Authors: Toby Barlow
He heard the gravel kick as a car turned off the main road and started up the drive; then the engine cut off and a car door slammed. Perhaps it was the police again with more questions, or Elga returning with the girl, or maybe it was a Soviet stranger coming with an ax. (He was always nagged by the slight worry that a stranger from the old land would come after him, not because he was important, but simply because the state was so random in its violence. Even with Stalin dead, the bear still seemed intent on mauling the world.)
The knock came at the door, and he pulled his robe on as he crossed the dark room to answer. He was surprised to see Zoya standing there. She had dark circles under her eyes and gazed at him with a solemn look that was both nervous and penitent. “Come in,” he said.
He put the kettle on the stove. She found a chair and sat staring out the kitchen window. It was still mostly dark out.
Andrei tried to open things up with small chatter. “Things have been busy around here. The farmer next door died last month, a flu killed him. One cough and he dropped like a stone. There is trouble with the will so now his sons are fighting over the land, tearing his little empire to pieces.”
She was silent. Andrei kept talking. “Yesterday a policeman came out from the city asking about Elga. Have you seen her?” He poured the tea.
“Yes,” she said and continued to stare out the window. “I have seen her. Only days ago. Maybe it was yesterday? I can’t even remember. So much has happened.” She sighed. “I have news to tell you.”
Andrei sat down across from her. “What is it you have to tell me, Zoya?”
She looked up. “Max is dead. I am sorry.”
Andrei closed his eyes and instinctively prayed for grace.
“There was a fight,” she bluntly went on while he kept his eyes shut. “I was attacked by Elga; she was insane and she wanted me to die. She had a girl there with her. They had me trapped in their spells. I needed a distraction to break the girl’s concentration. So I killed Max and the girl screamed and I got the time I needed to escape. Again, I am sorry.” She stopped talking and he looked at her again, her fingers nervously tapping the handle of her teacup.
For almost sixty years, Andrei had watched his little brown brother scratch and sniff across the continent in a strange otherworldly state. Part of him had been waiting for the spell to end so that they could be reunited, while another part had hoped Max would vanish completely into the ether, taking all this unwanted mystery with him. Andrei had never thought Max would die before he did, he believed his brother was protected, his mortality locked up within the whorls of magic. Hearing the news, Andrei’s first thought was not grief but worry that this spell had been sustaining them both, as though participating in the strangeness of Max’s adventure had been what kept him going, either magically or because he refused to end his days unsure of how the grim fairy tale ended. How many wars had been waged, how many cities conquered, how many maps redrawn, while his brother was tucked inside wool coat pockets or stashed in steamer trunks or scurrying to and fro across gutters and granaries as the circumstances demanded? Throughout it all Andrei had never lost the connection to his brother. But now it was done. Max was gone. A door unlatched in his heart and Andrei felt something slip out; he wondered if he needed it. Sitting quietly at the table with Zoya, a new emptiness inside him, all Andrei knew was that he was honestly not sad at the loss of Max, he was only aware that his own shadow of time had just grown a full length longer, crossing some unseen line.
He looked up and saw the anxious expression of the woman across from him. She was waiting for his answer. “I must thank you for coming and telling me this yourself. It is surprisingly thoughtful of you. But I guess in a way we were all family. Do not feel bad, though. My brother truly died many years ago, Zoya,” he said. “He was drowned in his own black sea even before you met him.” Zoya still looked worried, so he told her what she needed to hear, a fact he suspected she knew already. “In his heart, my brother was always a rat.” Now she did look relieved. Andrei gave her a half smile and patted her hand, thinking to himself, Well, here we are, a lost witch seeking absolution from a broken priest. These must be modern times.
“Where are you heading to?”
Zoya shook her head. “I don’t know. I’m here with some people, we are leaving Paris,” she said. “But I’m not sure where we’re going.”
The priest thought about how many times he had asked that same question and heard some version of that same answer from Zoya. He realized a woman as beautiful and self-possessed as Zoya never needed to know where she was heading, she only needed to know what to do once she got there. “Who are your friends?”
“Two Americans. They’re waiting in the car. I told them you could help us. We need to find a place to hide, very serious people are after us.”
“You can stay here,” said Andrei. “The policeman told me they had Elga in jail for stealing a car. I doubt they will keep her for long, but she won’t be here for at least a few days.”
Zoya thought this over, then nodded. “We will stay one day, then we will be on our way. We’ll take the train.”
“Didn’t you come in a car?”
“One of the Americans is taking it back. The other is coming with me. You can drive us to the station after we’ve rested.”
Andrei grinned. He knew Zoya was kinder than Elga, but years with the old woman had made her almost as presumptuous and demanding. “I’d be happy to. 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 the morning. When, finally, the door opened and she saw Elga’s stooped silhouette waddle in, a ray of light shot through Noelle’s heart, but it was not enough to illuminate the darkness.
Now she sat watching as the old woman dug into the big suitcase, took out the old pistol, and tucked it into her belt. Elga patted the gun and a little smile crossed her lips. Then she emptied all the clothes from the dresser and the armoire into their suitcases.
“So, what?” Elga looked over at her occasionally as she packed. “Your chicken laid an egg?”
The little girl nodded.
“And you ate the egg.”
The girl nodded again.
Elga shut the suitcases and buckled them up. “Okay, so now, what, you think the stars are made from the bites of crocodile teeth, the sun is a boiling gob of God’s spit, and we are—I don’t know—slaves to all the white maggots that are down there writhing in our guts? You think things like that now, yes? The universe is so awful, so black and bad?” She stopped to look at the girl. Amazed, Noelle nodded a final yes. The old woman shrugged. “Ya, well, before you thought ballerina shoes and cream puffs made the world spin round. You are maybe closer to the right answer now. Go backward a bit, find your balance. It takes time.” She pulled the suitcases down onto the floor and started hauling them toward the door. “Come on now, I need help.”
“I’m not going,” said Noelle.
Elga stopped and looked at the girl. Noelle feared that the old woman would get angry, slap her or yank her hair to force her to go, but instead Elga’s features softened into an expression that could almost be described as kind, even sympathetic. Leaving the suitcases, the old woman came back and sat on the floor by the chair. She took the little girl’s hands in hers.
“Okay, how about I tell you a story? This is a true story, not a fairy-tale fable. Okay?”
“Okay.”
“Once upon a time, I had daughters too. I didn’t tell you that before, did I?”
Noelle shook her head no.
The old woman moved her lips, as if she were talking, but no sounds came out; she stood there mouthing silently for a few moments until finally her words began. “Well, I had daughters. But I never knew them. They were taken away, it was bloody and simple work, the way a stupid farmer would kill that chicken of yours. My girls were buried in a swamp. When I found out, it made me so angry, angry that I didn’t get to hold them, adore and cherish them, they were a part of my heart, torn from my hands, so I was filled with fury that I could not raise these girls and give them all my kindness. You see, I wanted to give them treats, like I give you treats. So what did I do? I bared my teeth and I bit at the world. I bit the guilty, I bit the innocent, I bit the whole ugly world. These things still haunt me. But you know what I think now when I wake up with the nightmares?”
Noelle shook her head.
Elga’s voice was heavier now, as if her words might spill into tears. “I think, yes, I was wrong, maybe very bad. Bah, I don’t know. An evil was done to me, to my blood, to my soul, and so I hit back, and kicked back, and then I bit back, hard. Maybe too hard. Yes. Maybe. And then I think of how the sky up above us teems with hawks, eagles, and vultures, all with sharp talons, while all around us fierce and quick animals stalk the grasses with their fangs and claws, and then too, below us, the earth, the black soil, squirms with the insects wielding their pincers and bitter venom. All these creatures, all around us, lashing out and biting at the world. We say we are civilized, but most of all, we are dumb animals. We have nice soft pillows and black telephones, and now toothbrushes too, but that does not mean we are not simple, desperate to fuck, to eat, to kill, all the time, never stopping. So don’t forget that.” She stopped as if she were finished, but then a thought seemed to occur to her. She crossed the room and pulled back the window’s thick curtain. “Come, look outside here, I can show you how dumb and simple they are.”
Tentatively, the little girl got up and went to Elga’s side. The old woman pointed down to the broad Place de la Concorde, which sat right across from the hotel. Automobiles buzzed busily around it. “What do you see down there in that square?”
The little girl squinted; she had been sitting in the dark for such a long time that the brightness hurt her eyes. “Statues?”
“No, no, little one, they are more than statues. That one there, the tall skinny one”—she pointed to the great monument that sat in the middle—“you know what that is?”