Джейн Смайли - Perestroika in Paris

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 another! 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.