By Mike Sula
By the second day of the cat’s absence, they began to grow more concerned. “He used to come in, go out, then come back, to eat, to sleep,” says Bara, a 36-year-old biology student at UIC. “My mother told me there is something wrong. I said maybe he will come. So we waited. The next morning I went to the university and coming back in the evening, we knew at that time the cat was gone.”
The Sarrajes had only heard that Arroudea was causing problems for neighbors once before. Three weeks earlier Bara and Sara were startled by the sound of their other cat, Catty, scrapping with an intruding black feline in the garden. “Arroudea intervened to defend his brother,” says Bara. “Arroudea was shouting at the other cat. Screaming. They were running. So we followed them to the end of this street. A number of our neighbors got out at the end of the alley and one of them said, ‘This cat should be shot.’ I told them, ‘This is our cat.’ They said it should be neutered. I said that this wasn’t the solution because our other cat is neutered and he is still unhappy with other cats coming in the garden. But my last sentence was ‘We will consider this.’ But when I went back I thought, ‘How rude they were.’ This is the first time we met our neighbors and they said that this cat should be shot.”
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That afternoon A.B. called the Melvins and spoke to Nancy’s husband, Tom. Nancy was at work, he said, and wouldn’t be home until five. A.B. called at five and then again at six. Still not reaching Nancy, he walked down the block and knocked on the Melvins’ door. “Her husband talked to me,” says A.B. “He told me his wife left the cat in Humboldt Park. I was so furious. I told him, ‘How come you could do this?’ He said, ‘Because other neighbors talked to you about it and you didn’t take care of this problem, so we had to do something about it.’ I said, ‘In addition to what your wife says, you knew that it is my cat.’ He said, ‘I don’t know what my wife put in her letter.’”
The Sarrajes took the catnapping personally. As the days passed they began posting flyers bearing photos, poems, and recriminations on their front gate. They also hung several For Sale by Owner signs. “My name is Arroudea,” one flyer said. “I am [a] one and a half year-old cat…I had a wonderful home and family, then cruel racism eventually reached me when one of the cruel, heartless neighbour[s] kidnapped me and dumped me into a terrible faraway place.” A photo captioned “Harmony” showed Arroudea and Catty cuddling together on a sofa. Another photo, dated 1996, featured a wayward house rabbit that the Sarrajes say was Melvin’s, sitting contentedly in their garden. It was captioned: “Dear Bunny, You are bothersome but innocent. More than welcome.” An unsigned poem reads, “We have taller buildings, but shorter tempers; wider freeways, but narrower viewpoints…. We’ve been all the way to the moon and back, but have trouble crossing the street to meet the new neighbor.”
“You can talk to us and tell us that it is wrong to leave your car in the alley,” says Bara. “We felt that day that it was not a very friendly environment, but we decided to forget it.”
Bara likens the climate to the one they left behind in Syria: “We thought we had escaped those dictators there, but actually there are still some dictatorial mentalities just a few feet from us.”
