Babayaga

punctuate his various points, Oliver’s hand kept optimistically straying up her thigh. She let him have his fun.

At one point he paused mid-anecdote and looked her in the eye. “Zoya, my dear, you are intriguing.”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean, you’re a little strange.”

She smiled. “Oh no, I’m not, it is only that I am from a foreign land, and you are confused by our cultural differences.”

“I don’t think so. I know plenty of Russians and you’re different from that lot. Where did you grow up? Moscow? St. Petersburg?”

“A small town you’ve never heard of.”

“Oh, I know that town very well, it’s where so many pretty girls come from. But seriously, tell me about yourself, Zoya. I may come off as somewhat conceited and self-centered, and I suppose I am, but I can be observant too. At times tonight you’ve been absolutely luminescent, but in other moments, my God, girl, you get a look that is as heavy as an anvil.”

“That only sounds like a Russian to me, Oliver.”

“But—”

She patted his hand. “Maybe you should go home now, you’re drunk and tired.”

Oliver looked both amused and offended. “No, I’m most certainly wide awake. I feel like I’m Fred Astaire with Cyd Charisse in Silk Stockings.”

As his hand slid farther up her leg, she laughed. “Oliver, you make your passes the way Americans kill Indians.”

“What are you talking about?”

“Did you ever know any Indians?”

Oliver paused. “American Indians or Indian Indians?”

“The ones from your country, the ones you all killed.” His hand slid down between her thighs.

“I’m sure I certainly didn’t kill a single Indian. But I can’t say I personally know any, either.”

Zoya looked into her glass of wine. “But it’s funny, don’t you think? The way you Americans killed them. I read about it in a book once. How you would make treaties, yes? And then you would break the treaties so they would get upset and make war, and so you would kill them, and then there were new treaties? And you kept going and going, the same trick, over and again, until there weren’t any more Indians.”

“Well, they’re not all dead,” Oliver said, shaking his head. “But, of course, it was appalling.”

“Yes, a tragedy, but rather clever too, no?” she said. “You almost made it appear to be an accident. Sloppy and offhand, like spilling red wine on a rug. It was the same way Stalin killed, a few here, a million there, a few sips of vodka in between. That is the way to do it. Now, Nazis, they were serious and efficient about it, so German and well organized, that it could not be ignored. If they were more like you perhaps they would have gotten away with killing all those Jews. But the Germans were simply too obvious and clear in their purpose.”

Oliver looked at her with amazement. “Look, I don’t think—”

She laughed. “Never mind.” Now she placed her hand on his leg.

He smiled, shaking his head in bewilderment. “I merely want to say, as an American, that I believe our genocidal habits are well behind us.”

“Well, you did drop that atom bomb.”

He raised a tipsy finger. “Only to make a point.”

She leaned over and kissed him on the cheek. “Enough talk, Oliver, we should leave while you are still reasonably sober. I don’t like lovers who prefer their booze to my body. So, we go to your room now?”

“Yes,” he chuckled, surprised at her frankness. He threw a handful of francs on the bar and wrapped his arm around her shoulder. “Cold war indeed.”

VII

Seated on a bench on the hospital grounds, watching the gardener clip the hedges, the girl thought about what the old woman had been telling her. It was exciting, so many possibilities. The old woman had made her swear by the saints to keep it a secret, but even if she had wanted to share it, the other patients were too far gone to confide in. Even sweet Martine, who had her moments of clarity, was sure to break out into one of her nonsense songs before Noelle could get through the whole tale.

The old woman had become Noelle’s only reliable company at the hospital. Nurses came and went with their shifts, their only concern being whether she had tried to hurt herself again. Her parents had not visited in a month, and the last time they were there her father had stood in his gray suit staring with a grim, pale expresssion at the scars on her wrists, while her mother rattled on about the tangled state of her hair. Now the two of them were off traveling to visit relatives in Brittany and would not be back for a few more weeks. At first her loneliness had been profound and she lay in her hospital cot with slack-jawed despair, but then the old woman had found her and now it seemed things were going to be very different.

It had happened a few nights earlier, just after her melancholy had crept back like a black beast coming to eat at her heart. Noelle was sitting up in her bed, looking out her hospital window and wondering if she would ever trust herself again, out there in the wilds of the world. Every thought that came into her mind tortured and oppressed her. Recalling her mother’s eyes, or remembering the swarms of small children playing wild in the schoolyard, or even the memory of the sea of shiny black umbrellas that filled the rainy boulevards, all these random recollections made her chest ache.

“So, tell me, what do you see up there in that night sky?” said a voice behind her.

She looked and found the old woman standing by her bed. Noelle was not frightened, the staff often came through after-hours to check on the patients. “I don’t see anything out there but darkness,” she said.

“Ah,” said the old woman, sitting down beside her and roughly patting her on the back. “That is good. Very good. I have known Gypsies that will tell you they can read your fortune in the stars. But they only do this to trick you into looking up. They say, ‘Look close! There is the Leo, there is the Aries!’ and while you are squinting up into the blackness, these Gypsies stay plenty busy picking your pockets below.” They were both silent for a moment. “I hate Gypsies,” the old woman said, and then she got up and waddled off, disappearing down the hallway.

The next day the old woman returned after the lights had been turned off, coming out of the gloomy blue shadows carrying a comb and brush. She reached into the pocket of her skirt and pulled out a sucette. “Here,” she said.

The girl happily took the lollipop as Elga sat down on the corner of her bed and began working the knots out of the girl’s black hair. As she worked, the old woman asked questions in her short, blunt way and, knot by knot, with a mouth full of the sweet sucette, Noelle told her the short, sad story of her life.

Ever since she could remember, she had wanted to be a ballerina. She had trained and practiced, starving herself to be as thin as those beautiful creatures she watched flitting about the spot-lit stage draped in silk ribbons and tulle. Her mother had been more than encouraging, pressuring her to always be top of her class, taking her to the city to see the Opera Ballet and then sitting in on all her lessons. Her father had paid sums far beyond what they could afford for the best schools and most highly regarded teachers. They lived outside Paris in a small country village, but there was a bus, and Noelle and her mother rode in for classes three times a week, often not returning home until long after her father was asleep. Finally, although her teachers intimated that she might not yet be ready, Noelle’s mother insisted it was time to try out for a spot in the Academy.

The audition had been even more rigorous than she could have imagined. She felt tense and nervous and it all went wrong, her battement frappe was too weak, her deboules awkward, and every arabesque painfully unsteady. As she finished her final routine she did not even need to see the distracted and bored expressions on the judges’ faces. In fact, she knew she had failed before the music even finished. Stopping there on the empty stage and listening as the piano’s last small high note echoed out into the air, she felt the ancient theater creak, crack, and begin to collapse around her, breaking apart into a hundred thousand splinters that fell at her feet. The walls caved in and the ceiling came down as her entire world tumbled and crashed in around her—her little village, the rolling countryside, waves of