Free Come, Barbarians by Todd Babiak

typically Parisian apartment buildings: stone and stately if not as imposing as the beauties along Avenue de Breteuil, the route he had taken. Kruse arrived too early. The receptionist on the main floor chuckled a bit cruelly at the idea that anyone in the newsroom would return from lunch before two. She handed him yesterday’s edition of the paper and he went for a coffee and an inferior croissant at a busy café on the corner.
    His parents, Allan and Nettie Kruse, had left half their insurance policy to a centre for poor immigrants in Toronto. They were pure Mennonites, by blood and by heart, and carried a special feeling for refugees and poor newcomers. Stories around the dinner table were stories of settlement and flight, settlement and flight, as bad politics and swords and guns had chased their great-grandparents and great-great-grandparents all over Europe for centuries. Nearly all his clients in Toronto had been conservatives of some sort, from the old families Evelyn so admired to the newly rich who had trampled on friends and laws and now simply wanted to protect what they had earned—or had stolen—with a low tax regime. He had liked his clients, or most of them, and he had admired his daring wife; it wasn’t a normal woman’s mission, to transform conservative politics in a foreign country. But the Front National, at least the one he read about in the papers, sounded a lot like the sort of party that would have either repelled his ancestors at the border or discovered a religious or legal reason to chop off their heads.
    A block away from the offices of
Le Monde
, there was an eighteenth-century hospital for sick children. At one in the afternoon a smoky dusk had fallen over the city. Commuters were out on their belching scooters and little cars honked peacefully at one another, but with the metro shut down it was a day for pedestrians. Even in the rain the city was a riot of finely dressed professionals, elegant grandmothers, and courageous dog walkers. It was never an amiable place but the Parisians did look up at him. In France, especially in Paris, eyes rested on his scars longer than at home, where the possibility of offending a stranger hovers like a weakly-chained dragon over Southern Ontario. Kruse walked around the children’s hospital after his coffee and croissant and settled on a park bench surrounded by hopeful, cooing pigeons. Now and then a mother and father would pass on the sidewalk, two umbrellas open, pushing their child in a wheelchair. One of the children, bald but for a few stray hairs, was so beautiful and so fragile Kruse could not look at her. Her tortured parents manufactured grins. He envied them. Nurses stepped out of taxis and walked through the hospital gates with determined sighs. There was an institute for children with blindness nearby, and they too were out for lunchtime strolls—arms linked or experimenting with a cane. Neighbourhood schools surrounded the hospital, an elementary and a lycée. The quarter was alive with laughing and crying children, exhausted parents, and tin-voiced adolescents and teenagers in the ripped jeans and flannel lumberjack shirts of Seattle.
    Men in blue overalls had not yet picked up the shit from last evening’s dog walkers. In the entrance of a shuttered magazine shop, a man in layers of wet clothes lay sleeping on a pile of cardboard boxes. From Foxbar Road or from her dreary office overlooking a parking lot in the stark northern reaches of Toronto, Paris was, for Evelyn, art and wonder. She had never been to Paris but it was her definition of conservatism, the way we once lived and the way we ought to live again; children and parents and public institutions and food markets and bistrosand architecture in harmony. In the Paris of her imagination she walked Lily to school in the morning and said hello to the baker and the butcher, bought a coffee and proceeded to the Sorbonne.
    The first time he had come to Paris, in the early eighties, the