The Bird Market of Paris Page 2

  He was a gifted raconteur, telling stories over and over, each time adding another tiny detail, embellishments like sequins on a dress. He talked a bit about Egypt, about the green talking parrots that lived in the palace and about the superior nature of Cairo’s fruit and vegetables, but most of all, Poppy overflowed with stories about Paris, the city’s broad sidewalks where ten people could walk shoulder to shoulder, and the lazy afternoons sitting in cafés, people watching. Rarely did I hear about the Pyramids of Giza or the Sphinx. He was taken with Paris, and through his stories I was taken with it, too. He said he would take me there someday.

  He told me about the Marché aux Oiseaux, the bird market of Paris, held on Sundays in conjunction with the famous flower market and close to Notre Dame. I heard about the bird market of Paris from Poppy so often, it became something I had to experience.

  “You can hear the music of the birds a mile away,” he told me. “The birds are a miracle, you cannot imagine such beautiful birds, the colors, the songs.” He spoke emphatically, like a man running for office, and I believed him.

  In my imagination, birdsong filled the market, waving and swelling like smoke, sunlight bathing each feather to a glisten, down to the shaft where the feather anchors into the wing. Pullets, canaries, and finches playing with the afternoon light, an iridescent sheen bouncing from their tightly groomed feathers. Roosters with feathers on their feet. Pigeons with tails spreading up and out like an Andalusian lady’s fan. I didn’t know these birds, but Poppy’s talk made them irresistible. That’s the way I’ll love them, too, I thought, when I’m old enough to go to Paris. It was as inevitable as the stars, which were birds, after all.

  Chapter 2

  Poppy cut his shoulder-length, flowing silver hair himself by looking at the back of his head in a mirror. He had a strong, straight nose, and was known for his overgrown eyebrows; he’d roll them upward into curls, like handlebar mustaches on the outside edges of his eyes, and chase me around the house or yard as I squealed, pretending to be afraid. He seemed tall when I was a child, but he was of average height. I rode on his broad shoulders to pick grapefruit and key limes from the taller branches on the trees in our yard.

  Most close friends and relatives called Poppy by our last name, Moustaki, including Nona, though when I was around, she called him Poppy. My father, his son, called him Monsieur Moustaki. My mom called him by his first name, Soli, and acquaintances and business associates called him Bruno, his middle name.

  Though my family was Greek, they didn’t speak Greek because they originated in Corfu, a tiny Grecian island with its own many dialects, and they were Jews. Poppy’s parents spoke Italkian, a mixture of Hebrew and Italian sprinkled with enough Greek so that invading armies over the centuries couldn’t understand them.

  Poppy’s father, Victorio, a tailor, and his mother, Stella, fled Corfu to Egypt in 1891 after a period of civil unrest, when most of the Jews were forced off the island. In 1917, they brought Poppy into the world in Cairo, then a metropolitan city bustling with Europeans who spoke French as a common language, and who, with a liberal measure of Arabic, could also communicate with the Egyptians. With an ear for languages, Poppy learned Greek and became fluent in ten other languages: Italkian, French, Arabic, Hebrew, English, Italian, Portuguese, German, Spanish, and later, in Miami, Haitian Creole. He defined fluency as the ability to speak about philosophy in the language. He spoke English well, but never used contractions.

  My father, Poppy and Nona’s only child, was born in 1943 in Heliopolis, Egypt, a home birth at 39 Alexandria Street. He learned only French and Arabic as a child. Despite the religious differences, he was educated by Jesuits in a French-speaking Catholic school in Cairo because Nona felt it was the best school in the city.

  Poppy had learned to sew in his father’s tailor shop, but worked as a military attaché in communications during World War II in the Greek army. He was the liaison officer for the British army under General Montgomery—and, later, the liaison between the Greek and British armies and the Free French army. He hinted that he had also been a spy for the British, rooting out Nazis hiding in Cairo.

  After the war, Poppy became a couture dressmaker, designing gowns for rich and famous ladies in Cairo, including King Farouk’s wife and small daughters, and the king’s sister, Princess Fawzia Fuad, wife of the Shah of Iran.

  Poppy’s stories about Cairo sounded glamorous—yachting, car races, servants, parties. Photos of Nona as a young woman show her dressed in slinky sequined dresses, posing with the king’s court at parties, Poppy at her side. King Farouk became a main character in Poppy’s tales of Egypt: how Poppy played backgammon tournaments with the king and wouldn’t lose games on purpose, though most other people were afraid to win against His Majesty; how the king cheated at poker—if he had three kings in his hand, he’d consider himself the fourth king and win; and how the king would eat “twenty-four pigeon soup,” made from slow-boiling twenty-four pigeons into a small bowl of rich broth.

  In 1952, Gamal Abdel Nasser overthrew King Farouk in a bloody revolution, and thousands of Europeans and Jews left Egypt at gunpoint, taking only what they could carry. The revolutionaries killed many who refused to go, including Nona and Poppy’s friends and neighbors. The dissidents burned the blocks around my grandparents’ home—every office building, every store, every nightclub, and every restaurant. Nona and Poppy watched the mob wash through the streets toward their apartment to steal guns in the hunting club at the bottom of the building. Nona, Poppy, and my nine-year-old father ran down the emergency staircase and through a side exit as the furious riot breached the front door.

  They fled down an alleyway and saw a taxi sitting there, as if it had been waiting for them—a cosmic cab with the door wide open. They told the driver to take them to Heliopolis, where Nona’s mother lived. Poppy had managed to grab a few rare coins, and Nona had filled her pockets with the contents of her jewelry box. They had nothing else but the clothes they were wearing.

  My father watched people drench cats in gasoline and set them on fire—the cats bolted in flames into buildings and set Cairo ablaze—and saw people jump from the tops of burning buildings into Tahrir Square. Dissidents surrounded the cab in a swarm of fists and rage as the driver honked and urged the mob to part for the car, gunning the engine a few feet at a time for miles, swallowed by a mass of humans, crying for freedom from the king’s reign, spurred by indignation that they were being led by a Turk, not an Arab, and a lover of foreigners and foreign things. Poppy’s impeccable Arabic allowed my family to survive. The police stopped the cab many times, the dissident crowd rocking the car back and forth, trying to overturn it, and Poppy retorting in Arabic with “Hey, get out of our way! I am one of you!”

  They returned to Cairo a few weeks later to find their apartment ransacked and burned, but they remained in Egypt another four years under Nasser’s regime, where one word against the government made a person disappear. During the violent conflict in 1956 for control of the Suez Canal, Poppy and Nona sat under heavy blankets each afternoon listening to a barely audible shortwave radio—it was illegal to tune in to foreign stations, and the punishment for doing so was death. They waited for French radio to announce where the evening’s French and British aerial bombardment of Cairo would take place so they could stay at a friend’s house in a different neighborhood if the bombs were scheduled nearby. At sundown, before bombing commenced, police roamed the streets screaming, in Arabic, “Jew, son of a dog, shut out the lights.”

  The police placed Poppy under house arrest with the rest of the foreigners. My father’s school was turned into a prison camp. Every male non-Arab over eighteen was detained there, his head shaved, his street clothing swapped for a blue jumpsuit. Poppy escaped internment because he had a friend in the district attorney’s office. In late 1956, Poppy, Nona, and my father were stripped of their belongings and placed onto a boat bound for Europe. Crossing the gangway, Nona was ordered to surrender her wedding ring; Nasser’s milita
ry personnel wanted to make sure the refugees left with nothing. Nona stood tall—all five feet of her—looked the soldier in the eye, and said, “Over my dead body.” He waved her onto the ship.

  Nona, Poppy, and my father had a cabin, but many others didn’t, nor did they have blankets, and people froze to death on the deck. They arrived in the port of Zeebrugge, Belgium, traveled by train to Paris, and struggled to survive in their new city, sometimes sharing one potato among the three of them as an evening meal. Nona often gave her share of potato to my father, stifling her own hunger by drinking hot water. Poppy was resourceful—and a good gambler—earning money playing backgammon tournaments. They spent four years in Paris. My father attended Parisian schools, and Poppy started sewing again, designing dresses for socialites, including Charles de Gaulle’s brother’s wife and daughters.

  Just after the war, Nona’s sister had married an American pilot who flew private jets for Saudi Arabian king Ibn Saud, and the pilot sponsored Nona, Poppy, and my father to come to the United States, three of the two thousand visas issued by Senator Jacob Javitz of New York for Egyptian refugees. My dad remembers the ship pulling into New York Harbor on a cold day in January, after a rough, seasick, transatlantic journey from Europe when he was thirteen, gazing at the Statue of Liberty with her flame igniting the sky. He spoke one word of English: milk.

  After the family moved to Miami, Poppy opened his design studio downtown not far from the famous Coppertone billboard featuring a little suntanned girl and a black puppy pulling down her bathing suit bottom to reveal her tan line. Poppy ascended into the top ranks of the local fashion designers in the mid-1960s. He became somewhat of a celebrity, appearing on The Dick Cavett Show, The Jackie Mason Show, and The Merv Griffin Show.

  Every Christmas, Poppy decorated a giant evergreen for Miami’s courthouse with heart-shaped ornaments dotting the tree like hibiscus and pairs of live doves in gold cages embedded into its branches. On the tree’s top, a sparkling flocked dove with outstretched wings readied itself for flight, holier than any angel.

  * * *

  I don’t think Poppy saw much of my father while he was building his couture business in Paris, and then again in Miami, so when I came along, it was a chance for him to “raise” another child.

  He would open his wallet and ask people, “Do you want to see a picture of my pride and joy?” They would nod, and he’d show them a wallet-size photograph of the furniture wax Pride and the dish soap Joy, both sitting in front of a blue photo backdrop as if they went to Sears to have their portrait taken. After the laughter, he’d turn to a photo of me and say, “That is my little girl.” Most people assumed that I was his daughter.

  Both of my parents worked long hours, first in the garment business and then in luxury car sales, so Poppy took me everywhere with him: to the ballet, classical concerts, and the racetrack. I thought everyone’s grandfather took them to grown-up parties to meet the mayor. I accompanied Poppy to events with the who’s who of Miami and beyond. Walter Cronkite said he liked my curly hair, and Dionne Warwick asked me if I wanted to sing when I grew up—of course I did, but I couldn’t carry a tune in a basket. I met Count Basie and scored autographs from the ballet dancers Rudolf Nureyev and Mikhail Baryshnikov. Poppy had dined with everyone from kings to congressmen, from Pavarotti to the Grand Imperial Wizard of the Ku Klux Klan—he used to show me the man’s business card and laugh. My childhood was full of celebrities I didn’t recognize, and rail-thin models with jutting clavicles pinching my cheeks and painting lipstick on me at fashion shows.

  Poppy sewed dresses of flowing, colorful jersey, embellished with gold rope and dyed feathers, and he invented a dress called the “M” that could be worn a hundred different ways, his trademark design in Miami in the 1970s. He created miniature versions of his dresses for me, and I walked the runway by myself at the opening of his lavish fashion shows at the Doral, the Biltmore, and various country clubs, tossing rose petals onto the runway from a wicker basket. The spotlights in my eyes blurred the audience into a black mass, a huge, dark lake that issued a collective gasp—the sound most people make at a basketful of puppies—as I stepped from behind the curtain and minced to the end of the catwalk, smiling and terrified, tossing each petal for Poppy, taking each step as if it were the most important step of my life. I was a shy, bookish, frizzy-headed imp with deep-set eyes and cowlicks at my hairline that formed my bangs into a heart shape on my forehead, but in those few minutes, I was a model.

  Poppy hung my finger paintings and drawings all over his studio and showed them to everyone who came through the door as if I were Picasso himself. We spent long beach days together at Crandon Park, where he gave me paddleball lessons at the edge of the surf as seagulls screeched like faulty brakes and plunged at our blanket to steal my potato chips. He indulged me with hot fudge sundaes and bought me an encyclopedia volume every month for two years until I had the entire set. The books had faux leather bindings, and each page was edged with gold, so when the book closed the fore edge gleamed like treasure.

  Chapter 3

  The year I turned nine, my parents offered to take me to Walt Disney World a month after my birthday instead of having a birthday party. Maybe it was a kindness because I didn’t have enough friends to warrant an ice cream cake and bouncy house. But the lack of a party dogged me, and I couldn’t sleep till well past midnight the night before my birthday. Nona snored in bed beside me as I plotted a party for myself.

  On my birthday, my parents had to work late selling cars at their respective car dealerships—Ferraris for my dad and Subarus for my mom—so I was alone with Nona and Poppy that afternoon and had just over an hour to prepare.

  I had invited four girls from school to arrive for my party at four o’clock. I didn’t use invitations bought from a stationery store like the invites other kids dispensed for their parties: card-stock status symbols insinuating the scrumptiousness of the cake and the bounty of the take-away party favor bag. I wrote the invites on lined paper and decorated them with Magic Markers—hearts, flowers, and swirled flourishes in each corner—and passed them to the girls at lunch.

  Nona baked my favorite coffee-flavored cake, ten thin layers, including two layers of hardened caramelized sugar and chocolate icing with a little rum in it. She drove me in her blue weather-worn 1965 Plymouth Valiant, which didn’t have air-conditioning, to the five-and-dime where I bought party favors for my guests: a fuzzy bunny statuette, yellow plastic sunglasses, a small green plastic tub shaped like a trash can containing green slime with eyeballs in it, a Strawberry Shortcake doll knockoff, four packs of cherry Pop Rocks, and a small stuffed puppy dog.

  At home, I spent half an hour layering the prizes with tissue paper, wrapping paper, and tape, so we could play my favorite party game where we sat in a circle and passed the wrapped present around as someone played music in the background. When the music stopped, whoever held the present peeled one of the layers of wrapping. The person to peel off the last ply of paper kept the present.

  I slipped on a dress emblazoned with a pattern of cherries and a bright green sash at the waist, the full skirt whooshing over my thighs with a thin layer of scratchy crinoline beneath it. Poppy had designed and sewn the dress for my birthday after I chose the fabric from the hundreds of bolts of cotton in his design studio. I loved caressing the exotic fabrics, holding the eyelet to the light, swathing myself in the soft jersey and charmeuse, and inhaling the scent of the rough muslin, a fragrance like milk and popcorn, when Poppy ironed it.

  It was warm for October, and we had multiple fans whirling as I played Michael Jackson’s Off the Wall record on the turntable, an album I had been wearing out since summer. The mellow groove of “Rock with You” mingled with the yeasty smell of baking bread. I yearned for pink party streamers and a “Happy Birthday” banner, like the one I’d had the year before, but it was too late for that.

  Four o’clock came—no guests. I called one girl and she said her mother wouldn’t let her come. At fi
ve thirty, another girl called to decline the invitation. I didn’t have the other girls’ phone numbers, so I asked Nona to look them up in the white pages. Nona said if they didn’t want to come, I shouldn’t chase them.

  She brought me the latch hook rug I’d been working on and told me to add more yarn while I waited for my guests. Nona was gifted at arts and crafts, skilled at stained glass, and could sew almost as well as Poppy.

  Poppy often took me to visit Nona at Miami’s National Parkinson’s Institute, where she worked as an assistant physical therapist, and I’d help her create arts and crafts projects with the Parkinson’s patients, finger painting and cutting out paper flowers, helping their trembling hands use the blunt scissors.

  But that evening I didn’t have the patience to work on the place-mat-size rug, which, when finished, would depict an alert-looking owl perched on a pine bough.

  I put down the latch hook and yarn and sat at the window, staring at cars cruising down our quiet street. I leapt to my feet each time one approached, but each time the car drove by. Around six o’clock, Nona dragged me from the window and asked me to show her the game I had intended to play with my guests. I didn’t want to play yet, in case the girls arrived, but by six thirty, she was sitting on the orange shag carpet with me while Poppy manned the record player, and we passed gifts back and forth to choppy versions of “Don’t Stop Till You Get Enough” and “Off the Wall” until one of us found the present underneath the layers of wrapping. Nona pretended to be delighted and surprised at the gift when she won, turning it over in her hands to study it, as if she had never seen it and hadn’t bought it a couple hours before. I held back one present in case the girls showed up.

  Nona pressed candles into the rummy cake and lit them. She and Poppy sang the “Happy Birthday” song off-key as she walked toward me, balancing the tall cake in both hands. How could I blow out the candles without at least my parents there?