Thirst Read Free Page A

the proper papers, yet had nowhere else to go. And in the end, the Algerian had been harmless, even flattering. When was the last time (she imagined Madame Reynourd asking her) a man had courted her with such persistence? Of course, she had no choice but to ask him to leave (she imagined telling Elizabeth), but (she admitted) she needn’t have been unkind.
    Nula turned a corner and found Marie and Melanie studying a statue, smiles of delight and discovery playing on their faces. This cheered her. No matter what ugliness
and corruption there was in this world, Paris’s beauty was fair compensation. She stepped beside the girls, gently running a hand through Melanie’s long hair, and examined the unusual, centaurlike mass of bronze. It suddenly resolved: a man behind a woman, both on their knees, his hands firmly gripping her hips.
    “It’s bad!” she cried, pulling the girls away. “Bad! We’re leaving now!”
    Nula raced Marie and Melanie, momentarily silenced by her vehemence, down one lane and then another, past a dozen statues that only now were recognizable. Nearly every one showed a man and woman in some position of copulation—and those that didn’t, well they were much worse. Prière de ne pas laisser de détritus, no littering, warned a sign along one path, and under the warning was the legend, Musée de l’Histoire Naturelle: Jardin de la Sexualité. “Don’t look,” Nula shrieked as they passed a grouping of marble figures demonstrating several forms of oral sex.
    As soon as they reached the street, Nula furiously cleaned the girls’ ice cream-smeared hands and faces with the premoistened towelettes she always carried in her purse.
    “You’re hurting me,” Marie whined.
    “Being clean doesn’t hurt.”
    “The woman was drinking the man’s pee-pee,” Melanie said.
    Her sister started to explain, but Nula shouted, “Shut your mouth!”
    Marie replied with an obscenity.

    Someone called from across the street. “Mademoiselle, Mademoiselle!” Nula, still on her haunches, didn’t need to look up.
    “Bloody hell,” she muttered.
    “Mademoiselle,” the Algerian called again, dodging traffic. He approached, breathing hard. “Accept my apology please for such misunderstanding that I made.”
    He thrust a bouquet in her face.
    Stunned, Nula rose and took the flowers, a clutch of white lilies, yellow peonies, tulips, and a single sunflower, wrapped in newspaper.
    The Algerian said, “I too look for romance.”
    Nula kept her lips pressed together, maintaining her expression of annoyance.
    “I want that you should see,” the man added. He removed a black vinyl wallet from his jeans. In it was his carte de séjour, his resident permit. On the card, under his long, unpronounceable family name and his twentieth arrondissement address, was a line reserved for his profession: étudiant.
    “I have right in Paris like you,” he told her. There was less rancor in this statement than pride. Nula had come to France on the ferry from Rosslare; his journey had been much more difficult.
    “So you do,” she said evenly.
    Marie and Melanie stared at the Algerian and then at the flowers. Marie sniffed at the bouquet. “They’re nice,” she mumbled, dazed by his gallantry.
    “Well then. I now say farewell ladies. Farewell.”
    The Algerian, or perhaps he was a Libyan or even
a Tunisian, bowed and straightened, then turned on the heels of his Adidas and hurried down the street. He didn’t look back before he vanished around the corner. “Men like that,” Nula began to tell the girls, but she didn’t complete the sentence. She really didn’t know men like that at all.
     
    By the time they reached home, by way of a crowded, overheated train, Nula, Marie, and Melanie were exhausted. Madame Reynourd met them in the flat’s foyer and asked if they enjoyed the museum. Marie said it was boring, and she and her sister trudged off to their bedroom unbuttoning their school uniforms.
    “And how was your