Authors: Toby Barlow
Noelle could not believe that a woman scrubbing urine stains off the floor could have ever dined with a prince, and the food she was describing sounded disgusting. “Who eats a peacock?” she asked out loud, unable to contain her curiosity.
The old woman stopped her work to look up at the girl. “I’ll barter a question for a question: Who ate the first egg that dropped out of a chicken’s ass?” She paused for a moment, waiting for Noelle to answer. When the girl said nothing, the old woman blurted out the rest. “A hungry person, that’s who.” Then she went back to her scrubbing, still talking to Noelle. “But it’s not always the fancy food that tastes delicious. My sisters and I camped for six seasons on a Yamna farmer’s land. He would scoop eel out of the river for us and fry it with truffles he’d foraged and fresh sweet butter from his cows. Delicious. He was a dense and stupid oaf, but he was strong and big and he always smelled like horseshit. Oh yes”—the old woman paused again in her scrubbing—“nothing is as good as the smell of horseshit. You know, the streets are swept clean now, and all the horses are gone, so there is nothing in the air but the soot of your burning engines.” She went back to her scrubbing. “That’s why I like to sleep in a barn, to be close to real smells. Horseshit and horse farts. Those are the smells of life.”
That made Noelle giggle. A little smile crossed the old woman’s lips. Then she returned to her work and did not speak again.
IV
Witches’ Song Three
Ah, ugh, agh, we pull at our skulls
and gnash our wasted teeth watching.
Why always the cracked cups, Elga, why never the whole ones?
The old woman’s no better than a corrupt conscription officer out rousting feeble drunks.
With bum dumb warriors such as these it is no wonder
we are only a few fingers’ count from lost.
Our odds always long,
now here we are sinking low into polder bog,
desperately reaching and clutching at this single bare stalk
that looks far too weak to offer safety.
So many enemies, countless routs,
even our most sacred rites and pious celebrations of renewal
snatched up by that insatiable and foul pope beast.
See him sit proud and poised,
branded with the crusader’s crucifix,
braying on about his mewling manger,
promising eternal life
and bottomless vessels of wine for all anointed.
Now there’s a pandering peddler.
He forever extols the virtues of love and compassion
while his crusading Knights Templar
slice at the bare babes’ throats.
He can bear no other tale, take no rival myth,
and in his absolute hunger to rule he tore down and cooked up
every sharp-tongued woman in his path,
even turning on his own, his blessed, his consecrated,
the poor, fevered nuns, no more than sick or delirious,
only mad with loneliness,
brokenhearted in their sunbaked convents,
suffering amid the spiraling vertigo
of eternal ennui.
There, standing stone-faced amid their magpie cries for grace,
the priest raised his hand for silence and said simply
and solemnly, burn
sisters burn.
Ghosts, they say, stay for three simple reasons:
they love life too wholly to leave,
they love some other too deeply to part,
or they need to linger on for a bit,
to coax a distant knife
toward its fated throat.
V
Vidot the flea was exhausted. He rested, hanging upside down beneath the couch of his rival’s apartment. Over the past two days he had learned all that he could possibly want to know about the man. He had been certain that his investigations would unearth evidence of a great villain, but what he discovered was a decent enough individual with a perfectly ordinary life.
The man’s name, which Vidot had painstakingly traced out on letterheads and various envelopes lying throughout the apartment, was Alberto Perruci. He was Italian, a philosophy professor working at the University of Paris. He had a wife named Mimi. She worked as an assistant photo editor at
Festival
magazine. She was a very attractive woman; in fact, Vidot had to admit that even she was more beautiful than his Adèle. Mimi clearly adored her husband and would wrap her arms around him when he came through the door, kissing his neck with warm affection before resting her head against his chest.
Why would such a man need another lover? How insatiable was his greed? Many Europeans—Italians, Spanish, and French—all kept lovers; Vidot did not understand it, but he accepted it as a fact. Still, this woman cooked, she cleaned, and she waited on her husband with a complete unwavering devotion that impressed Vidot. His Adèle was certainly, by all appearances, a good wife, but she never knelt to remove his shoes at the end of the day, she never poured him an aperitif and brought it to his side while he read his evening paper, she never sat in his lap and tickled his ears when they listened to the radio. His respect and instinctive affection for the beautiful Mimi made his heart ache in overwhelming empathy for all the betrayals in the world.
The first day, Vidot had gone to work with Alberto, riding high on his head, tucked safely beneath his hat. He had sat on the tip of the man’s skull, looking out at the bored and listless students yawning as Alberto lectured them on Hegel and Marx. Later in the office as the professor graded papers, Vidot watched from above, mildly impressed at how thoroughly Alberto went through the students’ work, marking it up in a diligent, thoughtful manner. Then, after a little more than an hour, the descending hat returned Vidot to a state of darkness, and when next he emerged he was in his own apartment again, watching this perfect devil once again embrace his Adèle.
He barely recognized his wife: in Alberto’s presence
this prim and proper woman instantly became a creature of lust; her eyes watered with hunger and her mouth opened wide as she avidly kissed him until she had to gasp for breath. Vidot felt sick and instinctively returned to his only comfort at hand, once again digging his jaws deep into Alberto for more vengeful—and succulent—sustenance.
About twenty minutes later, lying dazed and nearly unconscious amid the man’s thick hairs, he was suddenly roused by the sound of his own name. Scurrying again up to the peak of Alberto’s skull to listen, he saw his beautiful Adèle lying naked on the bed, recounting how a policeman had called to say that Vidot was off on an undercover investigation. She said that while this was certainly convenient for the two of them, it was also odd, as her husband surely would have mentioned it. Alberto kissed her cheek and told her they must make the most of this little vacation together. He rose to dress. Vidot was so distracted thinking about what his wife had said—why would the station say that he was off on some secret mission?—that he missed the critical moment and so once more found himself trapped beneath Alberto’s hat.
When Alberto arrived home, Mimi had greeted her husband with the usual ardor, laughingly telling a tale of models running around the magazine’s office in their frilly underwear. Alberto had laughed too, patting her bottom affectionately and pouring them both wine while she pulled a casserole out from the oven. Vidot was flummoxed by the casual ease with which his rival moved from scene to scene. This Italian was a marvel.
As they were retiring to the bedroom, Vidot finally leapt clear of the man. He did not want to witness any more of Alberto’s amorous antics or be party to any more of his betrayals. Settling beneath the couch, he anxiously counted the days he had left. A flea’s existence might be short but it could certainly be lively; since he had been transformed it felt as though he had already died a thousand times over. How fortunate he would have been, he thought, if only he had perished alongside poor Bemm. Being torn asunder by the talons of an owl seemed infinitely preferable to the slow, unendurable torture life brought to him now.
Vidot knew he would go mad if he did not find some new distraction. His mind went back to the puzzling thing Adèle had said. Why had the station misled her? It seemed highly suspicious. Not only that, but it was harmful too, for had she been told the truth, the news of Vidot’s disappearance could have had a profound effect on his wife, she might have suddenly realized how devoted she was to her equally devoted husband. But, for reasons he could not understand, his superiors were covering things up. The shrieking sounds of Mimi’s sexual ecstasy started bouncing off the walls of the dark apartment. Christ, thought Vidot, this Italian was unstoppable. Vidot forced himself to concentrate on his little mystery. Why had the station lied? He guessed Maroc was probably behind it, that hunk of swine was as fork-tongued as they come. Vidot realized he would have to make his way back to the station to uncover the answers. Sensing the long, laborious journey ahead, he sighed. It would be so much easier, he thought, to stay here in this warm, comfortable apartment, spending his evenings listening to the lovely Mimi enjoying her false and perfect heaven.
VI
Zoya sat at the restaurant bar with Oliver, listening to him chatter on as he drank his scotch and emptied a pack of Chesterfields. She laughed at his stories on cue. He was not boring, but he was only a means to an end and there was little reason for her to pay too much attention. As his tales rambled on, she was reminded that this was why she preferred married men, they already had someone to bore with their stories. As if to accent and punctuate his various points, Oliver’s hand kept optimistically straying up her thigh. She let him have his fun.
At one point he paused mid-anecdote and looked her in the eye. “Zoya, my dear, you are intriguing.”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean, you’re a little strange.”
She smiled. “Oh no, I’m not, it is only that I am from a foreign land, and you are confused by our cultural differences.”
“I don’t think so. I know plenty of Russians and you’re different from that lot. Where did you grow up? Moscow? St. Petersburg?”
“A small town you’ve never heard of.”
“Oh, I know that town very well, it’s where so many pretty girls come from. But seriously, tell me about yourself, Zoya. I may come off as somewhat conceited and self-centered, and I suppose I am, but I can be observant too. At times tonight you’ve been absolutely luminescent, but in other moments, my God, girl, you get a look that is as heavy as an anvil.”
“That only sounds like a Russian to me, Oliver.”
“But—”
She patted his hand. “Maybe you should go home now, you’re drunk and tired.”
Oliver looked both amused and offended. “No, I’m most certainly wide awake. I feel like I’m Fred Astaire with Cyd Charisse in
Silk Stockings.
”
As his hand slid farther up her leg, she laughed. “Oliver, you make your passes the way Americans kill Indians.”
“What are you talking about?”
“Did you ever know any Indians?”
Oliver paused. “American Indians or Indian Indians?”
“The ones from your country, the ones you all killed.” His hand slid down between her thighs.
“I’m sure I certainly didn’t kill a single Indian. But I can’t say I personally know any, either.”
Zoya looked into her glass of wine. “But it’s funny, don’t you think? The way you Americans killed them. I read about it in a book once. How you would make treaties, yes? And then you would break the treaties so they would get upset and make war, and so you would kill them, and then there were new treaties? And you kept going and going, the same trick, over and again, until there weren’t any more Indians.”
“Well, they’re not all dead,” Oliver said, shaking his head. “But, of course, it was appalling.”
“Yes, a tragedy, but rather clever too, no?” she said. “You almost made it appear to be an accident. Sloppy and offhand, like spilling red wine on a rug. It was the same way Stalin killed, a few here, a million there, a few sips of vodka in between. That is the way to do it. Now, Nazis, they were serious and efficient about it, so German and well organized, that it could not be ignored. If they were more like you perhaps they would have gotten away with killing all those Jews. But the Germans were simply too obvious and clear in their purpose.”
Oliver looked at her with amazement. “Look, I don’t think—”
She laughed. “Never mind.” Now she placed her hand on his leg.
He smiled, shaking his head in bewilderment. “I merely want to say, as an American, that I believe our genocidal habits are well behind us.”
“Well, you did drop that atom bomb.”
He raised a tipsy finger. “Only to make a point.”
She leaned over and kissed him on the cheek. “Enough talk, Oliver, we should leave while you are still reasonably sober. I don’t like lovers who prefer their booze to my body. So, we go to your room now?”
“Yes,” he chuckled, surprised at her frankness. He threw a handful of francs on the bar and wrapped his arm around her shoulder. “Cold war indeed.”
VII
Seated on a bench on the hospital grounds, watching the gardener clip the hedges, the girl thought about what the old woman had been telling her. It was exciting, so many possibilities. The old woman had made her swear by the saints to keep it a secret, but even if she had wanted to share it, the other patients were too far gone to confide in. Even sweet Martine, who had her moments of clarity, was sure to break out into one of her nonsense songs before Noelle could get through the whole tale.
The old woman had become Noelle’s only reliable company at the hospital. Nurses came and went with their shifts, their only concern being whether she had tried to hurt herself again. Her parents had not visited in a month, and the last time they were there her father had stood in his gray suit staring with a grim, pale expresssion at the scars on her wrists, while her mother rattled on about the tangled state of her hair. Now the two of them were off traveling to visit relatives in Brittany and would not be back for a few more weeks. At first her loneliness had been profound and she lay in her hospital cot with slack-jawed despair, but then the old woman had found her and now it seemed things were going to be very different.