Babayaga

through the station. At the other extreme were the partnerships where every engagement with the outside world was a blending of one another’s thoughts and words as they harmoniously, almost clairvoyantly, completed one another’s sentences, wishes, desires, writing in one another’s diaries and signing each other’s letters. There was a spectrum of working, functioning examples lying between these two extremes as vast in its richness as the many species of butterflies in the wilderness.
    Zoya had to agree that Gwen and Oliver had no chance of that. For starters, Gwen was slightly false-faced, the tone of her pronouncements came off as a pretender’s, finely schooled and well-read but a long day’s journey from wise. Zoya had not heard of any broken heart in Oliver’s past, but in her brief experience with him, his actions focused more on conquest than chemistry. She recalled how, in the throes of the sexual moment, his face held almost a boyish pride, as if the final act of consummation was equivalent to planting a flag on a snowy mountain peak.
    Looking at the shirt Gwen had on, she realized it was the same one of Oliver’s that she herself had worn the morning after she slept over, the very day, in fact, when she had first met Gwen. She was wondering if the girl had put it on as some sort of statement when the phone’s ringing startled both of them. Gwen jumped up to answer it. “Hello?… Oh, hi … Yes, she’s up, we’re chatting now … Where?… Of course, darling, of course.” Gwen hung up the phone and sat down again. “That was Oliver. He wants us to meet him over in the park. Not exactly clear what he’s up to, but I told him we’d be there. A rendezvous in the woods,” she giggled. “How exciting.”
    Zoya tensed slightly. Gwen’s casual and happy tone held a nuance that worried her, and her voice on the phone had seemed wrong. One of the things Zoya had grown very good at over the years was spotting deception, and Gwen was a liar. She could not tell what precisely this lie involved, but she knew it was not an innocent one. There was danger in the room now, it was moving in Gwen’s distracted eyes and dancing in her nervous fingertips as she snapped her cigarette case shut. Had that really been Oliver on the phone? Zoya doubted it. Was it a trap? Probably. Why? And who would care that Zoya was there? Who even knew who she was?
    Zoya tried to stall. “Perhaps I should wait for Will here.”
    “Oh, don’t be a silly stick-in-the-mud like that,” Gwen said and teasingly punched her on the arm. “Oliver said Will’s with him, and besides, we both need some air. It smells awful in this place. Come on, we’ll have fun.”
    So Zoya nodded and Gwen went to get dressed. Zoya was not too nervous. She was confident that, even with her fatigue, she could handle what lay ahead. After so many years of playing along these mortal games, it was never too difficult to simply evade and escape. But she did not like heading into obvious and unknown deceptions. The only reason she went along was that, as was the case all too often, it was the only direction to go.
    XVII

    Witches’ Song Eight

    So you see,
    like water spinning round
    down the drain,
    we suck up these troubled and toiling souls,
    pooling them thickly together,
    for now is the time
    to set prey against prey,
    and watch as these our proud planets,
    rotating both near and far,
    pass over our sun’s brilliant surface.
    The small moons we have spun
    will cross too, providing an illuminating eclipse
    down into the pit
    of dear darkness.
    XVIII

    Vidot was getting hungry. He sat on the peak of Will’s head, listening to Oliver talk on endlessly as they strolled into the unlit city park. “You’ve never been here? Really? The Bois is incredible, there’s no place like it in the world. See that sign for the zoo over there? During the Siege of Paris the besieged citizens took the animals out of their cages, cooked them up, and served them at Paris’s finest restaurant, on their best china. I had never thought of a zoo as an exotic larder before, but I suppose it is, potentially at least.”
    Riding along, the flea’s mind wandered; he had his own memories of the Bois, for this was where he had first wooed Adèle. They had met a few months after the Occupation, he was a patrolman whose bruised sense of pride and patriotism was only beginning to recover. She was younger than him, a student of the classics at the university. They had met