Babayaga

Zoya came back in the room with two men. Weary-eyed, they looked like a pair of naughty seminary boys, their suits wrinkled, one with a fading bruise on his cheekbone and blood on his arm, the other one mud-stained and tousled. This is what happens, thought Andrei, when you fall in with a girl like Zoya.

As she introduced the two, there was an expression on her face that the priest had not seen for some time. Was that a blush, he wondered. Ah, perhaps she had fallen for one of these two. Zoya had always possessed a persistent romantic streak. Elga complained about it all the time, saying that it made Zoya soft. But Andrei knew otherwise, he had watched her turn too many of her lovers into corpses. She was not soft, but she could be sentimental. Yes, he could see she had something for this one with the bruised cheek. What a miraculous fountain love was, Andrei thought, ever flowing, ever refreshing, with a force too exhausting to even contemplate. He rose and gave them a polite smile. “Welcome,” he said in his rough French. “I am making some tea. Would you like some?”

The two both shook their heads. “No thank you,” said the taller one, in French but with an accent that sounded somewhere between British and American.

“Fine, then. In that case, you will have to excuse me.” Andrei took his old cassock off the wall hook and put it on. “I have a morning service to attend to. You are all welcome to stay, and if you are hungry you’ll find dried lentils and some potatoes in the pantry. There’s some Cantal cheese in the icebox too, but no bread.”

“Thank you, but I think—” the taller one began to say, but the priest was already out the door and did not hear the rest. Climbing onto his bicycle, Andrei started down the gravel road. The sun was not all the way up yet and he was already tired of this day.

XIII

Noelle had the chicken in her lap when Elga finally came back to the suite. The room stank of stale air and ammonia. “Mmmn, mmmn, little girl, what have you been up to?” growled the old woman, who looked beat-up and tired, with her eye now almost swollen shut. She trundled by Noelle on her way to the dresser, patting the girl’s head as she passed. “Come now. There’s a man out front with a car for us.” Noelle did not move.

She had only awoken a few hours earlier, lying on the floor in a pool of her own urine. She had halfheartedly mopped the mess up with bath towels and then left them in a wet pile by the couch. Her stomach felt acidic and hollow. She had climbed into the big yellow chair, determined to wait for Elga. The old woman would come back, she had to. After a little while, the chicken had emerged from behind the couch, approaching her gingerly, with tentative steps. “Don’t worry,” Noelle had said to the chicken, “I know it’s not your fault.” She took the chicken in her arms and sat there, curled up around the bird, both of them motionless through the morning. When, finally, the door opened and she saw Elga’s stooped silhouette waddle in, a ray of light shot through Noelle’s heart, but it was not enough to illuminate the darkness.

Now she sat watching as the old woman dug into the big suitcase, took out the old pistol, and tucked it into her belt. Elga patted the gun and a little smile crossed her lips. Then she emptied all the clothes from the dresser and the armoire into their suitcases.

“So, what?” Elga looked over at her occasionally as she packed. “Your chicken laid an egg?”

The little girl nodded.

“And you ate the egg.”

The girl nodded again.

Elga shut the suitcases and buckled them up. “Okay, so now, what, you think the stars are made from the bites of crocodile teeth, the sun is a boiling gob of God’s spit, and we are—I don’t know—slaves to all the white maggots that are down there writhing in our guts? You think things like that now, yes? The universe is so awful, so black and bad?” She stopped to look at the girl. Amazed, Noelle nodded a final yes. The old woman shrugged. “Ya, well, before you thought ballerina shoes and cream puffs made the world spin round. You are maybe closer to the right answer now. Go backward a bit, find your balance. It takes time.” She pulled the suitcases down onto the floor and started hauling them toward the door. “Come on now, I need help.”

“I’m not going,” said Noelle.

Elga stopped and looked at the girl. Noelle feared that the old woman would get angry, slap her or yank her hair to force her to go, but instead Elga’s features softened into an expression that could almost be described as kind, even sympathetic. Leaving the suitcases, the old woman came back and sat on the floor by the chair. She took the little girl’s hands in hers.

“Okay, how about I tell you a story? This is a true story, not a fairy-tale fable. Okay?”

“Okay.”

“Once upon a time, I had daughters too. I didn’t tell you that before, did I?”

Noelle shook her head no.