“Pardonnez-moi, mademoiselle,” he says. They have crossed paths at the Medici Fountain. It is March, and the buds have begun to swell.

“I am not French,” the young woman replies. She smiles. “Neither are you.”

“But you are the one with a bird on your head.”

Smaller than a wren, scarcely fledged, it puffs out its feathers and shudders for an instant, then composes itself and settles into her hair.

“I know.” Her eyes widen. “Isn’t it strange?”

He nods.

“Does it bother you?” she asks. “You look so pale.”

He licks his lower lip. “My natural complexion.” He smiles and asks where she comes from.

“The Rue de Medici,” she says, and points.

“No-no,” he says and asks where she was born.

Romania, she replies. Brasov. In Transylvania.

He smiles.

“Please,” she says wearily, “no vampire jokes.”

He runs his eyes over her. She stands still, staring into the middle distance, as though submitting to an airport search. Curious features, he thinks. A broad face, ice-gray almond eyes set over those high cheekbones. Blonde hair sticking to her neck and collapsing into a greasy sprawl on her shoulders, perhaps the way it fell when she arose this morning. He can picture her herding reindeer in a slanting snow. 

She wears an ivory sweater so large that she is always pulling back the sleeves, which are edged with grime. He imagines easing it over her head.

“You sleep in your clothes . . .”

“When it pleases me,” she says. “Why do you ask?”

He shrugs his shoulders.

“You are so pale,” she says again. “Perhaps I make you uncomfortable.”

“No.” He tries to chuckle.

She turns toward the fountain. “What do you think?”

He does not like the look of it. “They ruined a perfectly good fountain, those statues.”

“But the lovers are so beautiful,” she says.

“What about the one-eyed monster?”

She laughs and moves off.

He catches up and asks if he might walk with her.

She shrugs. “Why not? I already have a bird on my head.”

The silence in which they walk allows him to focus on his rate of respiration and the frequency with which he swallows.

“So,” he says, “. . . what are you doing in Paris?”

“Nothing.”

She had come on a full scholarship to the Université Paris Cité, she tells him, to pursue training in neonatal hematology. Then without warning, the money ran out. Learning of this, the young man with whom she had been living ran out as well and sent her a text that he found the relationship draining.

“I would settle for a tip job.” She runs a sleeve across her nose. “But nobody tips in Paris.”

He glances at the bird, which is busy preening. “It thinks it’s found a home.”

“I don’t want to go home,” she says. “There is nothing there.” She takes a pathway to his right. “You will find this statue more to your taste.”

He follows her past the shuttered puppet theater and the playground. She winces at the shrieks and laughter. They pass through a thicket to a clearing in which stands a Statue of Liberty, four meters tall.

“It was done by Bartholdi himself,” she says.

He scarcely notices, because the thicket swarms with fledglings like hers, flitting among the low shrubs or resting on the ground.

“A reproductive strategy,” he says. “The crows can eat only so many at one time, and the rest will live on.”

“For what?” she asks.

The bird takes to the air, hovers over her head for a moment, then wobbles into the chaos below and disappears. 

He turns to the statue. He can see, through the folds of her robe, a slight bulge.

“She is pregnant.” He wonders, did he shout?

The young woman says, “And now, monsieur, I shall leave you with her.”

As she turns, she crushes a fledgling underfoot. It is clearly an accident.

“Adieu.”

He is left with the fluttering of birds.