by Jane Smiley
Now the raven hopped to the table, then onto a stack of books, then onto the back of Étienne’s desk chair, then onto the rim of the lamp shade. He looked here and there, every so often pecking something. He stood over the core of an apple on the corner of the desk, pecked it, dropped it. Finally, he hopped to the footboard of Étienne’s bed and looked at him, cawing mildly, not making much noise or, Étienne thought, arguing about anything. At last the bird fell silent, and the two of them stared at one another. It occurred to Étienne to reach out and pet the bird, but he decided against it and kept his hands warm under the covers. A moment later, the bird hopped to the book, which was lying open on the counterpane. He turned his head back and forth, looking at the white, shiny pages, then tapped the book gently with his beak. Perhaps he decided that there was nothing in it for him, because he suddenly lost interest and walked across the bed, then flitted to the windowsill and pecked at the glass again. Étienne got up and opened the window. The raven flew into the very dark night (clouds, no stars). Étienne closed the window. No book he had ever read spoke about such a thing, but Étienne was not surprised. If every new thing were to come as a surprise, he knew he would be surprised every hour of his life.
SIX
Now that she had explored the Champ de Mars, eaten oats out of Anaïs’s bowl a few times, and in general made the best of her surroundings, Paras could not quite remember, or even imagine, her former, regimented life. To stand in a stall all night and most of the day? To hear the other horses banging their buckets, kicking their walls, making grunts and whinnies, pawing the straw, knocking their chests into the door? To go out always at the same time every morning? To eat what they put in front of you day after day? Yes, she had banged her stall door when she heard the food coming, but it was not exactly because she was hungry, it was because she had nothing else to do. Paras knew that she had left because she was curious and didn’t know any better, not because she was dissatisfied, but, well, this freedom, these friends she had made, and this strange field were all more intriguing than anything else she had ever seen. When the grass was spare or the ground was frozen and the wind howled, it occurred to her to go back, but she was well aware now of what she would be giving up. Horses did what they were told—every yearling learned to be led here and there, learned to spend most of his or her time in a stall, learned to be groomed and tacked up, learned to step forward and step back, learned that humans had their foibles and their faults, but it was better to go along and get along. Every two-year-old you met had already been mounted, ridden, galloped, and, sometimes, raced. Horses who got injured came back and reported that they had stood around day after day, week after week, with nothing to do and no one to relate to—a good reason not to get injured.
Delphine and Rania had treated her kindly, and she had had no complaints about them. The other woman she saw sometimes, her “owner,” was also kind and gave her plenty of cookies and carrots. Not all of the other horses she spoke to out on the course could say the same, and some of them, even the nice ones, quite resented how they were handled—the whipping and the spurring especially. Or their trainers hardly knew their names, much less their preferences. And she had enjoyed racing—the hot, stretching efforts of the galloping, the coiling spring over the fences, the exhilarating sense of competition. Here on the Champ de Mars, there were no winners or losers, just humans and animals and birds going about. A canter was a canter, a trot felt good (especially when it was cold, and it was getting colder by the day). But the thrill of racing seemed a part of the past, something worth giving up in order to be able to satisfy her curiosity and do things as she pleased. She enjoyed Frida and Raoul and Nancy and even Sid. There was an owl who dropped by in the night, when Raoul had gone to his nest, and the owl had a few things to say. There were foxes who appeared, even though Frida told them repeatedly to stay away, barking with that deep, resonant bark she had that was so startling when you first heard it. Possibly, there was a human, too, because from time to time a carrot or an apple or a lump of sugar would appear on the concrete abutment beside the pond, and certainly these treats were meant for her, since they were horsey sorts of treats. But that human, whoever it was (and Paras did not think it was the boy), was making himself or herself scarce.
Sid made up his mind about the nest. He put it exactly where it had been for the last three years, among the weeds under the thickest branches of the trees to the north of the pond, not far from where Paras curled up each day—she could just see it from her spot. Once it was built, Nancy made a home of it—she wallowed about in it, stamped on it, worked it into a comfortable shape, then settled in and stayed there for long periods of time. After completing his work, Sid took off, with complaints, for the south. “Screech-screech-screech, you should come with me, I won’t be gone long, I will linger around Évry in case you change your mind.” Nancy put her head under her wing. After Sid was gone, Paras asked, “Where is Évry?”
“A day’s flight. He says that every year, even though I never go.”
For many days, the weather was tolerable and the grass was thick enough in spots; but it got dark earlier, and the number of humans in the Champ de Mars diminished day by day. Paras was hungry, and she visited Anaïs more often. Anaïs was not like Delphine or Rania—she was shy with Paras, and, Paras thought, a little afraid of her. She rarely came too close, and she put her hand out to touch Paras as if it were at the end of a pole. But her touch was gentle and smooth. She would lay her palm under Paras’s very abundant mane and stroke her from the cheek to the shoulder slowly, her hand flat, like a smooth cloth. Paras had always been ticklish with the curry comb and the brush, but she had enjoyed the rag they used to shine her up so that the sunlight gleamed off her coat. When Anaïs gave her the oats, she held the bowl away from herself, as if Paras might step on her (she would never do that), and Paras was careful to eat slowly, neatly, not spilling any oats onto the pavement. She offered Paras a few other delicious things, too—bran, wheat bits mixed with molasses (something Delphine had fed her as a treat). She mixed shredded carrots in with the oats, and once she had fed her an apple tart. Each time Paras visited her, she lingered as long as she could, but if the sky was beginning to lighten, or the dogs were waking up, or an automobile could be seen passing on the Quai Branly, Paras made sure to walk away, always in a different direction, so that Anaïs would not see her heading back to the pond. She had never seen Anaïs in the Champ de Mars. Anaïs, like all humans, had given her a name; it was “Chouchou.” Since Anaïs was at the shop every time Paras went there, Paras assumed that the shop was where she lived.
Paras’s coat was thicker this year than it had ever been—if she were still at the racetrack, Rania would have clipped her by now, and she would be wearing blankets, light during the day, heavy at night, and even a wool square over her haunches during training. Her coat kept her plenty warm, though—as long as she stayed fairly dry, it fluffed up nicely whenever she moved around. Trotting about, really moving, was the most warming thing, but she was, as always, careful in her choice of when and where to get this exercise. Her fluffy coat was the reason, when she left Anaïs this time (honey, shredded beets in the oats!), that she got back to the pond without realizing what Frida pointed out after she jumped over the fence. Frida said, “You do understand that you’re covered with snow, don’t you?” Frida was lying with her forelegs and her hind legs curled underneath herself. Now that she thought about it, Paras could just feel a little cold weight along her spine. She put her head down and shook herself. Snow lifted off and fluttered around her. Where it landed, she touched it with her nose. It was light and intriguing.
Frida said, “Look where you came from.”
Paras turned around. She hadn’t thought she was trotting through snow. She knew snow—quite often it crunched under your hooves. Once, when she was a yearling, she and her three companions had been let out in new snow. They had frolicked and floundered, the thin, frozen surface giving w
ay so that they dropped through it and then leapt out of it again. Now she saw that the whiteness receded into the distance, and there, in a long line, leading to the spot where she had jumped the fence, were her hoofprints, round and dark in the smooth, blank field. Frida said, “You’d better hope that those fill in by morning.”
Paras looked upward. The air was thick with sparkling flakes; a light breeze whirled them around, but they fell and fell, into her face, into her eyes. She glanced at the pond—it was white, too, around the edge. Paras crunched through the ice until it was in fragments around her cannon bones, cold and sharp. The water in the middle was covered with a film of ice that was not yet white, but almost. She tapped it with her nose; it broke; she took a long, freezing drink.
Frida sighed.
Paras suspected that she was thinking sad thoughts—she had come to understand that many of Frida’s thoughts were sad, that there had been that human who had mysteriously disappeared, that without a human a dog was a little ill-at-ease in a way that a horse was not. Dogs, evidently, saw humans as friends, whereas horses saw them as co-workers. “Well,” said Paras, with her newfound sense that everything would work out, “at the moment, I’m tired and full, so I’ll sleep, and then we’ll see.”
“What are you full of?” said Frida.
Paras pretended not to hear. For now, she wanted to keep Anaïs to herself; anyway, she didn’t think Frida would care for oats.
After Paras curled up and went to sleep, Frida lay still for a long time, trying to keep her feet warm and her nose curled under her knee, but more than once, she could not resist looking at those hoofprints. Finally, she rose to her feet and slinked away, looking back once to see if Paras had awakened, but no—not even her ears flicked. Frida knew from her recent experience that a horse didn’t sleep as much as a dog did, but she was asleep now. Frida took off at a run.
Frida could follow the hoofprints perfectly well—not only by sight, but also by smell, and the fact of the matter was that even a human would notice that Paras had defecated on the dirt road to the north of the pond. What surprised her was that the hoofprints went to the other side of the Champ de Mars, away, from Jérôme’s shop, toward the Avenue de Suffren, a street Frida had explored several times and had never found of the least interest. She might have enjoyed exploring the soccer field, but the fence was too high, and she might have visited one of the dogs she heard barking in the area, but all of them seemed to be safely locked in upstairs rooms. She had visited one vegetable shop, but the man there stayed inside, unlike Jérôme, and none of the customers had noticed her. Nevertheless, the hoofprints stopped at this shop. As far as Frida could tell, everything all up and down this block was closed up tight. She sniffed all the doorsills, growled at a couple of cats but asked no questions, and looked at the hoofprints again. Next to the vegetable shop was a bakery. Frida paused, put her forefeet on the windowsill. The light was dim, and she could see nothing. The glass was cold, with frost creeping upward in tendrils; she could smell nothing. In frustration, she gave a little whine. The door opened, and someone wrapped in white exclaimed, “Out! Out! Get away, bad dog!” Frida backed up into the dark street, and ran off. It was snowing harder now—Paras’s hoofprints had nearly disappeared. When she got back to the abutment, Paras hadn’t moved, and Nancy was so soundly asleep that she didn’t even flinch when Frida touched her with her nose. Nancy, she thought, was a fool—a dog was a dog, and a mallard was a mallard. Frida might exert all of her willpower but still be overcome by instinct, especially if Nancy were to move, but Nancy remained as still as a rock—her feathers, fluffed, were chilled, too. And so instinct did not kick in. Frida lay down in her spot and thought happily about carrying her bag to her usual shops early in the morning, when Jérôme was just taking in supplies and organizing them. He might give her something ugly—something that humans would not like, but that was fine with a dog. He’d done that before. She fell asleep and dreamed of a nice knucklebone.
Paras woke up first, and she did not understand where she was. Something was hanging over her. Something else was all around her. The only warm spot was right beneath her chest. She shook her head and blew out her nostrils, and the air that came out was a white fog. Then she shook herself, and with that, the whiteness encompassing her splintered and fell in little pillows to the ground. She realized that it was snow, that the branches that normally arced above her as she slept had been weighted down with it. They now trembled and lifted, and she could see the world. Not that there was much to see—the earth was white, the trees were white, the pond was white, the sky was white, and the air, too, was still white with flakes drifting downward in the stillness. She turned her head. Snow was mounded against her side almost to her withers. She made her skin shiver; the snow shivered, too, and slipped off.
It was only then that she began to feel cold, and to feel cold meant, as always for a horse, that she had to move. She stretched her foreleg and started to stand up, but Frida was there instantly, saying, “Be careful! Be careful!” She dropped two carrots in front of Paras’s nose. How disappointing‚ they were tasteless, floppy carrots—but she ate them. Frida pressed closer. She said, “The snow is higher than my chest. I had to bound over to the market. It took me forever and was exhausting. I could hardly bring anything back. The streets are not much better than the Champ. No cars anywhere.”
Thanks to Anaïs, Paras had had that full feed—oats, honey, beets, but also bran—almost more than she could eat, though she had eaten every morsel. She was not hungry—but she did expect to be hungry. For the first time in many days, she began to feel a little nervous.
She hoisted herself to her feet.
Thoroughbreds are nervous horses—you heard that all the time, and it was a compliment. It meant that they were quick and smart and attentive. There were non-Thoroughbreds up where she had trained and mostly lived, in Maisons-Laffitte, and all the Thoroughbreds congratulated themselves on not being as dull as those others, with that odd hair around their fetlocks, and those heavy heads and thick coats. You might not be a winner (and every Thoroughbred was well aware of who won, who placed, and who showed), but at least you were a Thoroughbred, and that counted for something. But to be nervous meant to run here and there, and it was pretty clear, even if Frida had said nothing about it, that running about was not a good choice right now.
* * *
UP IN MAISONS-LAFFITTE, Delphine was also looking at the snow, and there was more of it than there was down in the city. She had just finished shoveling the walk that led from her small house to the road. Soon she would get on the little tractor she kept for barn work and push the snow away from the horses’ stall doors, out into the middle of the yard. And at some point, the men who took care of the entire training facility would plow the roads. The horses would keep their blankets on today, and she and Rania would take them out into the yard and walk them for an hour around the pile of snow. She had ten horses; all this would take most of her day.
She didn’t have to worry about them for the moment—the night before, she had given them each an extra hay net to get them through the morning as well as the night.
None of her stalls were empty; she still wondered and worried about Perestroika, but another horse had come to take her place, to be trained for the spring season. There was a stall nearby that she used for storage—if Paras turned up, she could put her there. But she had lost hope. No one said it, but everyone thought it—Paras was surely dead. Perhaps she had wandered from Auteuil to the Bois de Boulogne and died there, and her carcass, stripped by vultures and foxes, was hidden in a ravine somewhere. Perhaps she had been kidnapped. A stolen horse might be doing something somewhere. Paras’s markings were not unusual—a plain white star, two little cowlicks in typical spots, otherwise, a red bay, no white stockings. Delphine would recognize her, but to the average person she would look like a multitude of other horses. Delphine had scrutinized horses at all the racetracks
she’d been to—in Deauville, down south, in Chantilly—for that telltale luxuriant forelock, those intelligent eyes, those wide nostrils, but she had seen no horse that looked like Paras. She had contacted the racing authorities at France Galop, she had put up signs, she had advertised in newspapers and on Internet forums, she had told all of her friends more than once, she had called all the stud farms in France, England, and Ireland, just in case a mystery mare might show up to be bred, though how a thief might pull that off, she had no idea. But someone else might—a fellow trainer named Louis Paul (and everyone knew that wasn’t his real name) was said to have stolen horses in the past. And he didn’t like women trainers, said they were ignoramuses and deserved no support. Once in a while, he went out of his way to mock her if she didn’t do well in a race. There were plenty of stories about ringers in the racing world—horses disguised to look like other horses so that they could run in a race they might win. She had notified Animal Control. Of course, a stolen horse could be sent to the slaughterhouse, but for what? A handful of euros? And surely any slaughterhouse would recognize that Paras was sound, well fed, young. Delphine had contacts at a few slaughterhouses, too. It was a mystery, as if the horse had vaporized into space.
She, Madeleine, and Rania had taken it very hard—Rania hadn’t wanted Delphine to agree to train the new horse, a gelding named Jesse James, but Delphine could not do without the income, and it had seemed too sad to do as Madeleine wished—as Madeleine offered to pay for—to hold the stall, empty, bedded, waiting for the filly’s return. The race Paras had won was not prestigious—it was not as though, at least at this point, she was worth hundreds of thousands of euros—but, unlike many owners, Madeleine didn’t care about that. What all three of them cared about was the filly, soon to be a mare, Paras herself. As a trainer, Delphine thought she might have been harder-hearted than Rania or Madeleine. Training racehorses was a business; you had to accept that anything could happen and still you had to get on with it. And she had gotten on with it, but she couldn’t give up the conundrum. Paras was Delphine’s very own cold case.
