The Shop in the Half-Basement

March 1, 2020

There is a street in our provincial capital that the whole town calls Krivaya — Crooked Street — although the signs give it quite another, perfectly respectable name, bestowed in honour of some distinguished person. Nobody remembers the distinguished person any more, but anyone who has walked down the street even once can see that it is crooked: first it runs downhill, then it changes its mind and runs uphill, then it winds round the old water tower like a tipsy godfather round a wattle fence, and only at the market does it come to its senses and straighten out, as if nothing had happened.

The houses on Krivaya are old, merchant-built, with thick walls and windows so wide you could roll a barrel through any of them. Below them lie half-basements whose little windows have sunk into the pavement right up to the eyebrows, so that a passer-by sees in them nothing but somebody's legs and a cat. In some of the half-basements they mend shoes, in others they sell draught beer, and in others they sell nothing at all — a padlock simply hangs there, and the padlock has been hanging for twenty years or so, and nobody knows who hung it.

But in house number seventeen, in the half-basement where, they say, paraffin was once sold, and before that either coffins or trunks (the old women argue about it to this day), there hangs above the door a wooden board, and on the board is lettered in black paint:

KESHA THE PALMIST I read palms. I see a month ahead.

Below it, under glass so the rain won't get at it, is the price list. Six lines, six prices in silver pieces, and at the bottom, in small letters: "Prediction valid for 30 days. No refunds: everything comes true."

You will say: what a marvel — a fortune-teller. As if there weren't enough of them these days! In every shopping centre there sits some madame in a fringed shawl laying out cards, and on your phone there are thousands of such madames, each promising love, money and the lifting of the curse of spinsterhood for a modest fee. All true. But, in the first place, Kesha is no madame. And in the second place — and this is the main thing — with Kesha, everything comes true.

I will not try to persuade you. Don't believe it if you don't want to. Only ask any trader on the market square, any woman in the queue at the clinic, any taxi driver waiting on the corner by the tower: tell me, is this Kesha from Krivaya telling the truth, or just wagging his tongue? And the taxi driver will first look at you as though you had just dropped off the moon, then spit and say, "Oh, it's the truth all right, curse it." And he will say nothing more, because, as it turns out, last year the taxi driver had a story of his own, which he does not like to recall.

---

Mornings in the shop always began the same way, and that first March morning was no different.

Grisha came first. He came at half past seven, though they opened at ten, because those were his instructions. Grisha did everything according to instructions, and this was his chief virtue, and perhaps his only one. Sixteen years old, long as a pole, with arms that seemed to grow from not quite the right place and so were forever knocking into something, with sticking-out ears and a face so guileless that at the market he was always given more change than he was owed — simply out of pity.

Grisha took off his jacket, hung it on the nail by the door — on that particular nail and not the one next to it — put on a blue overall, filled a bucket with warm water and washed the floor.

The floor of the shop was stone, made of old slabs, and it had to be washed in a particular way: from the far wall towards the door, without missing a single slab, wringing the cloth out dry, and at the end going over the threshold twice. Why twice, Grisha did not know. He had been told to. So he did.

Then Grisha dusted: the windowsill, the shelf of ledgers, the old client's chair, the little table with the box of tissues on it ("for the emotional ones," as was written on the box in Kesha's hand). Then he put the kettle on. Then he sat down on the stool by the door and waited.

The shop was not large. One room, long and narrow like a pencil case, with a low vaulted ceiling. By the entrance stood the client's chair and the little table. Further in, from wall to wall, hung a heavy curtain of dark green velvet, worn bald in places. Behind the curtain was Kesha.

Clients never saw Kesha. Never. This was the first rule of the shop, and Grisha explained it to everyone who asked — and almost everyone asked.

"The master doesn't meet clients," Grisha would say, looking somewhere above the head of the person asking, because that made it easier for him to remember the words. "The master needs to concentrate. Whatever you want to know, you tell me. I pass it on to the master. The master reads your palm and writes the answer."

"But how can he read it if he can't see me?" the client would marvel.

"From a photo," Grisha would answer, and show his phone.

At this point the client would usually start laughing or, on the contrary, get angry at being taken for a fool, and then Grisha, not the least bit offended, would say the next of the phrases he had been given:

"You don't have to believe it. But pay, and in a month you'll see for yourself."

And, would you believe it, they paid.

---

Kesha himself did not come into the shop through the door. To be precise, he never left it: behind the green curtain, behind the desk, there was another little door, a low one, and it led to the back room, where stood Kesha's bed, a wardrobe, a hotplate, books and his grandfather's old trunk, which Kesha had not opened for twelve years. And so he lived — in the shop, behind the shop, by the shop — and hardly ever went out, except in the evening, when Krivaya emptied, for a walk to the tower and back.

He was twenty-seven years old. He was thin, pale with that particular pallor found in people who sit a great deal in basements, and he wore his grandfather's old sweater with patches on the elbows, though he could have bought himself ten new ones. He had money: a good palmist always has money. But there was somehow nothing for Kesha to spend it on and, above all, no one to spend it with.

Kesha did not like people. No, that's not right: he wished people no harm, and if someone had fallen in the street in front of him, he would probably have helped them up. But listening to them — their complaints, their tears, their endless "and then he said to me, and then I said to him" — this Kesha could not bear at all. It wore him out as if he had been hauling sacks. And that was why, last autumn, he had hired Grisha.

Grisha was the ideal assistant. He listened to everything the clients told him with the same sympathetic expression, understood nothing, remembered nothing except the main thing, and asked no questions. Kesha wrote him a set of instructions — detailed, four pages long, with examples of what to say if a client cried, what to say if a client shouted, and what to say if a client tried to break through behind the curtain — and Grisha learned them by heart, like a poem, and rattled them off without a hitch.

But the main thing in Grisha's work was the photograph.

"The palm has to be photographed properly," Kesha said when he was teaching him. "That's the most important thing. More important than everything else put together. Understand?"

"I understand," Grisha answered.

"An open palm. The whole hand in the frame, from the wrist to the fingertips. Fingers slightly apart. Light from the side, not head-on. In flat light the lines disappear. Understand?"

"I understand."

"If the picture's bad, I won't see anything. And if I don't see anything, I'll write nonsense. And if I write nonsense…"

"…then the nonsense will come true," Grisha would finish, because he had heard it a hundred times already.

"Exactly," Kesha would say.

And Grisha photographed. He photographed diligently, with the tip of his tongue sticking out, made the client turn their hand this way and that, went to the window, came away from the window, asked for "just one more," and the clients, cross at first, in the end gave in and stood as though at the doctor's, holding their palm out in front of them as if begging for alms.

---

That morning, the first of March, there were five clients.

Kesha never read more than five a day. This was the second rule of the shop. To the sixth, Grisha would say with a sympathetic face, "The master isn't seeing anyone else today. Come back tomorrow, early," and the sixth would leave, swearing, and the next day would come at half past seven and stand outside the door while Grisha washed the floor.

The first was a young woman in a puffer jacket who wanted to know about "Work": whether the bank where she had gone for an interview would take her on. Grisha photographed her palm, carried it behind the curtain, and twenty minutes later brought out a parchment — real parchment, thick and yellowish, rolled into a tube and tied with coarse thread. The woman unrolled it right there by the little table, read it and first beamed, then frowned.

"It says here: they'll take me, but not in that department," she said. "What's that supposed to mean?"

"It means what it says," said Grisha. "The master writes it as it is."

The second was an old man with a walking stick, who took "Purse" and, having received his parchment, moved his lips for a long time and then said, "The twelfth? Well, the twelfth it is," and went away pleased.

The third was a young lad, a courier, in a yellow jacket with a big square box on his back. He had dashed in between orders, was in a hurry and kept looking at his phone.

"I want 'Heart,'" he said. "My girlfriend left me. Will she come back?"

"The master doesn't say 'she'll come back' or 'she won't,'" Grisha recited. "The master says what will happen this month. Meetings, confessions, quarrels and reconciliations."

"Well, let him say it, then."

The lad paid two silvers, held out his hand, and Grisha took the picture. The lad's name was Lyonya — Grisha wrote it down in the visitors' book, where he wrote down everyone who gave their name. Twenty minutes later Lyonya received his parchment, read it, snorted, stuffed it in the pocket of his yellow jacket and ran off, answering someone on the phone as he went: "Yeah, I'm coming, I'm coming."

The fourth was a lady who wanted "Caution" and who, while she waited, managed to tell Grisha about her mother-in-law, about the neighbours downstairs who kept flooding her, and about her dog, which was eating the sofa. Grisha listened to it all with the same sympathetic face and from time to time said, "I understand," and kept glancing at the box of tissues in case it should be needed. It wasn't.

But the fifth client came when it was already getting dark.

---

In March it got dark early, and in the half-basement on Krivaya earlier still: even by day the light went in there reluctantly, as if it had to be coaxed. Grisha had just switched on the lamp over the little table and was about to put the kettle on when the door opened.

He had not heard footsteps on the stairs. It was only later, when Kesha questioned him, that Grisha remembered and said in surprise: there were no footsteps. The steps down to the shop were iron and echoing, and you could hear every client from above, as soon as they took hold of the railing. But this one — nothing. The door simply opened, and a man was standing in it.

What he looked like Grisha could never explain afterwards. Tall — that much, yes. In a long dark coat, old-fashioned, right down to the ankles. A hat, it seemed. Or not a hat. The face…

"An ordinary face," Grisha would say, wrinkling his forehead. "Well, a face. Like everybody's."

"Young? Old? A moustache, a beard?"

"Ordinary," Grisha would repeat, and it was plain that he was trying with all his might to remember and could not.

The man came in, closed the door behind him and stopped in the middle of the shop. Grisha stood up, as he was supposed to, and said, as he was supposed to:

"Good evening. Are you here for the master?"

"For the master," said the man. His voice was quiet, as though it came from far away.

"The master reads palms and sees a month ahead," said Grisha. "Here, please, are the options and the prices. What would you like to know?"

The man did not look at the price list. He said:

"Let him look and see what he sees."

There was nothing like that in Grisha's instructions. Grisha was taken aback, but not very: he had something prepared for such cases too.

"The master needs an option," he said. "Otherwise the master doesn't know where to look."

The man was silent for a while, as if thinking. Then he said:

"Then — 'The Main Day.'"

"The Main Day" cost eight silvers and was the most expensive. It was rarely taken. Grisha nodded, took out his phone and said the memorised phrase he said twenty times a day:

"Open your palm, please."

The man took off a glove — only now did Grisha notice that he had been wearing gloves — and held out his hand.

Grisha looked at it and saw nothing special. A hand like any hand. Broad, pale, with long fingers. Grisha led the man to the window, turned his hand to the light the way he had been taught, from the side, so the lines would show, and took the picture. Then, just in case, another. Then he looked at the picture on the phone, saw the palm, all of it, from wrist to fingertips, and was pleased.

"Have a seat," said Grisha. "The master will read it and write. Twenty minutes or so."

The man sat down on the client's chair. He did not put his glove back on but laid his hand on his knee, palm up, as though holding something invisible on it. Grisha took the phone and went behind the curtain.

---

Kesha was sitting at the desk in the circle of light from the green lamp, drinking cold tea. On the desk lay a pile of blank parchments, an inkwell, a pen — a real one, steel, his grandfather's — and a large magnifying glass on a bronze handle.

"Last one," said Grisha. "'The Main Day.'"

Kesha nodded, took the phone and looked at the picture.

He looked for a long time. Grisha stood beside him and waited, shifting from foot to foot: usually the master looked at a picture for a second, two at most, and then started writing, and the pen scratched away quick-quick, like a mouse in the wall. But now he did not write. He looked.

Then Kesha raised his eyes to Grisha, and Grisha — even Grisha, for all his simplicity — saw that the master was paler than usual.

"What is this?" Kesha asked quietly.

"A palm," said Grisha.

"Whose?"

"The client's. The last one. He's sitting out there."

Kesha turned the phone towards him.

On the screen was a palm. Well photographed — here Grisha could be proud of himself: the whole hand in the frame, fingers slightly apart, light from the side. A broad pale palm with long fingers.

And there was not a single line on it.

No life line, no heart line, no head line. No mounts, no crossings, no stars, no islands, not even the smallest crease at the bends of the fingers. The palm was smooth as an eggshell. Like a doll's. As if it had not been photographed from a living person but moulded out of wax and left unfinished.

"Is this a joke?" asked Kesha.

"No," said Grisha, and his eyes went round. "Master, honest to God. I saw it myself. The hand was normal. With lines. Like everybody's. I looked!"

"Go and look again."

Grisha drew back the curtain and went out.

The client's chair stood empty. The door was shut. On the little table, in the place where clients put their money, lay eight coins — silver, but not like the ones everyone paid with. Larger, heavier, darker, with worn edges, as though gnawed.

And on the chair, on the seat where a pale hand had lain palm up only a moment before — Grisha later swore to it on his mother's life, and Kesha believed him, because Grisha never lied — on the seat lay a small clod of earth, no bigger than a fingernail. Damp. Black. As if it had only just been taken out from under the snow.

"Master," Grisha called in a hoarse voice. "Master, he's gone."

Behind the curtain all was quiet. Then Kesha said:

"There were no footsteps on the stairs."

It was not a question. Grisha listened inside himself, to what he remembered, and realised with surprise that the master was right: there had been none. Neither when the man came nor when he left.

"There weren't," said Grisha.

"Close the shop," said Kesha. "And go home."

"What about the money?"

Kesha was silent for a while.

"Don't touch the money," he said. "Let it lie there."

Grisha closed the shop, hung his overall on the nail, put on his jacket and went home to the outskirts on the last marshrutka, and the whole way he looked at his own palm, at his own lines, as if checking that they were still there.

And Kesha sat at his desk in the circle of green light and looked at the photograph of the smooth palm until the phone screen went dark. Then he pressed the button, and the screen lit up again, and he looked again.

Above Krivaya Street a wind was rising. Somewhere up by the water tower a loose sheet of tin was banging. And in the half-basement of house number seventeen, on the little table by the door, lay eight dark coins, and nobody touched them.