by Jane Smiley
Paras did not go into the house every night, nor did she visit Anaïs every night. Her days and nights had fallen into a pleasant rhythm, but it was only a rhythm, not a schedule. At any rate, on Christmas Eve, she had a nice long sleep in the courtyard, wondering only once where Frida had been and why she was sleeping and sleeping and sleeping. Paras of course noticed the bag beside the door, but it was not her purse, had no distinct odor. Raoul might have investigated it, but he was occupied in other parts of the city.
And so she shook her head, extended her foreleg to lever herself to her feet, saw that it was light though the sun wasn’t up yet, the perfect time for a meal—she would climb the step, tap the door, perhaps. She rose. She stretched forward. She stretched backward. There was a breeze. She tossed her head. And now the door opened and Étienne came outside, stumbling over the bag as he did. He said, “Hey! What is this?” He lifted the bag and looked at it, then looked inside it, then went to the gate, which he saw was open, and looked down the street. Paras could see that he had no idea that the bag was from Frida. But it made him happy—that was evident. He turned, and said, “Grandmama! Grandmama! Father Christmas has made a visit!” He laughed and went back into the house, leaving the door open. Paras glanced over at Frida, who was now awake. She tossed her head toward the door, said, “Come in with me! Come on! It’s warm in there! You’ll enjoy it!”
But Frida trembled and curled up even more tightly. Jail!
Paras thought Frida might never enter the building. She snorted, went up the step and into the grand salon.
Étienne took Paras straight to the cuisine, where he had already filled her bowl with apples, carrots, and a pear. He petted her on the neck, rested his head against her shoulder. He seemed happier than Paras had ever seen him. Over and over, he said, “Merry Christmas, Merry Christmas, my dear! What a Merry Christmas this one is!”
Part Two
TWELVE
New Year’s passed pleasantly—Étienne managed to make some crêpes for Madame, sprinkled with demerara sugar (and for Paras, and for Kurt, and even for Conrad, who was lurking in his tunnel near the stove). Madame’s birthday came and went; she thought of it all day, but didn’t say a word about it to Étienne. She knew he knew she was old, but she didn’t want him to put a number to it. That was her main concern, vanity, until she lay down in her bed at the end of the day and her real concern hit her—yes, she wasn’t going to live forever, and what in the world would happen to Étienne? If she lived to be a hundred, he would be twelve when she passed, and although he might see himself as independent, no one else would, nor should they. She knew she had funds that had been accumulating for all of her life, but, legally, he might have no access to those funds (how might she find out about this?). The funds themselves would lead the authorities to hand him over to a trustee or (God forbid, remembering her youth) an institution. What had she been thinking? She imagined this room, her room, in this sturdy building. Well, she had been thinking of how her home had protected her for her whole life, and as a result, she had failed, even when she could see, to look out the window at the large world. She tossed and turned all night, ruminating on these things, and in the morning, when he brought her cup of tea and croissant, she patted the bed, put her hand on his arm, got him to sit down. She couldn’t see him, but she sensed his mood—lively, expectant, happy. She didn’t want to wreck that, and so she made up her mind that she would come up with something soon, and said, for now, only, “Ah, my dear, you are very kind.” He jumped up and hurried out of the room.
After giving his great-grandmama her tea and her croissant, wondering for a moment why she looked so worried, and then hurrying to the grand salon, Étienne went straight to Paras, who was lying on the carpet. As big as she was, she was careful in the grand salon, and graceful. She walked about, took naps, went to the cuisine, nudged the handle of the faucet for a drink of water if she was thirsty (and then nudged it until the water stopped running). Yes, having a horse was a lot of work. Even though the horse was pretty good about saving her deposits for outside (Étienne quickly learned that if she tapped the door he had to act at once), she ate far more than either he or his great-grandmama did—she was making her way through many stored root vegetables, dried legumes, fruits, and fresh vegetables. She would be expensive once the provisions in the cellar gave out. However, that would be sometime in the future, and Étienne knew that his future must include some very bad things—such as school, such as his great-grandmama’s passing on. Indeed, his future was a yawning chasm of loss and mystery that he didn’t dare look into.
This present—attending to the horse, petting her—was so enjoyable that he decided once again not to think about those things. Étienne often read while leaning his back against her as she rested. He liked to rub her with a cloth and brush her with an old hairbrush he’d found in one of the rooms upstairs. Lately, he had been sitting astride Paras as she curled upright on the carpet, her back hooves tucked neatly against her belly. She didn’t mind—she yawned, then she looked at him. He could imagine riding—the horse’s neck and ears in front of you, your hands entwined in her mane—but it was scary. Right now, his toes touched the carpet; everything was quiet; there was nothing scary about it. After a while, he “dismounted” (a word he had read in the riding manuals), and she stretched out on her side. He perched himself across her ribs then sat quietly on her hip. But even as he did so, he knew that he really wanted to ride.
* * *
WHEN ÉTIENNE WAS asleep or in the library or taking care of the old lady, Kurt sat on Paras, too. In fact, he ran all over her, snaking under her mane, trotting across her shoulder, scrambling up her leg from her hoof to her elbow. She liked it—it gave her a good scratching, and meant that she didn’t have to roll to take care of an itch. When Kurt asked her if she had ever had a rat as a friend before, Paras said, “Assassin wouldn’t allow it.”
“Who is Assassin?”
“A Jack Russell terrier.”
Kurt thought she said, “Jack Russell terror.” And, indeed, when she described the pleasure the dog always took in chasing rats, grabbing them, snapping their necks, he felt terror. Paras said, “He didn’t eat them,” as if that was a good thing. Why would he kill them, then?
“For sport. He enjoyed it.”
He sounded to Kurt like a cat, but, then, you didn’t get that feeling with a cat, that the cat was killing something because she enjoyed it—it was a duty for a cat, the essence of catness, to kill things.
Paras said, “Some of the horses were afraid of rats—not so much the sight of them as the sound of them. Horses don’t like mysterious sounds. But rats were fine with the rest of us. However, it wasn’t our business.”
While they were having this conversation, Paras was in the cuisine, eating her chopped beets from a bowl Étienne had placed in the seat of a chair, and Kurt was sitting on the back of the chair. When Paras was finished, Kurt scurried down into the bowl and disposed of the scraps. Paras said, “You know where I need a little scratch?”
Kurt looked at her, his mouth full.
“Under my mane, just behind my ears.” She stretched her head toward him and closed her eyes. He stepped lightly onto her maxilla and eased upward. When he got to her ears, he went a step farther, turned around, then entangled his back feet in the thick brush of her mane. She raised her head. It was disorienting, but Kurt held on. Paras said, “Ah, that feels good. I miss grooming. At the time, I thought there was too much of it, especially the everlasting baths, the water spraying in your face, but I liked the brushing.”
She turned to look left and then right. Kurt felt as if he was being spun around, but he held on.
She said, “You’re not that heavy. About the same as a bridle. But try to stay in the middle. It’s easier to balance you.”
She walked into the grand salon, went to look out the window. Kurt thought he might be sick, what with the beets and all.
Down. Up again. A noise from the staircase—Paras’s head swung to look.
Étienne’s footsteps on the stairs. Paras knew that Kurt was afraid of Étienne, and since she generally took things as they came, she didn’t try to dissuade him. But now she did a kind thing—she carried him over to the entrance to his tunnel and put her head down. He let go and dropped, sliding part of the way down her forelock. He went into the tunnel, which was dark and cool—relaxing, really. As he headed up the tunnel to his bedroom, he decided never to do that again, sit on her head. But he knew that he would, that sitting on her head was, perhaps, his best bet for getting out into the world and finding his doe, his desired mate.
* * *
RAOUL HAD a winter project, too—making his most superior nest ever, the roomiest, the coziest, and the most aesthetically avant-garde (he had woven in several strands of silvery Christmas decorative materials so that they glinted in the moonlight in a pleasing pattern that reproduced the random effect of stars). He was now sixteen. Of course, that was in human years. An avian “year” had nothing to do with the sun or the earth, it was called a “segment,” and had to do with vegetation and migration. He had lived for fifty segments, ten of them in Paris. Every male Corvus, upon reaching the age of fourteen segments, was required to challenge those around him in three ways—flights, speeches, and combat. Outside of Paris, these challenges were ritualized and traditional. For example, the topic of most speeches was either insect varieties or grains. Flights were sometimes for distance, sometimes for speed. Combat was ritualized, too—the old fellow who might lose the battle simply moved his family to a nest in a less prestigious tree—say, from a walnut to a beech. Relations in Paris were more chaotic and less friendly, and Raoul had been hard put to fend the youngsters off. Sometime soon, he would have to move his nest away from the statues of Benjamin Franklin, accept his banishment. And, yes, he was lonely. It didn’t help that Paras and Frida seemed perfectly happy and not much in need of his advice over there at that creepy empty house with that poor child, that ancient humanlike creature, and that rat.
He might have done what he used to do—observe humans and Aves and develop his theories—but no one wanted to hear his theories. Tonight, his dissatisfactions were nagging at him, so he groomed himself until the roots of his feathers ached, and still could not settle in. The Place du Trocadéro was dead—all the cafés were closed; the two buildings of the architectural museum were like blocks of ice. Even the lights in the great Tour across the river looked rather forlorn. Raoul hopped to a higher branch, then spread his wings and flew, first upward, over the metal man on the metal horse; then he glided down the esplanade. The moon was a small pale crescent. He floated over the river, banked left. No one at all in the Champ de Mars except Mademoiselle Paras, trotting briskly across the damp wintry turf, her forelock bobbing, her tail up, and her nostrils flared. She was making plenty of noise, but the windows of every house were dark. Raoul circled her once, then landed on her rump. She snorted and said, “You can fly. You don’t need to hitch a ride.”
“I can’t fly and talk to you at the same time.”
“Other birds do.”
“That is a misapprehension on your part. They are proclaiming, they aren’t conversing. If we want to communicate, we park. I am parking on your hind end. You might halt.”
“I’m hungry, and I don’t want to be late.” Nevertheless, she slowed to a walk.
“Where are you going?”
Paras explained about Anaïs, the baker: “She has access to grain. All different types of grain, in fact. You can’t eat kale at every meal and expect to maintain your strength.”
“I keep telling you Mammalia that insects are a wonderful source of energy and piquancy.”
“How many flies would I have to eat per day? I weigh four hundred and fifty kilos.”
Raoul admitted, though only to himself, that this might present a problem. He said, “A bird eats seven times its weight each day.”
“How much do you weigh?”
“Over a kilo. Maybe a kilo and a quarter.”
“Ignoring the fact that I could not possibly process three thousand kilos of food every day, I also do not believe that you process seven or eight kilos of worms, flies, and frites every day.”
Raoul didn’t say anything. He flew off her rump, and she rose to a light trot. She had come to pavement, so her hooves made a crisp sound, but since she had lost her shoes a month ago, she no longer clanged. She turned left. Raoul followed her to the shop, where there was, indeed, a youngish human female working at a large table on the other side of the lighted window. Just as Raoul saw her, she glanced in their direction, smiled, and came to the door, which she opened. She exclaimed, “Good evening, dear girl!” Paras, who had dropped to a walk, and then halted, rested her chin gently on the woman’s shoulder and snuffled a polite greeting in her hair. The woman patted her cheek and moved her forelock out of her eyes. Raoul found a perch on an empty vegetable display case in front of the shop next door. With mammals, it was an everlasting round of love, hate, sadness, gladness, fear, and anger. All Aves knew that mammals said of themselves that they were “higher” than other animals. And all Aves dismissed this idea with a laugh.
Anaïs had become more comfortable with Paras. She had been sure that the horse would have been caught by now, but as far as she could tell, the horse was not even discovered. Certainly, where the horse lived was a mystery to Anaïs herself. On the day she heard that phantom whinny—before Christmas, it was—she had wandered around the Champ de Mars and seen no sign of a horse. Anaïs had then decided that Paras was a spiritual embodiment of some sort—one result of her very religious upbringing was that, although she rejected doctrine, she didn’t mind visitations. And she knew from all the stories she had heard as a child that if a god or a spirit asked something of you, your job was to provide it in good faith and with a happy heart. And so she did. The horse came three or four times a week. Her provisions added maybe 1 percent to the wholesale expenditures of the bakery and the café, so Anaïs raised the prices of some of the luxury items that her customers should not be eating anyway, like chocolate croissants and lemon tarts, to cover it. And though Paras only trotted away when she was finished with her grain, and was not, at least for now, flying Pegasus-like into the empyrean, Anaïs had a remote hope that something amazing would happen someday—say, on the vernal equinox.
Anaïs loved her job, but since she was up all night, hers was a rather lonely life. She was isolated from her family because of the religious disagreements, and all of her friendships were based on business, not a sense of connection. She was now in her thirties, unmarried, hadn’t had a boyfriend in four years, so it was a great pleasure to pet the horse, to feel the warmth of her coat underneath her mane, to sense her kindness and her enjoyment of the food Anaïs put together for her (tonight, a combination of wheat berries and flaxseed, with grated carrots mixed in). She rested her shoulder on the horse’s neck, closed her eyes.
Then a raven flew up and landed on Paras’s back. Anaïs was startled, but the horse only twitched, kept eating. The raven sidestepped forward along her spine, his eye on Anaïs—he kept turning his head, first one way and then the other. He was a little creepy—so utterly black in the dark. But every supernatural being had a companion, and at least he wasn’t a bat. Anaïs held tight to the bowl, and thought that if the raven tried to peck her eyes out, she could put the bowl over her head.
But the raven simply started to caw—caw-caw-cawcaw-caw—not loudly, but, or so it seemed to her, conversationally, somehow. And then the horse tossed her head, and the raven flew back to what Anaïs now saw was his perch on Monsieur Curzon’s potato bin. Anaïs set the bowl on the pavement; the raven sailed down to it and pecked up a few tiny bits. Anaïs laughed. Meanwhile, Paras quietly inspected the pockets of her benefactress’s apron. Anaïs cupped a lump of brown sugar—the one most preferred by custom
ers—in the palm of her hand, and Paras took it, let it sit in her mouth, melting for a bit, then crunched it down. The raven looked up at Anaïs. Anaïs squatted down and offered him a lump of sugar. He took it in his beak, dropped it, pecked it, then picked it up and flew off with it. For a woman who had never had a pet because of her mother’s allergies, this experience of living in a world of horses, birds, and other animals was a pleasure to be cherished, even if they should turn out not to be embodied celestial beings.
* * *
A FEW DAYS LATER, when the weather was fresh and almost warm, Frida was lying in her spot with her bag nearby (a nice cloth bag that retained the fragrances of any vegetables or bones that had been carried in it). She waited, as a bird dog knew to do, and, sure enough, Madame de Mornay and Étienne shuffled out of the house, then opened the gate. Frida followed them. Etienne knew she was there, as he knew she stayed with Paras in the garden, but she was so shy that he hesitated to acknowledge her, and was waiting to see if she would acknowledge him. Madame used her cane with one hand and laid the other on Étienne’s shoulder. Étienne pulled the little two-wheeled shopping trolley along and kept his eyes forward. Frida assumed her place two paces behind them.
The surface of the shopping trolley, which was made of fabric, fluttered, catching Frida’s attention. The three of them crossed slowly at the traffic light. Autos did not honk, though Frida sensed their bursting impatience. Madame was steady, impervious. They passed the sporting-goods store, and Frida glanced through its glass door, but the fellow who had sold her the ball was not visible. The surface of the trolley fluttered again. Frida sped up, and she could smell the bad smell now, over and above the vegetable fragrance of her own bag. It was a grimy, sour odor. The odor of rat. Frida’s nose twitched.
