Perestroika in Paris

by Jane Smiley

  But there were other things to attend to. There was that man running behind her, almost on top of her. Frida shifted her weight to the rear and the side. The man, who said, “Mon Dieu!,” was deflected off the curb, and Madame remained safe. The man slowed to a walk—much more appropriate, Frida thought.

  Étienne and Madame stopped, unusually for them, in front of the chocolate shop. Étienne said something, then Madame said something, then they stepped inside, leaving the trolley on the threshold. The fabric of the trolley fluttered again. Frida stepped up to it, dropped her own bag, put her paw on it, nosed open the flap. Yes. He was inside the trolley—a small, dark, glossy rat. He had been scratching around, but now he went quiet and stared up at her, his eyes large and frightened. Frida bared her teeth.

  Kurt said, “I’m sorry. We haven’t met, but I’ve seen you through the window. You are friends with Perestroika.” He added, “My friend.”

  Frida understood that she had overreacted. She cleared her throat and said, “Yes, I’ve heard about you. I understand you are not game.” Even so, her whiskers twitched.

  Kurt said, “Where are we?”

  “Rue de Grenelle, outside the chocolate shop.”

  “What is a chocolate shop?”

  Frida, who saw Étienne and Madame approaching with a box, said, “Curl up in the corner and find out. But keep your paws to yourself.” She stepped back. Étienne, still attending to Madame, put the little box into the trolley without looking. He closed the flap, and they walked on. Madame was saying, “Nothing wrong with an occasional treat. I bought a box of candied orange peel dipped in dark chocolate. Some other nice things in the box, too. Take good care of it, my darling.”

  Étienne patted his great-grandmama on the back of her hand.

  They walked on.

  Frida took a few deep breaths, and at the fruit-and-vegetable market, where Jérôme was absent for some reason, replaced by a young woman, she waited until Étienne and Madame began inspecting vegetables (always a long process), then nosed open the flap. The little box was untouched. She said, “Why did you come along?”

  “I didn’t mean to. I was sleeping in here, and suddenly we were out the door. I always wanted to get out the door, but now I’m not so sure. Do you see any rats around—females, perhaps?”

  “Not a one,” said Frida.

  “Oh dear.” Kurt sighed.

  “It’s too busy for rats. There are humans and automobiles everywhere. I can’t say that I smell a rat in the neighborhood right now, but I’ve gotten a whiff from time to time.”

  “My father tells me that cats did away with everyone. We are the last living rats.”

  “He’s exaggerating,” said Frida.

  Kurt curled into a ball, his paws over his face. Frida let the flap drop and sat down in her attentive and statuesque position beside the trolley. She was a predator, but even so, she did not want the rat to be squashed by groceries. It was a conundrum—if Étienne merely dropped the bag of vegetables into the trolley, that might endanger the rat (but also the chocolates); if he reached in to take out the box of chocolates, he would see the rat, and then there might be chaos. There was a reason why Paris was home to so many fat cats—the rat’s father was wrong about numbers, but not about culture. Étienne and Madame went deeper into the shop. Frida bumped the trolley, knocking it over so that it fell on the fabric side, then put her nose down as if sniffing it, and said, “Ease yourself out under the flap. I’ll lie down close to the wall of the building, and you can hide between me and the building.” She arranged herself. Kurt slipped out. He looked rather striking to Frida, but the Parisians had their chins in the air, and if they saw him, they did not react. He pushed in behind her. He whispered, “The boy petted me once,” but after that said nothing. She barked one gentle bark, and Étienne appeared a few seconds later. He stood the trolley back up, said, “Bon chien!,” and pulled the trolley into the shop. Frida had no idea what to do next. She lay quietly, ears forward. Humans saw her and smiled, but did not, apparently, look closely—there were no screams or gasps. The feel of the rat’s fur against her leg was warm and soft. The stink was not overpowering, not unlike the stink of every mammal, including Madame de Mornay. Every so often, the rat gave out a little squeak, but it was so soft and high-pitched that humans could not have heard it.

  Étienne and Madame came out of the vegetable shop, went into the meat market. Frida remained still, arranging herself to look as proud and supercilious as she had ever done before, even in her days of solitude in the Place du Trocadéro. As a result, the woman in the meat market didn’t chase her away.

  Now Étienne and Madame came shuffling out, dragging the trolley. Humans stepped aside to give them space. Étienne was pulling the trolley, and it was full. The flap, partially open, revealed the box of chocolates nestled into the moist greenery of a bunch of carrots. Frida rose to her feet. She said nothing, but Kurt did what she would have advised him to do: he walked along underneath her, exactly within her midday shadow. He made no sounds. Fortunately, Madame was tired, and she and Étienne proceeded deliberately, rather close to the wall of shops, out of the way of passersby. Frida was a little nervous, but what would anyone do even if they did see them? The rat was inside Frida’s territory. Even a human would deduce from that that the rat belonged to her.

  But of all the humans, only the gendarme saw the rat scurrying down the street, within the stride of the German shorthair. It looked like an optical illusion, especially when the dog paused with the boy and the old woman for the streetlight, and the rat paused, too, and then skittered off the curb and across the intersection in the dog’s shadow, perfectly in time with the dog’s step. Did the dog know the rat was there? The gendarme couldn’t tell. After the four of them disappeared around a corner, he stood scratching his head and wondering what he had really seen. He checked his watch. Lunchtime. He went into the nearest bar and ordered a shot of brandy; then he wondered if perhaps he might be transferred to Montmartre, where strange things happened all the time and weren’t so disconcerting.

  That evening, Kurt could not sleep at all: he was still too amazed at his first foray into the great world. He thought that it was no use telling Conrad about it—Conrad would not believe that their kingdom here, so huge to them, was relatively so small and dark, or that the number of humans in the world so defied all of Kurt’s powers of perception that his sensory mechanism had broken down completely. He might believe that the sunlight was so bright that a rat could not open his eyes for more than a second, and that the noise of humans and their doings was overpowering, but he would not believe that a dog had saved Kurt’s life, that cats were relatively few and far between, or that Kurt could not wait to go out there and look again for his doe.

  THIRTEEN

  Pierre thought that perhaps they were due for an early spring—the Champ de Mars had gotten plenty of rain since the December blizzard, but was now drying out quickly. It was Pierre’s job to make a meadow in the midst of a city, to give it beautiful flower beds and swaths of color. And no one in Paris was willing to step in a puddle. It did not matter if a man or a woman purchased his or her shoes at Hermès or at Monoprix, those shoes were not to know muddy water. Pierre had been to the U.K. and seen “wellies,” but never on a bona-fide Parisian. And so he had to take care of the allées and the grass (which was wet and tender this time of year, reaching for the sunshine) and the fences, which got rusted and bent over the winter, by whom and how Pierre was not quite certain. It was a hectic time, which was fine with Pierre, since he had no one at home but his four cats, and because there were four of them, they viewed him even more superciliously than the citizens of Paris did—the mere fact that they outnumbered him rendered him incidental in their eyes. He knew from that piercing whinny before Christmas that the horse was somewhere nearby, but he hadn’t seen her or any of her products recently. It gave him a pleasantly eerie feeling when he ha
ppened to think of it, but he hardly ever happened to think of it, he was so busy.

  When Pierre was growing up on a farm west of Saint-Céré, five hundred kilometers due south of the very spot where he was standing, and infinite worlds away, he had cared nothing about the apple orchard, the plum trees, the sunflower fields, the cows, or the sheep. He’d wanted only to get to Paris. When he got here, he tried various forms of employment, and at the first one, a travel agency, he’d met his wife. And they had traveled a bit—to Greece, Italy, Morocco, Scotland, England. But the tightness of the office made him restless, so he tried driving a taxi. The streets of Paris were both confusing and frustrating—once he had been stopped for an hour in a traffic jam over by Montreuil in which the cars were so crammed together that even a police vehicle blowing its siren had been unable to get through. Then he’d found this job, and his restlessness faded away, or, rather, dissolved into the very sort of work he had left behind down south. Here he was, active, orderly, as solitary as his father had been. Almost fifty. His father had died at fifty, pulmonary embolism.

  Then, as he was sorting rakes in the gardening shed and inspecting the upper hinge on the shed door (screws coming loose—the door needed replacing), he saw a stray dog trot past. The dog was a German shorthair, sleek and elegant, with a confident air. A striking dog, which was why Pierre recognized her—she was the dog that belonged to that busker. Pierre had seen the two of them several times in various places around the arrondissement, particularly across the Pont d’Iéna, over by the carousel and the architectural museum. Everyone knew the fellow was quite a musician, had a guitar worth as much as an automobile, made a lot of money, could have found a place to live if he had wanted to, but you could tell by his look that he was a bit of a renegade, the kind of old fellow, maybe sixty, who had always been a renegade. Pierre had given him a euro or two. What was that song he’d played—“Malagueña”? Something classy. Pierre stepped out of the shed enclosure and watched the dog trot away, then looked around. The busker was nowhere to be seen. The dog was trotting north, carrying a shopping bag. Pierre laughed, pleased with the distraction. He thought, well, once you have decided that a stray horse is none of your business, then a dog with a shopping bag is truly none of your business.

  * * *

  AFTER EATING her meal, slowly, as she always did, as she always had—even oatmeal had interesting flavors if you ate it slowly enough—Madame de Mornay made her way into the grand salon, feeling the warmth of the sun as she went. She paused at the second window and touched the glass. It was almost hot. She turned the crank that opened a lower pane and felt the breeze. Her ninety-eighth spring! Had every single one been so full and rich? She did not regret any one of them. She took a deep breath and then made her way to her chair, where she sat quietly for a while, sensing the flow of the air around her. Then she put her hand out, found her knitting, and commenced. Her project was a useless one, a coverlet to be pieced from the squares she knitted, using up a lifetime of leftovers, most of them merino wool, her favorite. She had made many a sweater and sock in her day; no doubt her bin of remnants was a riot of colors that did not match. But she knew her stitches by heart, by feel. She didn’t have to see what she was doing to know whether to knit or purl or pass the slip stitch over. She could do a simple lace if she kept proper count. It was rather like saying her rosary or playing the piano, orderly and reassuring.

  Perhaps the onset of spring was why those feelings of dread for Étienne that she had had around her birthday had receded in favor of hope, or even confidence. She still understood the stakes, but the boy was taller all of a sudden—she had to lift her hand fairly high to put it on his shoulder—and somehow this calmed her. Yes, she had been selfish to keep him here; however, she herself had never gone to school, had had a governess who was quite well educated, who had taught her to read, write, and do mathematical equations, had introduced her to Stendhal, Balzac, Flaubert, Rousseau, Poincaré, Colette, and George Sand. A music tutor had taught her to play the piano. She was allowed free run of a library that included many eyebrow-raising texts, and she had read them and discussed them with her tutor and her mother numerous times. Étienne might have started school at five, but Madame had decided that the school nearby was a sterile, unpleasant place, not right for her darling.

  But once she felt better, then she felt worse—truly, she had been selfish. She had wanted Étienne all to herself, and had also wanted to prevent anyone, everyone, from access to the life they led here on the Rue Marinoni. Her experience of Paris was that if you went about your business with dignity and cleanliness, no one dared to investigate. Yes, she had plenty of money in the bank—her bills were paid—but she didn’t remember the name of the bank—the old one had been taken over more than once, and no doubt the bills were no longer even paid by a human, but by a computer program. As she remembered, she had crept to the bank some years ago—four? five?—and the man she met there, very well dressed, had reassured her that the bank had only her best interests at heart. Did she believe him? How might she decide? If someone were to investigate, she and Étienne would be separated, and both of them would be put in separate places to be “taken care of.” Her extreme age was against her, her failing sight was against her, her deafness was against her. It would be easy for “an authority” to assume that she could no longer live independently, would it not? Easy and profitable for a hospital, a facility, a “guardian.” She remembered the orphanages and institutions of her youth, cages for children where beatings abounded, food was scarce, and the adults embezzled the funds. Whether these things were true about real orphanages, or whether she’d read them in books, she could not now remember, but the images were as clear to her at ninety-seven as they had been at six, when, walking down the Avenue de la Bourdonnais, she asked her nurse why children were alone on the street, why they were so dirty and thin, why they came up to her and grabbed her elbow. Her nurse, a kind woman, had handed out what change she had, shaking her head, saying, “The war! The war! Our Father who art in heaven, have pity!” Madame could reassure herself that Étienne was better off than those children, at least. Every day, she ran her hands over the boy’s clothing to discover if he was dressed properly, and, every day, he was, and she detected no bony protuberances or emaciated upper arms—he was no wild child, like that boy she had seen in some film, when was that? A friend had taken her, then introduced her to the director, a handsome man whose name always made her think of truffles. Étienne was clean, fed, responsible, an avid reader. She shook her head, came back to the present, thought of the future: “What next?”

  * * *

  THE HORSE WAS about to stand up; Étienne wrapped his legs around her sides and twined his fingers into her mane. Underneath him, she tilted back, then heaved forward, and then he was up toward the ceiling (not too near the ceiling, since the ceiling in the grand salon was five meters high). She stood quite still. He could see through the window from a different angle, too, and what he saw was the top of the fence outside, the buds on the shrubbery that enveloped it, the house across the street, and a bit of brightening bluish sky—it was just past dawn, and his great-grandmama would awaken soon. He had stood on the back of the sofas once or twice, and looked out the windows of the library upstairs, and he ran up and down the staircase every day (he had been known to slide down the banister, until that became rather boring), but this was different. He felt Paras’s warmth. Perhaps he even felt her heart beating and the blood coursing in her veins. He felt her skin tremble and her tail switch easily to the left and easily to the right. She was still, but she was alive. It was frightening and it was exhilarating. She took a step forward. He felt her right hip shift slightly; then her right shoulder moved, then her left hip, then her left shoulder. Her head lifted and dropped. She paused, and then she took another step, and another. Her mane was thick enough so that his hands were full—it was rough and warm, and underneath it, her coat was silky. Her ears flicked toward the window; then
she paused, alert, as if she was listening to something. Her ears, though deep reddish brown, were edged in black. He hadn’t noticed that before. He bent down, put his arms around her neck, took in her smell. There were so many wonderful things about being on her back that the riding books never mentioned.

  He had set up the furniture in the living room so that, though his great-grandmama’s favorite chair and table were just where they’d always been, everything else was bunched together in the middle, to give Paras a place to sleep and some room to get around. From on top of her, this looked a bit like a racecourse, and so it was—she now walked the circuit in a leisurely fashion, and as he went around on her back, past the fireplace, the window, another window, short wall, long wall, doorway, short wall, window, window, fireplace, her steps were muffled by the carpet but his feelings kept rolling out. The first circuit was a vertiginous thrill, but he didn’t fall off, and then he felt himself get used to the movement and the rhythm, which was much more pleasurable. He sat quietly, let his back sway in time to her steps. By the third circuit, he was feeling a gentle rapture. None of the riding-school books in the library had ever talked about this, either. Time passed, step by step, and then the door opened to his great-grandmama’s chamber, and there she was, neatly clothed in her usual black outfit, her hand on her cane. She called out, “Étienne! Where are you, my boy?”