‘When the bombs make me look like kebab you are not allowed to eat me’, says 9 year old Diana to Groggy Gregor. She holds her cat in her arms like a baby. All relaxed one moment and panicking the next when someone walks into the room, then returning to her caresses after each false alarm.

Diana herself has been hanging between sleep and being awake for weeks. In the morning she counts the hairs she loses with sighs and grunts that sound almost like a leaf blower.

‘I don’t trust you. I can see it in your groggy, greedy eyes. You will nibble the pieces of me! You must never do that! I had only bread and lentils the past few weeks. I will taste like bread and lentils! Be warned!’ The cat purs in her arms.

Diana still doesn’t trust it. She goes looking for father. He’s trying to get a gas stove going in the middle of a collapsed office cafeteria together with five other men.

‘My sweet papa, will Groggy Gregor eat me after they get me?’

Papa sneezes super fast. Five times in a row.

One man offers a handkerchief.

One of the men rips his own shirt a bit and prays to God and says something like ‘may such words never again be spoken by a child in earnest.’

Papa says, his nose evidently stuffy and his eyes watery: ‘They won’t get you. But please keep that cat away from me.’

The other men are silent.

Now Diana knows Papa is lying. For her benefit. Lying to get something for yourself is haram, but lying to comfort someone else is mercy.

She turns and tells Gregor: ‘You devil!’

Mum she cannot ask anymore, because mum is dead.

No cat ate her because the lady who always did mummy’s nails had the good sense to store some of the dead bodies in the area in her husband’s ice cream truck.

Then as soon as the artillery shells stopped falling they buried her. ‘Too deep for you to reach. You’re greedy, but lazy’. Gregor does not protest.

‘How can I feed you and squeeze you and groom you and pet you when I am almost certain you will put your teeth in me soon?’

One last chance to know.

She runs out on the street to ask the oldest person she knows. An 89 year old woman who sells mint tea from a big kettle she manages to carry on her back. Strapped to her chest she has a wooden box with small glasses. And in the past lots of sugar.

‘Esteemed aunt, will my crazy cat eat me after the bombs hit me?’

‘Only if you stop fearing. Fear seeps into our bodies and makes us savory to cats. Stop fearing. Your cat will lose all appetite.’

About 45 minutes later her father found her on a street corner. On the back seat of a car. No trace of the rest of the car. As if someone had dumped the back seat of his car on the sidewalk and had driven on.

She was sound asleep with Groggy Gregor curled up on her chest. Her arms around him.

He wanted to wake her, but for the first time in months he spotted how beaufiful she was.

He sat down near her feet.

They were black and almost furry looking with dust.

He wants to cry, but is too tired to do it.

His eyes are red and his nose is already acting up.

He is hyperallergic to cats, but how can he force another separation on his daughter?

He fights the urge to sneeze, so as not to wake her.

To the cat he mumbles: ‘If you eat me you will sneeze your broken heart out.’