We do not believe in principles, only in frogs. Ivan Turgenev, “Fathers and Sons”

The “exotic animals” section of the classifieds portal was offering stick insects, giant snails, llamas and spiders, as well as a real zebra for nearly a thousand euros. I tend to look in there when I am creatively stuck: that is exactly when you can start thinking about a zebra on the balcony. There is also the stockpiling of food for a rainy day, the buying of dubious electronic equipment, the hoarding of facts nobody needs. For instance, I listened to a lecture by a Buddhist teacher in which he was asked what to do about cockroaches, since they supposedly carry diseases, yet one must not kill any living creature. The teacher asked back:

“And do you not carry diseases yourself?”

I devoted the rest of the day to pondering this, rather than writing a book or doing nothing at all. That day my attention was caught by two emerald litorias, or frogs, in a terrarium, being sold for a laughably small sum. There was no doubt about it: the frogs had to be bought at once and set on the windowsill, so they might bring some green joy.

The phone was answered by a Russian-speaking woman. She gave the address reluctantly. When I arrived, she said that one frog had already been sold and the other was left, and added that it was a shame to sell Pelmenītis, but what could you do.

“Do you have anything to feed the frog with?” the woman enquired solicitously.

When I admitted that I did not yet, she offered:

“I can sell you crickets.”

But I did not have enough cash on me, so I took the frog, terrarium and all, and carried it home. Pelmenītis radiated inner calm; the change of owner and surroundings did not trouble him in the slightest.

The first step was to rename Pelmenītis, although in itself the name was apt, if a little patronising. Given that the classifieds service goes by the abbreviation SS, I decided to call the frog the Führer. Her eyes were bronze-coloured, her face smiling, and she herself was smooth as porcelain. She changed colour from brown to emerald green depending on her mood. The second step was a trip to the pet shop, since frogs eat only moving food, which cannot be said of Buddhists. The man in the shop sighed and said the crickets had not come in yet, but would soon. He did not recommend breeding them myself, because “that's work” — those were his exact words, work. Crickets lay their eggs in the soil, but then eat them themselves, so you have to cover the soil with a metal mesh — hardly what you'd call work. A few days later I rang the shop and the crickets had indeed arrived, but the phone was answered by a woman who said she could not put the crickets into a box herself, one had to wait for the man. The insects were placed in a transparent box with a wad of tissue, so they would not trample one another. The man cautioned me:

“Keep them in your pocket, or they will freeze. But don't keep them in the sun either, they might catch fire.”

On the way home, the crickets imitated the sound of cicadas from inside my coat.

The Führer did not appear interested in the proceedings; she could easily be picked up and placed in the box with the insects. But that was precisely when the main event occurred: having spotted the first cricket, she hurled herself at the insect with lightning speed and shoved it into her mouth with both hands. Then she blinked for a long while, since that is how frogs help themselves swallow their food. The remaining knights of chitin crawled about the Führer quite fearlessly, some even climbing on top of her, though these she hastily flung away. A moment later a second one went into her mouth. In much the same way she ate five crickets and grew altogether melancholy. When I put the Führer back in the terrarium, she lazily hid herself away and turned completely brown. At night she sat in her little bath, which had previously been a food mortar. Holding on to the rim of the bath with both hands, the frog absorbed water. When day broke, the frog always hid until darkness.

Every evening, coming home, I would watch what she was doing. Unlike me, the Führer knew how to do nothing. Mostly she simply sat and looked. So that she might do so more picturesquely, I bought a decorative skull, inside which the frog was happy to hide during the day. At night, though, she would sit right on the crown of it, as though on a throne, and smile. When I tried to explain to a woman, with great enthusiasm, that frogs are cool and self-sufficient, she objected:

“But what sort of pet is that? She doesn't need anything from you. To be honest, I don't understand it.”

Come to that, I didn't understand it either.

Only now and then would the Führer be seized by a desire to go somewhere, which was a sign of hunger. Then she could flatten herself against the glass like a leaf; in the dark her pupils would dilate and her breathing would grow anxious and rapid. Once she even let out a shriek, and in the alarm of the evening I thought the neighbour was strangling his wife, so demented was the sound. Once the latest batch of crickets had been sacrificed, the Führer would turn brown again and hide. But the insects went on singing as though they carried no diseases at all. One evening I was watching a Bertolucci film on the projector with subtitles that read: Cricket sound. With some satisfaction I realised that my home, too, had cricket sounds in it, at least until the Führer had bitten off all the males of the swarm.

When the Führer was taken in the hands, she livened up a little, perhaps because of the warmth. If you touched her nose she would bashfully lower her head, and each time I would say:

“Boop.”

Despite her sedentary way of life, she was unbelievably athletic; she could hang above an abyss without effort and leap in unpredictable directions. Her smiling, wholly contented face suggested that it was not for nothing that the frog had travelled all the way from Australia itself, while everyone else strives in the opposite direction.

One morning I discovered that the terrarium was empty. At first I drove the thought away, checking the inside of the skull some four times, first feverishly, then coolly and rationally. Moving about the room was frightening: the Führer might be lying on the carpet and blending into it, she might be anywhere, and for no reason at all. Having crawled about the floor for three or four hours, I accepted the inevitable, and said as much out loud:

“Yours was a strange life,” — and went out for a walk. But when I tried to pull on a boot, I felt my foot meet something unusually soft. A couple of seconds from a heart attack, I realised that I had possibly crushed my own frog. I shook her out. The Führer looked a little the worse for wear, but was perfectly unharmed. Trailing after her like a bride's veil came a cloak of dust, gathered from under the sofa. When I put the frog into the mortar bath, she squatted motionless for a long time and seemed to be considering her next escape plan.

Several carefree months went by. Every evening I watched her sit and lie in wait. On rare occasions she sank so deep into her inner Australia that she took fright at a light being switched on, or at my shadow, and darted into the nearest hiding place. If I tried to get her out of it, the Führer would be so frightened she even wet herself a little.

And then came the day when she escaped for good. I had gone away for a while. The frog had been well fed, but some mysterious inner drive overcame the good sense of a full stomach. This time the Führer had hidden in my Croc and dried out completely. Now she resembled the Kyshtym dwarf, and her life's mission had been every bit as mysterious. I shed a few tears and buried her not far from the house, under a bush. The darkness so dear to the Führer set in. Soon the remaining crickets fell silent too. I should have bought a llama on the classifieds portal after all — and a Buddhist lama at that, so as to come to terms with how changeable everything is.