Chapter 1 #2
I didn’t like looking at the photographs of the dead to be summoned.
They reminded me of the furiously warm yet salty and dark-edged feeling that had washed over me when I was sixteen or so—when I tried doing my own séance to summon Mama.
The feeling was like Baba Valya’s description of the spark of affinity, something I had never experienced with my aura reading.
My experiment had not ended well. A cloud of darkness rushed at me, engulfing my mind and body.
I fell into a black void and only awoke days later with my grandmother standing over me.
I would never forget her lingering stare, the flash of fear in it, her warnings never to let in the darkness.
Hear me, Zinaida, she had said, using my full name to its devastating effect.
Unlike psychics with an affinity for spirit mediumship and the dead, for séances and the unclean force, you must not dabble in such arts.
The darkness could overwhelm you, and you may fail to wake up.
That is what almost happened. Never forget.
Of course, I didn’t listen. I wanted to see whether my affinity for living auras also extended to the dead, my psychic abilities to spirit mediumship. I owed it to myself to explore it. And to make contact with Mama on the other side.
When I shared my suspicions with Baba Valya, she answered with a curt Not necessarily, along with that flash of fear. What you experienced was likely but traces of your psychic affinity for living auras. But it is still too close to that darkness. You must not indulge it.
I pressed down my own fear. After all, spirit mediums safely practiced with the darkness, even helped people by holding real séances and truly communing with real spirits.
Perhaps Baba Valya simply misunderstood it.
I tried holding another séance, and another, and another.
But each time yielded no result. Not even that void.
Though I sometimes felt something, especially during my grandmother’s séances, it was never that furious warmth, that spark of affinity.
Maybe it had been a fluke. Maybe reading living auras was all I had, the spark of affinity or spirit mediumship not attainable for me, and I would always be missing something. Maybe I would never know.
“Let us join hands, ladies,” came my grandmother’s detached voice back in the consulting room.
“Close your eyes and think of your dear ones, departed or not.” The strictest rule at her séance table was to never, ever open one’s eyes; this allowed us to move freely among her sitters to weave the illusion of a séance.
“We summon you, beloved spirits. We bring light into your dark world of death. Commune with us, speak to us, show yourselves.”
This was our cue—we pulled open the windows behind us with a bang and let the rush of air ripple through the room.
The ladies gasped, one fervently whispering a prayer under her breath.
The candlelight wavered and went out, pitching the room and us into blackness. Excellent. This didn’t always happen; in those times, Katya and I stayed hidden, Baba Valya pronouncing the spirits less active than usual.
“Are you with us, summoned spirits? Or has an unsummoned spirit stumbled upon our little gathering? If so, and if you know the fate of the summoned, tell us about it, enlighten us.” Baba Valya waited the requisite amount of time.
Then she drew in a dramatic breath turned gasp.
“Someone is here—I can feel them! Can you?”
I moved from behind the drapery, stepping lightly toward the circle of unsuspecting, too-trusting ladies, who clung to each other with shaking hands and breathed hard through their teeth, as if the air were indeed thick with spirits.
Katya and I wore all-black clothing and trousers so we could move more easily and discreetly.
I brushed a finger along the curve of Karina’s long neck—and she released a startled cry.
I suppressed a giggle, tugging on Inessa’s shock of red hair and tapping her lorgnette—and her whole body quivered.
I touched one of Masha’s bony shoulders—and the poor woman recoiled so violently that she almost fell from her chair.
“You feel it! You feel it!” Baba Valya cried out triumphantly. “Now, tell us, poor, wandering soul, are you here for one of these women?”
At this point, Katya usually ducked under the consulting table.
Sure enough, a few minutes later, a knock resounded from beneath it. Then a second. Two knocks meant yes.
“Are you a general?”
One knock resounded. No.
“A philosopher or writer?”
One knock. No.
“A soldier?”
Katya paused for effect, then rapped twice. Yes.
“Are you looking for your mother?”
Two knocks. Yes.
“Is she in this room?”
Two knocks. Yes.
“Are you Leonid, and is Masha your mother?”
Two knocks. Yes.
A cry wrenched from Masha. “My dear boy! It has been too long since you appeared. Tell me that you are at peace. Please! Put your poor mama out of her misery.”
“Are you at peace, Leonid?” Silence. “What did you wish to tell your mother?”
In answer, the table floated off the floor.
Contrary to how heavy it looked, it was rather light when lifted only a few centimeters.
The ladies gasped in horror, and the table slammed back down.
I glimpsed the shadow of Katya’s lithe figure as she crawled out from under the table and made for the door, left ajar for this purpose.
I stepped toward the light switch, strategically positioned by the door so I could also duck out of the room. Usually, I made a big show of turning on the electric lights. It bathed our sitters in disorienting brightness, indicating that it was safe to open their eyes.
But I’d inadvertently glanced at the photographs.
Oh no, I had time to think—before the eyes of the men bored into me and I sensed the familiar needling, pressing sensation against my flesh.
As though they were watching me. I smelled salt on the air, noticed the darkness thicken against my neck.
I reached for the light switch with trembling fingers just as the ladies began to scream.
But all I could think about were those dead eyes, staring into my very core.
And beneath the chill of fear, all I could feel was the sizzle of exquisite longing.
“What could it mean?” sobbed the inconsolable Masha as Baba Valya and the ladies descended on her, the other two women visibly relieved their loved ones hadn’t made an appearance at our séance table. At least, this night.
Pressing down the prickle of guilt that occasionally reared its ugly head after the séances, even with Baba Valya now giving out free tins of her lemon balm tea against nerves, I dove into the hall.
I nearly collided with Katya. We wasted no time in throwing on Madame Sherbatskaya’s smart cocktail dresses and cloche hats, remembering our coats at the last moment.
Then we were out in the frosty, star-studded February evening.
The few passersby on the street were mostly young people like us.
We slipped in and out of the sad shadow of the closed-for-the-night Alexander Nevsky Cathedral and strolled down rue Daru, turning onto rue du Faubourg Saint-Honoré in the direction of Montparnasse.
It would take us more than an hour to reach it.
But Katya and I didn’t have the money for cab or bus fare, so we walked most everywhere in Paris.
Arm in arm, we would chat about the latest ridiculous thing Baba Valya had done, gossip about some patron or client, or take in the city in comfortable silence.
Tonight, the street air felt particularly fresh after the herbal, waxy consulting room—and those dead eyes.
Hearing bursts of Russian from La Rotonde, a favorite hangout of the expat Bolsheviks, we kept walking, in silent agreement that we wanted Paris tonight, not Russia.
Besides, these Russians had exiled our rue Daru Russians, including Katya, and imprisoned or killed their loved ones. They were no friends of ours.
We crossed boulevard du Montparnasse to the sprawling Le D?me, the block-like letters on the café’s awning announcing its presence as though screaming.
The terrace was crowded despite the cool night.
Seemingly every table was taken over by chatting, laughing, smoking men and women.
We were soon surrounded by a few painters, a model or two, and a writer, who pushed a couple of whiskeys toward us.
I met Katya’s gaze, whiskey not being our drink of choice.
But I shrugged, thankful it was free, feeling thirsty and craving a lift out of the darkness that had settled in the pit of my stomach like a stone.
I tried to lose myself in the endless stream of chatter and laughter, the cigarette someone handed me at some point, its smoke dispelling some of the darkness. But not all.
“Tell me”—the writer leaned toward me, too closely, too intimately—“what was the most interesting thing to happen to you today?”
I could tell by his poor French that he was American, apparently from some middle-of-nowhere town in Illinois, sniffing around Paris for his latest inspiration.
There were many such personages at Le D?me.
I hated intellectuals, but not worse than the Bolsheviks, who spoke only about Marx and Lenin and their damn revolution.
I sipped at my whiskey. By now, it had burned its way down my throat, set my belly on fire and my head swimming pleasantly.
I was feeling cheeky, not to mention truthful, for once.
“I thought I saw a pair of dead men watching me from their photographs.”
The American peered at me curiously, then laughed, clearly uncomfortable. “You are an odd bird, aren’t you?”
“You don’t know the half of it.”
“So what happened then?”
“What usually happens when you encounter horror?”
“You—scream.”
“No.” I leaned closer to the American so that we were centimeters apart, the air between us soaked with whiskey. “I turned on the light.”
The American broke into a smile, showing me his very straight, very white teeth.
He was handsome enough, with dark slicked-back hair that revealed a wide, intense forehead, a small mustache, and eyes that were merciless in their judgment, though set a little too far apart.
I closed the space between us anyway, kissing him on the mouth.
The painters and their models whooped and jeered. Katya smiled teasingly.
I didn’t even feel the American’s lips against my own. I was wondering what would have happened if I hadn’t turned on the light.
We stumbled back to La Rotonde with our new friends, no longer caring about the Bolshevik revolutionaries there, not after several whiskey glasses each, but about the café’s newly opened dance hall.
We were eager to lose ourselves in the ceaseless motion, the carefree music, the pure pace and rhythm and life of those halls.
I slid one hand onto the American’s shoulder, the other into his rather slick hand, and I let my feet move in time to the music as he pressed me to him tightly.
The tune was fast and jaunty, and I laughed, even saying something utterly drunken and stupid to him, maybe stealing another kiss or two through my whiskey haze.
I could usually forget Baba Valya’s séances at the cafés with Katya, but tonight, it was proving impossible. I kept imagining those dead eyes staring at me from their place of darkness, their place of death, drawn to them like a doomed moth to a flame.