a human who likes words and stories.
“Beautiful words that make you happy or make you sad, but they always please you and make you want to hear more.”
“A poet! What that human does is called poetry. Volume seventeen, letter P, in the encyclopedia.”
Beautiful, poignant, fun, inspiring – Luis Sepulveda wrote this story in exile from his home country and dedicated it to the city of Hamburg, where he found a refuge and a place to dream. I’m glad got the chance to share it with you, here on Goodreads.