'I want to anyway.'
'All of us, my daughter, have our own magic inside us.' Darya leaned forward across the table. Her eyes seemed to be drilling right through Natasha. 'Simple, ancient female magic. With all your ambitions, you've completely forgotten about it, and that's a mistake. But never mind. I'll help you. Only we'll have to do everything in three stages.'
She knocked gently on the table.
'The first thing ... I'll give you a love potion. This is not a great sin . . . The potion will bring your man back home. It will bring him back, but it won't keep him there.'
Natasha nodded uncertainly. The idea of dividing the spell into 'three stages' seemed inappropriate somehow – especially coming from this woman in this apartment . . .
'The second thing . . .Your rival's child must never be born. If it is, you won't be able to keep your man. So you'll have to commit a great sin, destroy an innocent child in the womb . . .'
'What do you mean?' Natasha said, shuddering. 'I'm not going to end up in court!'
'I'm not talking about poison, Natashenka. I'll make a pass with my hands' – and the seer did just that with her open palms – 'and then clap them . . . And the job's done, the sin's committed. No courts involved.'
Natasha said nothing.
'Only I won't take that sin on myself,' said Darya, crossing herself hurriedly. 'I'll help you if you like, but then you'll have to answer to God!'
Evidently taking silence as consent, she continued:
'The third thing . . .You'll have a child yourself. I'll help with that too. You'll have a beautiful, clever daughter who'll be a support to you and a joy to your husband. Then all your troubles will be over.'
'Are you serious about all this?' Natasha asked in a quiet voice. 'You can really do all this . . . ?'
'I'll tell you how it is,' said Darya, standing up. 'You say "yes", and it will all happen. Your husband will come back tomorrow and the day after tomorrow your rival will miscarry. And I won't take any money from you until you get pregnant. But afterwards I will – and I'll take a lot, I tell you that now, I swear by Christ the Lord.'
Natasha gave a crooked smile.
'And what if I cheat you and don't bring you the money? After everything's already happened . . .'
She stopped short. The seer was looking at her sternly, saying nothing. With an air of gentle sympathy, like a mother looking at a foolish daughter . . .
'You won't cheat me, Natashenka. Just think about it for a moment and you'll realise it's not even worth trying.'
Natasha swallowed hard. She tried to make a joke of it:
'So it's cash on delivery?'
'Ah, my little businesswoman,' Darya said ironically. 'Who's going to love you, so practical and clever? A woman should always have some foolishness in her . . . Ah, yes . . . cash on delivery. Delivery of all three items.'
'How much?'
'Five.'
'You want five?' Natasha burst out and broke off. 'I thought it was going to be a lot less than that.'
'If you just want to get your husband back, that will be cheaper. Only then, after a while, he'll go away again. But I'm offering you real help, a certain cure.'
'I want to do it,' Natasha said with a nod. What was happening felt slightly unreal. So that was all there was to it, just a clap of the hands – and the unborn child would disappear? Another clap – and she would bear her beloved idiot husband a child of her own?
'Do you take the sin upon yourself?' the seer asked insistently.
'What sin is there in that?' Natasha retorted, her irritation suddenly breaking through. 'Every woman's committed that sin at least once! And perhaps there isn't anything there anyway!'
The seer pondered, as if listening to something. She nodded her head.
'There is . . . And I think it's definitely a daughter.'
'I'll take it,' said Natasha, still irritated. 'I'll take all the sins on myself, any you like. Do we have a deal?'
The seer looked at her sternly, disapprovingly: 'That's not right, my daughter . . . All the sins. Who knows what sins I might decide to hand over to you? My own, somebody else's . . . and then you would have to answer to God.'
'We'd sort it out somehow.'
Darya sighed:
'Oh, these young people are so foolish. Do you think He wastes his time rummaging about in people's sins? Every sin leaves its own trace, and the judgement fits the trace . . . But all right, don't be afraid. I won't make you answerable for anybody else's sins.'
'I'm not afraid.'
The seer didn't seem to be listening to her any more. She was sitting there as if she was listening alertly to something else. Then she shrugged:
'All right . . . let's get the job done. Give me your hand!'
Natasha held out her right hand uncertainly, keeping a worried eye on her diamond ring. It didn't come off her finger very easily, but . . .
'Oh!'
The seer had pricked her little finger so quickly and deftly that Natasha hadn't felt a thing. She froze, dumbfounded, watching the red drop welling up. As if this was all perfectly routine, Darya dropped the medical needle onto a dirty plate encrusted with old borscht. The needle was flat, with a sharp little point – the kind they use to take blood in laboratories.
'Don't be afraid, everything's sterile, the needles are disposable.'
'What do you think you're doing?' Natasha tried to pull her hand away, but Darya shifted her grip with a surprisingly powerful and precise movement.
'Stop, you idiot! Or I'll have to prick you again!'
She took a small chemist's bottle of dark-brown glass out of her pocket. The label had been washed off, but poorly, the first letters were still visible: 'Tinc . . .'. She deftly twisted out the cork, set the bottle down and shook Natasha's little finger over it. The drop of blood fell into the bottle.
'Some people believe,' the seer said contentedly, 'that the more blood there is in a potion, the stronger it will be. It's not true. The blood in it has to be good quality, but the quantity makes no difference at all . . .'
The medicine woman opened the fridge and took out a fifty-gram bottle of Privet vodka. Natasha remembered her driver calling that kind of vodka 'the reanimator'.
A few drops of the vodka went onto a wisp of cotton wool that was wound round Natasha's little finger. The medicine woman held the bottle out to Natasha.
'Want some?'
Natasha suddenly had a vivid vision of herself waking up the next morning – somewhere at the far end of the city, robbed, raped and not remembering a single thing about what had happened. She shook her head.
'Well, I'll have a drop.' Darya raised the 'reanimator' to her lips and drained the vodka in a single gulp. 'That's a bit easier . . . for working. And you, you've no reason to be afraid of me. I don't make my living by robbing people.'
The last few remaining drops of vodka also went into the little brown bottle. And then, quite unperturbed by Natasha's curious gaze, the seer added salt, sugar, hot water from the kettle and a little powder with a strong smell of vanilla.
'What is that?' asked Natasha.
'Have you got a cold? It's vanilla.'
The medicine woman held the little bottle out to her.
'Take it.'
'Is that all?'
'Yes, that's it. You get your husband to drink it. Can you manage that? You can put it in tea, or even in vodka – but that's not the best way.'
'But where's the . . . magic?'
'The magic?'
Natasha felt like a fool again. Her voice almost broke into a shout as she said:
'This is a drop of my blood, a drop of vodka, sugar, salt and vanilla!'
'And water,' Darya added. She put her hands on her hips and looked at Natasha ironically. 'What did you expect? Dried eye of toad? Oriole's testicles? Or for me to blow my nose into it? What do you want – ingredients or effect?'
Natasha didn't answer, overwhelmed. And Darya continued, no longer trying to conceal her mockery: 'My dear girl, if I'd wanted to impress you, then I would have done. Have no doubt about it. What matters is not what's in the bottle, but who made it. Don't you worry, go home and give it to your husband. Will he be coming round again?'
'Yes ... in the evening, he phoned to say he'd come and collect a few things . . .' she mumbled.
'Let him collect them, only you give him some tea. Tomorrow he'll bring the things back again. That is, if you let him in, of course.' Darya laughed. 'All right then . . . There's one more thing we need to do. Do you take this sin on yourself?'
'I do.' Natasha suddenly realised that she no longer felt entirely able to laugh at what she had said. There was something here that wasn't funny. The seer had made her promise far too seriously. And if her husband did come back tomorrow . . .
'Your word, my deed . . .' Darya slowly drew her hands apart and began speaking rapidly: 'Red water, others' grief and rotten seed and evil breed . . . What was is no more, what was not will not be . . . Return to the void, you are dissolved without trace, by my will, at my word . . .'
Her voice fell to an incoherent whisper. She continued to move her lips for a minute. Then she clapped her hands hard.
It must have been a trick of the imagination but Natasha thought she felt a gust of icy-cold wind blow through the kitchen. Her heart started pounding, she felt a shiver run down her spine.
Darya gave her head a shake, looked at Natasha and nodded:
'That's all. Go now, my dear. Go home, my daughter, and wait for your husband.'
Natasha got up. She asked:
'But what . . . when do I ... ?'
'When you get pregnant, you'll remember about me yourself. I'll wait for three months . . . and then if I'm still waiting – don't blame me . . .'
Natasha nodded. She swallowed hard to keep down the lump that had risen in her throat. Somehow she now believed utterly in everything the seer had promised . . . and at the same time, it was painfully clear to her that in three months' time, if everything really did work out, she would be reluctant to pay the woman. She would be tempted to put it all down to coincidence . . . why should she give this filthy charlatan five thousand dollars?
And yet she realised that she would. She might drag it out until the very last day, but she would bring her the money.
Because she would remember the clap of those unmanicured hands and that wave of cold that had suddenly spread through the kitchen.
'Go now,' the seer repeated with gentle insistence. 'I still have to cook supper and clean up the apartment. Go on, go on . . .'
Natasha went out into the dark hall, took off the slippers with a sigh of relief and put on her shoes. Her tights seemed to have survived the ordeal . . . that was certainly more than she'd dared hope for . . .
She looked back at the seer and tried to find the right words. Should she thank her, ask her about some detail, maybe even make a joke – if she could manage to, of course . . .
But Darya had completely forgotten her. The seer's eyes were wide open and she was staring at the closed door, feebly waving her hands through the air in front of her as she whispered:
'Who . . . who . . . who?'