Chapter 4
Zina
Zinachka this, Zinachka that. Despite Baba Valya’s endearments, I bristled with annoyance. I cleaned the revolting, reeking hog entrails from the floor, opened the window a crack, and burned a pinch of rosemary for good measure.
I survived the day in the tearoom, only to sit through my grandmother’s fortune-telling consultations after hours, playing the assistant and maid to turn over the consulting room and to give out tins of teas with herbs for an array of real or perceived ailments.
By midnight, the hour we usually wrapped the consultations, I had made my decision: I would take on Princess Olga as my client. I would keep it quiet for now. Once I knew the princess wouldn’t cause trouble, I would tell Baba Valya. And hopefully add an I told you so.
My grandmother’s last client was still singing for her lost love over the gold ring floating in the clay bowl of water, and I was already thinking of the best time and place to invite Princess Olga for the séance.
Of course, I would need to hold it here in the tearoom, and on a Sunday, the one day of the week we weren’t allowed to tell fortunes.
Though, from time to time, for the right price and a prayer in church, we would break God’s day of rest with a fortune or two.
But on most Sunday nights, Baba Valya went to visit her friends and acquaintances on rue Daru to unwind, especially after the mad throng of tearoom patrons following church service across the street.
Finally, the last client left, and Baba Valya retired to her bedroom.
I waited until her snores resounded through Samovar—unlike me, she slept like the dead—before locking up and walking briskly down rue Daru.
The cafés had quieted, the skies over the city swathed in layers of dark cobalt-blue clouds pricked by an occasional straggling star.
I reached the address on Princess Olga’s calling card, an apartment building, and left a brief, hastily scrawled note with the porter.
Sunday, 11 p.m. Do not be late. Bring a photograph or miniature of your father.
When I returned to the tearoom, I climbed up to my loft, then up the narrow, curling stairs to the roof. I was buzzy from my note and its implications, and I welcomed the fresh night air billowing against my cheek.
Zefir ambled up to me in her languid way.
We sat on the parapet, me hugging my knees to my chest, and watched the city glitter all around us.
I wished I had a cigarette, maybe a cocktail, the urge to smoke and drink strong tonight.
I was thinking of Mama more than usual, moody despite the hint of spring in the air.
I scratched Zefir behind her ears, and she purred happily.
I pulled out Mama’s favorite deck of cards and swept my fingers over them.
They simmered darkly, strewn with stars.
Each card consisted of four pictures, each picture a quarter of an image divided by an X, the X itself divided by numbers and arrows that indicated the position of each picture as the cards were laid out.
Each quarter of an image had a color—scarlet red, blood orange, midnight blue, and evening purple, with forest green and mustard yellow mixed in.
Once shuffled, the deck was laid out in five rows of five cards each, allowing the fragmented shapes of the images to align into pictures with their own symbols and meanings.
According to my grandmother, I had first picked up Mama’s cards at not even a year old, when I crawled to them myself.
The snakes and bears and cats, the maidens and swords, the moons and lilies drew me in.
Each picture was a feeling, a flicker of a scent or a chime of a sound, a flash of a color, the promise of an image.
Little did I know this was my affinity for auras awakening.
I could see Baba Valya even now, after I had given her a card reading at eight years old.
It was our first lesson, in Samovar’s tearoom, near the fireplace over which hung the mottled, gilded mirror, a remnant of Mama’s Belle époque life.
The winter was strangely cold for Paris.
Baba Valya had dragged a table up to the very grate—so close I sensed the fire’s blistering burn on my small fingers, smelled its flames.
Are you cold, Babushka? To me, she seemed ancient already.
She barked out a laugh. This is nothing. We have true winters only in Russia.
What are they like? Even then, I was curious about the old country and my family’s beginnings there.
Cold. Snow-swept. Your bones creaked from it.
I thought her bones creaked now, but I said nothing.
I am sorry to say, Zinaida, but I do not believe you have an affinity for the cards.
Precisely in that moment, a glimmer appeared around my grandmother’s person, fine like dust, floating like mist, with a hue that went from periwinkle to lilac and back again. It felt like melancholy. Don’t be sad, Babushka.
Her eyes, quite expressionless, narrowed. Why would you think me sad?
There is dust around you the purplish blue of the sky at twilight, the saddest time of day.
That was the first time I had felt a person’s aura. Maybe our fortune-telling lessons had drawn out my affinity. Or it developed with my age and understanding.
Regardless, it took a few more sessions for us to understand the nature of my ability—that it extended to people and places and sometimes even things, that it often involved a color, a scent or sound, a feeling or emotion. Sometimes, a flash of an image.
At the end of the last session, Baba Valya grasped my hands. What you have is precious, child. You can read the force in living things. Their souls, the imprint of their very selves. Their auras. Guard your affinity well.
But if it was so precious, why did my grandmother look so frightened?
I understood only later that aura reading was a rare psychic affinity, and one Baba Valya didn’t know as well.
It was closely connected to the darkness and the unclean force, to risky divination practices like spirit mediumship, which, after my failed experience with it, my grandmother had categorically told me was a different beast altogether.
As a result, she couldn’t teach me much about aura reading at all. I learned it on my own.
The rare times clients inquired about it, they wanted to know if their new flat had a clean, friendly energy; if their grandmother’s old locket retained her imprint; if they could get a little clarity about the aura of somebody in their life; and the like.
The rarest of all was when a client wished to know about their own character, their soul.
Meanwhile, I continued my fortune-telling lessons with my grandmother.
We would meet in the tearoom after the chime of the doorbell followed out our last client at midnight. Then we would drag a table up to the fire in winter, below the window in summer, and Baba Valya would teach me the ways of our family’s women.
How did we start to tell fortunes? I asked her at some point.
Eh, probably with some blind old woman somewhere in ancient Rus’, Baba Valya replied, referencing that long-dead predecessor of today’s Soviet Russia. Her eyes sparked. Or with Marie Anne Lenormand.
The woman who had predicted the futures of Alexander I and Emperor Napoleon? I thought all we shared with the famous French fortune teller was her name, a name Baba Valya had adopted here in France to forget her real name. Not even I knew it.
Baba Valya only shrugged, and I decided I liked this origin story better. I imagined I carried the famous Madame Lenormand’s gift for divination in my blood.
I became skilled at reading the cards, at least their pictures and positions and what those meant.
Fortunes could be told in many ways, after all.
Each woman of our family knew most of the methods, though she felt an affinity to but one.
Mama had read the cards. Baba Valya read coffee grounds, beans, and peas.
Palms were used rarely, being outdated for years.
Some clients preferred it, however, given their husbands’ long nights at the card tables.
Fortunes could also be told by dreams and shadows and smoke, by the moon and stars.
Sometimes, by a cat on the stove, a hen, or, occasionally, a horse, cow, or pig.
Other times, by a sieve or shoes, by the calendar or the weather.
By shooting stars or a hare crossing one’s path.
There were fortunes we couldn’t see. All we could do was give our client the instrument to divine it for themselves—a mirror, a candlestick, a bowl.
I learned those as well. And how to impart a few hastily given, frustratingly obscure instructions to the client before leaving her to perform the deed, her fate either revealing itself or not.
We might be tellers of fortunes, but we aren’t prophets, Baba Valya liked to say.
Back on Samovar’s roof, I held Mama’s cards, and I wished I were a prophet, if only to see clearly into what tomorrow would bring. I wondered if Princess Olga would come the next day, a Sunday.
I lay on my back facing the sky, Zefir stretching out beside me. I tried to remember a shred of Mama. But of course, I couldn’t. I could only imagine her—with the same reddish dark hair and gray eyes as me, the same dislike of Baba Valya’s rules.
I didn’t know the details of Mama’s murder.
She had been found in the tearoom with her right wrist slashed—as though her murderer had accidentally nicked her with their blade, unable to decide whether to carry out her murder or not.
Some said one of her lovers had done the deed.
Others, that it had been her. I believed neither.
Years ago, I went to the police to investigate it, to see if there were reports available dating back to that time. Or newspaper articles. Or anything.
But the little I had found told me no more than I already knew.
Maybe for once Baba Valya was right, and the past wasn’t worth looking back on. As she liked to say, All we have is tomorrow.