The Fortune Teller's Fate

by Audrey Berger Welz

  This is a Genuine Vireo Book

  A Vireo Book | Rare Bird Books

  453 South Spring Street, Suite 302

  Los Angeles, CA 90013

  rarebirdbooks.com

  Copyright © 2017 by Audrey Berger Welz

  All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form whatsoever, including but not limited to print, audio, and electronic.

  For more information, address:

  A Vireo Book | Rare Bird Books Subsidiary Rights Department,

  453 South Spring Street, Suite 302, Los Angeles, CA 90013.

  Set in Minion

  epub isbn: 9781947856356

  Publisher’s Cataloging-in-Publication data

  Names: Welz, Audrey Berger, author.

  Title: Circus of the queens : the fortune-teller’s fate / Audrey Berger Welz.

  Description: First Trade Paperback Edition | A Genuine Vireo Book | New York, NY;

  Los Angeles, CA: Rare Bird Books, 2017.

  Identifiers: ISBN 9781945572968

  Subjects: LCSH Circus—Fiction. | Fortune-tellers—Fiction. | Acrobats—Fiction. | Ballerinas—Fiction. | Soviet Union—History—Revolution, 1917–1921—Fiction. | Russians—Fiction. | United States—History—1919–1933—Fiction. | Historical fiction. | BISAC FICTION / Historical.

  Classification: LCC PS3623 .E51 C57 2017 | DDC 813.6—dc23

  To my loved ones, especially Gary

  past, present, and future

  Contents

  Prologue

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  Chapter 41

  Chapter 42

  Chapter 43

  Chapter 44

  Chapter 45

  Chapter 46

  Chapter 47

  Chapter 48

  Chapter 49

  Chapter 50

  Chapter 51

  Chapter 52

  Epilogue

  Acknowledgments

  It is said that the elephant is a cousin to the clouds

  and has the ability to cause lightning.

  —South Asian folklore

  Prologue

  He sat on top of the same horse in the exact same spot they had been standing the day he saw her for the very first time. He knew he was in the right place by the sound of the creek nearby and the way the tree next to him was split in two by lightning in a big storm that had hit the area the week before they met. The red-and-white wild roses mixed in with dandelions and weeds covered the brush, overriding the smell of anything else, and over the years his feeling of aliveness depended upon the strength of that scent. It represented the memory of what he thought he was to her and who he thought they would become. It was the last time he felt really alive or would think of her that way.

  The day before she left, they had taken vows, which he had thought were sacred. They had sworn their undying love, and he had expected it would last a lifetime. She had worn garlands in her hair and kissed him sweetly after expressing what she thought he would want to hear. It was a dream for her, a young girl’s fantasy. However, in his mind’s eye he had proposed and she had said, Yes.

  When he had woken up the next morning, he had decided it was time for him to talk to her father and tell him their intentions. Yes, she was young, but he would wait. He knew he wasn’t of their class, but he could offer her a place of honor and respect in society and he would worship her and take care of her for the rest of his life.

  He tossed and turned that night and barely got a wink of sleep. An hour before sunrise, he put on his cavalry uniform, brushed his hair, and ran his hands over his cheeks as if to freshen them. He then looked at himself in his mirror with great approval, gathered his horse, and left.

  The sun was shining brightly. The brisk morning air helped him wake up as he practiced the words he wanted to say. When he arrived at the house her father had rented, he noticed much of the furniture was out on the front lawn where the help was beating and airing it. A strange feeling started to grow in his stomach as if a serpent had found its way inside and was slowly nibbling away at his passion and joy. Wanting to hold onto hope and promise, he dismounted his horse and walked through the front door that was swung open wide. A maid was standing close by. Not wanting to accept the implication that this most likely had, he asked, “Where has the family gone?”

  “They left early this morning to return home,” she said.

  Then the serpent swallowed his heart whole and that was the last he saw of it.

  He wrote letters. All came back unopened. Not wanting to face the truth, he returned to their meeting place every day, and each day he waited in anticipation, holding his breath, believing and desiring more than any man should that his love would be there. She and her father would find they had made a terrible mistake, and that the only man for her was him.

  His horse grew tired and bored of this ritual. He would pace, grunt, and snort as he was forced to stay with his master and appear to be as foolish as he.

  The young man heard rumors from time to time from the lady maids of the house where she had stayed. And each story he heard seemed to add fuel to the fire and feed the serpent inside.

  Wanting to stay close by in case she returned, the young man turned down positions that could have made him rich. Unlike him, she moved on with life and became a sensation. Granted, she was immediately sensational with or without him; he would never have waited for someone just ordinary. Nevertheless, over time he came to resent her finding happiness while he suffered and began to lose stature. It was whispered she was given gifts, sharing what she had learned from him, while he had been given not a thing. And all that he had thought and hoped would be his had gone to another man; even the son he had dreamed about who would so proudly carry his name.

  Anger started to fester and boil over where there had once been love, and one day when he returned to their special spot, he realized even he couldn’t bear his own foolishness any longer.

  His horse started to snort as he normally did. Then he began to pace. Before he knew it, his master had torn a switch from a tree, and in one sweeping move of his hand, he removed the leaves. He slapped the right rear of the horse with the twig. The horse started to gallop, but that wasn’t fast enough for the master. Not knowing where this would lead, the horse and the master continued until neither could take another step.

  Both were drenched in sweat and delirious, so much so it took him several minutes to hear the woman who was speaking to him and for
him to see where he was.

  When he opened his eyes, it was as if he were in a dream. There was a small, colorful tent with a pig tied up outside and a woman with dark hair down to her waist with streaks of gray greeting him.

  “You have traveled a long, hard path to find me,” she said.

  “I didn’t know I was looking,” he replied, uncertain if he was truly awake.

  “Oh yes, you have been circling me for several years. I have been right in front of you, but you haven’t seen me. I know why you are here. The serpent has told me everything.”

  Just then, the young man dismounted his horse and went to the woman and collapsed in her arms. Laying his head on her lap, he broke out in tears.

  “There, my boy,” the woman said, for he was still a boy to her. “Do not worry, you will get what is due you, for together we will put a curse on this one who has taken so much and this curse will extend to her loved ones.”

  The man and his horse were barely coherent and in that moment would have agreed to just about anything to ease the pain.

  “Your curse will suffocate the serpent, but I have spoken to the serpent and he says he is full and is willing to die for you; however, only if you eat him after he is dead. He has asked to be made into a stew so that you can eat what he has taken from you. Now nod your head yes or no and we will make your decision so.”

  The young man and his horse were then fed the stew and they fell into a deep sleep. When they awoke, the woman was gone and the serpent’s skin was lying next to him. The young man knew he would never return. He would live with the curse he had made in his sorrow, get back on his horse, and start riding north.

  Chapter 1

  Macon, Georgia, 1917

  I could hear our tigers, Midnight and Satin, being loaded onto the train as I pulled my old purple shawl tighter around my shoulders and stretched my hands out toward the fire. Lately, Vladimir and I had been staying up into the small hours most nights. We’d take folding chairs over to the fire outside our carriages and watch the glow of the embers, tell stories, and play cards. We’d say it was the creaking of the big top in the wind that kept us awake, but it wasn’t—it was our need to talk about our childhoods, our Russia, and remind ourselves that the memories we shared had once been our reality.

  “Your mother was a great dancer, Donatella,” Vladimir said that night when we’d turned over the last card and fallen silent. But then he frowned, as if he hadn’t said enough.

  “‘Every move you make tells a story,’ my mother would say. Then she would glide like a seagull through our front door to show me. All I ever wanted was to be her.” I stretched my arms and sighed.

  The circus had been in Macon the last few days and soon we’d be pulling out. Exhausted, I start to drift, as if I were floating on a raft through the evening sky. I take a deep breath and close my eyes. Memories surround me like fireflies and stars on a hot, moonless night. And through the sea of flickering lights I find myself seated on an overstuffed velvet chair in the parlor of my family’s home in St. Petersburg, on an avenue lined with elegant houses, just like ours.

  If I listen carefully, I can hear the clop, clop of steel on stone and the sound of squeaking wheels of late-night carriages going up and down our street. I can see the heavy gold-embroidered crimson curtain rise at the Mariinsky Theater, and feel the weight of my mother’s soft hand, squeezing mine. It’s spring and I’m wearing a silky dress dyed to match the rich violet-purple tulips blooming in our garden.

  The orchestra is playing like it’s dizzy, until each instrument finds its place and settles in. The theater is still, but not for long. The conductor walks out to a roar of applause, nods, and signals the musicians with a wave of his baton. Perfect notes surround me—Tchaikovsky’s The Queen of Spades. What an odd coincidence, I think now.

  “Take off my shoes; they’re too big for you,” my mother teased when we came home that night. The shoes she wore were sparkly, and I couldn’t resist trying them on. How I loved the way she tickled my belly until I giggled so hard I threw them on the floor. “You could trip and fall,” she said, laughing, “and then what kind of dancer would you be?”

  She took out the hammered silver box that held her prized abalone hairbrush. Its swirls of iridescent blue brought out the color of my eyes, she said. Unwrapping it lovingly from its silk coverlet, she stroked my long, dark, wavy hair, one, two, three, a hundred times. As a child, that’s how I learned to count.

  ¯¯¯

  My name is Donatella Petrovskaya. I wasn’t always with the circus. Born in St. Petersburg, I was christened Donatalia, and I attended the Imperial Theatrical School. I even studied under the great Cecchetti and performed at the Winter Palace while Grand Duke Sergei Alexandrovich played the flute. But that was before he went into hiding.

  Chapter 2

  Macon, Georgia, March 1917

  “Do you remember when you came to our house for New Year’s dinner?” Vladimir asked, pulling me out of my dreamlike state. He liked to reminisce. Of course, I did, too. It was that pivotal moment in time that connected me to him. “Even then,” Vladimir continued, “it was understood. You would become a dancer, a very good dancer, and I would walk in my father’s footsteps and take over the most famous Russian circus. It was so clear back then.”

  I took pleasure in his words. They almost woke me up. Vladimir’s family had owned the circus that was located near the Bolshoi and everyone in St. Petersburg wanted to be friends with them.

  “I was so young, and your family seemed so grand,” I said, thinking back. “After dinner, you showed me an album of circus pictures bound in a red leather cover. I was completely mesmerized. At the time, they seemed so exotic.”

  Vladimir was refilling his glass. My eyes wandered into the fire. Flames were leaping as were visions from the past. Vladimir had that effect on me. I was a young girl again, hearing the clink of glasses, my father’s laugh, and my mother’s sweet voice.

  St. Petersburg, January, 1897

  It was New Year’s Eve, in the old czarist calendar. We were going to celebrate with the Vronskys. I’d been beside myself with excitement for a week. My mother had known Anton Vronsky since the time when, as a young ballerina, she’d spent a summer dancing in his circus’s pantomime ballets—she told me how she’d paraded around the ring in a little cart pulled by four dogs. When he married, she became good friends with his wife, Lillya, a talented equestrian. Their son, Vladimir, was several years older than me. I didn’t know him well, but I idolized him.

  Papa had Alexi, our gardener and driver, hitch our Orlov Trotter, Chayka, to the sleigh and bring him around to the front of the house in the early afternoon. “We’ll go out on the Neva while there’s still light,” he said. In the winter, the sun hardly rose above St. Petersburg’s rooftops before it began to sink again. Already, the shadows were long and the snow on the street had taken on a violet tinge.

  My father spent a lot of time tending to business, so it was a treat to have him around for a whole afternoon. It felt like a real holiday!

  He lifted me up onto the carriage bench, and then handed my mother up beside me. Alexi, in the driver’s seat in front, clucked to Chayka, and he trotted out briskly, his ears pricked forward as if he too were enjoying this outing in the snow.

  St. Petersburg’s social season was in full swing, and the streets were crowded with elegant sleighs like ours and long, flat drays pulled by shaggy carthorses, stacked with cut blocks of river ice destined to keep the caviar cold at hundreds of New Year’s meals. We crossed the two canals before we finally reached the wide Neva. Trotters flashed past each other in front of the Winter Palace, pulling long, narrow sledges, their fur-hatted drivers perched on little coach boxes in front. Dashing young officers and the occasional adventurous young lady crouched forward on the narrow seat behind, lap rugs tucked around their legs.

  “They call those sleds ‘egotists,’”
my father told us.

  My mother laughed. “It seems to fit.” She looked happy and very beautiful, her cheeks flushed in the cold, wrapped in her favorite flame-red cloak that matched the scarlet lipstick she always wore, a strand of dark hair blowing across her face.

  Chayka danced and snorted at the sound of hooves behind him. My father had to grip the reins tightly to hold him as a troika flew past. A sharply dressed young officer urging his horses on had his arm around the waist of a slim girl beside him, the harness bells jangling furiously, their steel shoes throwing up a cloud of ice chips as they took great leaps. “The young fools,” my father muttered under his breath, but I could tell he was more admiring than annoyed.

  At the side of the Neva, some men were stacking and carving ice: a little ice cottage and a swan whose glassy wings were spread as if to take flight.

  “Look at the skaters!” my mother said, leaning forward. Families glided sedately past, hands linked to form chains. A few young couples waltzed together as if on a ballroom floor, and a little apart from the rest, cutting graceful arcs into the smooth ice like a gull swooping over the sea, was a girl whose pale gray cape swirled around her like a cold flame. I turned back to watch her until she was only a faint blur in the blue twilight.

  The double front doors and high-ceilinged, tiled foyer of the Vronskys’ town house made me feel small. Everything seemed larger than life. The carved lion’s paws on the old oak dining table’s legs were gigantic and looked as if they were crouching, ready to spring. I couldn’t stop staring.

  The food—there was so much: bilinis and caviar, slices of radish, little plates of pickled herring, then came the rabbit and pheasant—but what I remembered most was the champagne glittering in the adults’ glasses. The bubbles looked like grains of sand basking in the sunlight, almost too pretty to drink.

  “To Nicholas and Alexandra, long may they rule!” They toasted.

  I anxiously counted the forks, spoons, and knives by my place—so many! The plates were decorated with a mesh of raised rose-pink lines and little flowers where they crossed. Vladimir’s mother, Lillya, smiled when she saw me run my fingers over the delicate glaze. “Those are made at the Imperial Porcelain Factory here in St. Petersburg,” she told me. “Empress Elizabeth once ate on plates very much like these.”