Babayaga: A Novel (6 page)

When she reached her room she found it was quite spacious. She ran the faucet. The pipes rattled and banged but the water came out clean. She opened the windows and, reaching into her bag, took out a small stub of a red candle. After lighting it, she removed a few small striped feathers from her pocket and placed them on the outside of the window. She dripped the candle wax onto their thin quills to fasten them to the sill, pressing them into place with a centime. The birds would find her, maybe not tonight, but soon.

From another pocket she took a piece of chalk and wrote a row of small words on the inside of the hotel room’s door. Then she filled the tub and took off her clothes.

A hot bath almost always made her recall the fierce, frigid cold that had, through the years, so often clenched its teeth into her bones. She had to be careful with memories. When they flooded her unexpectedly, triggered perhaps by something as slight as the scent of blooming dianthus or the sharp taste of anise, they could overwhelm and debilitate her. But it felt safe to recall those deathly days of ice and cold when she was tucked in a warm bath. It was as if, enshrouded and cloaked in the thick cloud of rising steam, the ever-hunting frost could not find her.

There had been five of them when they began their flight west from St. Petersburg. They had watched every train pull out of the Warsaw Station, the cars headed west toward the Balkans, packed full of deserting soldiers, all pale-faced and drunk with desperation, impure vodka, and the mighty relief of escape. The city’s spare horses were all gone—eaten or seized—and the handful of automobiles in the city had been taken too, commandeered by panicked priests and overflowing with the frightened remnants of their splintered congregations. Their faces stared out as they sped by, heading fast to the border in their stolen cars. Too tired to coax their passage, still exhausted from weeks of furiously wrought protective spells, the five women watched as all those in the city who could took flight, and then they followed, on foot, trailing the last vehicles’ sputtering black exhaust, steadfastly heading down the frozen roads toward nothing.

The first lost had been Mazza, a day into the journey, shot dead as they stole a pair of mares from a barn. Zoya had looked back when she heard the gun’s report and saw Mazza’s eye explode out in wild, crimson red. They had not slowed their pace and the woman’s body was left behind, lying crooked, facedown, with the snow staining scarlet around her as they galloped their new horses away.

Three days later, the hard-driven mares already dead, the women had been running across a frozen estuary when Lyda broke through, sinking with only half a gurgled shriek, the heavy hidden current hungrily gulping down her last gasp, her thick knit woolen clothes making the swallowing simple for the river. Again they did not pause—no one looked back and nothing was said. Any words spoken would only slow their momentum.

Basha was the last to go. Sneaking from their campsite into a nearby village to forage for food, she had muttered a small charm for protection and disappeared down the road. Elga had slept soundly that night, curled up in her guttural snore, but Zoya lay awake, staring up at the stark claws of winter branches looming above her, waiting for Basha’s familiar footsteps to return to camp. When Elga finally rose the next morning and saw Basha had not made it back, she insisted they leave at once. Tucking her bulky Nagant into her belt, Elga patted the pistol. “We can sit here and wait, see who comes. But if it is not Basha, well, I only have so many bullets. You know, I always say the best plan is to run.” And so they turned south, and they ran.

For the rest of their journey, Zoya could sense the three lost women following their trail, one bloodied and blind, one soaked, spitting fish scales, and one invisible, a ghost in a ghost. She could feel them at her heels, haunting and hovering over as she and Elga pressed on, bearing down side roads, hiding from passing armies, and digging out forgotten root crops and semispoiled cabbages from the hard soil. Finally, in the warrens and maze of old Krakow, she and the old woman slipped free from the noose of their past, finding a rich bounty in the classical warming comfort of wealthy men’s laps and thick bankbooks. Pianos gaily played while she laughed and giggled, bouncing down into the deep plush divans and soft velvet lounge chairs, eating goose pâté, mushroom pierogi, and hot
naleśniki
topped with Finnish cloudberries while sipping bottomless crystal glasses of sparkling
Perlwein
and foamy steins of cold winter ale. The world was new once more. She remembered Elga laughing too, peering out from behind curtains and fogging service windows, staying back in the shadows of the kitchens and coatrooms while chuckling and clapping with relief as Zoya’s snares caught their prey, watching her kiss, swoon, and giggle for the magistrates’ fathers, the costermongers’ sons, and every furrier’s drunk uncle. Drowned out by the musical, mirthful tambourine jingle and bass drum din, Zoya’s three ghosts finally receded, like water seeping away into the soil, though she sensed they were merely settling below the sediment, always close, constant in their waiting.

There was a knock at the door. Zoya rose from the bath and wrapped herself in her robe. The new desk clerk, a tall, sweating boy with acne, had hauled up one of her trunks. She tipped him and let him go.

Picking through the luggage, she found the white dress with the faded orange polka dots and the red high heels. It was not much, but it was all she needed. Krakow was long past, and now time had chased her into this corner, this bare room, this bone-stark poverty. But she had been here many times before. Looking herself over in the bathroom mirror, she saw over a hundred years of this race, this unending run. She knew its predictable rhythms, its steely electrical hum, she knew the necessary steps she would have to follow. She could almost hear the tempo starting up now, the tune that played for this dance she knew so well. It led to the unrelenting hunger of hearts, to lustful, searching eyes, and creeping, confident hands, to souls who believed that what they could touch they could own. She would give them all they wanted. There would be amorous whispers, false promises, ecstatic moans, and, if they wished it, even pleading, playful cries of pain. Every desire would be fulfilled, for night after night, and mornings too, until, in a snap or a sip, a slice or a shove, that final question, the greatest mystery, that which they had pondered for so long in their church pews and lecture halls, would finally be revealed for them. What a gift she would give. She smiled nervously at her reflection. Yes, she would provide them with everything. She always did. All her remembering was done. Now it was time to hunt.

VIII

Will checked his watch. It was only eight-twenty but the little nightclub was already a loud, crowded haze of Gitanes and Gauloises. A Cannonball Adderley LP bopped alto saxophone out through poor belabored speakers and people shouted in a rough cacophony above the music. Will was not surprised that his new friend was late. Oliver seemed to possess that sort of joie de vivre that did not lend itself to punctuality. Will was only surprised to find himself there. He did not particularly need to seek out new friends, as there were always nice ex-pat dinner parties to go to—the Lion’s Club was hosting its weekly dinner that night, where he could have caught up with the many merry midwesterners who now lived here—and, even more preferably, he could have been on dates with pretty girls who were never too hard to find.

Though he had to admit, he had been growing a little wary of romance of late. When he had first arrived, he had quickly and happily embraced the ease of Parisian romance. Initially, he had only dated expat girls, but found that the British and Americans not only smoked too much (in fact, constantly) but also shared the habit of holding every cigarette in the same pronounced pose, as if they were about to say something of vital importance. Then, inevitably, they talked breathlessly and pretentiously and said nothing of interest to him at all. They were all young, overheated Rosalind Russells or Kate Hepburns, but without the scriptwriters on hand to supply them with decent material. Besides that, far too few of them remembered to relax enough to smile, and even when he got them into bed he found they were still affected, as if they were doing what they thought a woman was supposed to do, but nothing for which they had any instinct, or even desire.

Over time he built up enough confidence to start dating the local girls; they were more at ease with him, playing, teasing, and fun, and they enjoyed helping him improve his French. One girl called herself his “sleeping dictionary,” and, in the depths of many nights, his fumbling attempts to convert his rustic French-Canadian into cosmopolitan Parisian had provided a good laugh. The Paris girls did make him feel a little self-conscious, like a redneck newly arrived in the big city, but they were almost all kind and generous girls, thoughtful and easy to get along with. More important, he enjoyed their boldness and their sexual style: they were much more physically open than the Americans or Brits; some insisted on being spanked like bad girls and others wanted to be wrestled down like wild animals, while still others simply swooned and sighed like modern dancers and then shared a cigarette with him after. But it was all entirely comfortable; they came into his life and then wandered off again with an ease he found surprising.

There were two of them, Marie and Nicole, whom he had dated for lengthy stretches, taking one skiing up in Morzine, the other sailing along the coast of Brittany, but in each case, the girls had drifted away, taking longer and longer to follow up on the messages he left until ultimately his calling cards went completely unanswered. He did not mind, for while he had been happy enough to buy them the cigarettes, silk stockings, and chewing gum they desired, he sensed they were aiming for the sort of men who also came with their own ski chalets, open cars, and cruising yachts.

Occasionally, he would see a girl he had once been with riding along down the avenue on the back of a Vespa or drinking wine with another boy at a bar, and they would all innocently wave and smile. It all seemed perfectly natural, but after a while it began to wear on him, leaving him feeling as though all he had been to any of them was an exotic treat, “
l’américain
,” or, as the menus in town put it, “
le dessert du moment
.”

So, while he continued to date fairly regularly, going out dancing or catching a movie, he found spending a whole night with them to be what those pretentious British girls might have labeled an existentially empty event. He didn’t quite know what to call it. All he knew was that when he woke up with some new girl sleeping beside him, either in his flat or hers, he often felt substantially less whole, as though he was losing a piece of himself through every encounter, slowly dissipating, dissolving, bits of him vanishing into the vacuum of the world, and, with every conquest, becoming in some manner more hollowed out. It was exactly the opposite feeling he had expected to feel with these sorts of heady, libidinal victories. He had been raised to believe they would provide him with some sense of validation; that’s what he’d gathered from the way his uncles had talked about women (“babes,” “honeys,” “broads”) when the men took him hunting up in northern Michigan. They’d boozily spit out ribald stories of stag parties and bawdy burlesque shows involving generous fat-bottomed and bosomy women who would put two tits in your face for a quarter but whose names no one could ever recall.

The emptiness was easy to shake off and move on from, but it had its effect. He had lately found himself less inclined to chase the pretty smiles of Paris and spent more time wandering the streets alone, eating in the bistros and reading the paper or sitting up late with a book, a Herman Wouk novel, Hemingway’s Nick Adams tales, or a collection of Stephen Crane. He was not lonely, but he had grown isolated. He was ready for something different. Perhaps that was why he was here, he thought, glancing around the bar, waiting for his charismatic new friend who seemed like the sort who would come primed with volumes of trivial anecdotes, personal connections, and pertinent intelligence.

The couple sitting at the bar to the right of Will had been busily necking since he got there, and although it was still early, there was already a man at a table nearby apparently asleep though still upright in his chair. The sleeping man’s head bobbed, either along with the music or simply out of reflex, it was impossible to tell. Will finished his Pernod and put out his cigarette and was rising to leave when he felt a tap on his shoulder.

“Hullo, hullo,” said Oliver with a smile. “Sorry we’re late. William, I’d like you to meet Boris and Ned.” He nodded to the odd couple standing beside him. One of them—Will guessed it was Boris because the man looked like a parody of a Russian brute—loomed at a height Will guessed to be somewhere north of six foot six. This Boris was a lantern-jawed man with a chest as broad as a Klondike bear’s and shoulders so wide they blocked Will’s view of the rest of the bar. His features wore an unpleasant expression as if his face had been shoved into a dingy, wet dishrag. The woman standing beside him was as short as Boris was tall, maybe five feet at best. She wore her hair in a short brown bob, and her vulpine face held the same dismal, distasteful scowl as the Russian’s. She was puffing a nickel cigar that made her look like an ornery cowboy from some old Walter Brennan oater. “Boris’s real name isn’t actually Boris,” explained Oliver with a chuckle, “but it suits him to a T, don’t you think? On the other hand, Ned here really is named Ned. Ha ha. She looks meaner than she is, Will, I promise, though I warn you she is an absolute terror at dominoes—play that woman at your own risk. So, then”—he leaned over conspiratorially toward Will—“did you bring that knife?”

Will was about to answer when Ned tugged at Oliver’s sleeve and pointed to the neighboring table.

“Oh my, look! There’s Jake!” Oliver shouted, grabbing Will by the arm and leading him over to where the sleeping man was still bobbing his head. “Jake, old man! Wake up!” he said, kicking the man’s chair.