by Toby Barlow
She slept there through the rest of the day. Then, late in the afternoon, as the sun began disappearing behind a wall of dark clouds, a flap on the lower edge of the cabin swung open with a hard bang. A baritone voice like a swamp bullfrog’s called out. “You, in the dirt there. Come inside now. It’s going to thunder.” Then another trap door popped open beneath the house, beside one of the cabin’s stilts. Crawling close, Zoya found that there were footholds carved into the side of the birch leg. She climbed up into the dark room. While its contents seemed wondrous at the time, it was no different from the other lairs Elga would stitch together again in St. Petersburg, Warsaw, Riga, Ostrava, Kiev, and scores of other cities. There were rows of dead creatures, skinned and dried, earthen bowls of moldy bulbs and moss, stacks of fungi and gnarled roots stewing in open pots of luminous orange, pale gray, and olive green liquids. Volumes of loose-bound manuscripts, books, and papers were piled up, some pages torn out, hand-scratched and nailed to the rough walls. The small stone fireplace had a cracked chimney that the smoke leaked out of, making the atmosphere murky and hard to inhale. But the fire did kick out a strong heat, and Zoya was immediately drawn to its side while the old woman bolted tight the floor hatch behind her. Pulling up a stool, Elga sat down close to make a study of the girl.
“So, some villager told you about my home?”
Zoya shook her head no. Elga nodded. “You know who I am, then?”
Zoya shook her head again. Elga gave her a grin that was almost warm. “Well, you look hungry. I have good yarrow soup. Eat first, then we can talk.”
Along with the warm broth and vegetables, Elga served the girl the simple truthsayer recipe Zoya had long since memorized. It worked the way liquor does, only more so, and after an hour the old woman had pulled out the girl’s tale, her rape and abuse, her father’s death, her germinal child, all of it streaming from Zoya’s lips without a tear or a shiver. Every hardship of her life was reduced to batches of sounds that Zoya handed over to her hostess in exchange for more soup and a chance to stay by the warm fire.
When she was finished, Elga looked at her for a moment. “You would like help?”
Zoya solemnly nodded.
“Fine, fine,” the old woman said, clearing the empty soup bowl away. “I will help you, of course I am happy to, but it will cost you, and we must decide now how you will pay.”
“But I have nothing,” Zoya meekly replied.
Elga shook her finger at the young girl and her eyes flared. “We all can pay, girl, and you owe me too. You think soup comes free? I broke my back carrying that wood to burn in that fire. By any honest count, you already owe me more than you know.”
Zoya looked around, nervously realizing that she had trapped herself in a house with no windows and a locked door. “Please,” she pleaded, “I have nothing.”
“There, there, do not be so hard on yourself,” the old woman said, shifting her hard expression to a crafty smile. She reached out and softly stroked Zoya’s tearstained cheek. “Every soul with a breath has to pay someone for something. But do not fear, it will not be so bad. What, you think I want to hurt you? You believe those awful stories the village fathers tell their stupid children to keep them enslaved at home? ‘Oh, do not go into the woods, there is a woman there who will eat you.’ Bah. We are going to help each other, you and me. It’s a small price, a little help. That is all I need. Only a little…”
Now, in the small Parisian apartment, methodically collecting the scattered owl pellets from the windowsill, Zoya reflected on what that exchange had, in truth, cost her. Elga had taken more than a little. The price staggered her mind and flooded her with dark emotion, so she tried, as she so often tried, to shove the thoughts away and shut a heavy door on the past. But she never could succeed for long, the memories always pushed their way through.
First, there had been the child buried in her belly. That decision was one she felt she had to make, but the memory lurked in her, a ghost that had never ceased to burn. Allergic to the past, whenever the recollection came it was so clear in her mind it caused her throat to constrict, making it hard to swallow. Only when she traced the memory thread along its twisted path, seeing again how stark her lack of choice had been, could she let go of the guilt and let herself breathe again. Elga had led her through the logic of that painful conclusion the very first night and then taken her through the bloody purging. The old woman nursed her to recovery in the days that followed, the ordeal creating a bond between the women, Zoya now feeling that there was one soul on earth looking out for her, while Elga observed the girl’s grit and strength and silently counted the ways her newfound friend could be of use.
Whenever the sharp regrets stabbed at her, Zoya reminded herself that the child she lost had been conceived in violence, a bloody curse that had followed her from that moment Grigori seized her in the bedroom until the night she screamed as Elga tore it from her body. Every good thing since then had been tinged with the red stain of that violence. Time was not absolute, and even without witchery she could travel right back to that instant, loom above it, and watch the last vestige of her simple humanity pulled out of her, a dark mark punctuating the end of so much innocence. She came up out of that bath a new creature with a new path and purpose, and with Elga’s guidance (which was always as twisted as a weed root in drought), Zoya began a course of action that had its own logic, rules, and blunt necessity.
As the season began to change, the two women had wrapped themselves up and begun journeying the cold roads together. They never returned to those woods. For decade upon decade they covered the breadth of the continent, rarely resting for long, a year here, a few months there. They went in all four directions, wherever loose fortunes and safe travel could be found. When armies advanced, they followed in the rear guard’s wake, sharing spoils as their luck held solid. They had more than a few narrow scrapes but had always managed to escape clean, packing up and making their tactical retreats, before any real pressure was brought to bear. They were generally careful and quick, looking for sparks of suspicion in observers’ eyes so that they could be gone long before the thought ever reached those watchers’ minds.
Their exits almost always coincided with funerals, and Zoya could count her victims the way Homer counted ships. Legions of soldiers, brokers, barons, bailiffs, and fools had all fallen before her. Murmured instructions into the ears of sleepy-eyed Arabian horses led cavalry lovers to broken necks, and she had coaxed the arc of battlefield bullets and the aim of cannons’ muzzles into many a cursed chest. Some farewells came with great repercussions—a fever sent up a sleeping vizier’s knobby spine had once brought a whole kingdom down—though most were simpler transitions, a few even humane, merely a touch of the unwanted slipped into their tea or a fumbling foot on a loose stair, sending masonry hard against the victim’s head.
No one had ever looked to her for explanation; if she was ever noticed, it was only as a discreet courtesan, a rumored inamorata, or a laughing, playful harlot, always so easily forgotten.
She did have a quiver of curses reserved to make the bad ones suffer, and the bullies and savage sadists ultimately met pains that came in larger dimensions than even their base and brutal imaginations could conjure. Some had cuticle nicks that festered until the arms withered off as minds went feeble, others went into lavatories and never returned, as bowels fell out with bowel movements and whole men disappeared, sucked down into their foul latrines. The ones she despised most she killed best, as in a nightmare, bare naked, rocking astride their sweating bodies, until that ultimate moment came when their bodies tensed, poised for satisfaction. That was when she put her finger to their Adam’s apple and deftly pushed the windpipe shut. Their eyes went wide as she watched with grim pleasure, their one final victory eternally denied. Thusly, every exit was tailored to suit a nature: some came tinged with regret, others felt better.
There was one she had almost spared. He was a military engineer, an officer and hero from the lost war for Crimea. A
ll she cared for was his kindness, the thoughtfulness he showed by bringing bowls of fruit to their bedside in the morning, the way his green eyes gazed at her with so much affection, and how his hand resting on her hip made her cheeks blush as red as a cut thumb. “Don’t make me put this one down. I’ll walk away, but let’s let him live,” she said to Elga. The old woman said nothing, simply undertook the job herself. Passing as a chambermaid, Elga slipped some echoing curses into the folds of his uniform. The spell seeped into his chest at a steady rate until the delirium overtook him. Zoya received the news as she returned one morning to their grand hotel. He had hanged himself, tying sheets to the bannister and tossing himself down the wide open stairwell. As he choked to death, a fumbling, terrified guest tried to cut him loose with a dull dinner knife. Elga later admitted to the spell, said it had to be done, and after that day Zoya had never tried to save another.
Wherever they traveled, Zoya always found a way into the bright chandeliered wings and the warm officers’ quarters where the toasts came from crystal glasses and they cut their meat with silver, but Elga could always be found close-by, down in the scullery, or off in the servants’ wing, or, after the long day’s battles, out among the fields of the dead and dying, digging through the entrails of the infantry corpses, cutting out gall bladders, bile sacs, testes, and spleen for later utility. When doubts arose in Zoya’s heart, and over the years they intermittently did, Elga seemed to have a knack for showing up by her side, consoling Zoya with blunt woodland wisdom, explaining how it was all righteous, even merciful. “It is only fair and only just,” Elga would say. “Men have dragged us by our hair through the ages, and whether they give us crumbs or bright, shiny rocks, they truly give us nothing at all. If you have not opened your legs for them so that they could crawl out as babies or crawl in as men, then they will leave you to starve like a dog on the street. So now we are done playing the way they want us to play. Now we are moving to music they cannot hear, to a rhythm they cannot understand. They call it madness and we call it truth and find me the magistrate you can trust to judge between the two? Bah. So we dance on, we dance on.” At this, Elga would start stamping her foot hard to an offbeat rhythm and flash Zoya a mischievous smile.
So they danced on. Still, lingering regrets and resentments of all those hard decisions stayed with Zoya, like gristle trapped in her teeth or wax in her ears, and now, when the feelings were rising again and she needed some reassurance, the old woman had sent her off to be alone. It frustrated Zoya. Fine, she thought, I don’t need her, I certainly don’t miss her; after all, I have stayed away these past few years for good reason.
She recalled how they would once scuttle from camp to camp, city to city, plucking bright gold from the bloodstained hands of doomed officers and shining silver from the soiled fingers of ill-fated miners who all soon after died, cut down by saber or buried beneath whole falling mountains. Back then, the world was its own boiling cauldron of constant violence, the wars and battles never ceased, one Balkan war rolled into another that spawned a world war and then one more. Industry and iron erupted from the earth, soldiers and cannon clogged the roads and crowded the stations, ore filled the hulls of ships, and crates of raw supplies stuffed the boxcars. Whole cities rose up from the earth, swallowing up the countryside and spoiling the landscape, in many places beyond recognition, and the birds’ evening songs were now forever warped by the constant, shrill scream of the ubiquitous engines.
Now, though, things seemed to be settling down. The great threat of atomic annihilation had made all the European soldiers finally hang up their guns and go home, like chastened children worried that their overbearing brute of a father might slap them around. Perhaps, thought Zoya, this is why Elga is so angry, because she misses the busyness and scheming that came with the great din of battle, for now there’s nothing to distract and drown out her own rattling mind; perhaps it is the silence that is driving her mad. But no matter the reason, thought Zoya, I do need to stay away from her, for good, if I can. She has used me and haunted me and taken too much. I do not need her around. The anger flared in Zoya’s mind. Why, if that rat showed up now, she thought, I might bite him right in half.
She smoked the owl pellets and sat with her mixture of visions. Afterward, she felt better. Applying her makeup before the small vanity mirror, she prepared for the evening’s errands. She was a little concerned about moving around the city so openly during the time when the streets were most crowded; she preferred to go out later at night, or even in those mid-afternoon hours when people had finished with lunch and were trapped at work or napping at home. She knew she had already been out too much this past week, exposing herself almost recklessly, but Zoya also knew she had to keep moving and stay on her toes, for now she had her prey marked. She needed to bring Will in soon, before he grew confused, or some other woman got in the way. She had a small window to build a strong and simple bond with her busy rabbit, which she planned to do by mixing the two ingredients men enjoy most, lust and conquest.
Her concerns for caution turned out to be valid. As she walked down St. Germain, a little old man sitting at Café de Flore, who was trying to dim the racket of his busy week with a few strong glasses of Fernet-Branca, happened to see her pass by. She did not notice him, although, with his eyes bulging and his mouth agape, he would have made for an amusing sight. “My God,” he said after she had passed, “I swear I have seen a ghost.” The sleepy mule sitting beside him looked down at the old man’s empty drink and said, “My friend, keep putting that poison down your throat and you will be the ghost.”
XII
“Is this really a police car? Can your rat understand what I’m saying? Where did this bone come from? Where are we going to sleep tonight?” The young girl had Elga’s small satchel open in her lap and was going through it randomly. Her hands were everywhere, waving items around, fiddling with the dials on the dash, asking so many questions that Elga was tempted to pull the car over, strangle her, and leave her body on the side of the road. “What’s this little book for? Is this pink vial makeup? What does this knob do? Is this some sort of perfume?”
“No, that is a concoction for my gas.”
“Does it work?”
“I do not think so,” Elga said, releasing a tremendous fart. “Do you?” That quieted Noelle for a little while. They were heading back into the city. Elga wanted to act fast, before Zoya got suspicious and fled town. It would not be enough merely for Zoya to leave; Elga knew she had to see her die. She knew she was not being rash; it was time for Zoya to go. Why, look at the harm she had already done, putting the man’s head on a spike? Leading the police to her with that stupid clock? Zoya had always been spoiled, always aimed too high, too fond of the chocolates, the rubies, the furs, and the smoked salmon with the caper cream sauce, especially that. But her latest actions were surprising even for her, and even if they weren’t malicious, they were certainly dumb. That woman was bounding around like some wild doe with an arrow stuck in her ass. Taking her down would be an act of mercy, for clearly Zoya was losing her mind. Or, Elga thought, maybe I am losing mine. She shook that idea out of her head with the quickness of a burned finger lifted off a hot pan and looked over at the young girl riding beside her. Noelle now had the rat in her lap and was stroking Max’s head as he lay curled up, sleeping. Yes, thought Elga, it is time for Zoya to go, this new girl will be so much better. “Go ahead, little one, ask me another question.”
“How old are you?”
“Ah, that is a good one. I do not know.”
“Before cars?”
“Before trains, before guns. Before people stole the curves from the high clouds and the angles from the flying flocks to build all their little alphabets.”
Noelle pondered this silently for a moment before returning to her questions. “And where are you from?”
Elga chuckled. “You’re going for the tough ones, huh? You are clever. I am from the far away, way beyond that edge of the sky where the sun rises.”<
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“But where were you born?”
“The place I come from has changed its name many times; I don’t even know what it is called now. When I lived there, it was named for the colors of the bay’s water, then it was given the name of a fire goddess and then a soldier, then a saint and then again another soldier. You want to kill a place, name it. A name only draws the people there who will kill it again. They slice it up or tear it down; they rape the women, burn everyone on pyres, and then, thinking they own it, they name it again. Stupid. Enough to know ‘there is a hill and good water, a cross in the road and a strong oak tree.’ But do not say it out loud. A home should always stay secret or someone will come to steal it.”
Noelle was quiet again. Elga suspected the girl was frustrated with the answers she was getting. Tough, the old woman thought, the real answers are never what we want them to be. She would teach the girl all she needed to know, how to read and write properly, how to curtsy and blush, how to slow time so that a wrinkle takes a century to grow, and how to cast the curses so that men would give you their fortunes, and their lives. As they reached the outskirts of Saint-Denis, Elga hoped that the spell she had put on her police car was holding, she did not need any attention. She only had to get to a bank, find a hotel, and set Max off on Zoya’s trail. Perhaps they could do some shopping at Les Halles too. There were some market stalls where Elga knew she would find the necessary ingredients.
