Paris Is Always a Good Idea Read online

  A blue tiger with silver stripes. He looked just like the tiger in her picture.

  Héloïse opened her eyes wide. “Goodness gracious!” she murmured, now a bit surprised herself.

  “Why are you staring at me like that?” growled the blue tiger, and at first Héloïse was so frightened that it never crossed her mind to be surprised that this tiger could talk.

  “Do you happen to be the blue tiger?” she finally asked—very carefully.

  “Can’t you see?” the tiger replied. “I’m a cloud-tiger.” He threw Héloïse a bold glance from his shining blue eyes.

  “Oh,” said Héloïse. “I should have realized that straight away.” She looked at him doubtfully. “Are cloud-tigers dangerous?” she asked.

  “Not a bit,” answered the blue tiger, twisting his muzzle into a grin. “At least, not to children.”

  Héloïse nodded with relief. “May I stroke you?” she asked. “It’s my birthday today, you know.”

  “If that’s the case, then you can even ride on me,” said the blue tiger. “But first you must help me. I’ve stupidly managed to get a thorn in my paw from that rose bed over there.”

  He came a bit closer, and Héloïse saw that he was limping on his right paw.

  “Oh dear,” said Héloïse, who had also once had a splinter in her foot. “That hurts, I know. Let me look, Tiger.”

  In the dying rays of the sun, the tiger stretched out his paw to her, and Héloïse, who had very sharp eyes, saw the thorn and pulled it out with a determined tug.

  The blue tiger roared with pain, and Héloïse jumped back in fright.

  “Sorry,” said the tiger, licking his wound.

  “We ought to bandage it,” said Héloïse. “Wait a moment, we’ll use this!” She reached into her painting bag and took out a white rag, which did admittedly have a few spots of paint on it, but was otherwise all right, and bound it round the blue tiger’s paw.

  “I’m sorry about the spots of paint,” she said. “But it’s better than nothing.”

  “I especially like the paint spots,” purred the blue tiger. “Where I come from, they say that paint spots are the most beautiful things in the world.” He looked at the spotted cloth that was now wound around his paw with some satisfaction. “And sky-blue pebbles, of course—the kind that you only find in the Blue Lake beyond the Blue Mountains. They are also very precious, because they only fall from the sky every couple of years. Sky pebbles bring luck, they say where I come from. Do you have one?”

  Héloïse shook her head in wonderment. She’d never seen a sky-blue pebble, and certainly not one that had fallen from the sky.

  “And where do you come from?” she wanted to know.

  “From the Blue Land.”

  “Is that far from here?”

  “Oh yes, very far. So far that you have to fly.”

  “In an airplane?” Héloïse had never flown in her life.

  The tiger rolled his eyes. “For heaven’s sake, not in an airplane! They’re far too noisy and far too slow. And anyway we don’t have any airfields. No, no, the only way to reach the Blue Land is by longing.”

  “Aha,” said Héloïse, puzzled.

  The sun had gone down, and in the sky that was now quickly getting darker and darker they could see the moon rising, fat and round.

  “How about it?” asked the blue tiger. “Shall we take a little trip?” He bowed his head a little and pointed to his silver-and-blue-striped back. “Climb on, Héloïse.”

  Héloïse was not at all surprised that the tiger knew her name. Nor was she surprised that he could fly. After all, he was a cloud-tiger. She climbed on his back, wrapped her arms around his neck, and nestled her face in his soft fur that was now gleaming silver in the moonlight.

  And then off they flew.

  Soon they had left the Grotto of the Four Winds, the white pavilion, the little pink castle, the babbling waterfalls, and the sweetly scented rose beds far behind them. They crossed the dark forest of the bois de Boulogne and saw in the distance the city with its thousands and thousands of lights, the Arc de Triomphe rising majestically out of the star-shaped crossroads, and the Eiffel Tower soaring slim and shiny into the night sky, watching over the city.

  Héloïse had never seen Paris from above before. She hadn’t known that her city was so beautiful.

  “This is so amazing!” she cried. “Everything is so different when you see it from above, don’t you think, Tiger?”

  “It’s always good to look at things as a whole from time to time,” said the blue tiger. “And that is best done from above. Or from a distance. Only when you see the whole picture do you realize how well everything fits together in reality.”

  Héloïse snuggled in close to his soft fur as they flew back toward the Bois de Boulogne in a broad curve. The air was summery and warm and her golden hair fluttered in the wind. Below them on the Seine, which wound through the city like a dark satin ribbon, the tourist boats glided on with their bright lamps, and if anyone had looked up from below he would have seen a long streaming indigo-blue cloud with a shimmering fringe of gold and probably been more than a little surprised. But perhaps this person would also have believed that it was the tail of a shooting star and wished for something.

  “I’m so happy that you really exist!” cried Héloïse in the tiger’s ear as they swooped down on the parc de Bagatelle and the scent of the roses wafted in her freckled nose. “At school they all laughed at me.”

  “And I am glad that you exist, Héloïse,” said the blue tiger. “Because you are a very special girl.”

  “No one’s going to believe this,” said Héloïse, after the blue tiger had landed softly on all four paws in her garden.

  “So what?” he replied. “Wasn’t it great anyway?”

  “Absolutely wonderful,” said Héloïse, shaking her head a little sadly. “But they won’t believe me. No one will believe me when I tell them I’ve met a blue cloud-tiger.”

  “That doesn’t matter a bit,” said the blue tiger. “The most important thing is that you believe it yourself—and, by the way, that’s the most important thing in every case.”

  He sprang lithely to a spot under the open window Héloïse had climbed out of to collect her forgotten painting things and the picture of the tiger.

  It seemed to her as if an eternity had passed since then, but it couldn’t have been that long, because through the lighted window she could see her parents still watching their TV program. No one had noticed that she’d been away. Apart perhaps from Babu, who was standing in the big living-room window wagging his tail and barking excitedly.

  “You can climb on my back if you like—then it will be easier to climb into your room,” said the blue tiger.

  Héloïse hesitated. “Will I see you again?”

  “Probably not,” said the blue tiger. “Because you only meet a cloud-tiger once in a lifetime.”

  “Oh,” said Héloïse.

  “But you mustn’t let that make you sad. Whenever you want to see me, just lie down in the grass and wait until a cloud-tiger cloud flies past. That will be me. And now go.”

  Héloïse put her arms around the tiger for one last time.

  “Just don’t forget me,” she said.

  The tiger raised his bandaged paw. “How could I forget you? I’ve got your cloth with the paint spots.”

  Héloïse stood at her window a little longer, watching the blue tiger as he bounded across the garden in a couple of great leaps. He jumped over the hedge, flew away over the treetops, making their leaves rustle softly, and then rose above the bright disc of the moon for a brief moment before he was finally lost against the dark night sky.

  “I won’t forget you either, Tiger,” she said softly. “Never!”

  When Héloïse woke up the next morning, the sun was shining brightly into the room, the window was wide open, and her clothes and her red painting bag were lying on the floor.

  “Good morning, Héloïse,” said her mother, who had alm
ost tripped over the satchel. “You shouldn’t just drop things on the floor all the time.”

  “Yes, Maman, but this time it’s different,” said Héloïse, sitting up in bed excitedly. “Yesterday evening I went back to the park because I’d forgotten my painting things, and my bag was still there but my picture had vanished, and then in the Grotto of the Four Winds I met a blue tiger who looked just like my picture, blue with silver stripes, and he could even talk, Maman, because he was a cloud-tiger, but he’d hurt himself on the rosebushes and I bandaged his paw, and then he let me ride on his back and we flew all over Paris together and—” Unfortunately, Héloïse had to stop for breath at this point.

  “My goodness,” said her mother with a laugh, stroking her daughter’s hair. “You’ve had a really adventurous dream. That’s probably because of all the chocolate cake you ate yesterday.”

  “But no, Maman, it wasn’t a dream,” said Héloïse, leaping out of bed. “The blue tiger was in our garden. He was standing here, outside my window, before he flew away again.”

  She went over to the window and leaned out to look into the garden, which was calm and peaceful—actually just like every other morning. “It was a cloud-tiger!” she insisted.

  “A cloud-tiger … well, well,” repeated her mother, amused. “I’m really glad that he didn’t gobble you up. And now get dressed and Papa will take you to school.”

  Héloïse was going to explain that cloud-tigers are no danger at all to children, but her mother had already left the room. “That child really has a lively imagination, Bernard,” Héloïse heard her say as she went downstairs.

  Héloïse wrinkled her forehead and thought as hard as she could. Could it really be true that she had just dreamed the whole thing? Thoughtfully she put on her dress and stared at the red bag with her painting things, which was still lying beside her bed. She lifted it and looked inside.

  There was a box of watercolors, a couple of brushes, a sketch book with empty pages. An opened pack of cookies. The white rag with the paint spots was missing. And then Héloïse noticed something shiny right at the bottom of the bag.

  It was a round, flat, sky-blue pebble!

  “Héloïse, are you coming?” she heard her mother call.

  “Coming, Maman!”

  Héloïse clenched her fingers tight around the smooth blue stone and smiled. What did grown-ups know about anything?

  After school she’d go to her friend Maurice and tell him the story of the blue tiger. And she was absolutely sure he’d believe her.

  Long after she’d read the last sentence, Rosalie lay on her bed, allowing the story to work its magic on her. While reading, she had seen everything so clearly in front of her that she was almost surprised to see that she was in her own bedroom. Little Héloïse with her golden hair. An apple being handed over a hedge, the park with the ancient trees and the castle in the parc de Bagatelle, which was colored the most delicate pink you could imagine. The cloud-tiger in the Grotto of the Four Winds. The Blue Land which could only be reached by longing. The flight over Paris by night. The little girl’s fluttering hair. The promise never to forget. The blue pebble. The rag with the paint spots.

  Pictures began to form in her head, colors merged with one another, gold and indigo blue, silver and pink—what she really most wanted to do was to take her pens and brushes out and start painting.

  Outside the window overlooking the street a night-blue sky had spread imperceptibly. Rosalie sat there unmoving for a long time, sensing the deep truth that lay in the story and that, for all the amusing elements in it, there was also a gentle melancholy that touched her in an inexplicable way. Suddenly, she couldn’t help thinking of her father, and all that he’d given her along the way.

  “Yes,” she said softly. “The paint spots are the most important thing. The longing you should never lose. And belief in your own wishes.”

  Six

  Paris had welcomed him with a cloudburst.

  Almost like the first time he’d arrived there. He’d just turned twelve, a gawky adolescent with long blond hair who had suddenly gone through a growth spurt, wearing the inevitable jeans. His mother had given him the trip as a birthday present.

  “What do you think, Robert—a week in Paris, just you and me? Won’t that be great? Paris is a wonderful city. You’ll see, you’ll love it.”

  It was six months after the death of his father, Paul Sherman, an attorney in the well-known New York practice of Sherman & Sons, and in reality nothing was great anymore. Even so, Robert had felt quite excited as their flight approached Paris. At that time his whole family lived in the sleepy little town of Mount Kisco, a good hour’s journey north of New York City. But his mother, whose own mother originally came from France, had often talked to him about Paris, where she, urged by her parents, had once spent a summer as a young woman. For that reason she spoke very good French and had insisted that her son learn the language as well.

  As they then drove through the night in Paris with the raindrops pattering on the taxi roof, he had become infected with his mother’s enthusiasm, and almost twisted his neck trying to see the lights of the Eiffel Tower through the cab’s rain-smeared windows; and then the Louvre, the spherical street lamps on a magnificent bridge, whose name he had immediately forgotten, and the wide boulevards, lined with dark trees whose gnarled branches, reaching up for the sky, were hung with little lamps.

  The wet streets reflected the city lights, blurring the contours of the tall stone buildings with their curved iron balconies and the lighted windows of the host of cafés and restaurants, so that for a moment Robert felt as if he were gliding through a city of gold.

  Then the street became increasingly bumpy and narrow until the taxi stopped outside a little hotel and he stepped straight out into an ankle-deep puddle, soaking his sneakers immediately.

  It was strange what kind of details you occasionally remembered. Things that actually were of no importance at all. Nevertheless, they remained hidden in a corner of your mind only to creep out again years or decades later.

  It must have been the beginning of November when they arrived in Paris that time; a cold wind swept through the streets and parks, and what he remembered most of all was that it had rained a lot. They had gotten soaked more than once and had frequently had to retreat into one of the many small cafés with the jolly awnings for a hot, milky coffee.

  It was the first time he’d drunk a real coffee, and he suddenly felt big and grown-up, almost a man.

  He also remembered the dark-skinned woman with the broad smile and colorful parrot-print headscarf who had brought breakfast up to their room every morning, because it was quite normal in Parisian hotels to have breakfast in bed. And the assiette de fromage he had ordered in the Café de Flore (“the writers’ café,” his mother had explained to him). It was a plate of cheeses that were totally unknown to him, with the individual pieces cut into circles and arranged in order of taste, from mild to strong, which had greatly impressed him. One evening they had gone to a dimly lit jazz bar in Saint-Germain: they had dinner there, and he’d tasted crème brûlée for the first time in his life. It had a sugary crust, which splintered in his mouth with a soft crackle. He remembered the Mona Lisa, crowded round by people whose raincoats smelled of rain; a boat trip on the Seine that took them to Notre-Dame (it had rained there, too); and the Zippo lighter with the name PARIS on it, which he’d bought at the top of the Eiffel Tower after they had climbed the steps together.

  “We should come back sometime when the weather is better,” his mother had said as they stood up there on the platform with the wind gusting in their faces. “When you’ve finished college we’ll come back and drink a champagne toast.” She laughed. “By then I’m afraid I probably won’t be able to get up here on foot. But fortunately there’s an elevator.”

  For some reason they had later lost sight of the Eiffel Tower project, as you do, with time, forget so many projects thought up on the spur of the moment, and then one day it was
too late.

  One afternoon they had walked through one of the big city parks—he no longer knew if it was the Jardin du Luxembourg or the Tuileries, but he still clearly remembered the big white monument he had climbed up on. À PAUL CÉZANNE was written on it in golden letters. That had suddenly reminded him of his father and the inscription on his grave in the graveyard in Mount Kisco, and it was a little bit like having Dad there with them. The photo his mother had taken then, showing a laughing blond boy in a cap and scarf holding a Zippo lighter on a big block of white stone, had hung in the kitchen until she died. When he sold the house, he took it down from the wall and cried.

  He also had a clear memory of the time they went into a boulangerie and bought some gigantic pink meringues tasting of sugar, air, and almonds, and how their coats had then been covered in pink dust—and how his mother had burst out laughing. Her eyes were shining again for the first time in ages. But then, and he couldn’t tell why, her moment of happiness had given way to sudden sadness, which she tried to conceal, though he still sensed it.

  On the last day they had gone to the Orangerie and stood hand in hand in front of Monet’s great water lily paintings, and when he had worriedly asked her if everything was all right, she had simply nodded and smiled, but her hand had involuntarily grasped his hand tighter.

  All this came back to Robert when he arrived in Paris that morning. Since his last visit, twenty-six years had passed. He still had the Zippo lighter. But this time he was here alone. And because he was looking for an answer.

  His mother had died a couple of months before. His girlfriend had presented him with an ultimatum. He needed to rethink the future course of his life, and he was not sure which path to take. He had to make a decision. And all at once he’d felt that it could be helpful to put as many miles as possible between himself and New York, and to come to Paris to think things out in peace.

  Rachel had been beside herself. She had shaken her dark-red curls and folded her arms over her chest, and her quivering body was a living reproach.