Perestroika in Paris

by Jane Smiley

  She walked slowly and a bit noisily, but Étienne, who was upstairs looking for a book about horseback riding, did not happen to hear her. She opened the door of her chamber, moved across the hallway, paused, stepped, paused, stepped, paused, stepped again, until she could reach for the back of one of the wing chairs and move, chair by table by windowsill, to her favorite spot. When she got there, she groaned and sat down with a sigh. She was about three meters from Paras, who was standing by the fireplace, sniffing the very old logs piled on the grate.

  Paras had eaten her breakfast and gone outside already—horses are early risers.

  Over on the desk, Kurt was watching Paras and Madame. He could not help making a squeak or two, but he had no fear of Madame—one of his favorite tunnels opened into her chamber, and he was used to clearing away any crumbs that Madame might drop when she took tea and biscuits in bed.

  “Ooh,” said Madame, “good heavens! I am hungry!” She yawned, covering her mouth.

  Very slowly, Paras eased toward her, her nose extended. She was as silent as she could be. She stood near Madame, and sniffed her all over, her nose maybe ten centimeters from Madame’s face, her shoulder, her lap, her knees, her feet. Madame was very small: her feet hardly touched the floor when she sat up straight in her wing chair. Madame shifted, then raised her hands, smoothed her hair, tightened her bun. Her hand went past Paras’s cheek but did not touch it. If she had, she would have been surprised, but, perhaps, not afraid—Madame was used to unusual events. Madame thought a soft-boiled egg would be quite lovely, with a bit of bread and some raspberry jam. She called out, “Étienne, where are you?” Perhaps Madame did get a little whiff of Paras, but perhaps not. She had smoked heavily for years—Gauloises. Or maybe she got a whiff and simply did not believe her nose.

  Paras thought that Madame had quite an interesting and, you might say, well-preserved fragrance. There was a hint of floral and a hint of dust and a hint, but only a hint, of human. Madame picked up her knitting from the side table. Paras gently sniffed the knitting.

  From the landing, Étienne stared down at them: his great-grandmama so tiny, poised in her chair, feeling her knitting with the tips of her fingers; the horse, so huge, her ears pricked, almost but not quite touching his great-grandmama. He coughed. Paras turned her head, but only her head, her ears still pricked. She gently switched her tail. Étienne ran down the stairs and touched Madame de Mornay on the shoulder.

  The old woman smiled and said, “Ah, little one! How are you?”

  Étienne put his arm around his great-grandmama’s shoulders, and received a light kiss on the cheek. In the meantime, Paras pivoted gracefully on her hind leg. Her hooves clip-clopped on the hardwood floor, but Madame felt them only as a little rumbling that reminded her of the Métro, and she didn’t think anything of it. She was proud of the Métro—very forward-looking and typically Parisian for its day.

  Étienne went to the door and opened it wide. Paras walked out into the sunshine. Étienne closed the door. He thought, sadly, that he might never see the horse—his horse—again, since the gate was open. But he went to Madame, took her hand to show that he was with her, and helped her into the cuisine. He had to make sure that she circumvented a pile beside the window, but it was a small pile, perfect for the raspberry patch.

  Once they had left, Kurt zipped across the floor of the grand salon as fast as he could (which was very fast), clambered onto a chair and then onto the windowsill. He wished he had managed to get out the door with the horse—she was still out there—but he saw with despair that he had lost his chance. He was a buck, he needed a doe!

  Outside, Paras enjoyed the sunlight and a warm breeze. She went over to the partially open gate and looked out. The street was darkly wet. The snow had melted and was flowing into the drains. The humans who were out were, as usual, looking downward, minding their own business, thoroughly convinced that they knew all about everything having to do with their world. Dogs noticed her—tiny little dogs in tiny little blankets trotting by on the slenderest of lead ropes—but none of them barked, and so their humans hurried on. One, a Jack Russell terrier about the same size as Assassin, looked at her steadily, then paused at Madame’s shrubbery and lifted his leg. Paras snorted in derision at this property claim, but the dog ignored her, scratched a little in the wet dirt, and allowed himself to be pulled away by his mistress, who was reading the paper as she walked.

  Paras had found her night indoors very restful—perhaps she had caught up on months and months of lost sleep. A grand salon was much better in its way than a stall—more things to look at and explore, quieter, none of that constant sense of the other horses. In order to avoid having to make up her mind about going out through the gate, Paras explored the courtyard more carefully than she had the day before. The sunlight was now pouring in from above, and the snow had turned to slush. The riotous shrubbery covering the fences was brilliant dark green. Paras saw that there was a much larger entrance to the house, up many steps, very grand, like the entrance to a great stud barn. There was another gate, too, across from that entrance, also grand, with much curling brass-work. Paras saw that, just as the old lady had a room, and Étienne had a room, she could have a room—this nicely protected but airy spot, open to the sky, closed to the view of passersby, not quite as luxurious as the grand salon, but perhaps more suited to her needs, and, perhaps, a place that Frida would dare to enter. She walked about, looking here and there, sniffing this and that, listening through the growth to the humans and animals walking along the allée.

  * * *

  AFTER LEAVING the front porch of the architectural museum, Frida moped up to the cemetery. Now that she knew it was there, she could see Raoul’s nest in the tree above the statue of the sitting man, and she could even see the curve of the top of the raven’s head, but he made no move, and she shuffled past him. The cemetery was a quiet place, with many hiding spots among the monuments, which Jacques had made use of. She wandered about for a bit, remembering Jacques, then went back to the street and turned away from the square and moped along the street for a while, her head down, her tail, such as it was, down. Perhaps she felt more alone than she ever had, even after Jacques disappeared. Her only choice, she thought, was to continue up this avenue to the Bois de Boulogne, where she had been a few times. In the Bois de Boulogne, she would try to hunt birds as a way of staying alive. She would dig herself a hole, and she would, perhaps, waste away, and why not? Jacques was gone, Paras was captured, Raoul was a mere bird (for all his talk about Corvus corax), the lady who had given her that sausage had walked away. Mumble-mumble—Raoul was right about that—she knew she was mumbling, could hear herself. Well, she was a mumbler, that was just who she was. She came to an intersection. She was depressed, even in despair, but she saw the gendarme look at her, look around, heard him blow his whistle, knew that that whistle was about her—she could read humans with perfect clarity. She paused only for a split second; then instinct kicked in—she whipped to the left, and headed down that street, toward the river (she could smell it). And as she ran, having thought of a hole in the Bois, she remembered her real hole, the one with the purse in it. How was it that she had forgotten the money?

  The gendarme chased her for a bit, then disappeared. He would reappear, she knew, in a vehicle, and so she ducked into an alley and waited until the screaming vehicle zipped by; then she came out of the alley, turned left, and trotted, head up, back the way she had come. There was a set of stairs where she and Jacques had sometimes passed the night—a very private spot that fronted on the river. She found the stairs, went down them, rested alertly for a while, until everything was quiet, and finally emerged into the street that ran along the river. Not long after that, she was at the pond.

  “Good heavens!” said Nancy. “You’re back!”

  Frida said, “I am. How are you feeling?”

  “What do you think? It’s just one thing after anot
her! The water rose to right there”—she gestured with her beak—“and then receded. It was a nightmare. But I can explain these things to Sid until I am blue in the face, and he won’t pay a bit of attention, you mark my words.”

  “I will,” said Frida.

  Nancy harrumphed and tucked her head back under her wing. Frida went to the spot where she had hidden the purse, and began to dig. The autumn, the rain, and the snow had not been kind to the purse, but because it was made of excellent leather, it now had a nice patina and a delicious semi-rotten odor. As soon as she dragged it out of the hole, she rolled on it, back and forth. Then she stood up and pawed it open. There were considerably fewer bills in the purse than there had been on the night when Paras carried it away from Auteuil. They were damp and a little grimy, but they were intact, their figures and pictures easily visible. In her weeks of shopping for vegetables at Jérôme’s market, Frida had noticed how he received each bill. He preferred the brown and blue, so she had made it a point to take those. He had frowned at the white ones. Almost all of the bills left in the purse were now white. She did not find them interesting, but they were all she had. There were a lot of them.

  She took the handle of the purse between her jaws. She normally went to the shop by way of the Avenue de la Bourdonnais, but the gendarmes were still on her mind, so she stayed in the Champ de Mars, simply trotting down the allée, under the trees, past the houses. She could not have said what her intention was, but she knew that if Jérôme saw the money in the purse he would be kind to her. Unlike Paras, and unlike Raoul, she did have faith in humans. Jacques had always treated her with generosity and affection. Jérôme might save her, somehow. Frida trotted along as quickly as she could; though she saw humans turning to stare at her, no one could have caught her even if they had tried. The two that she passed even stepped out of her way. She paused at the avenue where cars passed through the Champ de Mars, but they were few in number, though the sun was high and the snow was gone.

  Paras, her ears flicking, heard her coming, or, rather, she heard a dog, and she recognized Frida’s characteristic gait—smart and quick. Paras would not have said that she loved Frida, or even felt affection for her. She might have said that she felt affection for Rania, who brushed her so kindly with that soft brush and fed her four times a day, but she had run off without a backward glance, and she had taken Rania’s purse with her, hadn’t she? It might contain something belonging to herself, Paras, but it had had Rania’s characteristic smell all over it. Curiosity had trumped affection, and done so easily. Nevertheless, when she sensed Frida passing, Paras let out a piercing whinny.

  Inside the house, Étienne, who was helping his great-grandmama make her bed, hurried to the window. There she was, in the front courtyard! She hadn’t run away after all. Étienne finished his task, then ran up the stairs to fetch his book about horseback riding.

  Kurt, who had emerged from the front tunnel on the premier étage, found his fur vibrating and his eyes rolling from the pitch and the power of the whinny. He had never heard anything like it. He passed out and rolled over, all four paws sticking straight upward.

  Pierre, who was standing in the basin in the center of the Champ in his thigh-high rubber boots, cleaning mold and mineral deposits from the face and mouth of the fountainhead, heard the whinny rise on the cool breeze, and though he could not quite tell where it was coming from (he shaded his eyes and looked around), he was glad to hear it.

  Raoul, perched on the Tour, also heard the whinny, but, then, he heard all kinds of things that simply told him that life in the Champ de Mars was much the same as usual, no matter what groundlings seemed to think.

  Anaïs, who had finished her night’s work and was walking down the Avenue de Suffren, heard it, too, just faintly, because the breeze was slipping around the buildings and carrying the vibrations of the whinny in her direction. The whinny aroused in Anaïs a hope that Paras would show up that night or the next night—with her own money, she had bought the horse some flaxseed to mix with her oats. And there were some delicious apples, Reinette de Cuzy, which had been aging in the cellar. She smiled to herself, and sped up.

  The local gendarme, who was standing at the intersection of the Rue de Grenelle and the Rue Augereau, had almost convinced himself that his delusions of a horse going into that house on the corner were well and truly past. So, when Paras’s whinny fluttered out of the Champ de Mars and fell upon his ear, he shuddered and went straight into Le Royal for a nice glass of Burgundy. The gendarmes’ union had recently certified his right to have a drink while on duty, and he felt like just a bit of a labor activist by exercising that right.

  Frida slowed her trot, pricked her ears, but then continued. She liked Paras, but there was no protection to be found in a horse. Frida had passed where she sensed Paras, was almost to the corner. The whinny came again, even higher and more piercing. It made Frida’s ears tickle. And then again. She stopped, turned, and crawled, though burdened by the purse, under the scratchy growth.

  There Paras was, her tail up and her ears pricked, her neck arched. Through the ironwork, Frida said sharply, “Shut up!”

  Paras said, “Oh, you found my purse.” She came over and put her nostrils through the fence.

  In her heart, Frida rejected the idea that this was Paras’s, or solely Paras’s, purse. Wasn’t she the one who had carried those bags back and forth from Jérôme’s market? Wasn’t she the one who understood that currency was to be exchanged, and thereby benefit the larger economy of Paris? Wasn’t she the one who had hidden and cared for the purse? Left to her own devices, Paras would have dropped the purse somewhere, having lost interest in it. That Paras should claim the purse was unjust, Frida thought. However, it was also true that Jacques had once found a very small purse, belonging to a man, lying open on the sidewalk. He and Frida had walked all the way to the Marais and returned the thing to the man, who had been very grateful, and given Jacques a sizable sum in return—enough for them to spend a lovely night in a pleasant room, where they both took showers and Jacques ordered a tray of food. It was not as though Frida didn’t understand ownership—only that she felt that, in this case, ownership was unfair. She said, “Yes. I did. It’s aged very nicely, I think. But you are making a spectacle of yourself. The gendarmes could be here any minute. I had a close call this morning, over in Passy.”

  “I don’t see how we could find a nicer or more private spot than this. The boy is a decent sort, much smaller than a jockey, and he serves a lovely bowl of soaked split peas. Look over there—a little alcove where you could curl up, protected on three sides. I think it’s a nice compromise between inside and out. I am sure he will let me out in the evenings, and with all of these bushes, you could climb over.”

  “Or dig under,” said Frida.

  Frida flexed her very powerful front feet. She hadn’t had an enjoyable and challenging dig in a while.

  When Étienne entered the upstairs library to retrieve his horseback-riding book, he immediately saw Kurt unconscious on the armoire. Owing to months of excellent provisions, Kurt was rather large, and Étienne was startled by his appearance. Of course, he knew that there were rats in the house—he could hear them late at night and early in the morning. But the only rats Étienne had ever seen were pictures in books. Those rats were thin and sinister-looking, with aggressive whiskers, narrow eyes, pointed noses, and bad intentions. This rat had a shiny, dusky coat. His whiskers did twitch, but more as a cry for help than as a threat. He looked, in fact, like a pet. Étienne went over to him and touched his fluffy white belly. It was silky. There was no odor. He stroked the belly. Kurt opened his eyes.

  Kurt was intimately familiar with Étienne, in a way that Étienne was not with him. Once, against his father’s, Conrad’s, express orders, he had sat for quite a long time in the moonlight on the foot of Étienne’s bed, watching him sleep. Étienne turned this way and that way, made human noises, once
even sat up and lay down again without opening his eyes. Kurt had seen Étienne eating, bathing, helping Madame de Mornay, reading, staring out the window, washing up, going out, and coming back in. He had never seen Étienne doing a threatening thing, and so, when Kurt opened his eyes at Étienne’s touch, he did not feel fear. He allowed the petting to go on, then sat up and yawned, which made Étienne laugh. The piercing noise was gone; Kurt’s world resumed its usual sensory identity. Étienne, after pausing, now began to stroke Kurt’s back, along the spine. After allowing this for what he considered the proper time, Kurt dipped his head in a little bow of thanks, and scurried across the armoire, over the back of one of the covered chairs, and into his tunnel. Étienne watched him for a moment, then found his book.

  The digging was going very well—the ground was loamy and wet, and the roots weren’t terribly intertwined. It took Frida only a few minutes to make a hole deep enough to push the purse through; Paras grabbed it with her teeth and dragged it under the fence. It did stink, she thought, wrinkling her nose. Dogs were so peculiar, in their preference for rotten over sweet. Frida dug and dug, achieving a kind of whirling rhythm; finally, she saw that she could safely crawl under the fence, avoiding the pointed tips of the iron bars. Of course, there would be maintenance—there always was with a hole—but the freedom to escape was worth preserving. She stood up and shook herself. Dirt flew everywhere. Then she inspected the courtyard. She sniffed all along the base of the house, and the steps, and the base of the fence. She sniffed the air. The place smelled of age and cats, birds and their nests, dead leaves, and rotten grass. It smelled of isolation, but not filth, like the alley she had lived in after Jacques died. Perhaps because of the effort and pleasure of digging, she did not feel as glum as she had before. She investigated the alcove. She lay down in it, and she decided that it would do for now. In the meantime, Paras continued to walk around until, finally, she sought out a patch of sunshine, went over to it, and lay down. Paras took a nap. Frida took a nap.