The Bird Market of Paris

I didn’t like it. I didn’t want to know that he had had transgressions. Poppy was my angel who could do no wrong.

  “It’s beautiful,” I said.

  “You keep it. I want you to know how people felt about your Poppy.”

  I stepped into the room and sat down beside him. He looked up at me with wet, cloudy eyes and reached for my hand.

  “You are my BaaBaa,” he said.

  I squeezed his soft hand. I wouldn’t hold Bella against him. That was long ago. In my room, I fished a pair of scissors from a drawer and cut off a small piece of BaaBaa, now threadbare after a couple decades of security blanketing. I walked back into Poppy’s room and pressed the raggedy square of blue fabric into his hand. He looked at it, turned it over in his hand a few times, and brought it to his face.

  “This is the perfect gift,” he said.

  * * *

  When I was young, Poppy always had a Rhode Island Red chicken named Kiki, and it took me a long time to realize that “Kiki” wasn’t the same Kiki she had been since I was two. I didn’t know what had happened to the other Kikis, but I had the usual suspicions. The Kiki when I was nine, my favorite Kiki, laid the biggest eggs we’d ever seen, twice the size of our other hens.

  One summer day, Poppy placed my favorite Kiki in my arms and asked me to follow him to the concrete slab in the shade at the far end of the yard. The chicken clucked as I rubbed my face on her neck. She was as gentle as a kitten, her orange feathers the softest material I’d ever touched, creamier than satin.

  “Watch this, Chérie. I will show you something amazing.” He took a piece of chalk from his pocket and drew a thick, straight white line on the concrete, about a foot long. He took Kiki from my hands and placed her in front of the line.

  “You want to learn how to hypnotize a chicken?”

  He gently pressed Kiki’s head to the concrete, lining her beak up with the line he had drawn. Kiki’s head ricocheted off the cement. He pressed her head down a second time, and again she resisted. On the third try, Kiki’s head stayed glued to the concrete, her beak aligned with the chalk stripe.

  “When she sees the line, she thinks her beak is heavy,” he said, “and she cannot move.”

  Kiki seemed helpless and I pitied her. I had thought of her as a creature similar to me, no more, no less; but there she stood, beguiled by a chalk line. It may have been the first time I distinguished any real difference between our animals and myself. I felt uncomfortable watching Kiki exposed; I didn’t like being complicit in her humiliation, thinking she’d stay there forever, doomed to the misfire in her chicken brain that said she couldn’t walk away.

  Poppy waved his hand in front of Kiki’s eyes and she clucked her way into the shrubs, her pointed orange chicken butt sluicing the green waters of our lawn. I ran my bare foot over the chalk line, blurring it into the concrete. Poppy and I fed Kiki and the other chickens leftover spaghetti, then sat in the screened patio watching our pigeons return to roost for the night. I didn’t hypnotize Kiki again, but I did think of her differently from that day forward, the way something mythic diminishes the moment it becomes real.

  Chapter 15

  The day of Poppy’s biopsy, we all woke up before dawn and drove him to the hospital. There were two ring-necked doves in the yard that morning, a male and female.

  Nurses prepped Poppy, and the neurosurgeon reassured us that he would be OK. He leaned over Poppy’s face and said, “Soli, we’re going to fix you up. Don’t worry, we’re going to get you through this.”

  I kissed Poppy good-bye as an orderly wheeled him toward the operating suite. We ate breakfast in the hospital cafeteria. Three hours later an orderly wheeled Poppy out of surgery and into recovery.

  Poppy closed his eyes and grasped my dad’s hand. His head was bandaged like a Civil War soldier’s, with a spot of bright red blood in the place where they had opened his skull. It shocked me that the biopsy was this intrusive. He might as well have had the entire tumor removed. I stood over him and stroked his cheek.

  “Monsieur Moustaki, how you feeling?” my dad asked.

  * * *

  When I was twenty-three, after the hurricane, and when my parents and Poppy and I were living in Fort Lauderdale, Poppy and I traversed the Las Olas Boulevard bridge to the beach every week to feed the pigeons and seagulls at the edge of the ocean. Parking was easy there, and the beach side of the road was for pedestrians, not for fancy hotels that blocked the public’s view, as was the case on most South Florida beaches.

  Poppy held my hand as we crossed State Road A1A toward the beach, the sand in front of us tattooed with spiky coconut palm shadows, like the print on a pair of board shorts. We might have looked like a scandalous item to passersby, a tan trophy girl in short-shorts and a baseball cap with a blonde fountain of ponytail cascading out the back, and a silver-haired man in white linen pants, a white button-down shirt, and a floppy white sun hat covering his ears and driving a shadow over his Greek face. I was a little hungover, as usual, but Poppy didn’t know. I lagged behind him and he tightened his hand around mine. I held a plastic sack of stale bread in my other hand.

  Down the beach I heard the slow rumble of an ATV, and I squinted to watch it dragging a grader over the sand, leveling millions of mini-dunes forged by the feet of tourists, moms and toddlers, and people who worked night shifts. At the shoreline it churned the seaweed under, making the terrain flat and artificial, but pretty, like a fresh snowfall. I had the urge to run behind it, my line of footprints the only human mark for miles.

  Poppy had a favorite seat, a worn wrought iron bench facing the Atlantic. Bathers avoided the boxy shadows cast by low buildings blocking out the western sun; they floated on plastic rafts in the last of the sunlight before the lifeguards would lock away their surfboards and close their stands for the evening.

  The pigeons crowded our feet the moment we sat. The seagulls noticed and hovered like noisy kites on strings, able to fix themselves in the air. There were black-hooded Laughing Gulls cawing and swooping, their red-lined beaks open and ready, and bold Herring Gulls, gray and white with red smudges on the bottom of their yellow mandibles, joined by a scavenge of Royal Terns with their pointed blonde beaks and tufts of black feathers like toupees on the backs of their heads.

  I opened the sack of bread and placed it between us. Poppy reached into the bag and ground a stale dinner roll between his hands, scattering half of it on the ground and tossing the other half into the sky in front of us. I did the same. Gulls overhead careened into one another’s airspace, banking off one another’s bodies in a game of hungry, violent tag. Birds flew at us from every direction, from the sea in front and the city behind, the flock growing from dozens into hundreds.

  “Chérie, have I told you about the pigeons in Paris?” Poppy said, tossing more bread to the pigeons, though the gulls commanded both ground and sky like feathered despots, taking more than their share of crumbs.

  “I don’t think so,” I said, though he had told me stories about pigeons in Paris as many times as there were pigeons in Paris. I tossed bread into the air one piece at a time, aiming for a particular Laughing Gull with each toss. He was quieter than the others, and I had a feeling he was hungrier, too.

  “When your daddy and your Nona and I lived in Paris, there were ten thousand pigeons for every person. You cannot imagine how many pigeons. The facade of the Louvre museum was alive, gray with moving shapes, every crack filled with feathers, and when they flew, flocks of pigeons covered the sun like storm clouds.” He tossed more bread to the pigeons at our ankles, the underdogs in this ravenous scrim. I held some bread crust between my fingers, trying to lure them near, but they were too cautious.

  “The buildings were being destroyed, beautiful artworks covered in pigeon poo poo.” Poppy talked with his hands, pantomiming statues of Greek mythological characters and antique building faces drenched in pigeon poop. “People in Paris did not like the pigeons, and the government had an idea how to get rid of them.”

  �
��They didn’t kill them, right?” I said. This was our ritual. He told stories; I pretended it was my first time hearing them.

  “They put sedatives into pigeon food. Imagine the whole of Paris covered in sleeping pigeons. You could not walk down the street. People from the government picked up all of the pigeons and put them into trucks and drove them many hours away and released them into a forest.”

  “That was nice of them,” I said.

  “Guess what happened.” Poppy turned to me, ready for the punch line.

  “They all came back?” I couldn’t help blurting it out.

  “Yes, they all came back!” Poppy laughed and slapped his thighs.

  The pigeons in front of us widened their circle at his gesture, but nothing deterred the gulls. They were so close I could feel the breath from their wings on my face.

  “The government should have asked me about the plan. Pigeons always come home. Everyone who loves birds knows that.”

  We fed the birds in silence as Poppy led both of us in a deep breathing exercise. Breathe in. Hold. Breathe out. He said the ocean air cured many ills. The breeze smelled like a tropical cocktail, coconut-ish and limey, with a lick of salt. I closed my eyes and breathed in time to the ocean’s waves, despite the cacophony of birds swirling around my head.

  When I opened my eyes, Poppy was standing a few feet in front of me, his arms raised like the underwater statue of Jesus, Christ of the Abyss, sunk in twenty-five feet of water at John Pennekamp Coral Reef State Park in the Florida Keys, where I had snorkeled a few months before. He held a dinner roll in each hand, the gulls swooping and diving to snatch them. A pigeon landed on Poppy’s head, then another on his shoulder. Soon, he was covered in pigeons, all scratching their way to his hands to feed. Poppy’s white clothes glowed in the afternoon light, and I sat in awe for a moment before arming myself with two handfuls of bread, intending to join him.

  The punctuated woop-woop of a police siren startled me. A blue and white police car pulled up behind us. Poppy dropped his hands and the pigeons scattered. A chubby cop stepped out of the car and approached. I thought he was going to ask if we’d seen a criminal, or maybe ask directions, though that seemed unlikely.

  “Are you feeding the birds?” he said. I squeezed my handfuls of bread, hiding it in my palms.

  “Is it a problem?” Poppy said.

  “You’re not allowed to feed birds here,” the cop said. His cheeks were red and his hairline glistered with sweat. I couldn’t see his eyes behind his dark glasses.

  “I did not see a sign posted,” Poppy said. “We are innocent, just me and my granddaughter feeding a few pigeons for fun.”

  “Whether you saw a sign or not, it’s illegal to feed birds here.” The cop mopped his forehead with the back of his hand.

  “We have come here many times and no one told us,” Poppy said. I nodded in solidarity and smiled big at the cop, but he didn’t smile back.

  “Please come here, sir,” the cop ordered.

  The cop directed Poppy to step toward the police car. I nudged the bag of bread onto the ground, kicking it under the bench, and followed them.

  “I need your ID, sir,” the cop said, reaching into his car and removing a yellow paper pad.

  Poppy patted his pants and shirt pockets. “My wallet is in the car.”

  “We promise not to do it again,” I said, my words quick and sharp.

  “Sir, can you please step into the car.” The cop opened the back door where criminals sit on their way to jail. I grabbed Poppy’s hand.

  “Miss, I need you to sit on the bench,” the cop said, pointing to our pigeon feeding spot.

  “I’m going with Poppy.”

  “Miss, sit on the bench, now.”

  “Chérie, do as he says.” Poppy looked scared, this man I loved who had never been in trouble a day in his life, a guiltless feeder of pigeons.

  “Where are you taking him?”

  “I’m issuing him a citation and it’s air-conditioned in the car,” the cop said. Sweat traveled from his sideburns onto his chin. “I’m not taking him anywhere.”

  I sat backward on the bench on my knees and watched Poppy slide into the car. The cop closed Poppy into the backseat, and then sat behind the steering wheel. They spoke, back and forth, and the cop seemed to be writing, though I couldn’t see his hands. My knees dug into the spaces between the bench’s iron bars and started to ache, but I didn’t move. The pigeons had dispersed, but a few gulls still charged the air around my face, and I waved them away.

  Poppy and the cop chatted back and forth like mimes behind glass, and someone must have said something funny, because they both laughed. Poppy gestured as he spoke, and then pointed at me. The cop peered at me through the window, then turned around to look at Poppy. They laughed again. The cop opened his door, stepped out, and set Poppy free.

  I ran to Poppy and threw my arms around his middle. He wrapped an arm around my shoulder and squeezed twice, which I took as code for “be calm.”

  “Chérie, this is Officer Hernandez. He grew up not far from where we lived in South Miami.”

  I shook the cop’s hand. It was sweaty.

  “Your grandfather is very nice,” Officer Hernandez said. “I’m going to forget the citation today, but don’t feed the birds here anymore. It’s not my rules.”

  We thanked him. He sat back down in his car with a groan and cranked his air conditioner, then shut the door.

  “What did he say to you?” I said as we walked toward the bench to retrieve our sack of bread.

  “That bloody sycamore. He asked me for your phone number.”

  “Really? What did you say?”

  “I told him you were fifteen.”

  I laughed. I picked up the bag of bread and Poppy grasped my hand. We crossed A1A behind the cop’s car and I saw him bending over inside, studying something below the dashboard, and in one swift motion I upended the sack of bread onto the trunk of his squad car.

  Gulls engulfed the car in seconds, screaming and fighting, swooping at his trunk in a crusade to assuage their appetites, but it looked more like a battle of freedom versus authority, feathers deposing the established order. Poppy pulled me forward by the hand toward the safety of the sidewalk on the other side, and I looked back and waved at the cop, who waved back, then checked his rearview mirror and scowled. Gulls scrambled and tumbled on the car’s roof and trunk, screeching and laughing in high-pitched cackles. Poppy looked back at the cop.

  “What did you do, Chérie?”

  “He said not to feed the birds on the beach, but he didn’t say anything about his car.” I tried to remove my hand from his, but he squeezed harder.

  “You have always had a sense of justice, even as a child.” He released my hand, then took it again as we crossed the street to the parking lot.

  We drove home, toward our own birds, and Poppy told me yet again about the bird market of Paris, slowly, like someone picking up pieces of a memory one by one.

  * * *

  The surgeon walked in.

  “I have some news,” he said. He looked at my dad and shook his head. “Do you want me to say it here?”

  “Yes,” my dad said. My instinct was to have the surgeon tell us the news in the hallway.

  The doctor leaned over Poppy’s face. “Mr. Moustaki, can you hear me?” he asked in a too-loud voice, as if he were talking to a child or someone who didn’t speak English. Poppy nodded and his eyes opened a little.

  “Mr. Moustaki, you have a stage four tumor called a glioblastoma,” the surgeon said. “We can’t do surgery or the laser knife on this kind of tumor. Do you understand?”

  “Is it fatal?” Poppy said in a soft, creaky voice.

  “One second,” the surgeon said, gesturing for us to join him outside the room.

  “This is fatal, I’m sorry,” he said to us in the hall in a hushed tone. “I don’t know if you want to tell him.”

  My dad and I started crying. I hated the surgeon. I wanted to smash his
face and watch blood spray all over his white jacket.

  “How long does he have?” my dad asked.

  “It’s hard to say. Three to nine months is my best guess.”

  “Thank you,” my dad said, and shook the man’s hand. Why was my dad thanking this man? I wasn’t going to shake his hand or thank him. I wouldn’t even look him in the eye. He was supposed to be our savior.

  “There’s nothing you can do?” my dad asked him.

  “If you want, I’ll order a round of radiation, and that might slow the growth. Think about it and we’ll discuss options.”

  We both walked back into the room wiping our eyes.

  “Tell me the truth,” Poppy said.

  Poppy had taught me that where there’s life, there’s hope—and he was alive. Dr. Z had prognosticated that Bonk had three months to live, and it had been a year since then. Doctors don’t know everything.

  “It’s fatal,” my dad said, wiping his face with the collar of his shirt.

  Poppy cried, weakly, and I started crying again.

  I pulled my dad by his sleeve into the hallway. “Why did you tell him?” I stamped my foot, furious.

  “He has a right to know.”

  Poppy and I believed in magic. In our world, anything was possible. But magic is fragile; it has to be nourished and handled gently, like an egg. The words that should never be said had been spoken, and had broken the magic with syllables and breath: The tumor is fatal.

  * * *

  We took Poppy for radiation treatments, but they made him sicker. His flowing silver locks fell out in a clump at the radiation site where they zapped him, and I collected some of his hair and put it between the pages of my favorite book, T. S. Eliot’s Collected Poems, at “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock.”

  There will be time, there will be time

  To prepare a face to meet the faces that you meet;

  There will be time to murder and create,

  And time for all the works and days of hands

  That lift and drop a question on your plate.

  When the radiation ended and there were no other choices, my mom arranged for hospice care. The hospice nurse, Terry, arrived at nine in the evening on the first night. She was well over six feet tall, with broad shoulders and frizzy black hair. She wore white nurse pants and a pink scrub top stretched over large silicon breasts. She had a strange, throaty voice with a thick Texas lilt. She had been guiding people into the eternal beyond for years, helping their families cope. Her laughter echoed through the house, and you couldn’t help but laugh with her. She was a cheerleader for the dying.