left each morning if he went to school, but my mornings I had to devote to my collections, the prime time to find people at home.
But even if I got Max, would he be safe? I needed a secure place to live and enough money to buy him food. Would I get more help from the White Russian community on Rue Daru? Maybe someone there could help.
I left for Rue Daru one late afternoon after delivering my receipts to Madame Melange. I was eager to see the place where so many Russians gathered and happy reunions took place. I had so little money still and hoped to make connections there, for a better job and my own bed in the community.
I took a longer route than necessary to pass my favorite sweetshop, À la Mère de Famille, Paris’s oldest candy store. Not that I had any money to buy candy, but nostalgia drew me there. How many times had Mother and I shopped there and left laden with bags heavy with chocolates and bonbons?
I stopped in front of the dark green–painted corner shop and took in the sweets in the window. Though the war drastically reduced the usually bountiful offerings, my favorite oval-tinned candies, les Anis de Flavigny, sat there in pretty little stacks. Produced since 1591 these satiny smooth little candies, made by patiently covering an anise seed, layer by layer, with sugar syrup, were Mother’s favorite and mine, too.
I stepped inside the shop and the most delicious scent of butter and sugar and peppermint wrapped around me. The place hadn’t changed a bit: at the back, the glass booth where the owner rang up the purchase on his old cash register, the black-and-white tile floor with the name of the shop written there, shelves and tables arranged with small displays of bonbons and marzipan flowers.
There were a few shoppers near the glass cases, the candy women in their white smocks helping them choose their chocolates just as Mother and I once had. Would the owner even remember me? Certainly not in my disheveled state.
I found the little tins of les Anis de Flavigny stacked with care and lifted one to my nose. While faint, the scent of licorice made my mouth—
“Hey, you there,” one of the candy women called. She hurried to me as a policeman apprehends a thief, a cross look on her face. “What are you doing? Those are for customers.”
“I am just looking, madame.”
“Just look from outside.” She plucked the tin from my hand.
“Where is monsieur?”
“None of your affair. Leave now.”
She pushed me out the door, barely touching my dog fur coat, and banged the door shut behind me.
I rushed away from the shop, tears burning my eyes, head down in the wind, missing my mother. What would her advice be, after losing everything? My son. My family. My fortune. She certainly would not stand for self-pity. Probably would tell me to stand up tall, one of her favorite cure-alls, and would quote one of her Japanese proverbs, like: Better to be a crystal and be broken than to be a tile upon the housetop.
I smiled at that and walked on, broken crystal that I was.
* * *
—
IT WAS A LONG, cold walk to Rue Daru and I regretted leaving my fur hat at home. On the way I passed a tent set up on a side street with the sign Marchand de Cheveux tacked on the outside.
Hair merchant.
The one Oxana had used?
The little tent was warm inside, heated by a portable stove, with a low stool and small desk on which the owner kept a black cosmetic case full of the accoutrements of his work. He met me as I entered, a white-haired peddler dressed in a belted, blue smock, chamois-colored trousers, and a wide-brimmed black felt hat. An enormous pair of brass shears hung by a ribbon dangled from his belt.
“Bonsoir, madame. Buying or selling?”
“Just looking.”
“I am René Carville. If selling, you can be paid in cloth or silver.”
I stepped to the tent walls to examine the hanks of tethered hair of all colors and lengths, and elaborate women’s hair additions in every shape and size pinned there. On the little desk, three wooden mannequin heads wore men’s toupees. A basket of balls of hair of all shades sat next to the stool.
I warmed my hands by the stove and the peddler pulled a hank of smooth, black hair from the wall. “If you need a hairnet Chinese hair is perfect.” He pulled