Chapter 5
Zina
On Sunday evening, promptly at eleven o’clock, I made out two figures through the misty darkness.
They glided toward Samovar as if the asphalt on rue Daru had turned to ice.
My heartbeat intensified, thrumming in my ears; I leaned forward eagerly.
The first séance on my own in years was about to begin, and I was excited.
Katya, standing behind me with arms crossed, didn’t return my excitement as Princess Olga and the man with her—likely the brother—approached.
Katya hated seeing people from her former social circles back in Russia.
Though she had heard of the sister and brother, she had never met them.
“I do not like it,” she said now. “I don’t know why. ”
“You are afraid of Baba Valya.” I gave her a teasing smile, though beneath my excitement I was just as wary, remembering the princess’s moment of coolness.
“It will be worth it, you will see,” I added as much for my benefit as hers; I had promised Katya half my earnings for her help with the séance.
“They had better pay as they promised.”
Princess Olga stepped inside first, with a vibrant, colorful energy that buzzed and hummed.
“Oh, Zina, it is so good to see you!” she said familiarly, in French, before pausing on the threshold.
“Your grandmother isn’t here, is she?” Her dimpled cheeks flushed.
“You must forgive me. Years later, and I am still the same terrified little girl.”
“My grandmother is out making calls,” I assured her. “We are alone.”
“Oh, good.” The flush scattered. “This is my brother, Prince Alexander—but please call us Olga and Alec. No titles, especially since they are quite illegal now!” She belted out that trilling little laugh and turned to her brother in a waft of what I recognized as Chanel No. 5.
Alec was even more charming than his sister, with striking blond hair and similarly green eyes. His were darker, though, muddier. Putrid hopped into my head like a toad. And his energy exuded a murky green substance, as though he really were of the swamp.
I shuddered at Alec’s unpleasant aura and hurried to introduce Katya.
“A Sherbatsky!” exclaimed the sister.
“You wouldn’t happen to know an Irina Goliteva, do you?” asked the brother.
“She is my cousin,” Katya said quietly.
Katya and her mother, Countess Sofia Sherbatskaya, first sought us out a few years before to ask the coffee beans and cards (in that order) about their family back in Russia.
The Golitevs were Katya’s Petersburg cousins, Katya having grown up on an estate near Moscow, her elder sister sick often and in need of clean country air.
Mama’s cards could never decide whether the Golitevs were still alive, alternating between hearses and scythes one reading, birds and bears another—the former indicating loss, danger, and evil fate, the latter joy and happiness.
Olga was now peering at the samovars and tea things on the tables, at the tea tins on the shelves, at the little sketches and paintings on the walls, even at the empty, smudged spots among the artwork where the portraits of the dead Romanovs used to hang—according to Baba Valya, they had been “good business sense” until a few years ago, following the revolution, when talk on rue Daru began to tell of Soviet Russia’s reach even in Paris.
Zefir, hiding under a table, let out a hair-raising hiss. Her jewel-toned eyes, one violet, one yellow, were fixed on the newcomers. She felt the same contradiction in their auras. But I was determined to see the séance through.
“Is that a Picasso?” Olga asked, ignoring Zefir and pointing to a little charcoal sketch of a woman’s face, rendered in minimalist, abstract lines, intersected by a crescent and a star shaded in so darkly it shone almost black.
“Yes,” I replied, Picasso being an exception to our émigré artists. His Russian wife had once asked me to read his aura to determine whether he had been with other lovers. It turned out he had frequented a local brothel.
“I have never been to a tearoom like this,” Olga was saying. “In Europe, I mean. It is so reminiscent of our tearooms in Russia. Don’t you think so, Brother?”
“It reminds me of Chai, back in Petersburg. You would love it, Zina.” He spoke as familiarly as his sister. But with him, it left me feeling queasy.
Olga gasped. “Yes! That’s the place I was thinking of! It is making me quite nostalgic. Say, Zina, can we have a little more light? I can hardly see, and I want to see it all!”
“I prefer to keep to candles,” I said, friendly yet firm. Electric lights were a poor idea. A passerby could see and report us to Baba Valya; she had spies all over rue Daru.
“And here I was hoping we could get a tour…The stories you must have! The secrets this place must keep! Might my brother and I have a little look around—with candles, of course?”
Olga’s insistence to see the tearoom irritated me. And Zefir’s hissing was so loud it was triggering an ache in my head. I smiled politely. “Let us make our way to the consulting room. I can feel your father’s spirit waiting.”
“If you say so.” Olga released her belting laugh, as though I had said something particularly diverting.
Yet she hesitated, visibly on the verge of arguing.
She was darting curious glances around the shadowy room, craning her head to peer into the darkened hallway beyond the tearoom, the steep stairs that led up to our sleeping quarters.
Before she could again insist on a tour, Katya and I hurried her and Alec into the consulting room.
For once, Zefir hung back, and hissed at me, too. She really wasn’t happy with me.
“Did you bring what I asked?”
Olga pressed a photograph into my hand, throwing a curious glance at Katya. “Perhaps it would be best if we were alone? Séances are private things, I have heard.”
“Katya is my assistant and will provide additional guidance for your father’s spirit to navigate the world of the living.
Besides, holding séances with less than four people is inadvisable.
” A little white lie, to move it along. I motioned to the consulting table, with the circle of candles already lit and flickering. “Please take your seats.”
I shut the door behind us as Olga and Alec took their places at the table. They looked about, suppressing little smiles at each other that I didn’t understand.
I propped the photograph against a vase of white lilies I had purchased from Mademoiselle Deschamps’s flower shop.
I tried to replicate Baba Valya’s séance, including the burning of cinnamon and lemongrass, as well as the setting out of the coffee cups.
But I was thinking of what I would do later, maybe ask Olga and Alec about my mother, their connection to her and Baba Valya; maybe run out for cigarettes—if Marcel’s shop was still open, and it had better be.
“Let us join hands,” I said, Katya and me sitting down.
I took up Olga’s hand, warm and sure, then her brother’s.
At the touch of his flesh, a disquiet bit into me like an invisible spider.
“Close your eyes and think of your father,” I went on, despite the feeling.
“And do not open them until the séance is concluded.” My gaze finally strayed to the photograph; I had been hesitant about this part, wondering if I would feel its dead eyes.
The man that stared back at me had a severe face. It was handsome, with the classic lines of a Greek statue and those dark Romanov looks, the prominent nose and forehead. As I had feared, his eyes burned into me. Not only that. They had a knowing in them, an odd familiarity.
I felt my insides stir with heat, and that deep, dark feeling washed over me like a powerful ocean wave. The heat intensified, turning scalding. Something living and breathing sparked into existence in my chest.
I smelled salt on the air, shook from an inexplicable chill.
As when I had been sixteen years old, performing my first séance on my own…
The darkness could overwhelm you, Baba Valya had said, and you may fail to wake up.
I remembered falling into that bottomless black void. Cold. Empty. A nothing. The days I had lost.
I pushed the fear away. I didn’t know if this was part of my affinity, a call to a darkness I could harness and to the dead I could communicate with, or something else.
I was unsure why it had once again found me.
All I knew was the feeling filled me with longing, with hope.
I was a woman, a psychic and fortune teller.
I had to face my fear, the feeling. I wanted to.
The spark was a tantalizing possibility of what I could be and do.
It was like recovering a lost piece of myself.
My affinity, whole. Me, complete. Spirit mediumship within my grasp, my mother’s spirit seeming closer to me.
But first, I closed my eyes and reveled in the feeling, savoring its spark.
“What should I call your father?” I asked, when I was able to speak.
“He was known as Le Grand-Duc in Paris,” said Olga. “Perhaps that?”
“All right—the Grand Duke.” Then I spoke the words I had heard Baba Valya use countless times to summon her fake spirits.
They were all I knew. I would try to believe in them, and maybe they would transform my séance into something real.
I squeezed Olga’s hand, feeling oddly empowered; Alec’s damp hand I let lie in mine like the limp body of a dead frog.
“Are you with us, Grand-Duc? Your children are here to commune with you.”
Before Katya could rap under the table, my ears filled with a clatter.
I opened my eyes, only to see Baba Valya’s wooden bookcase swaying.
My head gave a violent spin, and my vision blackened.
White-hot stars exploded into my eyes. I think I dropped Olga’s and Alec’s hands.
But it was all jumbled, dim and smoky, as if I had stayed out too long at the cafés.
The candles gave a flicker, then another, until they were winking at me like stars about to die.
One by one, they went out. I blinked back the darkness.
A movement snagged at my gaze—by the windows where Katya and I usually hid.
It was tangled in the drapery meant to ward against the unclean force.
Blurred gray faces, slightly yellowed with time, materialized in the folds.
Their eyes stared at me with an unnatural light that had my flesh crawling with horror and wonder both.
The faces untangled from the drapery, the rest of their entities coalescing into shadowy shapes, then figures.
They crawled toward me alarmingly fast, like running beetles.
Suddenly, there were so many of them, multiplying and regenerating.
In seconds, they gathered and merged into a wave of fused limbs and gawking faces and wide eyes.
It was all salty, wild, desperate. I heard a rush of chaotic sound—the howl of a reckless wind, the ticking of a beetle, disjointed words and fragmented phrases—
Looking for—
Trying to understand
Dead
I cannot believe—
Where is—?
Why
My head splintered. I could now see nothing past the darkness, as if it were truly a wave of tempestuous seawater crashing into me.
It filled my mouth with so much salt and grime that I gagged.
I could no longer make out the words; all sound had devolved into a torrential stream flowing past my ears.
I felt bone cold. I felt the touch of dead flesh.
I smelled it, too. Mold and rot, the determined decay of the once living.
I thought I would meet with the same void as before—this time, never waking up from it—when a figure unraveled from the rest.
It was stitched from shreds of shadow, like a corpse with other skins sewn onto its body.
I saw it had the same strange coloring as the faces in the drapery, gray but yellow tinged, as though the figure had come to life from the first daguerreotype photographs of the last century.
He was tall, with that ebony hair and those dark eyes that burned into me with their ghastly, unnatural light.
Their unnerving luster. The figure was not tangible, not real, yet it was undeniably there, mysteriously willed into existence.
My insides turned to ice, all of me turned to ice.
The table was gone. Olga, Alec, Katya—all gone, too.
I was not sitting but standing.
And before me was the Grand Duke—as if he had stepped out of his picture into the real world, from death into life, from nothingness into somethingness.
In the absence of physical evidence, though they were supposed to exist, I had come to believe ghosts lived only in memories and nightmares.
This belief now flew quite out of my mind, like a magpie into the night. For here was a real, fully materialized spirit—one I had summoned myself.