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Xavier is sixteen when he is banned from his first park in Paris. Perhaps surprisingly, the incident in question has nothing whatsoever to do with pigeons.
The park ban wounds him less than does the confiscation of his portable radio, which cost his entire life’s savings.
I wasn’t even playing it very loud, he thinks. By the time he thinks it, he’s already being escorted to the street.
In a huff he stalks to the next closest park, but finds that his recent affront hovers over it, not unlike a storm cloud, or an ugly balloon. The next park is no different, and, not yet being a person who pursues fleeting hopes, Xavier gives up.
The quiet without his radio is almost painful. He thinks: Perhaps I was making too much noise. But why didn’t they just ask me to turn down the volume?
The thought occurs to him that someone might have asked, and he might not have heard them. This is perhaps the worst possibility he can think of. It makes him feel like perhaps he deserved to have the radio taken, and perhaps he is being unfair by having the audacity to be upset.
He is still trying to push this thought out of his head when he, distracted, trips over a bag someone has placed before the bench on the walkway beside the Seine.
First his shoe catches in the bag handles. Then his hands fly out naturally to break his fall, and one of his fingers jams on the bench in a way not nasty enough to need attention but not benign enough to be ignored. A sound something like a trill flies out of his mouth, which would be almost entertaining if it hadn’t happened to him, and if his walk hadn’t been so poor already, and if there hadn’t been a woman on the bench listening to him.
“Are you alright?” she asks, frowning at his hand with concern. “Do you need me to take a look?” Something about her is undeniably familiar.
“You can,” Xavier says, and realizes he’s not being polite. “If you wouldn’t mind,” he corrects himself. It’s only that he hadn’t expected to talk to anyone on his walk, and it takes a moment to adjust. “I’m very sorry for not looking where I was going.”
“I can tell you had things on your mind,” the woman says astutely. It’s not just that she seems familiar; she acts familiar, too. There is something almost conspiratorial in the way she takes his arm by the end of his sleeve and moves his sore hand around, scrutinizing. Xavier, neither comfortable nor uncomfortable, looks for something to look at and settles on the woman’s brooch. He recognizes it.
“You used to sit here when I was young,” he blurts out. “You used to talk to my grandfather.” He and his grandfather took walks along the Seine every weekend before his grandfather fell ill.
The woman smiles, and Xavier realizes she recognized him from the start. “I was sorry to hear of his passing. I remember you. The little boy with the toy pigeon on a stick. Waving it all around.”
“He—my grandfather—made it for me,” Xavier explains, all misfortunes forgotten. “I have it at home. I don’t bring it out with me anymore, but I do have it.” It has a place of honor on a shelf above his bed. All of his shelves are crowded with pigeon memorabilia, of course, but that shelf is special.
“Wonderful,” says the woman. “My name is Marianne Lenoir. Do you like anything besides pigeons?”
“Nothing as much as pigeons,” Xavier explains, “but I listen to the radio, and I play chess in school. And my name is Xavier,” he adds hastily. “Xavier Ramier.”
“It’s a pleasure to meet you, Xavier Ramier,” says Ms. Lenoir. Xavier is delighted to find that he believes her. “Chess, you say?”
“I’ve played for almost four years now. Would you like to know anything about it?”
“I believe I know most of the basics. What do you enjoy about chess?”
Xavier thinks about this very seriously. It isn’t often that an adult asks him why he enjoys things without attaching a very derisive tone. Though, in their defense, they are usually asking about pigeons. “I like the way the game changes as you learn more about it,” he says. “I remember being very surprised to learn about castling, and wanting to feel that same kind of surprise again.”
Ms. Lenoir seems to consider this, her gaze drifting past him and over the surface of the water. “I know about castling,” she says, “but I think I’d like to hear you explain it to me.”
“The king moves two spaces towards either rook,” Xavier says promptly. “The rook moves to the space which the king passed over, so it’s now on the king’s opposite side.” He goes on to explain the requirements for castling, and then, at Ms. Lenoir’s request, he describes a few of his own chess games.
She tells him, when he leaves, that he is welcome to return to the bench beside the Seine any day he likes. She is always there at the same time, and she rarely says no to company.
Xavier returns a few times, mostly to talk about pigeons, but it does not become a regular habit until over a decade later.
Xavier is twenty-nine when he is banned from his second park in Paris, and, unsurprisingly, this time it’s the birds. Though it is not yet illegal to feed them, neither is it illegal for a park’s owner to expel a visitor, loudly, on the grounds that he is disturbing the peace.
And what about my peace, Xavier thinks, wondering idly if a portable radio would cover the owner’s shouting.
Unfortunately, as he thinks this, his hand makes the unwise decision to fling birdseed at the owner. It’s not something he told himself to do. If he’d had a moment longer, or if the screaming hadn’t been quite so loud, he thinks he would have been able to stop himself.
He wishes he had had a moment longer. Now there’s a policeman chasing him, which is really something Xavier tries to avoid.
He’s gained a sizable lead when he realizes where he is. The Seine. The walkway. And, up ahead, the bench. Marianne Lenoir is sitting on the far end with a book in her lap. Xavier’s just glad he didn’t trip over anything this time.
“I need help,” he says, out of breath, as he approaches her.
“Castle,” she says.
“What?”
She moves to the near side of the bench and pats the spot next to her, digging through her bag. “Castle.”
Xavier sits in the middle of the bench. She piles her knitting into his arms and puts a grey hat on his head, but it isn’t necessary. The policeman runs right past them.