The Past
Valya
Moscow, Imperial Russia
There was no sign over the awning. Only the teetering piles of books in the window display and the cedar and vanilla smell of old paper in the doorway let the average passerby know it was a bookshop.
To the not-so-average passersby—the fanciful maidens praying for husbands, the preoccupied wives desperate for love and babies, the lonely widows attempting to make sense of their fates—the shop sold not ordinary books but lubok prints and texts on saints’ lives and fortune-telling, dream books and divinatory guidebooks and pamphlets, perpetual calendars and astrological charts and folk omens.
Despite her tattered, muddy skirts, and the hunger she wore like another piece of clothing, Valya faced the shop with her characteristic pluck.
She was eighteen, beautiful, and fierce.
She had seen the worst of life, being orphaned already.
Her father had died when she was only a child in a fluke horse accident; her mother had succumbed to consumption caught from a rich client.
She was not afraid of anything, least of all what people thought of her.
So Valya went inside.
The books, of course, were nonsense, being fodder for female patrons, the publishers growing fat and rich from women’s pain and suffering, their inability to control futures that should have been theirs.
It usually made Valya rail and rage in red-faced fury.
But not here. She studied the books on display with surprising interest, even flipping through an 1848 copy of The Interpretation of Dreams by the Venerable 106-Year-Old Man Martyn Zadeka with a sick kind of curiosity; every girl in Moscow owned some version of this dream book.
On the cover, an old white-haired man sat at the table of a traditional peasant izba surrounded by three maidens—waiting, as in life, for a man to tell them of their fate. Valya refused to be such a woman.
“Are you an adherent?” came a voice, charming and pleasant, without pretense.
Valya glanced up—to meet the warm hazel eyes of a man.
He had light brown hair, a wide uncomplicated smile, and handsome though plain and weather-roughened features.
She knew right away that this was Ivan Morozov, the printer, publisher, and owner of the shop.
The illiterate peasant peddler from Tver who had become a merchant in the country’s second-largest city.
She just had not expected him to be so young.
Or so pleasant looking, she hated to admit. She should loathe him.
To her surprise, Valya did not. “Not an adherent, no. A critic, more like.”
He laughed, the sound as pleasant as his face and bearing. “You do not believe in dream interpretation? You would be the first such maiden who has come into my shop.”
“I heard your shop is new, sir, so that doesn’t surprise me in the least.” She tried to ignore the flare of interest in Ivan Morozov’s eyes, which bathed his pupils a bright emerald green.
“I believe in it,” Valya added truthfully.
“Only, I do not believe Martyn Zadeka knew it. Everybody only thinks so because a famous dead poet said so.”
Ivan Morozov’s eyes burned. “Tell me more.”
And she did. They talked long after his shop closed, long into the night, when the clip-clop of the horses in the streets had dwindled into the cozy, warm glow of a silence among books.
A lone candle burned on the little rustic table between them, the cheese and rye bread and preserves Ivan had brought out from his small pantry fresh and delicious, especially to her empty stomach.
She had grown used to surviving on scraps of nothing on the streets, only getting by on her fortune-telling and smarts, not having a proper meal unless it was due to the good grace of strangers or distant relations.
But it wasn’t only the food and warmth. Her instinct about the bookshop had been right. Ivan Morozov did not sell the books to sell lies; he sold them to sell hope. His eyes lightened to jewel green whenever he spoke of giving people something to believe in.
“That is why my passion, if you can call it that, is spiritualism.”
Valya recoiled. Work with spirits was fraught with the nechistaya sila. She had always stayed away, had never had the desire or inclination for it, knew it was not her affinity. “Do you have an affinity for it?” she asked, wondering if he did.
He shook his head, lowering his gaze. “I believe it can be learned.”
“You are a fraud, then.” Unlike other methods of divination, spiritualism and mediumship could not be learned. Either one had an affinity for the dead or not.
“I believe in giving grieving people what I myself am searching for—peace.” He told her about losing his wife and child in a devastating fire in his shop in Tver. “I would do anything to hear them. To feel them in the same room. To commune with them.”
Valya had not yet fallen in love with Ivan Morozov. It was not until she did a coffee reading for him that she felt her heart swell very big with unfamiliar emotions.
A few nights after they had met, he brought coffee for them, per her request. She sat him down at the little rustic table, this time brimming with delicacies she had only heard of—red and black caviar and exotic pickled fish; white rolls with creamy butter; sweet, fluffy pastila and flaky tea cakes with crunchy walnuts and powdered sugar.
Valya did all kinds of fortune-telling and divination as part of her trade, everything her mother had taught her before she died.
But coffee reading was her favorite, and her affinity.
Every time she inhaled the aromas of the coffee beans, she felt herself open to a world no one else saw, a world alive and teeming beneath her reality.
It was a little like stepping out of the banya, with every pore, every sense, open and breathing deeply of the cool atmosphere after the intense, raw-to-the-flesh heat.
It was a travesty that coffee in Russia was available almost exclusively to the rich, or else she would be rich herself.
Valya carefully picked through the coffee beans that Ivan Morozov handed her, selecting only the most well-formed, promising ones.
She ground the beans herself and brewed the coffee in a little copper pot on his coal-burning stove.
Choosing a plain white porcelain cup, she poured the coffee inside, added an extra pinch of grounds for good measure, and asked Ivan to drink from the cup once they were done with their feast.
“Hold the cup with both hands and imagine diving inside. Do not finish the coffee, especially the dregs, then slowly turn the cup three times counterclockwise while focusing on your question or desire,” she instructed, all while pleasantly drowsy, her belly full and satisfied as never before, even with a father and mother to care for her.
Valya offered Ivan the cup, their fingers brushing.
It set fire to her heart. The drowsiness transformed into a desire sparking hotly down the length of her body.
She had never felt such sensations before, being an innocent in matters of love.
Her veins throbbed with it, the blood rushing so insistently that she heard it pounding in her ears.
He did as she instructed, smiling at her over the rim of his cup.
Once he was done, she picked up his cup and let her mind drift with the aroma of the coffee, transporting her to her own world.
She felt the heat of her affinity flare in her chest. Only then did she begin to read the symbols and patterns in the cup.
She did not need long. A puddle expanded at the bottom, eating through the coffee grounds until it swallowed up all the other symbols, all the way to the top of the cup—the future.
There was only one thing it could be—blood.
Valya knew with her intuitive fortune-telling sense that Ivan Morozov would not live past twenty-six years of age.
She couldn’t see into the cause of his demise—illness like her mother, accident like her father, or something else.
Many endings came bathed in blood, after all.
She knew only that he was cloaked in tragedy, cursed with a woefully short life.
It shadowed his face, transforming his looks from plain to exquisite.
That was when Valya fell for him, hard and tumbling and all at once.
Tragic people, men especially, had a higher purpose in Valya’s thinking.
And since he would be forever out of reach, her life would not be interrupted for long.
She had a feeling even then that she would be a woman on her own. She secretly desired this life.
She remembered their first time—right after that first and last reading.
It was a night of passion, of burning yet tender kisses, of moonlight that shone on naked skin, as he kissed each centimeter of her, worshipping her as a goddess.
And the confessions that came after, the soulful, heady unbosoming that could only happen between the sheets, after knowing each other’s bodies and hearts, after promising all within one’s power and all without.
The fervent oaths that would unavoidably be broken.
Valya did not share what she saw in the coffee grounds with Ivan Morozov.
He did not ask, not once he saw her face after the reading.
She glimpsed a knowing look in his eyes, which had gone a misty, earthy green.
In retrospect, he probably knew his bookshop would upset a lot of people, a lot of rich, titled, aristocratic people.
After that, Valya moved in with Ivan Morozov, becoming his wife in all but name.
By night, they made love and spoke of fortune-telling and dreams, the bookshop and its books, their plans for a future Valya knew would never come to fruition.
Sometimes, they would hold a séance or two for desperate bookshop patrons wishing to contact and communicate with a departed loved one trapped in the beyond.
Other times, they would study the books on spiritualism that Ivan Morozov collected to see if a spirit would manifest for them.
Spirit Mediumship: A Guide to the Intuitive Séance was his favorite.
But no spirit materialized. Valya knew no spirit would.
Though she grew convinced there was no threat of the nechistaya sila if the séance was fake and the psychic without an affinity for spirit mediumship and the dead.
And they helped people, gave them peace and hope, even if make-believe.
Even if fraudulent. It tossed a few extra coins into their pockets, too.
That was an added benefit, as she never wished to return to the streets.
By day, Valya told fortunes to their patrons at the little rustic table she had dragged below the old staircase.
Everybody called her Madam Morozov, the Fortune Teller Under the Stair.
For the first time in her life, she had a real home, a kind man who loved her, and a child in her belly she knew was a girl she would name Svetlana.
Valya saw it in her coffee cup, intuited it would happen, and it did.
Svetlana was born one windswept, stormy December night, screaming and tearing out of Valya’s body, already angry at her lot in life. Already knowing and refusing to accept it. Days later, when she was not even a week old, she lost her father.
As the bright, flickering flames consumed the bookshop, Valya tightened her hold on Spirit Mediumship: A Guide to the Intuitive Séance and her wailing daughter and pushed through the caved-in entrance out into the icy, snow-packed street.
But not before glancing behind her at Ivan Morozov, her husband for all intents and purposes, lying wide-eyed and deathly still in the same place they had met.
The blood splattered upon his chest glistened in the fire’s wild light, the handle of the blade plunged deep into his heart.
Past the smoke billowing into the street, Valya glimpsed the men hurrying away from the bookshop.
No doubt, they worked for the same men whom Ivan Morozov had angered with his success, some competing publisher owned by some aristo.
All she could see of them were their black-cloaked backs, their heels striking the cobblestones of Arbat Street as they fled.
Valya willed for them to turn, to see the ruin and ashes of her life.
Their figures were growing fainter with distance, their footsteps and voices more muted.
But one man turned back. She saw narrowed, black eyes.
A black beard, thin and patchy. A very low, very mean forehead.
Otherwise, forgettable. Even still. She committed the details of his face to memory, the clothing he wore, the blade he had used, the ruby on the end of the handle glinting as scarlet as Ivan Morozov’s blood.
Someday, Valya would see this man again. She would make sure. Someday, she would see Ivan Morozov, too. She would find a spirit medium who would call him up from the grave—even at the risk of the nechistaya sila.