slip away for a few hours?”
“No problem,” she said, “when she’s taking attendance, I’ll just put on a beret, go to the other side of the group and look restless.”
“Ha-ha, and thanks,” I said, giving Penelope a little hug. Mademoiselle Lesage seemed to be just warming up.
“... and the tiny little oval windows known as ‘oeil de boeuf,’ which means ... anyone?” she paused hopefully, “eye of the beef, of course.”
Three
As the wind picked up, so did the pedestrians’ pace along the Quai des Grand Augustins (no just plain Elm Street here); I hustled along with the crowd, my backpack bouncing behind me. Looking over the wall to the River Seine below, I saw barges and tourist boats passing under bridges and kids with guitars taking shelter ahead of what felt like a coming storm. Booksellers unravelled plastic wrap over tables of books and posters. Just beyond them I spotted a beautiful old bridge with stone half-moon shapes on it and a statue of a man on a horse.
“A little lost, ma petite?” A bookseller who looked as old as the bridge itself called out to me. At that moment the sky opened, and a wild rain crashed down upon us. He quickly began closing up his bookstall. “Here, you’ll need this today,” he said and handed me a tattered umbrella with the head of a duck on the wooden handle.
“Thank you,” I said and struggled to open it as the wind tried to gather me up. “Who is the statue of and what bridge is this?”
He pulled his coat around his neck and continued closing his stall. “That’s Henri the Fourth, one of the great kings of France, and this is the Pont Neuf.” He smiled at me through a bushy white beard. “That means ‘new bridge,’ although it’s actually not so new; it was built about four hundred years ago. It’s the oldest bridge in Paris.”
A rivulet of rain slipped through a hole in the umbrella and ran unnoticed down my face. I must have looked a bit like a statue myself.
“C’mon, I don’t want you to catch a cold on your first day in France, little one. Rudee’s waiting at the cabstand. It’s Mac, isn’t it? I’m Jerome.”
There was only one taxi idling at the corner, and in the time it took the bookseller and me to reach it, the driver had waved away a businessman with his briefcase on top of his head and a tourist couple trying to stuff a wad of bills through the crack in the window.
Jerome tapped at the cab window and leaned in to speak with the driver, who turned to look at me intensely.
“Good luck, Mademoiselle Mac,” Jerome said as he waved and disappeared into the rainy street.
The door was barely closed before the cab took off over the Pont Neuf. I think I would have felt safer on the back of Henri the Fourth’s horse.
Four
The taxi was filled with seriously gloomy organ music, and a deodorizer in the shape of a beet dangled from the ashtray. In the mirror, a pair of stormy eyes glared at me from under a forehead that resembled the edge of a cliff. Over the seat, which was covered in those little wooden balls you only ever see in a taxi, I could make out a helmet of hair wedged on an otherwise bald head that I recognized from my dad’s scrapbook as belonging to Rudee Daroo. I smiled and a voice growled from the front seat, “Who pushed the funny button?”
“My name is Mac, and my dad ...”
“Yesyesyes, I know him well, and why you were not here yesterday is not worth the sound of the clock.”
I felt like I needed a translator, but I pressed on. “I did leave yesterday, Rudee, but it’s an overnight flight, so you see ...” I realized why he might have expected me the day before, “... anyway, my dad told me all about you and the band, and he played me the tapes of the Pipeline Tour and the nose solo ...”
Rudee snorted and turned down a narrow street, squeezing past a double-decker tourist bus. “Don’t make me smoke out loud. I should send you straight home, but the least I can do is give you a bowl of borscht.”
Borscht wasn’t my first choice, but I was very hungry. Rudee turned up the organ music till the doors rattled, so I sat back and got my first look at the old stone wonders of Paris on a rainy day. He navigated the taxi down an impossibly narrow alley and into a vine-covered shed before leading the way, grumbling to himself, into the shadow of a gloriously beautiful church with three spires, two of which were topped with gleaming gold crosses. It seemed ancient and dream-like to me. We rushed into a side entrance and up a set of stairs to a small apartment with two tiny rooms. Shelves of cracked dishes, plastic flowers, a stopped clock, and an intense odour of cooking vegetables greeted me.
The source of the smell that hung in the air like a damp towel was soon revealed as Rudee starting warming his pot of borscht, stirring happily and whistling some sombre little melody.
“Rudee, where are we?” I asked.
“The Église Russe, the Russian church where I play the organ every Sunday, little quarter note. The taxi is just to make ends meet during the week. Here you go.”
He placed a bowl of purple steam in front of me with the first smile I had seen from him, and I was glad for both. A plate of bread with a crust like concrete, but soft inside, helped the beets go down. “Listen, I’m sorry for being upset. I thought I had misplaced you, and I’ve been sweating marbles since yesterday, but ... so, your daddy played you ‘Back Burner,’ did he?”
I nodded and he seemed pleased. While I ate, he told me some of the history of the Église Russe, including the fact that Picasso had gotten married there, and all about some music composers from behind what he called the “Cabbage Curtain.” He asked if I had noticed that one of the crosses was missing from the spire in the middle of the church and told me sadly about the recent theft. By the time Rudee got to his version of the immortal Pipeline Tour, I was feeling a bit woozy.
“Okokok, little Mac, you need to count some winks, I can see. You can stay in the turret tonight, and we’ll get you back to your class tomorrow.”
I was too weak to argue, so he grabbed my backpack and led me up a wooden staircase with no railing into a spire of the church. The air seemed different, fragrant but older and definitely dustier. The first thing I noticed by the light of the candle that Rudee left burning was the stained glass windows. They had panels like a comic book of saints and kings and queens, plus a lot of people in robes and hoods. I’m not sure how a full-sized person could sleep on the wooden bed that was attached to one wall and followed the curve of the church tower. There was a sparse library of very heavy-looking books. The corners of the bookshelves were tiny carved angels that seemed to guard the bed. Who had they looked down on and protected before me, I wondered. I didn’t feel as sleepy as I should have, so I pulled out the smallest book I could find from the shelf. It still felt like a box of bricks. Inside were paintings of a beautiful church like this one and winding streets filled with food carts, dogs, and children playing.
Five
I woke to coloured light dancing across my bed. The windows came to life in the morning sun, pale as it was. When I pulled the shutters open, I felt dizzy for a moment. The city of Paris spilled out in front of my eyes — ancient buildings with balconies jammed full of geraniums and a thousand miniature chimneys that sat like broken teeth on a comb. Everywhere were people stopping to talk, gesturing
