Chapter 22
Valya
Valya waited for Dr. Misha to drive her to Svetlana’s grave. It was located in the new Sainte-Geneviève-des-Bois Russian cemetery about thirty kilometers from Paris. So she was happy to catch a ride in his new cab.
Valya grudgingly exchanged pleasantries with the Russian passersby as she waited.
They walked past her tearoom with fearful looks they didn’t bother concealing.
She tried to press down the worry for her granddaughter, whom she hadn’t seen since yesterday.
Where was the girl? Zina had better explain herself when she returned, though admittedly, things had not been the same between them since their argument.
“Will you be moving, Valya?” Her client Masha hobbled up to her, nosy as usual.
“No,” she returned sharply. “Why? What have you heard?”
“Oh, nothing. It must be nothing. Except how tired you look, dear heart! How overworked and exhausted! You must get plenty of rest. At our age, you know, it is a necessity, or la! We die.”
Valya ground her teeth; Masha was at least twenty years her senior, if not more.
She squinted into the coming traffic, searching for Dr. Misha, her joints creaking horribly.
But thankfully, here he was, his cab pulling up to the curb.
She hurried toward it, past Masha, nearly knocking Anton the opera singer off his feet.
“Chyort voz’mi!” He threw his hands up. Then, seeing her, melted. “Ah, Valya, it is you. Pardon me, dear Valyachka, I am jumpy. I have nowhere to read my newspaper.”
“What are you talking about, Anton Osipovich? The tearoom is open as usual. You may visit and read your newspaper there.”
“Oh, but I cannot, and you know why, Valya. It is haunted. Truly this time.”
“It is, dearest Valyeusha!” Masha chimed in. “When was the last time the lights worked properly, or somebody didn’t trip and topple? It’s your daughter, as tempestuous in death as she was in life. Perhaps we should summon her at our next séance.”
The last thing Valya wanted to talk or think about was her daughter. While Svetlana wasn’t the one haunting the tearoom, she was suddenly everywhere.
“Somebody is always scalding themselves with hot tea or cookies.” Anton continued his litany of complaints.
“And the fortunes,” Masha lamented, “my goodness, dear heart, why, they are bleak. Bleaker even than Russia after the revolution!”
“Pah, all this is but foolish superstition. Rumors. Pay no heed to them, dear ones.”
Anton shook his head. “Superstition or no, the last time I was in your tearoom, I slipped and fell so hard I saw stars and said goodbye to the world, believing I was a dead man.”
The incessant man talked almost as much as he used to sing.
“Have courage, Anton Osipovich.” Valya patted him on the shoulder and made for the cab amid the honking motorcars and dissatisfied drivers swearing up and down in throaty French, more suited for poetry than protest. Now, in Russian you could swear properly.
She missed the Petersburg streets with an ache then.
“Where are you off to so late with the good doctor? The sun will soon be setting!” Anton shouted after her.
“Visiting my daughter, dear Anton Osipovich,” she threw back, hopping into the cab despite her aching body.
Anton and Masha immediately converged, no doubt trading gossip about the tearoom and her.
Her clients and patrons were leaving in droves because of the infernal demon, who reveled in playing tricks on them.
Valya would try one last remedy, hence her trip, then she would decide how much more to tell Zina.
For Valya was tired. Tired of the infestation.
Tired of paying house calls, spending her francs in Mademoiselle Deschamps’s flower shop, wearing the reeking amulet, maintaining the other ineffectual remedies.
Tired of the police sniffing around. Worse, Valya had started to awaken all over the tearoom, find bruises on her neck, sense invisible hands squeezing the breath out of her in the small, quiet hours.
If this last remedy failed, she would need to involve Zina, to attempt something that not even the best medium in Moscow had been able to accomplish.
“Good evening, Valya,” Dr. Misha said in his warm physician’s voice once she was safely ensconced in his cab. “How is your health tonight?”
She was very glad he asked. She had prepared a list of ailments to discuss with him on the way to the cemetery.
Paris was moody and partially clouded as they set off.
But there would be a sunset—enough of one, anyway, for her purposes.
As Dr. Misha drove and answered her questions, Valya watched the well-kept buildings being replaced by run-down ones.
They crawled this way through a city slowed by traffic, south into the countryside.
They reached the cemetery an hour or so later. Dr. Misha dropped Valya off before parking and visiting his own family’s graves.
The beginnings of the new Sainte-Geneviève-des-Bois Russian cemetery spread before her under fragrant age-old pines that swept their dark, heavy branches low to the ground, which even in spring was covered in reddish pebbles and dead leaves.
The snow-white marble tombstones with their distinctive Orthodox crosses and tiny blue church cupolas rose up on either side of her as she made her way to the grave she sought.
Valya forced her stiff limbs, grown even stiffer on the cab ride, to push forward. She glanced up at the sky, its orange and red colors vibrant, almost violent, though the sun was too sunken in the swath of dirty clouds.
Under a freakishly naked pine, she caught sight of the grave—the name Svetlana Lenormand, the dash with the too-short years, the epitaph someone else had written for Valya: Beloved daughter and mother.
Valya came up to the grave, emotion building in her throat—and spat on it.
Furtively, she looked about and, seeing no one, tugged an old, tarnished necklace out of her faded carpetbag, as well as a velvet pouch, a small shovel, two red candles, and a long black ribbon.
In spite of her irritatingly knobby and trembling hands, Valya dropped the necklace into the pouch and tied it with the ribbon.
The ruby glinted bloodred through the narrow opening.
It reminded her of blood…his blood, pooling on the floor, edging closer, to her very boots, until she felt the cold, sticky wetness through her stockings.
Valya shook her head and dropped painfully to her knees. She placed one candle on each side of the grave and lit the wicks. The red flames guttered at first, then surged. She started to dig a hole beside the grave.
She shielded her eyes and looked up at the unfurling scarlet stain of the sunset, a deep red, like the ruby, like that blood.
It was time. She used all her might to bury the velvet pouch with the ruby necklace, his ruby necklace, before sitting back, closing her eyes, and chanting the spell—the banishment, her curse.
“Take this sacrifice, once your possession. Dead one, go back. Back to where you belong. Into the ground, into this grave, into darkness and death. No one will see you, no one will miss you. Everyone will forget you. You will forget you. No one will remember you.”
Valya used her bare hands to push the soil over the buried pouch as she chanted on.
“Everyone will forget you. No one will remember you. They will not see you or your grave. They will pass it and you by. You will be forgotten, forgotten, forgotten. You, Grand-Duc, will be forgotten.”
She finished her curse by spitting on the grave with all the hatred inside her—on this place where lay not her daughter but the Grand Duke.