Babayaga

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

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 Adele. 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. Adele 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 Adele. 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 Adele 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 Adele 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 Adele and become one with those eyes and that mind, or else he would never experience what it meant to be present in the world.