By the author of Sharp Teeth, a novel of love, spies, and witches in 1950s Paris—and a cop turned into a fleaWill is a young American ad executive in Paris. Except his agency is a front for the CIA. It's 1959 and the cold war is going strong. But Will doesn't think he's a warrior—he's just a good-hearted Detroit ad guy who can't seem to figure out Parisian girls.Zoya is a beautiful young woman wandering les boulevards, sad-eyed, coming off a bad breakup. In fact, she impaled her ex on a spike. Zoya, it turns out, has been a beautiful young woman for hundreds of years; she and her far more traditionally witchy-looking companion, Elga, have been thriving unnoticed in the bloody froth of Europe's wars.Inspector Vidot is a hardworking Paris police detective who cherishes quiet nights at home. But when he follows a lead from a grisly murder to the abode of an ugly old woman, he finds himself turned into a flea.Oliver is a patrician, fun-loving American who has come to Paris to start a literary journal with the help of friends in D.C. who ask a few favors in return. He's in well over his head, but it's nothing that a cocktail can't fix. Right?Add a few chance encounters, a chorus of some more angry witches, a strung-out jazzman or two, a weaponized LSD program, and a cache of rifles buried in the Bois de Bologne—and that's a novel! But while Toby Barlow's Babayaga may start as just a joyful romp though the City of Light, it quickly grows into a daring, moving exploration of love, mortality, and responsibility.
Man hunts and fights. Woman contrives and dreams; she is the mother of fancy, of the gods. She possesses glimpses of the second sight; and has wings to soar into the infinitude of longing and imagination. The better to count the seasons, she scans the skies. But earth has her heart as well.
Women must tell men always that they are the strong ones. They are the big, the strong, the wonderful. In truth, women are the strong ones. It is just my opinion, I am not a professor.
There are facts and there are lies. There are true lovers with bad alibis. The world is a busy hive, filled with stories that have been retold over and again ever since our tongues learned to talk and our ears first opened. We hear all this, yet we are still lost, barely making out our path in the pale, inconstant light. As the ancient man said, we know nothing. But I can tell you this much is true, this happened. I know, because my elder sister wrote of it to me in a letter sent late last autumn, of how, behind the high walls of a fading castle, tucked in a valley not far from the northern border of France, a woman in her later years brought out an old guitar and, strumming it gently to find the tune, announced to the night, “I will sing you a song now about when the babayagas fled to Paris…”
When I was living in Paris, we had an expression, a very American one, which in a way explains it better than anything else. We used to say, “Let’s take the lead.” That meant going off the deep end, diving into the unconscious, just obeying your instincts, following your impulses, of the heart, or the guts, or whatever you want to call it.
Time was bothering Zoya. She lay on the broad bed amid the crumpled silk sheets, listening to Leon scrub and gargle in the bath. There was almost a cartoon melody being composed in the various noises of his evening toilette. He always fastidiously washed and perfumed himself after they made love, immersing himself in soaps, talc, and a cloud of
Coming out of the bathroom with the steam billowing out around him, he looked like some gray ball of boiling fat spit out from a cauldron. “What is wrong,
She remembered the day he had first found her while strolling through the Jardin des Plantes. When had they met? Was it the spring in ’45? Not long after the war had ended, when the Paris streets and nightclubs thronged thick with a mix of wide-eyed American and British soldiers fresh off the train from Calais and sniffing about for fun. She had her pick of any one of the swarm, but she found Leon instead, a stocky middle-aged Parisian of square chin and broad shoulders, far from the slouching fat man he had grown into. So much time had passed as she had watched his profile slip and slide steadily down from stout to rotund to fat, eyes growing cloudy, his bright blue irises dimming to a mottled gray, folding bloodshot beneath the heavy lids and puffy circles of wine-swollen flesh. When he was drunk on brandy, he loved to recount how he had once been a formidable athlete, back in his Catholic school days, but she had a hard time convincing herself of that, looking at him now, for he was simply a doughy old man, while she still looked as fresh as she had the day they first met.
“I have a small headache, I need fresh air,” she said. “Why don’t you get dressed and we can have a stroll before you go home?”
“At this hour? Ha! Have I not exhausted you yet?” As he toweled off his back, his vast white belly shook. It was almost too silly to watch.
