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 watching 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.