The Smooth Palm

March 2, 2020

In our town insomnia is nothing to be ashamed of; one might even call it a public affair. The night watchmen at the bus depot don't sleep, nor do the taxi dispatchers, nor the old women on Oktyabrskaya, who by three in the morning have already gone over in their heads every one of the dead and every one of their daughters-in-law; the bakery on Market Street doesn't sleep, and by five in the morning the smell of warm bread drifts all along Krivaya; and they say the chairman of the town council himself doesn't sleep, because he has an ulcer and a young wife. So if a man's window is lit at night in our town, the neighbours are not alarmed; they only say understandingly the next morning, "Couldn't sleep either, eh?" — and tell him why they couldn't sleep themselves, and they can tell it for a long time.

Kesha did not sleep all night, and that was unlike him.

On the whole he slept well — the sound, dreamless sleep of people who have no wife, no children, no debts and no bosses. He went to bed at eleven, got up at seven, and between those two hours nothing happened to him. His grandfather used to say that a palmist mustn't see dreams: "Dreams are other people's palms that climb in on you without asking. You've seen enough of them in a day — that'll do." Kesha laughed at the time, and later, when he began reading for real, he understood that his grandfather, as always, had been right.

But that night he did not go to bed at all.

He sat at the desk and looked at the photograph. Then he moved it from the phone to his old laptop and looked at it on the big screen. He zoomed in, zoomed out, twisted the brightness and contrast, as he sometimes did when Grisha brought him a very dark picture. He switched on filters he had never known existed. And everywhere, at every magnification, under every filter, the palm stayed smooth.

It was not a bad photograph. Kesha had seen thousands of bad photographs — blurred, overexposed, taken against the window so that the palm turned into a black silhouette, taken so close up that only two fingers fitted into the frame. Here everything was right: the light, the angle, the focus. Every pore on the skin could be seen. You could see a small scar at the base of the thumb, old and white. You could see that the nails were clean, cut short, slightly bluish at the moons.

There were no lines.

By five in the morning Kesha realised he could not look any more; he closed the laptop, came out from behind the curtain and sat down on the client's chair. Sat down — and at once stood up again, because he remembered who had sat on it last. He stood in the middle of the shop. He looked at the little table.

The eight coins lay where they had been left.

He went up and bent over them without touching. In the lamplight they were almost black, like silver that has not been cleaned for a long time. Larger than today's — half as large again. On one side there was something like a coat of arms, or perhaps a face, but so worn you could not make it out. On the other, letters round the edge, also worn. Each coin's rim was uneven and jagged, as though someone had been gnawing them.

Kesha did not touch them. He could not have explained why; he simply did not want to. The way you don't want to pick up a dead bird, even when you know it can no longer do any harm.

---

Grisha came at half past seven, as always, but he was not as he always was.

Usually he came in stamping loudly down the iron stairs, said a loud hello — "Good morning, master!" — even though the master was behind the curtain and could not see him, and went straight for the bucket. But now Grisha came down quietly, as if sneaking, stood for a long time on the threshold and looked at the client's chair. Then he looked at the little table with the coins. Then he said in an undertone:

"Good morning, master."

"Come here," Kesha called.

Grisha, still in his jacket, went behind the curtain. That too was unusual: he only went behind the curtain with photographs or parchments, on business, never just like that.

"Sit down."

Grisha sat on the stool that stood by the wall. The stool was small, and Grisha's knees stuck up nearly to his chin.

"Tell me."

"Tell you what, master?"

"Everything. From the very beginning. How he came in."

And Grisha told him. He told it badly, confusedly, kept going back, mixed up what came first and what came after, but Kesha did not hurry him. He knew Grisha: if you hurried him he got completely lost and fell silent.

This is what came out.

There had been no footsteps on the stairs. Grisha now remembered that firmly.

The man was tall, in a long coat. About the hat, Grisha first said there was one, then that there seemed not to have been, and then that he did not remember whether there was or not, but he could picture the man in a hat, whereas without a hat — for some reason he couldn't.

The face was ordinary. Here Grisha struggled longest of all. Kesha asked him about the eyes, the nose, the mouth, the age, and at every question Grisha wrinkled his forehead, opened his mouth to answer and shut it again.

"Well, something at least," said Kesha. "Just one thing. Was he clean-shaven or bearded?"

"I don't know," said Grisha, and suddenly he looked so unhappy that Kesha was sorry he had asked. "Master, I looked at him. I definitely looked. I always look at the client when I'm talking, you told me to yourself — look at the face, just a bit above the eyes. I looked. But when I try to remember — there's like… like a smudge there. Like somebody rubbed it out with a finger."

"All right," said Kesha. "And his name?"

"He didn't give it."

"Did you ask?"

"I asked." Grisha thought. "Or no. I always ask. For the book. I must have asked. But he didn't give it."

"What did he say?"

"'For the master.' And then: 'Let him look and see what he sees.' And then: 'Then — "The Main Day."' That's all."

"And the hand? Did you see his hand with your own eyes? Not in the photo — just like that?"

"I saw it," said Grisha confidently. "That I remember well. I took it to the window, turned it. A hand like any hand. Only white. And cold — I was holding it while I turned it. Like out of the fridge. But there were lines, master. There were. I'd have noticed. I'm not a complete fool."

"You're not a fool," said Kesha. "I know."

Grisha looked at him gratefully.

"Maybe he's, like…" Grisha began. "Maybe a magician? There are magicians like that, I saw on the internet. They smear something on their hand, and…"

"Maybe," said Kesha.

But he knew it was no magician. He could not have explained how he knew; he simply knew, the way he always knew, looking at a photograph, that this man would quarrel with his brother in two weeks' time and that this woman would find a purse in the street on the twenty-third. This knowledge did not come from his head but from somewhere under his ribs; it was heavy and dense, like a stone, and there was no point arguing with it.

---

"The money," said Kesha.

Grisha looked at the curtain, beyond which stood the little table with the coins.

"Did you see him put it down?"

"No. I was behind the curtain. With you."

"And when you came out to him, it was already lying there."

"It was."

"Eight?"

"Eight. I counted. Afterwards. When you said don't touch, I didn't touch. Just counted."

Kesha nodded.

"Have you seen coins like that before?"

"No," said Grisha. Then he thought. "Although… My granny, my mum's mum, had a little box. Buttons were in it and all sorts. And there was one coin like that too. Big, dark. Granny said it was for luck. I was little, I wanted to take it to play with, and Granny smacked my hand. She said: 'Don't touch, it's not ours.'"

"What does 'not ours' mean?"

"Dunno. That's what she said." Grisha shrugged. "Granny said lots of things. She died when I was six."

Kesha was silent for a while.

"All right," he said at last. "Go and wash the floor. We're opening as usual."

"And what about this?" Grisha nodded at the laptop, on which, Kesha knew, the photograph was still open. "Will you write for him? He paid. Eight silvers. 'The Main Day.'"

And here Kesha realised that he did not know what to answer.

In the seven years he had kept the shop — and he read practically every day, five palms, almost without a day off, apart from those two weeks the year before last when he lay ill with pneumonia — well, in all those seven years there had never been a case where he did not write. Sometimes the photograph was bad — then Grisha retook it. Sometimes a person's month was empty, nothing would happen in it — then Kesha wrote exactly that: "A quiet month. Expect nothing." Sometimes there was something in a palm that was better left unsaid — and then Kesha wrote carefully, in roundabout hints, so that the person would understand exactly as much as he could bear.

But to write nothing at all — that had never happened.

"I don't know," he said. "Go."

Grisha went. A minute later the bucket clattered behind the curtain and the cloth began to slap.

Kesha took a blank parchment, unrolled it and weighed down the corners — with two bronze weights, the inkwell and the magnifying glass. He dipped the pen. He looked at the screen.

"The Main Day," he wrote at the top, as he always did. That was the heading; next he was supposed to write a date, and under it what would happen on that day and what to do.

He wrote nothing more.

He sat over the parchment for perhaps half an hour. The ink dried on the pen, and he dipped it again. Then again. Behind the curtain Grisha finished the floor, dusted, put the kettle on, drank his tea, washed his mug. And Kesha still sat — and the pen hung over the parchment and did not come down.

In the palm without lines there was not a single day. Neither a main one nor a minor one. Not one. This man's month was empty — not the way a quiet month is empty, when nothing happens in it, but completely, clean through, as a well is empty when there is no water in it. In a quiet month life still flows, only evenly, without splashes; you can see it the way you can see the current in a calm river. Here there was no river. Here there was the bottom. Dry.

That's how it is, Kesha thought, with the dead.

He remembered that once, long ago, still in his grandfather's time, they had been brought a photograph of the palm of a man who died three days later. Grandpa had looked at it a long time and then said, "See, little grandson, how it breaks off? Three days there are, and then — as if cut with a knife." And Kesha had seen it: the month was there, was there, and then it broke off. But it broke off — whereas here nothing had even begun.

Kesha put down the pen, rolled up the empty parchment and pushed it into the desk drawer.

---

The day passed as usual — that is, there were five clients, and Kesha read five, and in none of the palms was there anything special. One girl would meet an old friend on the twentieth. One man would lose his job but wouldn't be upset, because he'd find another, a better one. One pensioner would live through March peacefully, only on the eighth he shouldn't go to the market. The fifth was a lady in a fox stole who had come not for herself but for her husband, and spent a long time explaining to Grisha that her husband couldn't come himself because he didn't believe in it, but he'd let her photograph his palm — while he was asleep; she had taken it while he snored — and Grisha, after some thought, said that asleep was all right, there was nothing in the instructions about sleep. Kesha read the husband's palm too: in March he would buy the boat he had dreamed about for twenty years, and his wife would not like it. Kesha wrote quickly, as always, and as always when he wrote he thought of nothing else.

But in the evening, when Grisha had gone and Kesha was left alone, he opened the laptop again.

He did not know why. He had looked, it seemed, at everything there was to look at. But something drew him — the way a man who knows there is a corpse lying in the next room is drawn to look through the door once more.

Outside the wind was howling, the same wind as yesterday, and the tin on the tower was banging without a pause now. The lamp on the desk burned steadily. The tea had gone cold. Somewhere behind the wall, in the neighbouring cellar, water was dripping — Kesha heard it every night and had long since got used to it.

He looked at the photograph.

A broad pale palm. Long fingers. A white scar at the base of the thumb. Bluish moons on the nails.

And one line.

At first Kesha did not understand what he was seeing. He blinked. He brought his face close to the screen. He zoomed in on the picture.

The line was thin as a hair and pale, barely visible, but it was there. It began at the edge of the palm, under the little finger, where the heart line begins in people, and ran across the palm — not straight, as it should, but slantwise, down towards the wrist — and broke off halfway. As if someone had begun drawing it with a pen and given up.

In the morning it had not been there. Kesha was as sure of that as he was that his name was Innokenty. He had looked at this picture all night, enlarged every centimetre of it, and there had been no line.

And now there was.

Kesha sat and looked at it, and it seemed to him — though of course it could not be, it was just his eyes being tired — it seemed to him that it had grown a tiny bit longer, by a hair, by the width of a pen stroke, while he was looking.

He closed the laptop.

The shop was quiet. Beyond the curtain, by the door, on the little table, lay eight black coins. And in the neighbouring cellar the water dripped and dripped, and Kesha suddenly thought that he had never asked himself what was there, in that neighbouring cellar, and whether there was any water there at all, and whether there was a cellar there at all.

He put out the lamp and lay down without undressing, and lay in the dark with his eyes open until morning.