by S. E. Amadis
“A medium?” he would have vociferated with a snarl in his customary fashion. “You’re gonna spend your hard-earned bucks on that sorta hocus-pocus? You know ghosts don’t exist. They’re nothing but an old wives’ tale to scare the shit outta li’l kids. You know that after we die we just go out like a candle flame, don’t you? We’re just extinguished forever. K.O. Caput. Fizz. Don’t tell me you actually believe in that fucking God stuff, do you? God don’t exist, and you know it. If he did I’d be richer’n a lawyer and we’d all be living in a palace. Not in this fucking hole in the wall with me slaving my bloody hands off all night in a factory.”
Well, but that was only Damian’s opinion. I knew God existed. Beyond the shadow of a doubt. Otherwise, how could you explain that my grandparents had survived to walk out of a land worse than hell on their own two feet?
Once downtown, with Romeo now cosily cuddled in his pram, I struggled to drag the heavy contraption out the door and onto the sidewalk. That row with Damian was making me late for my appointment, and I couldn’t afford to waste a single precious minute of my allotted time with the famed medium.
Before stepping from the station, I pulled out my clunky, fold-up mobile – the latest rage back in the day – and dialled the phone number of the office where I was temping. I stammered out some mumbled excuse about how Romeo was sick with flu so I couldn’t work that day, sighing with relief when my boss accepted my convenient lie with nothing more than a casual “and take care of that adorable cutie pie for me, will you”.
I pocketed the mobile and headed for the door, casting desperate glances at my watch. The wind buffeted my face like a slap as I stepped outside. Like the slap Damian had dealt me so viciously earlier that morning. Unconsciously, I brought my hand up and touched my cheek where I could still feel the sting of Damian’s palm against bruised, tender skin.
I’d barely taken three steps, shoving the pram before me in a frazzled rush, before the heavens opened up into one of those massive, late-autumn deluges so characteristic of this time of the year. I paused only long enough to slip the plastic cover around Romeo, snuggling it tight around the stiff metal casing of the stroller before continuing onwards.
Romeo gurgled contentedly underneath his blanket, then clapped his hands with delight as he surveyed the oppressive, leaden sky. Lulled by the monotonous drumming of raindrops on plastic, he fell backwards cushily into his cushions and was soon completely out of it.
I didn’t have time to stop and pushed ahead doggedly with my heart pounding like a fist in my throat, heedless of the downpour, shoulders hunched and head bowed in stoic anonymity on the deserted sidewalk as the rain stung my eyes and dripped from my hair, a mournful, melancholy day for one of the saddest moments of my life.
The light, between-seasons jacket I was wearing did hardly a thing to protect me from the storm and by the time we reached the hotel where Sergei Gozzoli was staying, I was soaked through to the skin.
Both the pushchair and I were such a pathetic mess I was certain the cheery receptionist would shoo us out. But instead, as soon as I pronounced the medium’s name, he smiled at me and waved us in with an expression of such pitying sympathy, that I could literally read his thoughts as clearly as if they were stamped all over his forehead in bold-face: Poor thing, there goes another of those hapless, gullible oafs who’ve lost someone close to them. She looks too young to have lost anyone. I wonder who she wants to speak to.
Sergei Gozzoli was waiting for us in the doorway of his room, apparently alerted by the receptionist. He ushered us in, his elbows sticking out gawkily, and indicated a shaded corner for me to park the pushchair.
“What do I have to do so he won’t wake up? Should I speak softly? Does he like stuffed toys?” he mumbled, shifting from foot to foot. I could tell he was trying to be helpful but didn’t have the faintest idea how to act around a baby. He waved his hands self-consciously in the air. “He doesn’t scream a lot, does he? Is he going to scream now? Maybe you should stick a pacifier into his mouth?”
I merely nodded and glanced at Romeo’s sleeping figure, thinking the medium clearly had no idea and thanking my lucky stars that Romeo was such a tranquil tot who never stirred up a ruckus even when wide awake. Sergei turned his back towards me, mumbling to himself, and proceeded to ignore me and avoid my gaze.
I peeled off my streaming jacket and cast about for someplace to hang it, but since Sergei limited himself to plonking himself onto his bed without another word, his gaze off somewhere in the hinterland, I ended up draping it over a shabby wooden chair.
“Sorry to leave puddles all over your room,” I murmured in a monotone, bristling at this senseless small talk but feeling compelled to continue on with it anyways, to fill the awkward silence. I got the distinct feeling I was merely talking to myself.
Sergei suddenly seemed to come down from heaven and notice that I was there. He shrugged.
“Ah, um, yes, but we’re in a hotel, right? They’ve got cleaners, right?” He glanced around as if in a bit of a daze. “Doesn’t bother me. It’s not your fault. Besides which, I don’t have to clean up here,” he added. “One of the perks of staying in a hotel.”
He turned his back abruptly to me again and began to paw through a dark blue nylon satchel on his bed. I studied him surreptitiously. He was tall and angular, bony as a broom, with his face covered by a grizzly, copper-tinted beard. A worn and faded sweater, about two sizes too baggy for him, hung from his knobby frame. He didn’t invite me to sit down or issue any instructions and, at a loss for anything better to do, I crumpled into another wooden chair as shabby as the first.
I pulled a recording device from my purse and placed it on the table.
“You don’t mind if I record our session, do you?”
Sergei shrugged again.
“Fine by me,” he replied succinctly, as curt as ever, then turned back to his nylon bag.
I wondered how he’d ever managed to make it as such a renowned professional.
I clasped my hands on the table in front of me, still dripping water into puddles underneath my chair in the sepulchral silence, and waited.
Pale light gleamed in through the cheerless window smeared dirty grey. Sheets of rain washed mournfully over the panes, which looked out onto someplace dank and dismal, with a dreary, hypnotic drizzling.
I just sat there. I didn’t know what to do, because Sergei continued to ignore me. I fidgeted nervously, clasping and unclasping my hands on the table. So jittery I didn’t even realize I was soaking wet and frozen until I started shivering convulsively, involuntarily, as much from my nerves as from the cold. The damp air, tinged with ice, penetrated through my drenched velvet sweater and chilled me to the bone. I felt as if someone were clenching gelid fists in my stomach.
At last, Sergei snitched a sketchbook and a strip of charcoal from his bag and turned towards me, his expression transfixed, staring wildly into some point in space as if observing invisible Martians. I couldn’t help following his gaze and glancing at the wall above my head.
Clunkily, he lowered himself back onto the edge of his bed and began to pass his arm over the sketchbook with wide sweeping motions.
“I like to doodle while I work,” he explained in a barely audible whisper, his eyes darting about from side to side, furtively. “It helps me to concentrate and focus.”
He looked up at me and smiled, unexpectedly. The smile softened his angular features, made him more human. I realized he was probably just shy, not anti-social.
“I’m-I’m afraid I’m not much of a people person,” he stammered out, then coughed awkwardly. “It might sound weird but... it’s almost easier for me to talk with people on the other side than to talk with living human beings. People on the other side don’t rant or rage or scream at me.”
He let out a silly giggle. Then he adopted a more serious expression.
“Is there any person in particular you would like me to contact?” he asked, his tone filled with compassion. “If there
is, I can try and reach them. I can’t guarantee you that I’ll be successful, it’s them who chooses who comes to speak to you. But I can try.”
I stared at him, hardly believing that this was for real and he was truly capable of communicating with dead people. My stomach cramped up. I took a deep breath and began to fiddle with my fingers in front of me, scarcely daring to breathe my deepest, most unfulfillable longing out loud to this dubious stranger.
“My mother,” I told him at last.
He waited, but I couldn’t say anything more.
“How long has it been since she passed?” he continued.
I gulped.
“Four years.”
I could scarcely believe it had been such a long time ago. It felt like only yesterday I was kissing her good-bye to go to university. I wondered if somehow I’d gone stark raving mad to actually expect to receive some sort of communication from... from what? A ghost?
Besides which, I’d thought that everything my mother had ever wanted to say to me, she’d already said it in life.
At last Sergei nodded, lowered his hand to his sketchbook again and began to hum. I glanced about, wondering if apparitions would somehow just materialize out of thin air around us. But nothing happened that I was aware of.
“Your mother’s here,” he intoned at last in a hollow voice devoid of emotion. “She says not to worry about her, she’s in a good place and she loves you.”
Well, that was hardly earth-shattering news. In spite of myself, I started entertaining the notion that maybe mediums were bogus scam artists, as so many people claimed.
“Your mother says she comes to visit you and your baby every day. She’s proud of you. She thinks you’re a superb mother to this little one.”
He raised his gaze towards me.
“She says he’s no good for you. He hits you.”
I started in surprise. Then I turned my face, caught a glimpse of my reflection in the tarnished wardrobe mirror. There was the clear mark of angry fingers across the edge of my cheekbone in the form of a swollen bruise.
Well, it hardly took the mind of a Sherlock Holmes to figure out what had happened there. All the same, I found tears starting to trickle down my cheeks.
“I’m too scared to leave him,” I whispered. “I don’t have a steady job. What if I move out, and then I can’t pay the rent? What if something awful happens to Romeo...” I gestured towards my thoughtfully sleeping baby. “What if something happens to him, and I can’t handle it? What if I’m not able to take care of him?”
Sergei fixed me with a piercing glare.
“You can handle anything, Annasuya Rose. You’re much stronger than you think.”
He waved towards Romeo.
“You’re his mother. You’re capable of doing much more than you believe you are. You’re capable of doing anything for him. Anything at all. Even giving up your life for him.”
Sergei clasped his hands together in front of him with a prayerful expression.
“So don’t be afraid to do what you know is right.”
He smiled and dropped his hand into his lap on top of his sketchbook.
“She says, don’t worry. She will always be by your side. She’ll help you. If you leave him, you’ll never have to face anything alone.”
He began to sketch again, and his face turned vague and absent.
“Beware of that man,” he spat out suddenly.
A shard of ice cut through deep into me, numbing me even more frozen than I already was. I began convulsing more violently than ever before.
“Do-do you mean... the man I’m with right now?” I gasped out, my voice trembling and shrill. I felt spaced out, and my head began to swim.
Sergei shook his head.
“There’s a man in your future. A dark, black, evil shadow. Beware of him. Don’t ever let your guard down.”
He traced thick strokes across his sketchbook.
“Your mother will watch over you, but you must save yourself!” he barked out. “It’s your test. Your ordeal. Your odyssey... Your choice. No one can fight that battle for you.”
His hands became as still as dead wood, folded over his mysterious sketch.
“The way out of the darkness is to follow your heart,” he exclaimed.
I laughed nervously. So maybe he was just taking me on, after all. Typical scam artist spewing inane clichés.
“Your grandparents survived the horror of hell because they never forgot their humanity,” he declaimed in a monotone. “They followed their hearts, always. They helped their fellow inmates even when doing so meant risking their own lives. They defended their friends and loved ones, even when they knew it could mean a bullet to the brain – or worse. They realized that to do otherwise – to go against their conscience and do what they knew was wrong just to save their own hides – was something worse than death. Something they could never live with.”
Sergei fixed me with his unearthly stare once again.
“What is it that you could never live with, Annasuya Rose? What would be worse than death for you?”
I felt as if I’d been dumped into the bottom of the deepest, iciest, most desolate pit on earth.
Sergei lowered his head, hiding his expression from me. Then, a minute later, he glanced up at me – with the normal, jovial countenance of someone merely carrying out a friendly conversation over a Sunday barbecue.
“I’m afraid that’s it,” he told me, shaking his head ruefully. “The spirits don’t have any more messages for you, Annasuya. I’m sorry.”
He cast his gaze over the sketch on his lap and blanched.
“What is it?” I asked, still shivering.
Wordlessly, he held up the drawing his fingers had been whittling out on automatic pilot throughout the session.
It was the image of a faceless shadow ensconced within a deep, brooding hood.
Chapter 22
I lay in the grass by her stone cold tomb. My fingers clenched convulsively around the slab of white marble. I hugged my knees tight against me. Thunder rumbled ominously, and the same as on that long-ago and far-away morning when I’d visited the medium, the skies opened up and began to pour bucketloads of ice-cold rain over me. I hugged my knees and shivered, glad the rain was hiding my tears.
“Beware of that man.”
For months afterwards I’d wracked my brain, glaring with mistrust at every new male that ventured into my life, wondering if he would turn out to be “that man”. But nothing happened, and after a while I began to forget all about that warning. To laugh it off and shrug about it, frivolously, assuming that it had all been nothing but a flare of dramatic histrionics after all. A bit of pompous showing off to prove that he really was the real McCoy, a true, legit medium.
Although every time I thought about what he’d said about my grandparents, a shudder ran through me anew. There was no way he could have known my grandparents were Holocaust survivors.
The light began to fade. The sky darkened, as if on the verge of the Apocalypse. For a split second I thought the world really was coming to an end. Then I realized it was just the night falling. I giggled nervously, chided myself for such silly thoughts.
I tried to drag myself to my feet. My knees stiffened with the cold and I felt like a rigid, disjointed doll. I pushed myself up with effort, my thoughts straying already to other matters. Calvin and Romeo were probably getting impatient, waiting for me to show up for dinner. I wondered that they hadn’t called me to ask where I was. I dragged my mobile out of my purse, discovered with alarm that the battery was dead. Why was I always such a klutz? This was only about the umpteenth time I’d forgotten to charge it. It was really high time I made my way out of here.
My fingers grazed the tombstone one last time. It had taken me almost ten years to wander on over here. I had no idea when I would ever return. I fumbled in my pocket for the stone I’d picked up on the street and laid it on top of my mother’s gravestone with a loving caress. Immediately the rain began to wash o
ver it, tainting the slate grey a deep black.
I picked up my purse, tried to stumble down the wide avenues dripping with sadness towards the open gates. My jacket fell open, flapping in the wind, and I let the rain soak my shirt. As I neared the gates I caught a glimpse of the washing station, squeaky clean stainless steel sinks equipped with metal jugs. I remembered after the funeral, someone instructing ignorant, unreligious me about the necessity of washing my hands after visiting a cemetery.
I squinted up at the pounding deluge, letting the rain fill my eyes, my hair and clothes, tracing diluted watercolour patterns across my frozen skin, and wondered at the futility of washing my hands in this downpour. I approached the washing station anyways, filled a brittle metal jug with water and poured it disconsolately over my wrist.
A sob caught suddenly in my throat. The metal jug clattered into the sink. Tears began to gush from my eyes and I leaned over the sink, wracked with sobs. I buried my face in my hands, my shoulders shaking convulsively, relieved at least there was no one around to spy on my moment of weakness.
I wandered through the glistening streets towards the subway station, my thoughts lost in another era as neons flickered on around me, reflecting like brilliant, multi-coloured diamonds on the slick pavement.
I saw myself sitting on a stool in the kitchen, swinging my skinny legs in white woollen tights, my mother with her face lined and creased with anxiety over her baby’s first day of school, fitting a pair of shiny leather shoes over my white-padded feet. My mother pulling fresh-baked cookies from the oven to greet me as I waltzed in the door. My mother at my high school graduation, her face beaming with pride as I brandished my secondary school certificate in the air.
