Babayaga

you are in love, and it’s true, but then something happened, a kind of personal tragedy, and I was forced to stop. You might say I was scarred. Anyway, since then, my mind’s been a blank. Oh wait, I did have one idea, I thought I’d write down the crudest pornography I could think of, then hit the Roget’s hard and doll it all up into a novel. Figured if I dead-on nailed it I could get the book banned in the U.S., a nice nasty scandal would erupt, and international sales would shoot through the roof. Miller and Nabokov both managed that trick quite well, of course. But then of course mother would want to see it and, well…” He stopped to sip his drink. “For quite a long time I felt guilty about abandoning my writing, but then I heard a story that helped. A taxicab driver told it to me—he was Russian too. You see, before the revolution there was a Muscovite writer, magnificently talented, who was known for his brutal realism, real hard stuff, like Gorky, only darker. His work exposed the callous ugliness of the tsars, the starving peasants, the pestilence and fever, the whole shebang. Then, of course, the revolution came and, like the rest of the true believers, he bought all of it, brotherhood, unity, fraternity, the works. Of course, then comrades began disappearing into Black Marias; the state was seizing journalists, neighbors, all of them, poof, vanishing like some sort of terrible magic trick, and this writer began to worry. So he worked up a canny little strategy to dodge the ax: from that point forward, he only wrote nonsense. Kitchen sinks barking recipes to mops, cattle mournfully mooing out tennis scores, salt shakers singing nursery rhymes—the man had no agenda, but he had to write, because all he knew how to do was weld verbs and nouns together into some kind of powerful harmony. In the end, of course, Stalin suspected this fellow was up to something, so bang, they shot that writer dead. End of story. Well now, this tale certainly shook me, but I also took some solace from it. When the revolution does arrive and the committee gathers to judge, they won’t be able to hang me for any of my work, for I am the writer who never writes.”
    “I see,” Zoya said. She was interested in the way he told his tale, beginning with an emotional truth, a point of clear vulnerability, and then quickly burying it under drunken tangents, glib humor, and randomly grabbed pages of history. Here, she realized, was a man afraid of his own heart. He would rather hide it beneath layers like some papier-mâché mask, pasted together for a carnival. He was simply a coward. This was not a condemnation; she genuinely appreciated it about him. The truly craven were, in her eyes, nothing to despise; she had spent much of her life hiding with them, cowering in the dank, dark corners of root cellars, hiding up high in the branches of trees, or cringing below the putrid edges of half-full latrines, listening as pillaging troops and blood-lusting rioters tore apart their homes and villages. She remembered looking into the cowards’ quiet, knowing eyes as they huddled together, listening to the gunshots and the screams and then the receding din of the marching boots mixed with the clatter of looted spoils, all followed finally by the perfect silence of death. Cloaked there in that petrified darkness, crammed shoulder to shoulder with the breath of their fear on her neck, she learned that coward was often only another name for survivor.
    “So, you never write?”
    “No,” he said. “Every so often I think about dashing off a stanza about the crystal winter frost or the blush of a girl’s cheek, only to keep the blood going, but I rarely get round to it.” Oliver finished the last of his drink and seemed ready to change the subject. “Say, look now, here’s a thought. I’ve got two tickets for a cinema premier tomorrow night. Wasn’t planning on attending, but maybe we should go?”
    “Didn’t you already invite me?”
    “When?” He looked confused.
    “Earlier.” She liked shuffling the deck of time, keeping him off balance.
    “Did I? Yes, maybe, who knows. Lord,” he said, chuckling, holding up his drink, “I suspect someone slipped some alcohol into my cocktail. Ha ha. So, how about we meet up at the Hotel Lutetia, say at six?”
    She had agreed and then excused herself, leaving Oliver with kisses on his cheeks and a warm smile promising more. As she was leaving she saw him shake his head, clearly a