Perestroika in Paris

by Jane Smiley

  Paras halted. Her ears flicked. Luckily, she was right beside one of the sofas, and so, still gripping the horse’s mane, Étienne slid down until his foot touched the upward curve of its back; then he dismounted as best he could. Though he knew she couldn’t hear him, he said, “Right here, Grandmama!” Paras stood stock still. Étienne skipped over to the old lady and guided her into the cuisine. On the way past the front door, he opened it wide. The air was fragrant. That it seemed like spring surprised Étienne. With the horse in the house, time passed more quickly than it ever had before, perhaps because there was so much to do, so many books to peruse, and even memorize, about the nature of horses.

  When he came back after giving his great-grandmama her breakfast, the horse had gone outside. In his exhilaration over his ride, Étienne had forgotten to feed her, and now he didn’t know quite what to do—Grandmama would certainly sense something if he were to let Paras back in and give her her usual basin of steel-cut oats and legumes. He ran upstairs and looked out the window. She was snuffling among the shrubbery along the fence. The dog was lying in the sun nearby, and the raven was perched on the head of the sitting lion that still adorned the left column. There was grass, at least some. She seemed fine enough for now. And then he gazed around the courtyard, imagining himself sitting on her back, striding here and there. He could not wait.

  Out in the courtyard, Paras was not terribly hungry. Anaïs had given her an especially rich mixture of wheat berries, bran, flaxseed, and grated beets the night before, and, anyway, the grass in the Champ de Mars was coming back—rich and full of flavor. Grass in the courtyard was sparse, but what humans called “weeds” were plentiful, young and delicious. She ambled here and there, nosing for this bit of clover, that bit of dock. All the horses at the stables in Maisons-Laffitte had enjoyed the bits of herbs that got into the early hay, giving it more flavor and variety. Really, she thought, she might be a little thin, but, between Étienne and Anaïs, she now had a more varied and interesting diet than she had ever had in her life.

  * * *

  WHEN RAOUL PRESENTED himself at Nancy’s nest, the edge of the water wasn’t far from where Nancy was sitting dutifully upon the eggs, muttering to herself. Raoul thought but did not say that he had advised Sid to situate the nest on higher ground. Sid had insisted that higher ground was too exposed—was Raoul really and truly unaware of the hawks and the owls that flew about, focusing their gaze from above every moment on nests of duck eggs? Duck eggs were far and away the most delicious eggs, far surpassing geese and, what was it they were called—“Chickens?” offered Raoul—that humans ate by the hundreds. Sid was far more hysterical than most Aves, even mallards, that Raoul had ever encountered. How he flew into the empyrean with his mallard friends Raoul could not imagine, but, on the other hand, he had seen flocks of mallards squawking constantly, as if shouting to humans, “Shoot me! I can’t stand myself any longer!”

  Nancy said, “What will happen will happen. I say that every year, and I truly believe it, but I would like a rest every so often. At least the dog is gone.”

  “She isn’t far gone,” said Raoul.

  “Oh dear,” said Nancy. “You never know with a dog.”

  “I’ve never seen a dog as nice as Frida,” said Raoul.

  “Yes, but with any dog, something snaps, and there you are, she’s wringing your neck for you, tossing you aside without even eating you.”

  “Has this ever happened to you?” said Raoul.

  “It happened to a third cousin, out in Chatou. It was the talk of the family for years. The dog appeared to live with the flock in comity and peace, sniffed the ducklings, herded them a bit, and then, who knows, my cousin said the wrong thing, the wind blew from the wrong direction, the dog got up in a mood. Jumped on Pearl and did her in, in seconds. Left seven ducklings. Some humans baked Pearl for supper that night. Served her with oranges from their greenhouse. No, it doesn’t matter what a dog says. A mallard has to keep her wits about her. Better for the dog to be gone.”

  “Life,” said Raoul, “is always a chancy business.”

  “You are telling a mallard this? A mallard, for whom a moment’s peace is a rare and precious thing?” She tucked her head under her wing and went back to muttering.

  * * *

  NOW THAT SHE was living with Frida, Paras was a little surprised by her canine habits (it was Raoul who’d taught her that they were “canine”): She slept off and on all day; you could tell her something, but she didn’t believe it unless she checked it out with her nose (not her ears—equines relied upon their hearing); she could not control her tail—everything she thought was expressed before she knew it by the movements of her tail. She had a strange attachment to objects, which she stashed here and there and kept watch over (one time she had lost the “ball,” and then, when she found it, she rolled it with her paw, took it between her jaws, and tossed it in the air, trembling with pleasure). But the strangest thing was that, even though she still would not go into the house, she treated the boy as her very own human—she wagged that tail when he came out and when he looked out the window. He seemed to notice her—he smiled, and sometimes he even petted her when they went to the market.

  Raoul, who was perched in the crook of a tree limb that arched over the top of the fence, said, “My dear girl, I have never seen a Canis familiaris who was truly independent. Those who don’t have humans run around in packs with one another. When I first saw our friend Frida after her human was carted away, she didn’t leave the neighborhood over there. Ah well. And, you may not know, not all Canidae are familiaris.” He lifted his wings. Frida continued to sleep. “You ask me, the best type of Canids are Vulpes. They have a poor reputation among the other canids, but they think for themselves.”

  “I’ve seen foxes,” said Paras. “I’ve seen them in the Champ de Mars.”

  “Of course you have,” said Raoul. “They were certainly more surprised to see you than you were to see them.”

  Paras said, “I need to make a wider circuit. I would enjoy a good gallop.”

  Raoul fluffed up his feathers, sidestepped, plucked an insect from the base of a leaf. He said, “Mmm. Not bad.”

  Frida stretched out, groaned, and then woofed, very softly, in her sleep.

  The fact was that Raoul was thinking of abandoning Benjamin Franklin entirely. Those youngsters over there! The whole lot of them were from Dijon, pushy and populous in the Dijonnais tradition. He skipped upward from branch to branch in the tree. Certain forks or crooks in its branches had been utilized by earlier generations of Aves, but there was nothing at the moment, though in the adjacent tree there was a stick nest belonging to a pair of Columba palumbus. They were talkative and rather messy Aves, but they minded their own business. He hopped upward again. The branches of the tree got smaller and bouncier, the air got fresher. It wasn’t a bad tree, a plane tree, a common tree. But he didn’t have to think of it that way if he didn’t want to. When you got old, your priorities changed, did they not? He cawed a few times to Paras (though she didn’t look up at him) and stretched his wings.

  * * *

  DELPHINE HADN’T SPOKEN to Madeleine since Christmas. What was there to say? Delphine had exhausted herself looking for Paras, and had gotten to the point where she could only imagine bad outcomes—stolen by Louis Paul, with him gloating. He might have even sent her to the slaughterhouse, because her skills were a threat to his own chances for a win….She smacked herself on the side of her head to rid herself of this thought. Madeleine had not sued her for negligence—she was too kind to do that. Nor had Paras been insured. But the whole experience had driven Madeleine out of the horse-racing business. She had retired her silks, put her other two horses out to pasture, and contributed fifty thousand euros to a horse-rescue organization. Delphine’s barn was full—she had had to borrow three stalls from her neighbor, and what she would do if he wanted them back she did not know. Somet
imes, when she was out training, she would see a horse go by that reminded her of Paras—same refined head, mobile ears—but it was never Paras, never had that parallelogram-shaped star right over the cowlick between her eyes, never had that avid, curious gaze.

  As for racing, Delphine was doing well enough—already this season, she had won two flat races, at Cagnes-sur-Mer and Hyères, had a series of four seconds in a row in Lyon. She liked her horses, and she was looking forward to the season, both on the flat and over fences, but she could not keep herself from gazing at races that Paras might have done well in, imagining driving Paras to the course, imagining telling the jockey to let the filly do it her way, reliving the pleasure she had felt when the filly came home first, and then first again.

  When her mobile rang and it was Madeleine’s voice on the other end of the line, her heart fluttered, as if, as if Madeleine had some news. And she did, but it wasn’t about Paras. She had a new project, devoting herself to rebuilding a small abandoned convent in her village as a museum. Delphine thought it was a good idea—that village was at a crossroads where Gauls, Romans, Franks, and countless other peoples had paused, looked around, and decided to settle. The earth there was a swamp of artifacts. Madeleine sounded as if she was trying to be enthusiastic, as if she had made herself call Delphine in order to be friendly. She went on about potsherds and coins—there was one with a figure of a horse on it—Gaulish. Looking at it had made Madeleine rather sad. At the end of the call, just as they were hanging up and Delphine was watching Rania head out toward the gallops with the American horse Jesse James (fast, but still not comfortable, Delphine thought), Madeleine said, “I did look at a horse.”

  Delphine said, “A racehorse? What’s his name?”

  “Alphabezique.”

  Delphine remembered seeing the horse run; he was very good on the flat, big, and big-boned, a nice mover. She remarked that he had been a good horse—run fifth in the Arc, made a fair amount of money—but then said, “I thought he was retired.”

  Madeleine started to cry, and said that, yes, the horse was retired, she wanted to buy him as a breeding stallion; she loved him. And even as Delphine was counseling against this, saying that the horse wasn’t good enough for that, that only a fool went into breeding, best leave that to those with endless money, she started crying, too, so much so that she could not see Rania and Jesse James for the tears. Delphine could not say that Madeleine was persuasive. She did not end the conversation any more in favor of this crazy idea than when she began, but she did agree, the next time she headed south, to stop and look at Alphabezique. It seemed the least she could do.

  After the morning training was over, and the horses were quietly eating from their hay nets and Rania was listening to a tune on her iPhone, and Delphine should have been heading to her office to make out bills, she got into her car and drove into Paris. It was not that she thought Paras was in Paris. But she did think that getting away from Maisons-Laffitte might somehow give her a new idea about what to do—either how to find her or how to give up on finding her.

  It took about an hour, and there she was on the Périphérique, on the west side, and she could not help herself, she got off at Neuilly. She often got off at Neuilly, but she always turned south and headed down the Avenue de Malakoff. Now she went east, toward the Arc and the Champs-Élysées, something she hadn’t done in years. She disappeared, as she felt, into the maelstrom. Part of the problem was motorcycles zooming everywhere, the machines and the riders the same color, carrying the same brilliant shine, curving around her inside a cloud of noise. As she circled the Arc, the other cars seemed to swarm like bees attacking. She felt lucky that there were no bumps, that she was spit out at the turn into the Champs-Élysées without mishap in some mysterious way. Delphine had ridden in horse races, some of them with fifteen or twenty entries who bunched and spread out at fifty to sixty kilometers per hour. But, maybe for that very reason, she didn’t trust cars. Cars had no sense of a herd, no perception along their bodies of where the other cars were. Cars relied on their drivers much more than horses relied on their jockeys. She was panting as she passed Cartier, Swarovski, the Hôtel George V. These expensive places were routine for Madeleine, so why should the woman not do whatever she wanted with her money? Beautifully pruned horse chestnuts rose above the traffic like cliffs above a canyon, and all the pedestrians seemed to be staring at her, watching her drown. There was of course nowhere to pull over, so she kept her hands on the wheel and her foot on the gas, but she did not know why she had made this trip, or what it meant. All she knew was that her horse had disappeared, just a horse, not a great horse, not a horse even as good as Alphabezique, a pretty horse, an interesting horse, but horses came and went all the time. Why could she not get over this one? But, of course, it was the mystery of the whole thing, the possibility that Paras had died in some cruel way.

  Then there was some greenery, then there was the Place de la Concorde, then there was some more greenery—oh, yes, Les Tuileries. Sometime late in the afternoon—nowhere near dark, but the shadows were lengthening—she came to. She was on the Avenue de Suffren. It was hard to say where she had been—the Parc Monceau came to mind, but so did Montparnasse. How could she have ranged so widely without realizing it? There was a parking place down the street from the soccer field. She whipped into it, turned off the car, and sat there for a long moment. Up since 4:30 a.m., she was worn out. She emerged from the car and walked around it. No new dents, no new scrapes. She must have stayed out of trouble. The thing to do was to call Rania and have her take the train into town and pick her up. She would think of something to say between now and then.

  But when she checked her phone, she saw that it was dead. So, if she wanted to come to her senses, it would have to be coffee, then. She walked into a café and bakery.

  After her second cup, she was back to normal. What it was like, she had to admit, was the day she rode her first race as an amateur jockey. She didn’t ride races anymore, but at that time, ten years ago now, she’d had a wonderful old gelding, a horse with dozens of races under his belt at eight years old, still sound, still ready to run. She had forced herself to do it—to ride, to get in shape, to work the old fellow every day—and then she had entered him in a race right there in Maisons-Laffitte. But from the moment she woke up on the morning of the race, she might as well have been on Mars—she couldn’t breathe the air, she didn’t feel as though she was sticking to the Earth when she walked, and all through the race everything seemed to move slowly and at light-speed at the same time. They had come in fifth, she had won a thousand euros, the sense of being lost in the universe had lasted for the rest of the afternoon, and then, all of a sudden, she was awake, she knew that they had both survived, and for some reason that escaped all logic, she was committed to racing again, to having a few more horses, to embarking on this career. But for years after that, when people asked her about her first race, she’d said, “I don’t remember a thing.” She took a bite of her roll. It was an odd version, maybe something from down south, buttery but not a croissant, sprinkled with fennel seed. She took another bite. She might have liked a second one, but she had to keep her weight down if she was going to do her share of the training and stay in the horse business.

  Anaïs saw her. Anaïs came in once a week to help in the afternoon and to sort out the books before they went to the accountant. A woman, not old but all dried and brown, sat quietly at a table by the window, in tight pants, dirty boots, horseback-riding clothes. No one had dared wear such apparel in this bakery for years, if ever, and the other servers and the patrons looked offended, but Anaïs was fascinated. The woman seemed to be enjoying Anaïs’s own modest fennel-seed creation, so she picked up a little tray and walked over to her. Yes, the woman gave off a countryside fragrance, you might say, but it wasn’t unpleasant to someone who had laid her forehead against the neck of a horse about twelve hours before. She said, “Good day, madame. M
ay I offer you something else? Another small roll, perhaps?”

  The woman looked up at her. She looked exhausted. She said, “No, but thank you very much. This one is quite delicious.”

  “Thank you, madame. It’s my own creation. I like to make new things to amuse myself. Our customers do seem to particularly appreciate this one.” Now was the time, Anaïs thought, to ask about horses, to ask if a real horse could possibly wander the streets of Paris at night, accompanied by a raven, who sometimes perched between the horse’s ears in order to receive a grape, a horse who disappeared at the break of dawn, whose gaze seemed uncanny, almost flickering with light, who, she sometimes thought, had just the ghost of a halo hovering above her. She said, “Excuse me, madame—”

  * * *

  AND THE WOMAN SAID, “No thanks!,” sounding as if she meant “No, thank you, do not address me, I need nothing from you,” and so Anaïs decided once again that it was better to keep her nighttime escapades to herself.

  FOURTEEN

  Although Étienne was somewhat uneasy about how much his great-grandmama was sleeping lately, she was still eating her usual amount, still making her trips to the shops, and seemed to be happy, so he made use of the fact that she took a nap after her breakfast to go outside and ride Paras around the courtyard. It was easy now. There were ten steps from the courtyard to the portico. He climbed to the sixth step, and she sidled up to him. It was easy to grasp her thick, tangly mane and slide his leg over her back. She always waited quietly until he felt evenly balanced, and then, before he said, “Go!,” she ambled away, here and there over the grass. He was high enough to look in the windows, but not over the tops of the shrubbery, so he could hear people walking, talking, or running (he could tell by the quickness of their stride), humming, and he could hear a dog bark every so often, but he couldn’t see anyone, and, he was confident, no one could see him. Sometimes the two of them walked here and there for hours, and as they did, he let his mind wander. Because he had lived such an isolated life, there was no place for his mind to wander except around the worlds of the books he had read, but that was enough for now. He could imagine twenty thousand leagues under the sea, cold and black; he could imagine Emperor Hadrian; he could imagine the plague; he could imagine Gargantua and Pantagruel, though possibly no one in the world would recognize what he was imagining. Étienne was willing to read anything, even if he only understood one word out of ten. He could even imagine London, since one of the books he liked to read was a French translation of David Copperfield, an edition that had been lovingly perused by someone—there were all sorts of spidery notes in the margins. He had looked for another Dickens, but not found one.