Джейн Смайли - Perestroika in Paris

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. Sometimes, 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.