Babayaga

the stoop and then stood watching as Zoya walked off down the cobblestone street. A nausea itched in Elga’s guts. The girl boiled her blood. For so many years she had needed Zoya, leaned on her, used her to find safe harbor as they were pitched about the brutal landscape. It had been a tiresome journey for them both, from the far-off country quiet of long vanished woodlands through the black billowing exhaust and shrill screech of steel railway wheels as they made their way on, station to station, ducking and stepping between the dueling engines of empire wars and burgeoning progress. Civilization was ever encroaching, barreling down upon them, crowding them and clouding their path with the gunpowder haze and steam-engine smoke, pressing and pushing them down narrow lanes toward dead-end corners, forcing tricks from their hands and curses from their lips as they found a way to leap free over and again.
    But things were peaceful now, now she did not see the girl for weeks at a time, even months, and never missed her. There was no need. The continent was as quiet as a sleeping lamb, and the two of them had settled down with it. The papers called it a “cold war” but that seemed an odd phrase to Elga, she knew cold wars, they were the ones where hatchets and knives wielded by frostbitten fingers chopped solid meat sides off frozen stallion corpses. Those true cold wars had nothing in common with what she found in the newspapers now, but it was certainly an easier time, and as the din died down, she found the pretty dark-haired girl with the slender hips and the fulsome bosom to be growing tiresome. Each time she saw Zoya it bothered her more, like some silly farmer’s song you hate hearing but are forced to endure a thousand times until it claws at your ears. She could not place a reason for the irritation, but the feeling was so strong it felt almost cystic inside her. Time to cut it out, she thought, and good riddance.
    The wind kicked up and she sniffed at it. Coal soot, sea salt, ham, yeast, and dog hair, nothing new, nothing to worry about. She stood there, distracted, random words tumbling round in her mind, until a neighbor noisily emerged with a crate of empty milk bottles. Broken from her daydream, Elga waddled back into her flat, shutting the door hard behind her.
    V

    The tuxedoed jazz trio was playing a bouncy tune he didn’t know, there was no one in the black-tie crowd who he recognized, and the average age of the women there was somewhere north of fifty. But Will stayed on, seduced by the charms of an open bar. The event was ostensibly a book party for a Parisian politician’s wife, but the chatty guests didn’t look very bookish to Will. It seemed more like an up-and-coming chapter of Paris’s down-market society crowd. The men’s suits all seemed a size off, and the women’s dresses were either drab and dull or taffeta loud. Beside him, an ancient pair of grandes dames wearing outfits that looked like they were cut from wallpaper samples prattled on about summer shopping in Monte Carlo. One of them caught Will listening and abruptly asked, “Êtes-vous un critique?”
    “No,” he answered politely, “I am only here for the cocktails.”
    The women both laughed, a little too loud. “Of course, we are too,” said the one in blue. With their excessive makeup and painted eyebrows, they both looked like wax figurines caught melting in the sun.
    “Are you British?” one asked.
    “American,” Will said.
    “Ah!” The women both beamed at this news. “Are you a writer? An artist?” asked the red dress.
    “Are you from New York?” the blue dress chimed in.
    Will shook his head to both questions. “Actually, I’m from Detroit. I work for an advertising agency here.”
    At this news, both women made a funny face, as if they had each simultaneously bitten into a disagreeable dish. Will was unsure if it was the word “advertising” or “Detroit” that had ruined their high spirits, though he suspected both. He excused himself with a polite nod and began working his way across the crowd until he found a more peaceful corner by the table where the books were piled up. He lit a cigarette, listened for a bit to the jazz, and began leafing through a copy. According to the cover, Rendezvous at Saint-Cloud was a memoir of forbidden love in the French resistance. He was flipping through it, looking for pictures, when a voice speaking in a distinctively Brahmin American accent interrupted him