Jérôme watched the dog follow the boy and the woman. They rounded the corner and disappeared.
The woman, Frida knew, did not realize she was following them, but the boy did. He turned and looked at her several times, even whistled so that she would approach him, but Frida kept her distance. They came to the end of the row of buildings, to a door in a high fence that was covered with ivy and other plants so thick that even Frida could not see through them. The boy took a key from his pocket and opened the gate, helped the woman in, then pulled in the battered trolley. Frida heard him open what must have been the door to the house; then he came back to the gate and stood there, staring at Frida. She approached him, licked his hand, but did not enter. Gates would always close. Jacques had made sure that she was suspicious of that. Frida trotted away.
MADAME ÉVELINE DE MORNAY WAS not yet a hundred, but if she lived for three more years (and one month), she would be. Her grandfather had come from Domme, a lovely hill town on the banks of the Dordogne, a place Madame had loved to visit. He had come on one of the first rail lines, built during the Second Empire. He had made a great deal of money in soap and creamy lotions scented with lavender and verbena, then bought this house abutting the Champ de Mars, not far from the École Militaire. Éveline’s father had been killed in the First World War—she was three years old at the time and didn’t remember him. Her husband and her brother had been killed in the Second World War. Her son had died in Algeria, and her grandson and his wife had died in an automobile crash on the Périphérique. She now had this one child left—his name was Étienne. He was eight years old, almost exactly the same age as this twenty-first century, a century that Madame had never expected to see. With each death, Éveline had closed a room or two in the large house she lived in, and now she and Étienne made use only of the cuisine, the dining room, her father’s old study, which she used as a bedroom, and the small library, which now belonged to Étienne. There was a telephone, but it hadn’t rung in years—maybe Étienne didn’t even know what that sound was. Étienne had taught himself to read—there were books not only in his room, but all over Great-Grandmama’s house—and after that, he had taught himself to count, to add, to subtract, to multiply, and to divide. Others might have said he was dangerously isolated, but he was used to it, was leery of other children. What his great-grandmama told him of the outside world didn’t make him want to go out there, and he thought that if he could learn to do these things on his own, there was no reason to make himself known to the other children or at the school.
But sometimes he did feel lonely. For a while, he’d enjoyed the company of a neighborhood cat, but the cat had vanished. After that, he’d left crumbs for a pair of pigeons on the sill of his window, but the pigeons remained shy. He’d been watching Frida now for two weeks, and he knew for certain that she lived beside the pond to the north of the Tour, and that a horse lived there, too.
RAOUL WITNESSED Frida’s adventure from his perch on a second-floor railing down the street from the vegetable shop—he also observed with some amusement the human fracas that ensued when the two automobiles hit each other in the street, and their drivers jumped out and began cawing loudly about who was at fault and who should have been paying attention. One of them shouted at the old old lady, but she marched on, oblivious, her hand on the boy’s shoulder, Frida at her side. Nor did the boy turn to look. Now Raoul sailed along above them, riding the lightest of breezes, simultaneously keeping an eye on Frida and watching for stray frites on the sidewalk—sometimes he could swoop down and scare off a pigeon; it was good sport, he thought. The lady kept her hand on the boy’s shoulder and seemed to react to nothing. When they stopped at an intersection, she looked nowhere, and as they crossed the street, she paid no attention to the cars nearby. At last, when the boy and the old old lady came to their house, Raoul swept into the nearest hazelnut tree. After Frida left at a run, he floated about the place, glancing in through this window and that. All was silent and dark. The court was overgrown with grasses and weeds, but he was pleased to note some late blackberries, thick and brambly in one corner. He perched on the old, heavy branches and picked here and there among the half-fermented berries. When the boy appeared at one of the lower windows, then opened it, Raoul flew off.
But he stayed away from Paras and Frida for the time being. They might be oblivious to the brouhaha about the mallard nest, but he could not be. Any bird knew that a nest was a nest, and subject to the whims of fate. In the fork of a tree, on the ground, under the eaves of a building, in the corner of a chimney, in an attic, in a thicket of bushes—anywhere you built a nest, something could happen to it. Who was it, Raoul tried to remember, some dove he had known years ago, so proud of himself for building the nest in a warm, quiet, hidden spot that turned out to be the engine of an automobile. When the owner of the vehicle returned from his vacation, the nest had gone up in smoke. Sid had none of the sense of larger perspective that every bird should get with age. He would not accept that each spot had its advantages and disadvantages, and that fate would take its course no matter what. He asserted that he had been here and there with his band of drakes, to the ocean, to the ice, to the sandy shore, but Raoul Corvis Corax, the twenty-third of that name, had his doubts. It would come as no surprise to Raoul if it turned out that Sid and his band had made it no farther than Lac du Der-Chantecoq, where they strutted around, bragging about Paris all summer, and swimming in the calm of that domesticated body of water.
All the same, his own nest seemed empty and dull to him. He was so bored with his nest that he had let his rival, Maurice, enact his claim upon Benjamin Franklin’s lap, which Maurice had promptly ratified by defecating in every possible spot. Raoul thought he was spending too much time flying back and forth to the pond, urging Sid to come to his senses and build the nest. Winter, real winter, was at hand. Paras was as furry as a kitten.
That evening, Raoul arrowed back to the Rue Marinoni. He perched on the stone sill of the single lighted window. Inside the room, the boy sat in his bed with his back against the headboard. His covers were drawn well up, but he held a book in his hands. Raoul watched him for a bit. Through the next window over, he saw the old old lady, still and maybe dead (though that was impossible to know without pecking her corpus here and there). Her nest was spare and neat. There were three surfaces, and on each surface there was a single object precisely in the center.
Raoul jumped to the next sill. This room was so grand that Raoul could not see to the end of it. It was dark, quiet, and cold—he could feel the cold through the glass. There were many objects in the room, as in all the rooms of every human dwelling that he had ever spied into, but all of the objects were swathed, even the objects hanging on the walls near the window. The room seemed to have been waiting a long time for the coming of someone. Raoul flew back to the lighted window, landed on the sill, pecked lightly on the pane. The boy looked up.