Frida knew this was a hint.
The next day, Frida supplied herself with another bill and went to the market earlier in the day, just when every shop on the street was opening. She of course went to the meat market first—she could hardly help herself, the fragrance was so enchanting—but the woman who kept the shop was sweeping the step. She waved her broom at Frida and said, “Ahh, shoo, shoo! Get!”
Frida backed away and sat down, still staring at some pale, fat, featherless carcasses in the window.
She felt a pat on the head; the man said, “Ah, dear girl, you have returned again! The chicken is indeed very lovely.”
Frida had found with Jacques that if she was still and steady and opened her eyes very wide, he was more likely to do as she wished, and, indeed, the man held out his hand, took her bag, and removed the bill from it. Then he went into the meat market. She stepped carefully up to the window and touched it with her nose beside a pile of meaty bones, and he put two of these in the bag, paid for them, and came out. He did not give her the bag, though. Instead, he carried it to his own shop. Frida followed him. When she was across the threshold, he took two coins from the register and said, “Mademoiselle, I owe you two euros from your previous visit.” Frida indicated that she would take something from each of the bins closest to the street. When she had spent all of her money, the bag was heavy in her jaws, and she knew she would have to set it down more than once on her way back to the Champ de Mars. But the bones motivated her.
The bag broke as soon as she set off.
The man clucked, clapped his hands, and said, “Oh dear!” And then he gave her another bag, this one sturdy.
Between them, Raoul, Paras, and Nancy identified the fruits—orange, apple, pear, another apple, lemon, banana. Paras took the two apples; Raoul had seen lemons but never tried one; and Nancy took the orange. No one knew what to do with the banana, so they left it beside the pond. Frida carried the bones to her hollowed-out retreat and gnawed them happily.
THERE WAS a human who knew that a horse lurked about the Champ de Mars. He had seen her the first morning, inside the fence around the North Pond, when she stretched and snorted and hoisted herself to her feet, then made her way to a bit of grass half hidden by some bushes. His name was Pierre, and he was the head gardener of the Champ de Mars. Pierre loved the Champ de Mars, thought it was the oddest spot in Paris—out west, right along the Seine, flat enough to have begun as a hundred-hectare training ground for the students in the École Militaire, then large enough to host horse racing (before that moved to Longchamp), then to host what was now called a world’s fair, not to mention the Tour. It was full of grass and trees and gardens and cars and ponds and trash (Pierre did the best he could with that), over a kilometer long and half a kilometer wide, peaceful sometimes, busy other times, especially in the summer, but not so much now, in the late fall.
That first morning, he’d watched the horse for a while, and his immediate instinct had been to have her caught and vanned away. But she was a beautiful horse—a rich bay with a long tail, a thick mane, and large, expressive eyes—and the more he looked at her, the more he thought that, at least for now, she gave the Champ a certain style: every landscape needs a figure in it, perhaps especially a figure that is only intermittently visible, that is mysterious and alert. He caught sight of her often, and watched her when he could. He saw from her footprints and her manure that she was jumping out of the fenced area to graze in the evenings. Perhaps the tourists didn’t notice her, or, if they did, thought that because she was inside a fence during the day she was provided by the authorities as a picturesque gesture. Perhaps his employees did notice her, but it was not for them to say anything if he didn’t. So everyone wordlessly shoveled up what she left, as they cleaned up after dogs and cats and birds and foxes and once an ocelot that had escaped from its owner on the Avenue de Suffren, a much more troublesome beast than a horse. Pierre knew he should wonder where the horse came from, and report her, but, for now, he reassured himself that he was not in Animal Control, and if they wanted her, they could come and look for her themselves.
FOUR
Although Frida didn’t like the mallards because of the smell, and Raoul continued to disdain them as common common common (you saw them everywhere—did Paras realize they would mate with any Anatidae?), Paras considered Nancy good company, and extremely patient. Sid, Nancy said, did not live here all year round. He appeared every autumn about this time, decked out in green. He stayed with her for a while, and then flew south. He was sensitive to the cold. Winter migration was statistically the norm, but if you lived in Paris, well—Nancy cocked her head, then went on—it was an issue between them, but she was a homebody. She liked her territory. The pond had frozen over completely only one time. Down south (she had gone with him once), you had to put up with chaos. The worst of it around here, according to Nancy, was that, in addition to her own six or eight or ten eggs (one year she laid twelve), if she didn’t hide her nest well, other eggs could turn up, and there you were, you had hatched some completely alien little thing before you knew what was what. Her last bunch had just flown off a month before. Nancy pushed them out as soon as they could go—she realized that she was a bit impatient about it, but they were well cared for and strong, and she felt that she needed at least some time on her own, didn’t Paras agree? Paras of course agreed, since she liked to have a lot of time on her own.
In half a year, late in the spring, there would be another migration—only the drakes that time of year. And good to see the back of them. A drake plus ten nestlings was too much. “What were the nestlings’ names?” asked Paras idly.
Nancy shook her wings and cocked her head. She said, “I have no idea. It’s your mate who names you, not your mother.”
“For horses,” said Paras, “it’s humans. Our dams just call us ‘sonny’ or ‘honey.’ But humans don’t seem to know the difference between two horses unless they name them, so we allow it.” She confided in Nancy that, even if a horse didn’t have showy white markings, he or she always had distinctive cowlicks and dapplings and ways of moving. It was a mystery to all the racehorses that they had to wear not only jockeys but brightly colored cloths so that the humans could tell them apart. In even the most crowded race, every horse knew who was who. Some horses found the politics of it all quite nerve-racking, but, as a front-runner, Paras didn’t pay much attention to that.
Sid was a bossy one, but Nancy quacked that she could not complain, and she had never closed herself off to him, as some ducks did, not only to interlopers, but to their own mates. He was a good provider, and a duck had to be fat, because the ducklings would slim her down to nothing if she didn’t take care of herself ahead of laying time. And anyway (Nancy lifted her wings and tossed her head), Sid knew how to shake a tail feather. Quack-quack-quack. Paras found it soothing to walk around the grass, taking bites of this and that and listening to Nancy. Where, she asked, did the drakes go? Nancy had no idea. Of course, they said that they roamed far and wide—to the mountains, to the oceans, etc. But a duck had no way of knowing. Except for that one sojourn to the south, Nancy had lived in the Champ de Mars for years. It was an excellent spot, no matter what certain mallards said about other neighborhoods. There was plenty of cover, plenty of water, plenty of food. The noise didn’t bother her—she hardly heard it anymore.
“It is noisy around here,” said Paras.
Much of the noise was made by Sid, whose high-pitched mode of expression made Paras’s ears flick. Sid was in charge of the nest, and he had decided that this year, since Paras and her friends were always present, they needed to build it in a safer spot. So he marched about the pond and the neighboring groves, trying to make up his mind. “There, you see,” he said, “the outer edge is too far into the open. Very dangerous, but if we make the nest smaller, that has its dangers, too. We haven’t lost a duckling in three years. It’s a point of pride for us, and I speak for Nancy as well as myself, because we each have our duties and responsibilities, and my responsibility is the nest.” Sid stepped carefully, looked here, looked there, kept going. “Can’t be too far from the water,” said Sid. “Very vulnerable if they have to walk far. Owls at twilight, hawks during the day, foxes anytime, dogs for that matter, cats. You ask anyone, mallards are fair game.” He coughed and glanced over his shoulder and shuddered. “Rats.”