The Fortune Teller Page 16

  “Then what happened?” Aishe whispered, her eyes flitting to the box again.

  “She stuffed it into her bag and hurried out. On her way back to camp, she stopped at the river and offered prayers to the water.” Simza stood and reenacted the story to Aishe’s giggles. “She stomped on the ground and spun in a circle three times, commanding any fever that may have entered her body to flow out and into the earth. And she shook a tree—” She paused and pointed to Aishe.

  “Four times,” Aishe answered like a dutiful student.

  Simza nodded, pleased at Aishe’s memory. “Just like her grandmother had taught her. When she arrived back at camp, she opened her sack for her parents. They allowed Dinka to choose one treasure to keep. Instead of picking one of the fine dolls, she surprised them by choosing the wooden box.”

  Aishe listened, wanting to remember every word of her grandmother’s story so she could store it deep inside. One day she would be the old woman by the fire with stories to tell and memories that should not be forgotten.

  Simza smiled a toothless smile, her eyes sparkling again. “Maybe one day the box will belong to you.”

  Aishe doubted anything in the chest would belong to her. Her parents, aunts, and uncles would inherit Dinka’s treasures first. And she had countless cousins.

  Aishe didn’t agree with her grandmother’s opinion of the gadjos, that the people who lived in cities were always ill. She found cities exciting and dreamed of one day living in such a place, instead of always on the outskirts, by a river with their livestock.

  Usually they would enter a town for just a day, their long caravan a chain of colorful moving houses on wheels. Their wagons’ exteriors were intricately painted, with artful trim and decorative embellishments. Their wooden cabins had shuttered windows, and the interiors had built-in seats, cabinets, wardrobes, and beds. The band would only stay in a town to trade and entertain. Then they would head to the forest to camp in a clearing, their wagons ringed together in a circle. By morning they would be on the road again, never to return to the same town.

  Whenever Aishe asked why they had to leave, her parents explained that they needed to protect their spiritual energy, their dji, which they believed became drained when they spent too much time in jado, the non-Romani world. Aishe’s ancestors had left their homeland hundreds of years ago to become nomads, traveling the lungo drom, “the endless road with no destination.” Because of this, outsiders called them gypsies, though they despised the name.

  Aishe closed up Dinka’s chest and put it back in the wagon in its special spot. She kissed her grandmother’s forehead and went off to meet her two cousins for their special outing. Every Eve of Saint George, the elder girls would let Aishe join in their secret ritual.

  The ritual was quite simple. They carried fried fish and brandy to a place where two roads crossed. They would lay their offerings out and sit in the middle of the crossroad and wait for the apparitions of their future husbands to appear. Legend said that if a male figure appeared and ate the fish, it was a sign for a good marriage. If he drank the brandy, that was a very bad sign. And if he touched neither, then the bride and groom would both die within the year. The cousins never saw any apparitions, but every year they continued to try.

  Sometimes they would strip naked at midnight by the nearest body of water—a lake or a river—and stare into its pool to see the reflection of their future husbands. When that didn’t work, they stood naked on top of a dunghill at midnight with a piece of cake in their mouths and waited for a dog to bark. The direction the sound came from was supposedly the direction where their future husband lived.

  While her cousins were busy, Aishe would lie back in the grass with her eyes closed and dream about what her husband would look like. She never imagined him as a Rom, but she kept that secret to herself.

  * * *

  Only in winter did Simza and Aishe’s band quit their travels. Every year they settled in Styria, a small town in Austria, where they made their living in a variety of trades: metalworking, carpentry, basket weaving, and blacksmithing. Many of the men were also musicians—masters of the violin, flute, and zimbles—and often played for money. Aishe was a gifted harp player. She was also quite clever, which is how all the trouble began.

  Aishe befriended a sweet Austrian girl named Kitti, whose family owned a small farm. Aishe wanted nothing more than to learn how to read like Kitti, who always had storybooks with her. Aishe had never seen books up close, for no Rom knew how to read or write. Her people carried their history through songs and the stories the elders told every night around the fire. When Aishe offered Kitti a necklace to teach her to read and speak German, Kitti agreed.

  Aishe snuck into her family’s wagon to retrieve it; the necklace she found in Dinka’s chest was one of countless others. She assured herself no one would notice if it went missing. Her grandmother could barely see anymore and there were plenty left.

  The girls met almost every day for several winters, and by the end of the past winter, Aishe had mastered the language. She and Kitti had also become friends.

  Kitti began to lend her books, which Aishe took special care to hide. If she was ever caught with a book she would be beaten. The Rom were not allowed to pollute their mind with the gadjes’ words.

  One day Aishe came home from Kitti’s and found the camp in an uproar. Her father had found the books.

  “What are these?” He threw Kitti’s books at her feet and stomped on them. Then he grabbed Aishe by the hair and dragged her to the campfire.

  “Papa, no! I’m sorry!”

  Enraged, he took a leather cord and whipped her back repeatedly. “You! Are! Not! My! Daughter!” he yelled. With each word he cracked the strap harder.

  Deaf to her screams, he reached for the branding iron in the fire.

  Her mother grabbed his arm, “Stop! Stop it!”

  She barely managed to keep him from maiming their daughter’s face. He took the rod to Aishe’s hand instead and held it until it seared off her skin.

  Aishe shrieked and fell back, clutching her hand.

  “So you’ll never forget.” He raised the rod, ready to burn her again.

  Hysterical, her mother screamed to Aishe’s eldest cousin. “Take her! Niko! Take her!”

  By now Simza and all the elders in the camp were yelling the same. Niko picked Aishe up and ran off with her into the forest. They found a faraway place to hide, and Niko brought Aishe water from a nearby stream to soak her hand.

  “What were you thinking?” he scoffed. “Reading words. Bringing books here. Everyone knows they’re tainted.”

  “They’re not. They’re beautiful.” Aishe wept, cradling her maimed hand. “One day we will have our own books.”

  “That’s absurd,” Niko said, turning his back on her.

  That evening Simza came to find them. She appeared beside Aishe in the dark and lifted her chin. Aishe stared back at her with tears glistening in her eyes.

  “It is done” was all Simza said. Then she led her back to camp.

  Her father had gone off to drink away his anger. Aishe lay down in her family’s wagon and let Simza tend her wound with one of her special salves. All the while Simza sang a song Aishe had never heard before, a sad melody about a daughter leaving her family and never seeing them again.

  “What is that song, Grandmother?” Aishe whispered.

  “One you know well,” Simza said.

  Before Aishe could ask Simza to explain, her mother came inside.

  Her mother hesitated, something she never did. Aishe had never her seen her look so solemn.

  “You must marry,” she finally said.

  Aishe could not believe it. “Who?”

  “Milosh Badi.”

  Tears sprang to Aishe’s eyes. “But Milosh Badi is Grandmother’s age.”

  “You will marry him,” her mother said. “You’re sixteen.”

  “He’s as old and weathered as a tree!”

  “He is a musician,” her moth
er reminded her. “A good one.”

  “He’s ancient!” Aishe began to sob. She could not believe her parents would marry her off to him.

  “Milosh Badi will die soon and you will be a widow,” her mother said in her pragmatic way. “Your father has willed it so.”

  “He is punishing me for the books.”

  “You are never to speak of them or I will disown you myself!” her mother hissed. Then she left.

  Aishe curled up on her blanket and felt her grandmother’s frail hand stroke her hair. Simza began to sing the same song again. Aishe closed her eyes and pretended to sleep, but her mind was full of wild thoughts. She must leave. She had to. Like the girl in the song, she would run away and start anew.

  Simza was right. Aishe did know the song. She had known it all her life.

  * * *

  While everyone slept, Aishe gathered her things with the stealth of a thief. She moved to the edge of the tent and saw that her grandmother was watching her.

  Simza sat up with the eeriness of a phantom. Aishe froze, not knowing what to do. Simza had the power to decide her fate. If her grandmother woke her father, no one would be able to spare Aishe from his retribution.

  The two women locked eyes. Simza’s held the full weight of the cohalyi that she was. She picked up an object in the darkness and offered it to Aishe.

  Through the faint streams of moonlight, Aishe saw that her grandmother was holding out Dinka’s chest.

  Aishe took the gift. Then Simza draped two amulets around her neck and placed her favorite seashell in Aishe’s hand as a blessing. She motioned Aishe toward the wagon’s open door with a look that said, Go and live. I will always be with you.

  The Hanged Man

  Semele knew exactly the year that Simza had described in Dinka’s story. The plague had hit Northern Italy in 1629 and wiped out half of Milan’s population by 1630. Somehow Ionna had foretold those events over a thousand years before. It was just too incredible.

  Semele closed her computer. She had been in the Beinecke reading room for hours and her eyes needed a rest. The day was winding down and she couldn’t put off calling her mother any longer. She gathered her things and left the building.

  The brisk air hit her when she stepped outside. She buttoned her coat and walked over to Blue State Coffee to get an espresso. Depending on how fast she worked, she might be able to translate several more pages before heading to her mother’s. She wanted to find out what happened to Aishe and the cards.

  She knew with striking certainty she needed to figure out how to locate them, and quickly, and she realized there was one person she could call: Sebastian Abbes, a card historian in the Netherlands. She had worked with him earlier in the year while dismantling a collection for a Dutch client who had several valuable decks. If anyone knew about Ionna’s deck, he would.

  She checked her watch and quickly calculated the time difference. The Netherlands was six hours ahead. It was evening there now, but Sebastian wouldn’t mind. The man was a night owl and crazy to boot.

  She fished her cell phone from her purse and saw she had four missed calls and three voice mails from Bren. She stared at the phone with a sinking heart, unable to listen to the messages and call him back—not yet, not when she didn’t know how to say what needed to be said. It felt like swimming upstream. Instead she sent him a text: At Mom’s dealing with some things. Will call you when I get back. She clicked send, feeling like a jerk, but she had to focus.

  She forced Bren from her mind and called Sebastian. He answered on the second ring. “Madame Cavnow! Please tell me you are in Amsterdam.”

  Even in her dismal state, Semele couldn’t help laughing. Sebastian was a terrible flirt and had asked her out on more than one occasion. “No, still in the States. Listen, I need to ask a favor for one of my clients. They’re interested in acquiring an antique tarot deck, fifteenth century or earlier. Have there been any finds?”

  “We’ve had some exciting sixteenth-century finds, but not many cards older than that have survived.”

  “I was curious…” She hesitated. “Where did tarot cards originate? Was it Egypt?”

  Sebastian laughed so heartily, she felt embarrassed. “Semele. Don’t tell me you’ve been reading French Enlightenment manuscripts. No, the Egyptian notion is a complete myth,” he assured her. “A whimsical idea someone dreamed up in a Parisian salon.”

  “Oh.” What else could she say? I’m reading an ancient seer’s memoir and I’ll get back to you?

  “Playing cards came from the East and exploded on the scene in Europe during the 1400s. Think of them as the video games of the time. People were obsessed. The priests were up in arms.”

  Sebastian was always animated whenever he talked about his favorite subject. Semele sipped her coffee while she listened.

  “Cards went from being incredibly expensive works of art to being mass-produced on paper. Games usually involved gambling, which is why the church set laws, tried to ban them, burn them. It’s where the idea that cards were evil came from. No one wanted to do anything but play.”

  “But where did the tarot come from?” Semele returned to her original question, the one he hadn’t answered. “Who was the first to make them?”

  “That, unfortunately, we don’t know. The tarot literally popped out of nowhere in Italy a short time after playing cards arrived.”

  Semele tried to clarify. “So tarot came after playing cards, and they were used in a card game?”

  “Basically, yes, like bridge. There were also funny little parlor games people played too. Then in the late 1700s, a group of Parisians claimed the tarot was a set of ancient Egyptian divination symbols. That theory was widely publicized by a man named Antoine Court de Gébelin.”

  “And who was he?” Semele wrote down the name so she wouldn’t forget. She wondered if he’d show up in Ionna’s story.

  “A Protestant pastor who was attempting to prove that there was a universal root for all languages and religions. He believed all cultures were schisms derived from an ancient golden age of humanity.”

  “Sounds pretty utopian.”

  “Well, his writings were quite popular with both commoners and the king’s court. He wrote a large volume of essays called Le Monde Primitif.”

  Semele jotted that down as well. “Then what happened?”

  “Within a few years Eteilla, France’s first professional cartomancer, began to publish whole tarot-card-reading systems. Through the years he trained over five hundred card readers. Then Eliphas Levi came along and said the tarot was a system of high magic that gave us a glimpse of the inner workings of the universe. Levi believed the tarot would allow anyone to acquire universal knowledge.”

  Semele’s eyebrows rose. That seemed a little far-fetched.

  “By the end of the 1800s there was a fortune teller on every street corner. These so-called ‘founders’ of the tarot tradition never said where they got their theories. They claimed it came from intuition.” Sebastian stopped talking. “Does that help?”

  “Yes, actually, thank you. Could you let me know if a tarot deck like this surfaces?”

  “Believe me, if tarot cards dating back farther than the fifteenth century surface, everyone will know. So when are you coming back to Amsterdam? I’m lonely over here.”

  “Sebastian, you’re horrible,” she teased. “Talk to Mikhail.”

  After she hung up she thought about what Sebastian had said. She didn’t have any new leads. He hadn’t given her anything to go on, but she still believed Ionna’s cards were out there. She would just have to keep looking.

  She grabbed a table and logged into her computer. Since her return from Switzerland she’d forgone her daily routine of checking e-mail and scanning auction news. Usually she would jump online throughout the day to keep abreast of every sale and discovery, every “first found” and “only known” announcement. It felt like checking the pulse of history, but lately she just didn’t care. The more entrenched she became in Ionna’s
story, the more it seemed like the world was spinning without her. Still, she needed to review the information on her Beijing trip and also let Mikhail know she’d be out for a few days. She had been procrastinating looking at the new account, but she couldn’t put if off any longer.

  With a pained sigh, she opened the file to see what lay in store for her next assignment. At least reading English would be a welcome distraction.

  She scanned the client overview. One of China’s top restaurateurs had recently passed away and Semele’s new clients were the heirs. The family owned a string of Hong Kong’s most expensive restaurants—the kind where a simple club sandwich, laced with caviar and Wagyu beef, cost five hundred dollars. The restaurateur had died at the ripe age of ninety-five, and during his long life had built the largest collection of autographed menus from around the world.

  He had every menu imaginable: menus signed by countless composers, including Rossini, Puccini, and Strauss, with handwritten musical notations next to their signatures; menus autographed by stars like Frank Sinatra, John Lennon, Marilyn Monroe, and Charlie Chaplin, and others like Nikola Tesla, Thomas Edison, and Einstein. He even had a collection of menus signed by various presidents and had several official coronation menus. There would be several thousand for her to sort through.

  Semele had to admit that if she weren’t so upset about the theft and losing the Bossard account, the assignment would be fun. She was sure to be seriously wined and dined. The trip would be a once-in-a-lifetime gastronomic adventure, in the name of work, no less. Maybe a thousand-dollar piece of chocolate ganache cake would help her forget Bren, Theo, and the disaster her life had become.

  She quickly typed an e-mail to Mikhail, letting him know she had reviewed the file, and gave him her initial thoughts. Then she slid in a line about how they could go over the details on Friday, because she needed to take the next few days off.