by Jane Smiley
* * *
PARAS FINALLY FELT comfortable visiting Nancy and the ducklings when the ground was dry and the turf was thickening up. There was no moon, and the Champ de Mars was especially dark—always good for a ramble. It was so late that none of the buildings had even a lighted window. Of course the great Tour was lit, and beyond that, the bridge across the river. The river itself shimmered and gave off a warm vapor. It could not be true that Paras smelled or sensed the two racecourses so far out in that direction. It could not be true that Paras felt a little pull in that direction. This life was a well-fed pleasure—what more could she want? She came to the fence around the pond, trotted a little bit back and forth to test the footing, then popped over it at an easy canter. That was also a pleasure, and one that she had forgotten. Jumping. She had been particular about hurdles, in training and on the course, never touched a one. She wasn’t a careless type who came back to the barn complaining about this knock and that blow—she pulled her knees right up to her cheeks and kicked out behind. If you had been a nimble filly, the sort who could curl up in a ball to sleep, it was as easy as could be, and more fun than galloping—perhaps a bit like flying.
Nancy started quacking as soon as she saw Paras—the ducklings were in grave danger every single day, and should they survive, it would be a miracle solely attributable to Nancy’s alertness. Paras, having seen hawks and owls and a fox and two large cats as she trotted around the Champ, didn’t doubt her. The ducklings, so far, were Male No. 1, Female No. 1, etc., down to Male No. 3 and Female No. 3. They all looked like Nancy, and even though they were quite young, they were already swimming vigorously, according to Nancy; at the moment, their sleeping heads were arranged around her in the nest. That they all looked like Nancy was a triumph in itself, because Nancy had been sure that one of those shoveler ducks you see all over the place had introduced an egg into her nest, and it was all very well for certain ravens to say what’s the difference, but the difference was evident—that hideous beak. Nancy stopped quacking, sighed, rearranged herself among the ducklings. All was quiet. Everything was quite lush here, in the shadow of the parapet. Paras nosed out a few herbs and chomped some grass. She said, “Where’s Sid?”
“He’ll get back anytime now,” said Nancy. “Depends on air traffic, which can be a little vicious. He isn’t the kind who goes scouting about for stray hens. He’s faithful and knows his job.”
“What’s his job?” asked Paras.
“Look around,” said Nancy. “Six ducklings is a lot of work. Do horses produce offspring?”
“Yes,” said Paras, “but usually only one at a time.”
Nancy started quacking softly to herself. Paras didn’t say anything more, pulled a few weeds out of the water, just to taste them, and looked out there again, toward the big bridge and up the hillside to the grand buildings on the crest. They drew her; she jumped the fence beside the pond without even testing the footing (but of course it was fine—without shoes, all footings were manageable). She made her way along the edge of the lighted area, always cautious, and stood among the buildings not far from the bridge. A few cars passed, but there were long moments of darkness and silence. She saw that if she was going to get there it would be at this time of night. But what would she do when she got there? She was overfed now because of the rich grass, and no longer fit because of the intermittent exercise. The other horses would pass her with ease, kicking dust in her face, and then pretending concern when the race was over. She was a four-year-old, a mare, no longer a filly. And she looked like a mare, she was sure, one of those graceless beings that you respected but didn’t care much about, who did, indeed, as she had told Nancy, produce one offspring at a time. She lifted her head and flared her nostrils, recalled that long trot she had taken into the city the first evening. She had been in the forest, and she had followed her nose, and then she had crossed something that brought her to a small fenced area of grass, and she had jumped in there, and then she had jumped out, and then she had trotted down the street, her shoes clanging on the pavement, and then she had found that other patch of grass, and Frida. It was hazy, had always been hazy. But it wasn’t so hazy that she couldn’t find her way back, she thought. She flicked her ears. Was now the time?
And then she was startled into rearing up by a huge rumbling van that flew by, a van that would have hit her and killed her had she made the move she’d been thinking of. She stood quietly, her head down, her breathing fast, sweat breaking out on her flanks. Sometime later, when she had calmed down a bit, she turned, went past the fence and the pond and the bridge, and over to the allée, and cantered home. The gate was open, Frida was sleeping. The windows were dark. The courtyard was peaceful. Paras stood quietly by the shrubbery until the sun came up and Étienne called her in for breakfast.
* * *
PIERRE, unable to sleep, had come to work at dawn. If he got there early enough, he could watch the baby squirrels, doves, owls, ducks, coots. Of course, there were the pigeons and the rats. Part of his job was to control them, because tourists hated them, but he was of two minds about that: every city was an ecosystem, and Paris was more complex than most. The horse manure, fresh, still greenish, two piles of smallish clumps, surprised him—he hadn’t seen it in weeks. One pile was west of the Tour, a few meters from the Quai Branly. That one he pulped with his shovel and mixed with some of the soil he had in his cart. He piled the mixture around the trunks of a few trees. The other, smaller pile was where the Allée Adrienne Lecouvreur crossed the boulevard. He was looking at it when a voice behind him said, “What is that?”
He turned around in surprise. Maybe he had never met anyone in the park this time of the morning. He thought he recognized her—she was wearing a light jacket and a red cap—but he couldn’t place her. He said, “I’m guessing it’s horse dung.” He tried to make himself sound impersonal, indifferent, but, really, he was happy—well, thrilled—that the horse was still alive. He hadn’t realized how convinced he had become that the horse had gone to the slaughter. The girl—well, she was so slight, she seemed girlish, but her face was the face of someone who knew what she was about—said, “How can there be horse dung in the Champ de Mars?”
Pierre said, “Historical precedent, perhaps,” and the woman smiled, not what Pierre had expected. He said, “Horse dung isn’t unhealthy, and, at any rate, we clean it up.”
Now the woman smiled, and said, “It doesn’t bother me. In fact, I’m happy to discover proof that there is really a horse. I thought it was something much spookier.”
Pierre said, “What are you talking about?”
And Anaïs, who had decided to cross the Champ de Mars in the pleasant weather and take the RER train home from work, avoiding the two transfers she normally had to make, told him about her horse, her mysterious nighttime visitor.
Pierre knew Anaïs’s pastries perfectly well—he’d bought galettes and coffee there several times. He said, “You work in that café? Or the bakery? I’ve never seen you there.”
“I’m a baker.”
Pierre couldn’t quite contain his relief that the horse was still alive. He knew he was grinning. He said, “When was the last time you saw the horse?”
“The day before yesterday, during the night, and she ate a bowl of oatmeal with flaxseed, corn flour, and grated carrots.”
And then they looked at each other, not saying anything, both smiling. Anaïs was thinking that something around here was crazy, but at least she knew now that it wasn’t her, and, by the way, this gardener had a nice demeanor, comfortable and kind. Pierre was thinking that Anaïs must be a good-hearted woman, and those galettes, and the rolls, too, that he had gotten from that pâtisserie were chewy and delicious. The sun lifted itself into the heavens, just a little bit, and shone brightly on the pile of manure.
FIFTEEN
As a result of spying through the windows of houses and apartments around Paris for many segments and w
atching the humans lined up at the foot of the Tour, Raoul had noticed that it took humans forever to do the least thing. There they stood, looking around, waiting waiting waiting, shuffling forward, hardly speaking to one another. Ten flocks of Aves might rise into the heavens, sort themselves out, and billow off into the west or the east in the time that it took one human to creep onto the elevator, look out over the landscape, return to the earth, and toddle away. Or you could watch humans eat in their cafés, a spectacle affording no drama whatsoever. The food was dead before they even saw it, and yet they sat there, poking the dead things with their tools, their mouths working and working. And so, though Delphine planned to renew her search for Paras, though Pierre planned to keep his eyes open, though Anaïs planned to follow Chouchou the next time she came for a feed, though the authorities at the school planned to ask around the neighborhood and at police headquarters about a stray boy, the days went by, the same as always, pleasant and fragrant, occasionally rainy, occasionally cool. The herd of runners in the Champ de Mars swelled, but they noticed nothing, partly because, though Pierre didn’t look for the horse, he did clean up after her, trusting that she would appear. Anaïs always found herself up to the elbows in dough, in no position to take a long walk—merely feeding the horse used up plenty of time. And she knew that if she found the horse, if the authorities (including that kindly fellow—Pierre, his name was) got involved, the visits and her pleasure would be over: the horse would be claimed by a real owner. Only Jérôme actually planned to do nothing, say nothing, simply to supply the vegetables and the bread and the bones, to pat Frida on the head when she came to the shop with the boy.
In the meantime, Madame de Mornay knitted, made her bed, napped, ate a bit of this and a bit of that. She chatted with Étienne, she held her hat in her hand and stroked the feather, she thought of her husband, that dapper heartthrob, her mother and her brother, her son, and her grandson and his wife, Étienne’s parents, and she hoped some idea would come to her. No one had ever suggested that death was voluntary, unless you counted heading off to war a voluntary act, which it sometimes is and sometimes is not. Her father had died a commandant, which meant that, if he had not embraced that war, he had embraced his duty therein. Her husband had sent Madame and their son to Domme during the second war, then fought with the Resistance, died in a bombing raid upon Lyon, killed, ironically, by his own allies. And then her son had gone to Oran as a representative of de Gaulle. He had intended to stay eight days and had been killed by a ricocheting bullet on the second day; her grandson was a year old at the time. Her grandson had used his portion of the family money to live in Alaska, Hawaii, Hong Kong, Australia, Kuala Lumpur—anywhere that was not like Paris. Perhaps he had married, perhaps not. He returned home with a lovely girl from Dublin, twenty-five years old to his forty-four. The three of them had lived well enough in the house—Madame kept to herself on the ground floor; André and Irene ranged through the upper stories. André made big plans to renovate the whole place, to return it to its former undusty glory. His friends showed up, of all types, speaking all sorts of languages, but Madame was already fairly deaf by that time, and could make out very little. Irene’s French was good. Though her accent puzzled Madame, she’d liked the girl, the girl who was driving the night they were killed, the girl who got confused and entered the Périphérique going the wrong direction. Étienne was two and a half. Madame did not know if he remembered his parents—and if she were to ask now, she would not be able to hear his reply. She did not remember her own father. It was their fate as a family, perhaps, or merely luck, merely a part of being French in the twentieth century, when wars came and went like terrifying, unstoppable tempests. She had been spry enough when Étienne was two and a half, when he was five, to care for him, and then their roles had switched. Truly, she had done ill by the boy. And then she stopped thinking about it and returned to her knitting basket. The wool was running low—she could feel only three small balls in there. She had stitched each section to the others, and the afghan spread out over her bed and draped to the floor on every side. It was almost complete.
* * *
ÉTIENNE AND KURT THOUGHT only about riding. When Étienne was not caring for his great-grandmama or hastily dusting here and wiping there, he was staring at Paras or sitting on her or stroking her with a soft rag. At least he ate. Kurt no longer knew himself. All he wanted to do, inside the house and outside, was entangle his four little feet in that thick mane and go about from place to place. His former greatest pleasure, eating, now looked to him like a waste of time, and as a result, nothing was left on his bones except muscle and fur. Frida lay in her corner in the courtyard and muttered and grumbled about rats’ knowing their place, and their place, if they were smart, was indoors. Even Conrad occasionally looked out the window on the second floor in dismay, but Kurt could not be stopped. He was delirious with pleasure and desire.
As for Paras, after her near-death experience, she was willing to do anything. Otherwise, she might have discouraged Kurt from running over her and sitting on her constantly, but his feet, light and tickly, reminded her that she was alive. Any reluctance she’d had about presenting herself at the sixth step to Étienne was completely gone—he fed her and gave her a place to live, he cleaned up after her (and the shrubbery and the raspberry patch had never looked more richly green), he talked to her about horses in the books he read. She owed him, if not her life, then her living. Paras thought she might like to chat with Raoul about her conflicting feelings—he would certainly have something to say, and even if it wasn’t relevant or helpful, the sound of his cawing would be soothing. But it was spring; he wasn’t making much progress on his new nest in the nearby plane tree—he was off doing ravenish things, whatever they were. Paras was happy, but her happiness felt like a scarf of morning mist floating above her, ready to blow away any minute.
Raoul had been seized by a desire for one last circuit. He had enjoyed visiting with his cousin Liam Corax Corvus, who lived in the Jardin des Plantes, so he flew there again, but though Liam was welcoming, the garden was as tame as could be. He longed for something more, one last adventure. Out to Vincennes was the obvious alternative, but just when he was almost there, just when he recognized his youthful haunts, he veered around and headed west. He flew and flew and flew—a long way for an old bird whose idea of a voyage was from the Place du Trocadéro to Montmartre, but he rather gloried in his power, the way he once had, at least until the very end, when he came to a screeching, plummeting, aching halt, and landed, pretty wobbly, in the middle of the training track at Maisons-Laffitte, gasping for air and stumbling across the sand, even as a large black horse galloped toward him. He closed his eyes, didn’t move—and the horse galloped on. He heard the rider exclaim, “Mon Dieu!,” and, with the last of his strength, he hopped up to the limb of a slender little tree and sat there, his wings trembling, wishing only for a drink, maybe his ultimate drink, of water. Some ravens, ones he didn’t recognize, gathered across the horse track, on a wire between two poles, but he could hardly lift his head, and so they chose to ignore him.
When Delphine got back to the barn, she told Rania what had happened—a raven had fallen out of the sky right in front of them, had not moved. Whiskey Shot, the English-bred three-year-old she was riding, galloped right over the bird without even flicking his ears, didn’t touch him, maybe didn’t notice him. Then they chatted about how you might think that birds would be falling out of the sky on a regular basis, but no one ever saw such a thing—it was peculiar. Whiskey was a bold horse, their great hope—entered in the Poule d’Essai des Poulains at Longchamp, the first horse Delphine had ever entered in a Group One race. And he was young, had turned three in April. He had plenty of growing to do.
Raoul sat for a long time in that small tree—long enough for the other ravens to finish one squabble and begin another. He found a puddle underneath a spigot on the edge of the course. He drank some (sandy) and paddled his feet around in it
, refreshing himself a little bit. He was not quite sure where he was, but the ravens would tell him (while commenting on his ignorance) once he was revived enough to approach them. That was for later. For now, he flew back into the small tree, settled himself in the fork of one of the branches, and took the opportunity to survey the landscape. There were plenty of trees, and so there were many more Aves and of greater variety than he was familiar with in Paris. And they were all fat, especially the sparrows, the bee-eaters, the finches, the swallows swooping here and there. Wood pigeons, magpies, lapwings, even a furtive pheasant or two—never saw those in the Champ de Mars. He could see the outline of the head of a baby owl in a nearby tree, and then another one appeared beside it, peeping out. The mother would be nearby. Otherwise, there were horses everywhere. Several shot past him, but others came along more slowly, their riders curled on their necks. The horses progressed along several routes, not only the dirt track where he had landed. Some stood quietly with their riders, here and there, watching. He saw plenty of dogs, too, though attached to humans, not running free like Frida. And there were cats in the shadows. The world was full of cats—every Avis knew that. He could see a pair of them from this tree, gray and white, sliding around in the ragged grass. He adjusted his wings. He was beginning to feel stronger, and also rather proud of himself for making the trip.
