Babayaga: A Novel (36 page)

Zoya looked at Gwen. She had known many women who actually were what Gwen pretended to be, and she respected those genuinely independent and capable women, the ones with great confidence, intelligence, and self-reliance. Zoya could never call these women “friends”—for almost all were so sharp and intuitive that Zoya had to steer clear to avoid being too closely observed—but she liked the ones she had known in passing, all too aware of the fact that making one’s way as a smart, fair creature in a patriarchal culture took some deft choreography. The men would not let you fight them on their terms, for if you were as strong as them then they painted you as ugly or called you cold, while if you tried to succeed by promoting your merits they labeled you as vain. Some of these remarkable women did find men who could live with them as equals, and sometimes they found partners who even accepted them as superior, but even then, too often, those men fell victim to that darkest of instincts, pride. Then Zoya watched as these “gentle” men wore their women down with those soft and cruel weapons—jealousy, mockery, absence, neglect—often with lethal results. Men might be apelike and plodding, Zoya thought, but they were not entirely stupid beasts, they knew how to climb back on top.

“Of course, a real relationship with a man like Oliver would be impossible,” Gwen went on. “He jokes about making an honest woman out of me, but I know he won’t. You know, he had his heart horribly broken some time back and I think it’s limited his ability to feel any deep emotion, really. It’s fine, though, it’s not like I’m in any rush to create some pathetic simulacrum of a happy marriage like my poor mother suffered.”

Zoya nodded politely and sipped her tea. Many marriages she had observed seemed to her awkward, strained arrangements, often painful to be near. But she was not entirely cynical and had seen, too, a rich variety of marital bonds that worked well. One extreme was where the man rose to his slippers late, almost at noon, and stayed busy nearly to dawn, while his bride awoke earlier than the birds and retired to sleep only a little after sunset, their lives thusly arranged so as to barely touch, and when they did it was warm and affectionate, like running across an old friend while traveling through the station. At the other extreme were the partnerships where every engagement with the outside world was a blending of one another’s thoughts and words as they harmoniously, almost clairvoyantly, completed one another’s sentences, wishes, desires, writing in one another’s diaries and signing each other’s letters. There was a spectrum of working, functioning examples lying between these two extremes as vast in its richness as the many species of butterflies in the wilderness.

Zoya had to agree that Gwen and Oliver had no chance of that. For starters, Gwen was slightly false-faced, the tone of her pronouncements came off as a pretender’s, finely schooled and well-read but a long day’s journey from wise. Zoya had not heard of any broken heart in Oliver’s past, but in her brief experience with him, his actions focused more on conquest than chemistry. She recalled how, in the throes of the sexual moment, his face held almost a boyish pride, as if the final act of consummation was equivalent to planting a flag on a snowy mountain peak.

Looking at the shirt Gwen had on, she realized it was the same one of Oliver’s that she herself had worn the morning after she slept over, the very day, in fact, when she had first met Gwen. She was wondering if the girl had put it on as some sort of statement when the phone’s ringing startled both of them. Gwen jumped up to answer it. “Hello?… Oh, hi … Yes, she’s up, we’re chatting now … Where?… Of course, darling, of course.” Gwen hung up the phone and sat down again. “That was Oliver. He wants us to meet him over in the park. Not exactly clear what he’s up to, but I told him we’d be there. A rendezvous in the woods,” she giggled. “How exciting.”

Zoya tensed slightly. Gwen’s casual and happy tone held a nuance that worried her, and her voice on the phone had seemed wrong. One of the things Zoya had grown very good at over the years was spotting deception, and Gwen was a liar. She could not tell what precisely this lie involved, but she knew it was not an innocent one. There was danger in the room now, it was moving in Gwen’s distracted eyes and dancing in her nervous fingertips as she snapped her cigarette case shut. Had that really been Oliver on the phone? Zoya doubted it. Was it a trap? Probably. Why? And who would care that Zoya was there? Who even knew who she was?

Zoya tried to stall. “Perhaps I should wait for Will here.”

“Oh, don’t be a silly stick-in-the-mud like that,” Gwen said and teasingly punched her on the arm. “Oliver said Will’s with him, and besides, we both need some air. It smells awful in this place. Come on, we’ll have fun.”

So Zoya nodded and Gwen went to get dressed. Zoya was not too nervous. She was confident that, even with her fatigue, she could handle what lay ahead. After so many years of playing along these mortal games, it was never too difficult to simply evade and escape. But she did not like heading into obvious and unknown deceptions. The only reason she went along was that, as was the case all too often, it was the only direction to go.

XVII

Witches’ Song Eight

So you see,

like water spinning round

down the drain,

we suck up these troubled and toiling souls,

pooling them thickly together,

for now is the time

to set prey against prey,

and watch as these our proud planets,

rotating both near and far,

pass over our sun’s brilliant surface.

The small moons we have spun

will cross too, providing an illuminating eclipse

down into the pit

of dear darkness.

XVIII

Vidot was getting hungry. He sat on the peak of Will’s head, listening to Oliver talk on endlessly as they strolled into the unlit city park. “You’ve never been here? Really? The Bois is incredible, there’s no place like it in the world. See that sign for the zoo over there? During the Siege of Paris the besieged citizens took the animals out of their cages, cooked them up, and served them at Paris’s finest restaurant, on their best china. I had never thought of a zoo as an exotic larder before, but I suppose it is, potentially at least.”

Riding along, the flea’s mind wandered; he had his own memories of the Bois, for this was where he had first wooed Adèle. They had met a few months after the Occupation, he was a patrolman whose bruised sense of pride and patriotism was only beginning to recover. She was younger than him, a student of the classics at the university. They had met at the library. Adèle lived with her widowed mother in a one-bedroom flat where they drank ginger tea and ate very little. Vidot lived with two other patrolmen in a small apartment a few neighborhoods away, which made courtship difficult. So the pair of them would steal away for walks here in this park, the infamous Bois de Boulogne. He recalled kissing her against trees and slipping his hand beneath her blouse, how the feel of the warmth of her soft skin against his touch deliciously confused him, separating his body from his mind and taking him to a realm where the only things that existed had to be felt or tasted, like heat and flesh and desire. As the tender recollection returned, he desperately wanted to keep hold of it, the way one savors a delicious flavor before it vanishes from the mouth, but as hard as he tried, his grasp of the memory was slipping away, because this man Oliver would not shut up.

“Oh, and gosh you wouldn’t believe it, in the nineteenth century they had an exhibit of human beings in the park. Live ones, Zulus and Pygmies. The whole city came out to gawk. I suppose that is what people now do with their
National Geographic
magazines, ogle the natives’ bare black buttocks and fulsome breasts, but it strikes me as particularly surreal to have it happen live and in person. Do you think any of the sophisticates strolling in that human zoo looked into the noble savages’ eyes and found a universal brother? Seriously, one has to wonder, in that particular scenario, which side of the iron cage the savages were on.”

As they made their way along the familiar path, the flea looked over to a passing row of benches. He could not recall where specifically, but he knew they had been sitting near here when he had decided to propose to Adèle. It was a Saturday, he recalled, and while they had often laughed and joked about the funny people who strolled by with their parasols, their little pets, and their ill-behaved children, that one particular day Adèle had seemed more thoughtful than usual, almost distant. He had wondered if she was sad, or perhaps distracted, but then he noticed that she was simply paying very close attention to all the things around them, the textures, the light, the nuance of each distinct element, the blossoms and the buds. Probing with some seemingly lighthearted philosophical question, he learned that Adèle did not see life as so many did, a mere entertainment to be enjoyed or blindly consumed, and she did not see it as Vidot did, a great series of interlocking puzzles waiting to be solved. Instead, she described her vision of life as an enormous great act held within an infinite and immutable instant, one where she was present both as a witness and a participant. He was stunned, recognizing this idea of existence was the most logical and true interpretation he had ever encountered, and he knew that he had to marry Adèle and become one with those eyes and that mind, or else he would never experience what it meant to be present in the world.

“And right over there, back in 1900, they held the tug-of-war competition during the Olympic Games. Believe it or not, tug-of-war was quite the competitive sport back in the day. Incredible, isn’t it? I believe Sweden won. I recall reading that someplace, as a child I was quite the encyclopedic sports trivia wunderkind.”

Listening to Oliver rattle on, Vidot was reminded that he himself could also talk too much, especially about his work. He wondered if this had driven Adèle away. He recalled how he was always diving into details about his grisly cases. Even once they were solved, he kept the stories alive. How many times had he told the tale of the wedding groom found with the hatchet in his head (the priest did it). He wondered if he had been curious enough about Adèle’s life, toiling there amid the long shelves and crowded stacks of the library. He always assumed that his work, with its stories of thieves, cheats, scoundrels, and scourges was something she would want to know more about. But perhaps that was a false assumption; yes, probably so. Thinking about it now, he wanted to slap himself.

“Once upon a time, these woods teemed with criminals. Pierre Belon was murdered by highwaymen right down that path. Do you know Belon? Remarkable man, an explorer, naturalist, artist, actually he sketched out one of my most favorite drawings, a scientific comparison of a man’s skeleton and a bird’s. Amazingly parallel, bone for bone. Pierre Belon, my, my, what a fantastic person. Now, if memory serves, this is where we tuck into the brush to get to Brandon’s little meet-up spot. He’s rather fond of this cloak-and-dagger stuff.”

Vidot knew he had to stop obsessing about Adèle and concentrate on the matters at hand, but being back in the park had brought all the memories of their courtship blossoming to life, and now his small mind could not stop recalling how energetic Adèle had been when they were first together. He remembered her loving him so completely, so generously, looking up at him afterward, the sweat covering both their bodies, their breathing still hard. “Was that nice for you?” she asked, adding coyly, “Is there anything else you want?” He had not been a particularly adventurous lover, he did the things he believed one was supposed to do, diligently attentive, sweet and romantic, not clinical or cold but certainly not as imaginative, ravenous, or physically demanding as what he had witnessed between her and Alberto. Of course, over the years the constancy of their passion had abated, growing more intermittent and a bit more predictable, but in all that time he had never stopped desiring her; the beauty of her naked body, even as they aged, always thrilled him.

Thinking about their life, though, he realized that there was an imbalance between her desire and what he had provided. Clearly, he had left her wanting more over time. When she had asked, “Is there anything else you want?” she was speaking of her own needs, longing for a kind of affection he had never provided. She had wanted so much more than even what they shared when they had first hungrily groped, lusted, and kissed beneath these dark, obscuring trees. Instead he had given her steadily less. How had he ever let that happen? Perhaps he had let his intellect play too large a role in their life, and, instead of embracing, devouring, and taking her, out of some pure animal need, he had been too rational, analyzing her moods and desires, merely appreciating her when he should have been loving her. He realized that while he had been approaching her body like it was some dry tome, there to be studied and read, someone had come along and snatched the book off the shelf.

The anxiety of all this guilt-inducing second-guessing left him light-headed and hungry. Once again, he reminded himself that he would have to find something to focus on other than Adèle. But first he had to eat. Scrambling deep into the brush of Will’s hair, he dug in his fangs. The woozy satisfaction came fast and hit hard, blurring his senses, the warm blood washing all thoughts of his wife away. He wondered if this is what the hashish and heroin addicts experienced, cured from the daily pains of existence as senses dulled down and the mind clouded over. He was almost unconscious when, like a napping child hearing guests arrive, he vaguely registered a number of new, unrecognizable voices. Curious, he stumbled sleepily down the crest of Will’s skull and fuzzily tried to focus on what was happening in the woods.

A small group of people stood around a clearing in the trees. He counted seven in all, including Will and Oliver. The only other one Vidot recognized was Zoya (he had learned the brunette’s name earlier that day when a lustful Will had been earnestly repeating it during their early-morning exertions). Across from her, another young woman was pointing a gun at Zoya. Another man had a gun pointed at the woman. He, in turn, had a gun pointed at him. What the hell is happening? thought Vidot. I turn my back for one minute and the whole world gets a gun? Then he noticed that while everyone was speaking English, only one of them, the young woman, had an English accent. The rest were Americans, Ah yes, thought Vidot, Americans do like their guns. People started talking fast and he had a hard time following what they were saying.