V’là l’bon vent, ma mie m’appelle—

My mother taught me that lullaby. It’s an old song, a love song, a charm, and I sang it then to calm the wind; to make it leave us behind this time; to lull the mewing thing that I had brought back from the hospital. The tiny thing that neither fed nor slept, but cried like a cat night after night, while around us the wind shrieked and tossed like an angry woman, and every night I sang it to sleep, calling it good wind, pretty wind, in the words of my song, as simple folk once named the Furies, addressing them as Good Ladies and Kindly Ones, in the hope of escaping their revenge.

Do the Kindly Ones pursue the dead?

They found us again by the side of the Loire, and once again, we had to flee. To Paris, this time – Paris, my mother’s city and the place of my birth, the one place where I’d sworn we’d never go back. But a city confers a kind of invisibility on those who seek it. No longer parakeets among the sparrows, we now wear the colours of the native birds – too ordinary, too drab for a second glance or even a first. My mother had fled to New York to die; I fled to Paris to be reborn. Sick or well? Happy or sad? Rich or poor? The city doesn’t care. The city has other business to attend to. Unquestioning, it passes by; it goes its way without a shrug.

All the same, that year was hard. It was cold; the baby cried; we stayed in a little upstairs room off the Boulevard de la Chapelle and at night the neon signs flashed red and green till it was enough to drive you mad. I could have fixed it – I know a cantrip that would have done it just as easily as switching off a light – but I had promised us no more magic, and so we slept in little slices between the red and green, and Rosette went on crying until Epiphany (or so it seemed), and for the first time our galette des rois was not home-made, but from a shop, and no one felt much like celebrating anyway.

I hated Paris so much that year. I hated the cold and the grime and the smells; the rudeness of the Parisians; the noise from the railway; the violence; the hostility. I soon learnt that Paris is not a city. It’s just a mass of Russian dolls boxed one inside the other, each with its customs and prejudices, each with its church, mosque, synagogue; all of them rife with bigots, gossips, insiders, scapegoats, losers, lovers, leaders, and objects of derision.