Babayaga

“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 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.”