Babayaga

Perhaps they would like to come in for some tea?”
    “They are American, I think they prefer coffee.”
    “Well, I have tea.”
    She went to fetch her friends. Andrei rubbed his forehead; he felt guilty for calling his brother a rat. He had only wanted to relieve Zoya’s guilt, but he knew it was a truly terrible priest who only says what a confessor wants to hear. Max deserved a better eulogy.
    As Andrei put his clothes on he realized it had been three-fourths of a lifetime since he had last laid eyes on his brother’s true flesh, but he could still vividly recall Maximilian that last night, his sparkling eyes and devilishly wicked smile bobbing above that sea of unwashed and unruly miners all shouting in a drunken mad din as the roulette wheel rattled round. His brother’s expression had been so bright, so flush with joy. Perhaps Max had been lucky after all. If all men could vanish there, thought Andrei, in that moment of pure satisfaction, aglow with good fortune, fiercely confident in their futures, then the benevolence of God’s grace would be much easier to acknowledge. Instead, time had rolled on, washing through that barroom door, taking not only his brother away, but all of them, the miners, the gamblers, the witches, and the priest, all torn out into the driving river of war and waste, so many now lying enmeshed in unmarked mass graves or freed to the skies in the steady smoke that wafted through the camps’ barbed wire. We assume so much, thought Andrei, and forget how little we are promised.
    Zoya came back in the room with two men. Weary-eyed, they looked like a pair of naughty seminary boys, their suits wrinkled, one with a fading bruise on his cheekbone and blood on his arm, the other one mud-stained and tousled. This is what happens, thought Andrei, when you fall in with a girl like Zoya.
    As she introduced the two, there was an expression on her face that the priest had not seen for some time. Was that a blush, he wondered. Ah, perhaps she had fallen for one of these two. Zoya had always possessed a persistent romantic streak. Elga complained about it all the time, saying that it made Zoya soft. But Andrei knew otherwise, he had watched her turn too many of her lovers into corpses. She was not soft, but she could be sentimental. Yes, he could see she had something for this one with the bruised cheek. What a miraculous fountain love was, Andrei thought, ever flowing, ever refreshing, with a force too exhausting to even contemplate. He rose and gave them a polite smile. “Welcome,” he said in his rough French. “I am making some tea. Would you like some?”
    The two both shook their heads. “No thank you,” said the taller one, in French but with an accent that sounded somewhere between British and American.
    “Fine, then. In that case, you will have to excuse me.” Andrei took his old cassock off the wall hook and put it on. “I have a morning service to attend to. You are all welcome to stay, and if you are hungry you’ll find dried lentils and some potatoes in the pantry. There’s some Cantal cheese in the icebox too, but no bread.”
    “Thank you, but I think—” the taller one began to say, but the priest was already out the door and did not hear the rest. Climbing onto his bicycle, Andrei started down the gravel road. The sun was not all the way up yet and he was already tired of this day.
    XIII

    Noelle had the chicken in her lap when Elga finally came back to the suite. The room stank of stale air and ammonia. “Mmmn, mmmn, little girl, what have you been up to?” growled the old woman, who looked beat-up and tired, with her eye now almost swollen shut. She trundled by Noelle on her way to the dresser, patting the girl’s head as she passed. “Come now. There’s a man out front with a car for us.” Noelle did not move.
    She had only awoken a few hours earlier, lying on the floor in a pool of her own urine. She had halfheartedly mopped the mess up with bath towels and then left them in a wet pile by the couch. Her stomach felt acidic and hollow. She had climbed into the big yellow chair, determined to wait for Elga. The old woman would come back, she had to. After a little while, the chicken had emerged from behind the couch, approaching her gingerly, with tentative steps. “Don’t worry,” Noelle had said to the chicken, “I know it’s not your fault.” She took the chicken in her arms and sat there, curled up around the bird, both of them motionless through