Rooftoppers

Dashing across rooftops and swinging on trees, lampposts, and drainpipes to cross roads, Matteo, Anastasia, Safi, Gérard, and Sophie reach the neighborhood of the Gare du Nord shortly before two o’clock in the morning. Squatting on the rooftop of a school, they arrange themselves into a square, all facing outward to listen for the notes of a cello. After an hour, Sophie asks her friends what happens to rooftoppers when they grow up. They say that grown-up rooftoppers learn to live on the ground but still retain some wildness, which is safer for adults than for children—especially, Anastasia says, if they’re men. To prove that there have been rooftoppers in the past, Matteo shows Sophie a knife he found on his rooftop, which may have been hidden there for 100 years. Anastasia estimates the number of rooftoppers in Paris to be about 20 or 30, though she has seen most of them only in glimpses.

By five o’clock in the morning, they have heard neither cello music nor gariers, and Sophie feels close to tears. Suddenly, a vast flock of starlings fills the air around them. Tingling with a sense of the “high-day-holiday miraculous” (233), Sophie feels that they are a good omen.