Perestroika in Paris

by Jane Smiley

  If a curious filly wanted to walk down a street, her hooves clanging on the pavement, to look into windows without being seen by humans, then this was the time to do it, the only time when all was quiet. She crossed the field, glanced down one street, then turned down the next one. There may have been humans who awakened in their warm beds, looked at the dim windows, and said to themselves, “What is that noise?” They may have pulled the covers over their heads and decided they were dreaming, or they may have gotten up, looked out the window, and seen nothing. Possibly, it was that time of day when the security guards stationed here and there and a couple of members of the gendarmerie had the greatest difficulty staying awake, and so they didn’t watch the street as carefully as they might have. At any rate, Paras loitered and stared as she strolled along. Doors were closed, awnings were rolled up, windows were dark, the smell was mostly the damp pavement itself. She touched her nose to the cool metal of the automobiles, and the cool surface of the glass, and the stone buildings. She sniffed iron fencing, and nipped off tiny fugitive plants that grew through cracks in the pavement. She looked ahead, she looked back, she even looked up. A single dog was out and about, but he circled around her, his head low, his tail low, his ears low. He looked like a sad dog, not at all the proud beast that Frida was. There were cats here and there, squatting in corners, their paws tucked under their chests, their eyes slitted. They saw her—she knew this, because their heads turned as she passed. One, a black one, gave off a low meow as she walked by. Paras nickered in response. She might have seen a fox, too, slipping around a building, waving its orange brush, but foxes were elusive.

  Then she saw a light in a window. She stopped and snorted. A figure within the light was busy staring at something, touching it, shaping it. Paras watched. The door was slightly open, and a strip of light fell onto the pavement. And a scent billowed out. Paras was drawn to the scent. She stepped closer.

  Anaïs sensed that she was being watched. She glanced up and saw nothing but the darkness of the big windows that looked out onto the Avenue de Suffren. She had set her baking pans on the tables in the shop, and would carry them into the cuisine when they were ready. She shook off the feeling and went back to forming her rolls, her favorite part of baking. She had already baked the baguettes and the larger loaves. The croissants and petits pains au chocolat were in the ovens. Henri would arrive soon for the tartes and the galettes. But Anaïs was trying something—a roll with a hint of sweetness, cut into diamond shapes and dotted with fennel seed, then baked until the fennel seed turned crisp and golden. She heard a noise and looked up again. A horse’s head shone in the window, nostrils flared, ears pricked. Anaïs nearly jumped out of her skin. The two pans rattled as she bumped them. She exhaled, “Ahh!” The horse’s head turned to one side and then turned back, still staring. Anaïs coughed. Then she pulled herself together, wiped her hands on her apron, and went over to the coffeemaker. She picked up two lumps of sugar and went to the door, which she opened carefully.

  The horse stood still for a moment, then approached her. It took one lump of sugar carefully off Anaïs’s palm, then the other one. The horse’s lips were velvet. Anaïs put her hand on the horse’s neck and stepped out into the street. The horse eased backward. Anaïs looked toward the École Militaire, and then she looked toward the Quai Branly. No one in sight. The horse’s neck was soft and warm, and Anaïs could not help stroking it under the heavy black mane, down and down. The horse dropped her head as if enjoying it. The air was cold. Anaïs shivered, stepped closer to the horse.

  Anaïs didn’t have much experience with horses—she had ridden in a carriage twice and watched races on the television. About horses she knew only that they ate sugar and that they liked oats. Except that now she knew a third thing, that they had warm, fine coats. She stopped petting the horse and stepped back into the comfort of the bakery. In the corner, in a bin, Marie, who managed the café side, kept a supply of oats. Anaïs found a bowl and scooped some into it. When she went back outside, the horse had continued down the avenue. It was staring into a lighted shopwindow at bins of vegetables. Anaïs called out “Hello!” and made a kissing sound with her lips. When the horse turned its head, she rattled the oats in the bowl.

  Paras did not know the concept of dreams coming true—in fact, she did not quite know that a dream was different from being awake. She did know that after her dream of the oats she still felt hungry, as if she hadn’t actually eaten any oats, but she was too young, as yet, to be philosophical about it. Nor did it strike her as an unusual coincidence that, having dreamed of oats, she would now be offered some. But she did feel that Anaïs was a remarkably sympathetic human—similar to Delphine in her demeanor, but requiring nothing, and not likely to pull a halter from behind her back and put Paras in a stall. Paras did not want to return to a stall. She finished the oats and licked the bowl. Anaïs laughed. Then she petted the horse two more times along the warm spot under her mane. She stepped back and said, “I hope you return.” Paras tossed her head, then continued down the avenue until she saw the grass of the Champ de Mars reappear. Anaïs went back to her workstation, but not before washing her hands and arms scrupulously and changing her apron. She knew so little about horses that at first it didn’t occur to her to report the animal. If a horse lived in Paris, and could stroll down the street gazing into shopwindows, Anaïs thought, then that was the horse’s business. Later, though, thinking back on her experience, she thought: if, indeed, it was an actual horse.

  FIVE

  One morning, after a cold rain the night before, Frida was making her way to the shop. Frida avoided cars automatically—cars sometimes moved in unexpected ways—but she was an alert sort of dog, and no car had ever come near her. On this day, she could see that the cars were slipping, jerking, acting awkward and dangerous. She pressed herself a little closer to the shops. And then it happened: two cars screeched and bumped. An old old woman had stepped into the street, stumbled, fallen to her knees, and there was the boy she had seen in the Champ. He took both of the old woman’s hands, and she struggled to her feet. One of the cars had rammed the trolley she was pushing. The boy looked frightened, but the old old woman seemed unaffected. The boy pulled her back onto the sidewalk, grabbed the trolley. Cars began to honk. Frida trotted over to the boy as he stood beside the old old lady, and Frida did something she had seen a Great Dane do once: she stood against the old lady, leaned into her. In a moment, the old lady regained her balance. She was a polite old lady—she reached down and petted Frida on the head. Frida accompanied the old lady and the boy to the vegetable shop, and sat quietly next to the dented trolley outside.

  Although his shop was in a prosperous neighborhood, Jérôme was familiar with troubled lives. The village he had grown up in, north of Toulouse, was not a wealthy one, and, of course, here was Madame de Mornay, a regular but infrequent customer, who lived right down from the shop, on the Rue Marinoni. Madame was a hundred years old, Jérôme suspected, and she had in her care a boy of eight or so, who must have been her great-grandchild. The dog was sitting calmly outside. Jérôme had gotten into the habit of selling vegetables to her every other day, and of including a marrow bone or two in the bag. Usually, the dog brought a ten-euro note, but sometimes she brought a twenty. Once she brought a hundred-euro note, and though Jérôme was surprised at this, he carefully made change (how could a dog carry a hundred euros’ worth of vegetables?), rolled the bills up, and tucked them in among the leaves of the head of romaine she bought (and why would a dog eat romaine?). Jérôme had grown convinced that some housebound owner was sending her out, and now he thought that this must be her.

  Madame was blind but alert. She made her way deeper into the shop. Each thing she asked for, Jérôme gave to the boy, who placed it in Madame’s hand. Madame felt it over carefully. Jérôme held a basket, and the boy put each item into the basket. Then the boy paid, Jérôme handed them the bag of vegetables, and they left. Outside, t
he boy put the bag into the trolley and went into the meat market, then the bakery. The boy never spoke, nor was he spoken to, but he seemed to know exactly how to serve Madame. She kept him dressed in nice clothes, and she made sure, somehow, that he did as he was told. Madame was invariably polite and always paid in cash. She, too, was nicely dressed, and never without a hat. But Jérôme suspected that their life on the Rue Marinoni was a sparse affair. That the boy should, one day, appear with the dog did not surprise Jérôme. She was a beautiful dog—large for the streets of Paris, but elegant. However, Jérôme was saying nothing—the dog paid her bills.

  Jérôme watched the dog follow the boy and the woman. They rounded the corner and disappeared.

  The woman, Frida knew, did not realize she was following them, but the boy did. He turned and looked at her several times, even whistled so that she would approach him, but Frida kept her distance. They came to the end of the row of buildings, to a door in a high fence that was covered with ivy and other plants so thick that even Frida could not see through them. The boy took a key from his pocket and opened the gate, helped the woman in, then pulled in the battered trolley. Frida heard him open what must have been the door to the house; then he came back to the gate and stood there, staring at Frida. She approached him, licked his hand, but did not enter. Gates would always close. Jacques had made sure that she was suspicious of that. Frida trotted away.

  * * *

  MADAME ÉVELINE DE MORNAY WAS not yet a hundred, but if she lived for three more years (and one month), she would be. Her grandfather had come from Domme, a lovely hill town on the banks of the Dordogne, a place Madame had loved to visit. He had come on one of the first rail lines, built during the Second Empire. He had made a great deal of money in soap and creamy lotions scented with lavender and verbena, then bought this house abutting the Champ de Mars, not far from the École Militaire. Éveline’s father had been killed in the First World War—she was three years old at the time and didn’t remember him. Her husband and her brother had been killed in the Second World War. Her son had died in Algeria, and her grandson and his wife had died in an automobile crash on the Périphérique. She now had this one child left—his name was Étienne. He was eight years old, almost exactly the same age as this twenty-first century, a century that Madame had never expected to see. With each death, Éveline had closed a room or two in the large house she lived in, and now she and Étienne made use only of the cuisine, the dining room, her father’s old study, which she used as a bedroom, and the small library, which now belonged to Étienne. There was a telephone, but it hadn’t rung in years—maybe Étienne didn’t even know what that sound was. Étienne had taught himself to read—there were books not only in his room, but all over Great-Grandmama’s house—and after that, he had taught himself to count, to add, to subtract, to multiply, and to divide. Others might have said he was dangerously isolated, but he was used to it, was leery of other children. What his great-grandmama told him of the outside world didn’t make him want to go out there, and he thought that if he could learn to do these things on his own, there was no reason to make himself known to the other children or at the school.

  But sometimes he did feel lonely. For a while, he’d enjoyed the company of a neighborhood cat, but the cat had vanished. After that, he’d left crumbs for a pair of pigeons on the sill of his window, but the pigeons remained shy. He’d been watching Frida now for two weeks, and he knew for certain that she lived beside the pond to the north of the Tour, and that a horse lived there, too.

  * * *

  RAOUL WITNESSED Frida’s adventure from his perch on a second-floor railing down the street from the vegetable shop—he also observed with some amusement the human fracas that ensued when the two automobiles hit each other in the street, and their drivers jumped out and began cawing loudly about who was at fault and who should have been paying attention. One of them shouted at the old old lady, but she marched on, oblivious, her hand on the boy’s shoulder, Frida at her side. Nor did the boy turn to look. Now Raoul sailed along above them, riding the lightest of breezes, simultaneously keeping an eye on Frida and watching for stray frites on the sidewalk—sometimes he could swoop down and scare off a pigeon; it was good sport, he thought. The lady kept her hand on the boy’s shoulder and seemed to react to nothing. When they stopped at an intersection, she looked nowhere, and as they crossed the street, she paid no attention to the cars nearby. At last, when the boy and the old old lady came to their house, Raoul swept into the nearest hazelnut tree. After Frida left at a run, he floated about the place, glancing in through this window and that. All was silent and dark. The court was overgrown with grasses and weeds, but he was pleased to note some late blackberries, thick and brambly in one corner. He perched on the old, heavy branches and picked here and there among the half-fermented berries. When the boy appeared at one of the lower windows, then opened it, Raoul flew off.

  But he stayed away from Paras and Frida for the time being. They might be oblivious to the brouhaha about the mallard nest, but he could not be. Any bird knew that a nest was a nest, and subject to the whims of fate. In the fork of a tree, on the ground, under the eaves of a building, in the corner of a chimney, in an attic, in a thicket of bushes—anywhere you built a nest, something could happen to it. Who was it, Raoul tried to remember, some dove he had known years ago, so proud of himself for building the nest in a warm, quiet, hidden spot that turned out to be the engine of an automobile. When the owner of the vehicle returned from his vacation, the nest had gone up in smoke. Sid had none of the sense of larger perspective that every bird should get with age. He would not accept that each spot had its advantages and disadvantages, and that fate would take its course no matter what. He asserted that he had been here and there with his band of drakes, to the ocean, to the ice, to the sandy shore, but Raoul Corvis Corax, the twenty-third of that name, had his doubts. It would come as no surprise to Raoul if it turned out that Sid and his band had made it no farther than Lac du Der-Chantecoq, where they strutted around, bragging about Paris all summer, and swimming in the calm of that domesticated body of water.

  All the same, his own nest seemed empty and dull to him. He was so bored with his nest that he had let his rival, Maurice, enact his claim upon Benjamin Franklin’s lap, which Maurice had promptly ratified by defecating in every possible spot. Raoul thought he was spending too much time flying back and forth to the pond, urging Sid to come to his senses and build the nest. Winter, real winter, was at hand. Paras was as furry as a kitten.

  That evening, Raoul arrowed back to the Rue Marinoni. He perched on the stone sill of the single lighted window. Inside the room, the boy sat in his bed with his back against the headboard. His covers were drawn well up, but he held a book in his hands. Raoul watched him for a bit. Through the next window over, he saw the old old lady, still and maybe dead (though that was impossible to know without pecking her corpus here and there). Her nest was spare and neat. There were three surfaces, and on each surface there was a single object precisely in the center.

  Raoul jumped to the next sill. This room was so grand that Raoul could not see to the end of it. It was dark, quiet, and cold—he could feel the cold through the glass. There were many objects in the room, as in all the rooms of every human dwelling that he had ever spied into, but all of the objects were swathed, even the objects hanging on the walls near the window. The room seemed to have been waiting a long time for the coming of someone. Raoul flew back to the lighted window, landed on the sill, pecked lightly on the pane. The boy looked up.

  * * *

  ÉTIENNE WAS READING Vingt mille lieues sous les mers. There were two copies of it on his shelves, a very old copy that was hard to hold, and a newer copy. He had read it once before, but he understood it better this time. He was up to the part about Atlantis. When he imagined the sea, he thought of the Seine, but there would be no other side, and the boats traversing it would be bigger than houses. Étienne didn’t
mind not understanding things. There were many things that his great-grandmama did not understand, but she was patient about it; whatever it was, she sought to touch it or to hold it or to smell it, and after she had been with it for a while, she would nod and smile. She could make very nice food in her little cuisine even though she was unable to hear anything and, Étienne thought, did not see much anymore, either. Each morning, he stood in front of her while she sat in her usual chair, and she touched his hair to discover if it was tangled, his shirt to make sure it was buttoned properly, his shoes and the cuffs of his pants to know that he was neat, straight, and ready for the day. She herself wore the same clothes almost every day.

  A raven was perched on the windowsill, and once again, it pecked the glass—Étienne saw him (was it a him?) do it. The raven then cocked his head and looked at Étienne, as if he was asking him to open the window. It was very late—the clock said almost midnight. It was cold outside, and Étienne’s pajamas were thin, but he slipped out of bed and opened the window. He could have sworn that the raven nodded his shiny black head before hopping into the room. Étienne was a little surprised, but not terribly surprised. Animals in books did all sorts of things, and that was mostly what Étienne knew about animals, or about anything, for that matter. Since the weather was cold, he closed the window after the raven entered. Étienne went back to his bed, and got under the covers.