Tamara Petrovna

March 3, 2020

Every shop, be it a bakery, a barber's or the cobbler's booth by the market, has its regulars, and the owner knows them better than his own family: he knows who takes a white loaf and half a black one, who has their hair cut "like last time, only shorter," who has been bringing the same boots in for repair for eight years and says each time that it's the last. A regular is not just money; a regular is the clock the shop lives by: they came in — so it's Tuesday; they didn't — so they're ill, and you ought to ask the neighbours. Kesha did not have many of them, because not everyone will dare to go to a palmist every month, but he had some, and the first among them was Tamara Petrovna.

Tamara Petrovna came on the third of every month. Not the second and not the fourth, but precisely the third, and if the third fell on a Sunday she came all the same and stood by the door until Grisha opened up — and Grisha opened, because Kesha had told him to: for Tamara Petrovna — always.

She had been coming to Kesha for four years now. Even before Grisha, when Kesha himself, with a heavy heart, went out to the clients and photographed their hands himself, she was already coming. And she always took the same thing: "Heart." Not for herself — for her daughter.

"It's for Verochka," she would say each time, as if Grisha might forget. "Only for Verochka."

Tamara Petrovna was past fifty, a widow; she worked at the district library and dressed the way women dress who decided many years ago that there was no longer anyone to dress up for: a grey coat, a grey beret, grey low-heeled boots. Only her scarf was always bright — now raspberry, now turquoise, now orange as an orange — and it seemed that all the colour still left in Tamara Petrovna had gone into that scarf.

Her daughter, Vera, had never set foot in the shop. Kesha knew of her only what her mother told, and her mother told a great deal — to Grisha, of course, not to Kesha, but Grisha passed it on afterwards — and from these stories it emerged that Vera was twenty-four, that she was clever, beautiful and unlucky, that she worked in some office where she was not appreciated, that she lived with her mother although she could long since have lived on her own, and that she had no suitors and never had, "because, you know, she's proud, my girl."

And every month Tamara Petrovna came to find out whether someone might turn up for Verochka this month.

But what she had photographed was her own palm.

That was against the rules. Kesha read only the person whose hand was in the picture. But at the very beginning, four years ago, Tamara Petrovna had explained that Verochka would never in her life go to a fortune-teller, that Verochka laughed at such things, but she, the mother, had to know — and then Kesha, after some thought, said, "Give me yours." Because in a mother's palm, if the mother truly loves, the daughter can always be seen too. Not as clearly as in the daughter's own palm — as through clouded glass. But she can be seen.

And for four years Kesha had looked at Vera through the clouded glass of her mother's palm and written: this month — quiet. This month — she'll quarrel with a friend and make up by the twentieth. This month — a sad day on the ninth; let her mother bake something. This month — quiet. Quiet. Quiet.

Tamara Petrovna would read it, sigh, fold the parchment into her handbag — Kesha suspected that at home she had a whole stack of these parchments, tied with a ribbon — and leave until the next third of the month.

---

This time she came at half past eight. Grisha was just finishing the threshold — the second time, as was proper — and very nearly splashed her with water.

"Oh, Tamara Petrovna! Good morning!"

"Good morning, Grishenka." She stepped over the wet patch carefully, as over a puddle. "Is the master in?"

"He's in. He's always in."

Today her scarf was green, bright green like spring grass, of which there was as yet no sign at all: dirty March snow lay on Krivaya and the roofs were dripping.

"It's for Verochka," she said. "'Heart.'"

"As always," said Grisha.

"As always."

She sat down on the client's chair, took off her glove and held out her hand. Grisha led her to the window — Tamara Petrovna he led to the window gently, by the elbow, the way you lead a grandmother to the window — turned her palm to the light and took the picture.

"Sit a while. I'll put the kettle on."

"Thank you, Grishenka."

Grisha carried the phone behind the curtain.

---

Kesha took the phone. He knew Tamara Petrovna's palm well, better than his own — his own, by his grandfather's prohibition, he had never examined. Soft, finely wrinkled, with short fingers. The life line long but pale. The heart line deep, carved as if with a knife — widows often have one like that. And beneath it, at the base of the little finger, a slender twig — that was Vera, there she was, beside her mother's heart.

Kesha looked closely, and the month opened before him the way a road opens when you come round a bend.

Tamara Petrovna's March was quiet. Work, home, the library. On the eighth — some flowers, probably from colleagues. On the eleventh her head would ache. On the fourteenth she would stand a long time at the window. And Vera…

Kesha leaned closer.

This month Vera was brighter than usual. That was surprising — for four years she had barely shown through her mother's palm, like a watermark through paper, and now it was as though someone had added ink. The nineteenth. There it was. The nineteenth of March, evening. Vera would meet someone. A man. Where, Kesha could not see; he saw only that it would be in the evening, that it would be cold, and that Vera would laugh — laugh for real, for the first time in a long while.

Kesha felt something like joy. It was silly — what business was it of his, a strange girl he had never once seen in his life? — but he felt it. For four years he had been writing "quiet, quiet, quiet." And now, at last…

He dipped the pen and wrote:

"Heart. March. On the evening of the nineteenth Vera will meet a man. She will laugh. Let her mother not ask questions — she'll tell you herself."

He thought and added:

"On the eighth you will be given flowers. On the eleventh look after your head."

He was about to roll up the parchment when something caught his eye.

At first he did not even understand what. It was simply that in Tamara Petrovna's month, at its very end, nearer the last week, something was wrong. The way it is when you read a familiar book and suddenly, on a page you have read a hundred times, you see a misprint that wasn't there before.

Kesha went back to the picture and began to look carefully, day by day.

The twentieth — quiet. The twenty-first — quiet, though for some reason she would feel uneasy at heart. The twenty-second…

On the twenty-second of March there was a stain.

Not in the photograph — the photograph was clean. The stain was where Kesha saw the month, in that inner sight with which he looked and which he could never explain to anyone. Tamara Petrovna's twenty-second of March was covered in black, round, spreading at the edges — exactly like the blot a first-former makes in his exercise book when he dips his pen too deep.

Kesha looked at this blot and did not understand.

In seven years he had seen all sorts of things in other people's months. He had seen deaths — they looked like a cliff, an edge beyond which there was nothing. He had seen illnesses — they were grey and murky, like mist over a river. He had seen misfortune — it was sharp and prickly, as though someone had drawn a rusty nail across the month. He had even seen love, which was always warm and glowed from within, like a window in the evening.

But he had never seen a blot.

It was not death: after the twenty-second the month went on, continued — the twenty-third, the twenty-fourth, right to the end. But it went on somehow wrongly. Faded. As if after the blot the colour had drained out of the month.

And it was not illness, not misfortune. It was something Kesha had no name for. Something that came from outside.

He looked at the blot, and it seemed to him — again, as last night with the picture of the smooth palm — it seemed to him that it was stirring very slightly. Like ink that has not yet dried.

"Master," Grisha called from behind the curtain. "Tamara Petrovna's asking if it'll be long. She has to be at work by ten."

Kesha started.

He looked at the parchment. "On the evening of the nineteenth Vera will meet a man." He could add: "On the twenty-second be careful." Or: "On the twenty-second stay at home." Or something, anything.

But what? He did not know what it was. He did not know what to guard against. And writing what you don't know — that was what his grandfather had forbidden most strictly of all. "Write at random," Grandpa used to say, "and it'll come true at random. And then you'll have to clear it up yourself."

Kesha rolled up the parchment, tied it with thread and gave it to Grisha.

---

Tamara Petrovna read it right there by the little table, as always. Grisha, standing by the door, saw her face change: at first she did not believe it and reread it, then her lips began to tremble, then she pressed the parchment to her chest, to the green scarf, and said in a whisper:

"Lord. At last."

"There, you see," said Grisha, who did not know what was written there but could see it was something good.

"The nineteenth," said Tamara Petrovna. "Grishenka, the nineteenth! Four years!"

She dug into her handbag, took out her purse and laid on the table not two silvers but three.

"This is for you," she said. "For you and the master. Thank you. Please give him my thanks."

Grisha looked at the coins. Then at the other end of the table, where for the second day eight black ones lay untouched. Tamara Petrovna followed his gaze.

"Oh, and what are those? Antique?"

"A client left them," said Grisha. "The master said not to touch."

"Pretty," said Tamara Petrovna uncertainly, and for some reason moved her three silvers further away from them. "Well, I must run. Thank you. Thank you!"

She left, and Grisha heard her going up the iron stairs — quickly, almost running, like a girl.

---

The other clients that day were the most ordinary. A man came who wanted to know whether he would sell his car. A student came who had exams to pass. A man came in an expensive coat, with a thick gold signet ring, who took "Purse" and looked at Grisha as though Grisha owed him something. The student, while Grisha photographed her hand, kept asking whether she would be able to "resit" if the month turned out badly — as though palmistry were an exam and somewhere in the dean's office sat a lecturer who gave months their marks; and the man with the car haggled to the last over whether he could have it for half price, since he only wanted to know about the car and wasn't interested in the rest of his life, and Grisha, after some thought, said honestly that life couldn't be read separately from the car, "it's all on one hand." Kesha read them all. He would sell the car, but for less than he wanted. She would pass her exams, all but one. The money would come on the fourteenth.

None of them had anything on the twenty-second. Kesha checked. He checked everyone now: first he read the month as usual, and then he went back to the twenty-second and looked to see whether there was anything there. There wasn't.

In the evening he let Grisha go early, sat down at the desk and called up Tamara Petrovna's photograph on the laptop. Then the photograph of her palm that Grisha had taken a month before, on the third of February: Kesha kept all the photographs, every single one, in folders by month. Then January's. December's. November's. He opened them one after another and looked at the same place, at the month which in those pictures still lay in the future — and nowhere, not in one of them, was there any blot.

The blot had appeared only now. This month. This March.

Kesha leaned back in his chair and closed his eyes.

The wind outside had died down. The tin on the tower no longer banged. Only the dripping in the neighbouring cellar went on, drip, drip, drip, as if someone there, behind the wall, were very patiently counting out time.

Then Kesha, not knowing why himself, opened another folder — the one where since yesterday a single photograph had lain. The photograph of the smooth palm.

The line on it was there. Thin as a hair. From under the little finger, slantwise, towards the wrist.

And it had grown longer. Now Kesha was sure: not by a hair, not by the width of a pen stroke. Noticeably. Yesterday it had broken off in the middle of the palm — and today it reached almost to the wrist and bent there, at the very edge, into a tiny hook, as though pointing at something.

Kesha had never before seen a line run like that. Not on a single palm, not on a single living person.

He sat and looked at it, and suddenly understood what it resembled. Not a line. A crack. The kind you get on an old china cup: it runs thin, thin, barely visible — and then one day the cup falls in two in your hands.