Babayaga

Toby Barlow BABAYAGA A Novel

Dedicated to Richard Peabody & Rob Stothart, both poets & teachers & good, honest men

Man hunts and fights. Woman contrives and dreams; she is the mother of fancy, of the gods. She possesses glimpses of the second sight; and has wings to soar into the infinitude of longing and imagination. The better to count the seasons, she scans the skies. But earth has her heart as well.

—MICHELET

Women must tell men always that they are the strong ones. They are the big, the strong, the wonderful. In truth, women are the strong ones. It is just my opinion, I am not a professor.

—COCO CHANEL

PROLOGUE

There are facts and there are lies. There are true lovers with bad alibis. The world is a busy hive, filled with stories that have been retold over and again ever since our tongues learned to talk and our ears first opened. We hear all this, yet we are still lost, barely making out our path in the pale, inconstant light. As the ancient man said, we know nothing. But I can tell you this much is true, this happened. I know, because my elder sister wrote of it to me in a letter sent late last autumn, of how, behind the high walls of a fading castle, tucked in a valley not far from the northern border of France, a woman in her later years brought out an old guitar and, strumming it gently to find the tune, announced to the night, “I will sing you a song now about when the babayagas fled to Paris…”

Book One

When I was living in Paris, we had an expression, a very American one, which in a way explains it better than anything else. We used to say, “Let’s take the lead.” That meant going off the deep end, diving into the unconscious, just obeying your instincts, following your impulses, of the heart, or the guts, or whatever you want to call it.

—HENRY MILLER, The Paris Review

I

Time was bothering Zoya. She lay on the broad bed amid the crumpled silk sheets, listening to Leon scrub and gargle in the bath. There was almost a cartoon melody being composed in the various noises of his evening toilette. He always fastidiously washed and perfumed himself after they made love, immersing himself in soaps, talc, and a cloud of eau de Lisbonne before he returned home to face his wife. Even on nights such as this, when his Claudette was out of town, he performed the ritual out of habit. Usually Zoya did not mind, but tonight the music made her sad.

Coming out of the bathroom with the steam billowing out around him, he looked like some gray ball of boiling fat spit out from a cauldron. “What is wrong, ma chérie?” he asked.

She remembered the day he had first found her while strolling through the Jardin des Plantes. When had they met? Was it the spring in ’45? Not long after the war had ended, when the Paris streets and nightclubs thronged thick with a mix of wide-eyed American and British soldiers fresh off the train from Calais and sniffing about for fun. She had her pick of any one of the swarm, but she found Leon instead, a stocky middle-aged Parisian of square chin and broad shoulders, far from the slouching fat man he had grown into. So much time had passed as she had watched his profile slip and slide steadily down from stout to rotund to fat, eyes growing cloudy, his bright blue irises dimming to a mottled gray, folding bloodshot beneath the heavy lids and puffy circles of wine-swollen flesh. When he was drunk on brandy, he loved to recount how he had once been a formidable athlete, back in his Catholic school days, but she had a hard time convincing herself of that, looking at him now, for he was simply a doughy old man, while she still looked as fresh as she had the day they first met.

“I have a small headache, I need fresh air,” she said. “Why don’t you get dressed and we can have a stroll before you go home?”

“At this hour? Ha! Have I not exhausted you yet?” As he toweled off his back, his vast white belly shook. It was almost too silly to watch.