the yellow hen, anxiously. “Do I speak quite properly, in your judgment?”
—Billina the Yellow Hen, from Frank L. Baum, Ozma of Oz, 1907
This is a love story for grownups. There is sex, death, and snoring. A happy ending is not guaranteed. And so, it is a story about hunting. The real kind that starts with hunger and ends with guts being spilled.
Let’s start at the beginning.
The first year that I’d spent in the capital city of France, I was conducting dissertation research on a dutifully obscure topic interesting to five people in the world, all of whom enjoy arguing a great deal about it. Along with all the other university students, I was living in the 5th arrondissement on the kind of money that turns up under the couch cushions. Fellowships from private institutions paid for these trips, but the sums were barely enough to support a cat, let alone cover rent and food for a human being. I didn’t care. Still in my twenties, I was young enough that starving in attics seemed a perfectly reasonable way to live. I was Mimi in La Bohème! George Orwell in Down and Out in London and Paris! How lucky could I be? Not only was I living in the actual attic of a five-story walkup, but my neighbor wore a black beret and slunk around with a Gaulois dangling from his scowling lips, just like the evil French henchmen in the Flint movies.
Lest you think that I am exaggerating my delight, consider these interesting details about my building. When I opened my door, I greeted a tubby, sparkling-white, pink-nosed cat. Every day, rain or shine, she came and waited quietly on my doorstep until I let her in. She’d march ponderously around the perimeter of the entire room, look at me, meow loudly just once, settle onto the bed, and go to sleep. I’d get dressed, toss Mimi back out the door, and head out for the day. No one knew who owned her. I had no idea why she insisted on visiting me every day.
On the wall between the stairwell and my doormat, there was a small locked door about the size of a fuse box. One day, as I trudged up the stairs, I was surprised to find a queue of workmen lining up in front of this miniature portal, then leaning over and disappearing into it, one by one. When my turn came to go through, I held back and peeked: inside, there was a staircase snaking up to a storage space beneath the rafters. The workmen were turning this triangular wedge into an apartment. A few weeks later, a new tenant moved in: she was a Japanese student half my height and unnervingly silent.
The pup tent had no bathroom or plumbing. At the top of the staircase, there was a chemical toilet.
As the months wore on, I realized that the old ladies who lived in the building couldn’t tell me apart from the midget camping in the rafters. It was as if my imagination had vomited up the fetal twin of my subconscious and turned her into a pigeon pooping on my pretentions. It was a real-life version of the filthy joke about the rented outhouse and the television (if you don’t know it, I’m not going to tell you), but it all boils down to this: when the conversations literally go over your head, be grateful that the joke isn’t on you.
Every evening, after I’d finished chasing down documents in the archives, I’d go for my daily constitutional in the Jardin des Plantes across the street. To the great amusement of the gardeners, I would run in large circles, treating the plant beds as if they were an outdoor racetrack. They could not understand why anyone would want to go around and around through life, repeating the same route and getting nowhere at the same time, but it became a nightly ritual: me, jouncing past the roses, and them, waving affably at me, la chinoise (sigh) who obviously misunderstood the purpose of exercise since I ran without smoking a cigarette. Depending on my research agenda for the day, I also cut through the Jardin des Plantes to get to the Métro station, and it was on one of these bumblebee excursions that I was approached by a fidgeting little girl, maybe six or seven years old, in the pleated skirt and white blouse of a traditional school uniform.
“Excusez-moi, mademoiselle,” she nervously asked her shoes, “but do you speak French?”
“Yes,” I affirmed, wondering if she was lost. “What’s this about?”
“I’m on a scavenger hunt!” she told me. “See?” she exclaimed, thrusting a laminated list in my face. I took the list from her hands and skimmed it quickly. It requested the usual items, such as a four-leaf clover, a pure white feather, and a letter with a stamp from a foreign country. She pointed a chubby pink finger at the upper part of the page. “I have to get a foreigner to sing a song in her native language.”
Yes, there it was, item 32 on the 100-item list.
She fidgeted some more, and then blurted, “Would you most kindly sing for me?”
Who could refuse such politeness? “Sure,” I agreed. What the heck. It was for a school project.
She jumped up and clapped her hands, overjoyed.
“Do I start singing now?” I asked.
“No,” she replied firmly. “I must get the teacher.”
That made sense. Otherwise how does she prove that she really got a foreigner to sing for her?
Retrieving her list, she started to head off, then turned and eyed me doubtfully. “You aren’t going to go away?”
“Don’t worry,” I nodded reassuringly, “I’ll stay right here.” I sat down on one of the wooden benches at the head of the garden. As she disappeared, I started rustling around in my tote bag for a stray song I might have tossed in there.
“Arirang”? “Doraji”? These are Korean folk songs my mother used as lullabies. Bad idea, because they’ll put me to sleep.
“Three Blind Mice”? It’s a round. That requires coordination. No good.
“Joy to the World”? It’s the wrong season for Christmas carols.
Hymns? Pop songs? “Happy Birthday to You”?
When I finally emerged from the murky depths of my bag, where I’d turned up a bottle of antihistamines, a bottle of water, a copy of Plan de Paris par arrondissement, three broken mechanical pencils, a cough drop, a skeleton key, a dozen library cards, a crumpled brochure from the Hôtel des Arènes, and the all-important packet of toilet paper but no lyric sheets or karaoke cassettes, I was greeted by the terrifying sight of twenty uniformed girls heading straight for me. In seven minutes, one French schoolgirl had multiplied like a rabbit, and a warren of warm and fuzzy creatures was determinedly hopping my way.
This was not in the plan. I’d agreed to sing for one person. Now I was singing to an entire crèche.
The original girl came running over to me, pulling me off the bench, and dragging me over to meet her classmates. She was clearly the Girl of the Moment, having bravely asked a total stranger to sing and getting a positive response. “See! Here she is!” my little friend declared, gesturing dramatically towards me as if I was a unicorn she’d discovered lurking under her bed. “She’s going to sing for us!” More clapping and hopping ensued.
The exhausted teacher greeted me with as much enthusiasm as she could muster. “What will you sing for us?” she asked tiredly, shushing the giggling girls who’d surrounded me, trapping me inside a straightjacket made of sugar and spice. Grubby fingers intertwined and patent-leather feet thumped away in anticipation. Who knew such cuddly creatures could be so scary? Run away, run away . . .
Up until then, I hadn’t known what song I would sing. At that moment, I was inspired. “I’m going to sing ‘Do Re Mi,’” I announced triumphantly.
