Babayaga

They drove out of the 8th, down the Champs-Élysées, and crossed the river. Driving up the Left Bank, she watched the short woman emerge at one corner and the large oaf of a man crawl out at another. Finally the cab stopped in front of a café and she watched the tall thin man pay the cabbie and head in. This would not be too difficult, she thought. For starters, he was alone. Also, he was handsome enough, lean, and sharp looking. She’d done her fair share of work with ugly ones in the past, men with faces so pimpled and flabby her stomach turned merely at the memory of them.

She found Oliver sitting at the bar, hunched like a thirsty crane over a Pernod. She sat down in the manner of an old friend, and with, six words, whispered backward, had him convinced that they actually had met before. Three drinks later, a few double entendres, and a hand on a knee had him convinced he would be seeing much more of her.

She had asked very little, but as he smoked and drank through the night, Oliver told her quite a lot. He was a writer and a publisher, he said. He had rowed crew in college, his parents had hoped for him to study law, following the family tradition (a grandfather on his mother’s side had been a Supreme Court justice). Zoya had listened, smiled, and nodded along, though it all meant very little. He said he had fallen in love with Paris after the war and had lived here off and on, ever since then, now over in the 5th arrondissement.

“Decades of lessons and tutorials plus years spent here, and the locals still say my French is only fairly good,” he said.

“You understand my French,” she said. “That’s good enough, oui?”

He smiled warmly at her. Testing the spell of familiarity, she had said that he seemed happier than he’d been the last time she saw him, but at this, Oliver shook his head in dismay. “Glad to hear I’m putting on an optimistic front, but no, the thunderheads are looming, I’m afraid, and nothing’s panning out. My humble little magazine’s about to go under, we’ve lost our biggest benefactor, you see, and if I don’t come up with some grand stroke of genius, well, I’ll have to pack it in and go home.”

“Perhaps your writing will be successful.”

“What writing?”

“You’re an author, no? Did you not say—”

“Oh, yes, I did, didn’t I?” This had made him erupt with a burst of drunken laughter, a startling sound that reminded her of a mule’s braying, but then his face grew somber again. “Well, I was a real writer for a stretch, banging away at the typewriter every morning, big ideas billowing like thick cumulus clouds across the horizons of my mind, and all that bunk. Hemingway says the best writing is when you are in love, and it’s true, but then something happened, a kind of personal tragedy, and I was forced to stop. You might say I was scarred. Anyway, since then, my mind’s been a blank. Oh wait, I did have one idea, I thought I’d write down the crudest pornography I could think of, then hit the Roget’s hard and doll it all up into a novel. Figured if I dead-on nailed it I could get the book banned in the U.S., a nice nasty scandal would erupt, and international sales would shoot through the roof. Miller and Nabokov both managed that trick quite well, of course. But then of course mother would want to see it and, well…” He stopped to sip his drink. “For quite a long time I felt guilty about abandoning my writing, but then I heard a story that helped. A taxicab driver told it to me—he was Russian too. You see, before the revolution there was a Muscovite writer, magnificently talented, who was known for his brutal realism, real hard stuff, like Gorky, only darker. His work exposed the callous ugliness of the tsars, the starving peasants, the pestilence and fever, the whole shebang. Then, of course, the revolution came and, like the rest of the true believers, he bought all of it, brotherhood, unity, fraternity, the works. Of course, then comrades began disappearing into Black Marias; the state was seizing journalists, neighbors, all of them, poof, vanishing like some sort of terrible magic trick, and this writer began to worry. So he worked up a canny little strategy to dodge the ax: from that point forward, he only wrote nonsense. Kitchen sinks barking recipes to mops, cattle mournfully mooing out tennis scores, salt shakers singing nursery rhymes—the man had no agenda, but he had to write, because all he knew how to do was weld verbs and nouns together into some kind of powerful harmony. In the end, of course, Stalin suspected this fellow was up to something, so bang, they shot that writer dead. End of story. Well now, this tale certainly shook me, but I also took some solace from it. When the revolution does arrive and the committee gathers to judge, they won’t be able to hang me for any of my work, for I am the writer who never writes.”