Come Hell or High Water: The Complete Trilogy

by Stephen Morris

  She was an older woman, in her mid-forties at least, Magdalena guessed, but much younger than the crone at the chair. At least fifteen years older than Magdalena. This woman was also wearing a black dress but was much more fashionable, with small gold earrings and a string of pearls. Her black hair was streaked with gray and her eyes were sharp, not kind. She looked at Magdalena and, sizing her up in an instant, asked in a pleasant but disinterested voice, “Can I help you?”

  “I—I was interested in having a tarot card reading,” Magdalena was able to say after taking a deep breath. “I saw the sign in the window,” she added, feeling as if an explanation were required. She pointed to the cardboard poster.

  The woman looked at her a moment longer. “Come with me,” she replied, pulling the curtain behind her aside. There was a trace of an accent in her English, but Magdalena couldn’t tell where the woman had come from. Not from the United States, though. Magdalena stepped across the small room and followed the woman down a narrow hallway. The ancient woman hobbled behind them both.

  There were photographs along the hallway in simple frames. Photos of beautiful young women, laughing and smiling or winking at the photographer. Some of the photos were black and white, some were in color. Some were wrinkled or torn around the edges, apparently torn from magazines before being put in the frames. There was also a mirror in the hallway and as they passed it, Magdalena caught a quick glimpse of herself in the looking-glass. Same almost-thirty face with only a hint of make-up, same brown hair pulled back into a ponytail, same brown eyes. Same everything as always. Not skinny but not fat, either. Pretty, she always told herself, even if she didn’t really believe it. Pretty, but not beautiful. Especially compared to the photographs of the women in the hallway.

  Doors opened off the hallway on both sides. The elegant woman stopped at one of the first doors and opened it, gesturing for Magdalena to enter. Before Magdalena did so, however, she heard voices behind a few of the other doors. Some of the voices were clearly male. Other doors were ajar, and the rooms apparently empty. Magdalena was surprised at the number of people having card readings on a workday in the afternoon. The elderly woman stepped into the room as well.

  The woman closed the door behind them but didn’t quite shut it, saying, “I hope the cards are good to you, my dear.” A smile flickered across her lips and she was gone.

  Magdalena blinked. The room was small, but not claustrophobic. There was a table in the middle, covered with a dark velvet tablecloth. A candle stood on the table to one side, though the room was brightly lit by an overhead light. There were no windows. An empty metal folding chair was open on the side of the table closest to Magdalena. Another sat opposite her, with a tattered pillow on it to soften the metal. A deck of cards was face down on the table before her. The old woman managed to get around the table and sit on the pillow, which she adjusted with some effort. Magdalena sat.

  “So,” Magdalena started hesitantly, “I’ve never done this before. Except with friends, but we didn’t really know the cards very well. We had to keep looking in the book. I’ve never done this with anyone who really knew how to read the cards. So I’m not sure what exactly I’m supposed to do….” Her voice trailed off as she straightened her skirt and looked expectantly at the woman across the table from her.

  The woman seemed more than old. Ancient, really. Lines deeply creased her face but her eyes were kind. Even kinder than they had seemed in the waiting room. Her smile seemed to invite Magdalena to keep talking. She turned her head to one side, as if to hear better with that ear, half-covered as it was by her red bandana. Another red scarf was draped across her wizened shoulders and her black dress hung loosely about her bony frame. When Magdalena had seen her in the storefront lobby, she could see that the old woman was bent almost double, with a large humpback under her shawl. Now that they were sitting in this back room, with the door slightly ajar, the woman reminded Magdalena of her grandmother back in Prague. The grandmother had lived in the back bedroom of Magdalena’s family’s apartment when she was growing up. Magdalena would sit with the old woman (who was always in the rocking chair) and listen to her; she would spend hours recounting Czech fairy tales, legends, and myths while the rocking chair gently creaked back and forth, back and forth. It was Magdalena’s love of her grandmother’s stories that had ultimately led her to study Bohemian folktales, but her family had not been able to afford a complete undergraduate education for her, and so she had finally ended up as the secretary for the instructor of medieval Bohemian literature at Charles University in Prague.

  “Well,” said the old woman sitting across from her now, adjusting her shawl. She paused. “Start by telling me something about yourself, dear.”

  Magdalena swallowed. “I teach back home,” she said, slightly stretching the truth. “Medieval literature. I came to New York this week on holiday because school is closed for spring break back home.” That much was true. “I—I needed a change. Something different. I came here looking for something… I don’t know what. I’ve spent the week seeing all the usual tourist things, I suppose. I got my guidebook back home,” she patted the shoulder bag she was holding on her lap. “I’ve been here almost a week, and walking all over the city. I’ve always heard about New York, ever since I was a child. I’ve always dreamed of seeing the United States. I’ve been to America twice before, for school conferences in Boston and Connecticut. But I’ve never had a chance to really just visit—to see, I mean—the United States. Or New York. So I decided that this was my chance. I just got on a plane and came. Even though some of my friends said I was crazy. That it was too dangerous. After all, the World Trade Center was attacked and collapsed only six or seven months ago, they told me. Who knows what else might happen… now.” As an afterthought she offered, “I used all my savings for this trip.”

  The gypsy nodded.

  “I go home tomorrow,” continued Magdalena, uncomfortable with the silence that had hung between them for a moment. “I’ve seen all these fortunetellers with signs in storefronts all over the city, and today as I was walking down the street, I saw your sign in the window and decided to—come in. To see what you can tell me.” She swallowed.

  “Well, well, well…” The grandmotherly gypsy woman clucked softly. She looked at Magdalena for a moment and then reached out to pick up the deck of tarot cards from the table. She closed her eyes and shuffled the cards, her bony fingers surprisingly agile as the cards flew between them. She divided the pile of cards in half and turned one of them around, shuffling the two stacks together again several times. She handed the deck to Magdalena.

  “Now you shuffle, child. Three times.” The gypsy held up three scrawny fingers and Magdalena noticed gold rings that seemed slightly too large. Magdalena took the deck of cards offered her, and began to shuffle.

  The cards were larger than she was used to using. “Tarot cards are normally larger than playing cards, dear,” the gypsy explained. “This deck is large, even for the tarot. Do you play card games, dear? Just do the best you can. That’s how the reading becomes yours. Your life and choices impact the cards.” Magdalena shuffled the deck three times as best she could, feeling slightly foolish that she couldn’t make the cards fly from hand to hand as the old woman had. The deck of tarot cards she and her friends had used was much smaller than this one. She cut the deck and gave it back to the old woman, who reached out, took them and shuffled three more times, then cut the deck in half one last time, taking the bottom half of the deck and placing it atop the stack of cards. The fortuneteller placed her hands on the deck, lifted her face towards the ceiling and closed her eyes, muttering a few short phrases Magdalena couldn’t hear. “I probably couldn’t understand them, even if I could hear them,” she thought. She was also dimly aware of other people moving up and down the hallway behind her, coming and going, evidently being led to and from their own tarot card readings by the elegant woman she had met.

  But she was wide-eyed with excitement. The books at home had
never said anything about the “questioner” shuffling the cards at all, let alone three times. A professional gypsy telling her fortune seemed too good to be true. “This is the highlight of my trip to New York!” she decided, right then and there.

  The gypsy opened her eyes and picked up the deck, smiling at Magdalena. She took a card and placed it face up on the table between them. Then another, which she placed to the left of the first, and another she placed on the right. She studied them a moment and then began to speak.

  “This card in the center, dear,” she said, pointing. “This is the current moment. The card to the left indicates what brought you here and this one”—she pointed to the one on the right—“indicates what will grow out of your experience here today.” Magdalena pulled herself closer to the table.

  “This card in the center, the current moment—this card is the Fool. It indicates a search for experience, an opening for change and development, a desire for growth. And trust. You are trusting, very trusting, that this search will be safe.” The old woman placed one knobby finger on the card as she spoke of it.

  Magdalena recognized the card and what it stood for as the old woman across from her talked about it. She knew the picture of a man, jauntily dressed and carefree, with a knapsack tied around his walking stick slung over his shoulder, about to step off a cliff into thin air. The woman pointed to the card on the left.

  “What brought you here? This is the Hierophant, reversed. You have felt trapped, trapped by other people’s rules, trapped by what they expected of you, trapped by what they wanted you to be. You felt as if you had no choice in the matter and simply did as you were told.” She paused and looked up. “Poor child,” she added.

  Magdalena could see the image easily, both since the card was large and because it was right-side up to her, even though it was upside-down, reversed, from the card reader’s point of view—which is what mattered, in a card reading. No matter what direction the cards seemed to be facing to Magdalena as the questioner, it was how the old woman, the reader, saw them that counted.

  The knobby finger moved to the card on the right. “What flows from this moment, here today? The card is the five of Wands.” Magdalena could see the five young men depicted on the card, each with his staff, in apparent combat with each other. “What comes from this search is a battle, a conflict—an argument in which you cannot always tell who is on which side and where you may not always know who to trust. But your work is to bring harmony to this community, these people gathered around you, and unite them in a single purpose.” The woman looked at the cards a moment longer in silence. She chewed her bottom lip. A phone rang somewhere in the bowels of the warren of rooms around them.

  Magdalena was fascinated. This woman who she didn’t know and had never seen before told her she had felt trapped. Which she had. By her family’s poverty, their lack of social standing and lack of political know-how in the city’s Communist party government circles. By their expectations that a girl didn’t need to be educated but should simply marry and have children. She had felt trapped growing up and she felt trapped even now. Even with the Communists gone, she was still only a university secretary who had wanted to be an instructor, who made only a little salary, with a few girlfriends but who was—fundamentally—trapped by her sense of loneliness (which verged on despair at times) and powerlessness. She had come to New York in search of change, in search of adventure, in search of something that would help her to outgrow and escape her confinement. Not just New York. That search had driven her to this very storefront, this very seat at this table with this very woman, who was now speaking to her again.

  “Child, what is it you are looking for? Your eyes are so… so sad. So hungry.” She placed three more cards on the table. “These are what you must bear in mind and be especially aware of as you continue your search.” The three cards were the Ace of Cups, the Moon, and the six of Coins (reversed). “The Ace of Cups warns you—“

  Magdalena almost jumped out of her seat. There were suddenly voices on the other side of what she now realized must be a very thin wall. But these voices were not simply talking. It was a pair of voices, male and female, suddenly groaning loudly and inarticulately as something metal squeaked and rattled in a constant, ongoing rhythm. The old woman blushed.

  “Shut the door.” Her tone was suddenly preemptory and commanding. Magdalena half stood and pushed the door shut, hearing the handle click in the frame. It didn’t reduce the sound coming through the wall but it did reduce the background noise of the voices and footsteps in the hallway. She turned back to the gypsy.

  “I’m so sorry, child,” the woman said, looking her full in the face. She paused and then continued, the harsh tone gone from her voice. “The Ace of Cups warns you that a new chapter of your spiritual life, your emotional life, your inner life is about to begin and that such a beginning can be intoxicating, overwhelming. It can sweep you off your feet and make you forget to be careful, to protect yourself. It can cause you to be foolhardy. It is an exciting but also a dangerous time for you.”

  The card showed Magdalena a great golden chalice, from which four springs leapt forth and into which a dove descended, bearing in its beak the white circle of a Host inscribed with a cross like those priests used at the Mass. She had not been to church back home in a long, long time—since that was one of the forces she had felt trapped by—but she recognized the Eucharistic emblem nevertheless.

  “This is also a dangerous card for you, my dear.” She pointed to the Moon, with its hound and hyena howling at the crescent figure hovering above them. “Moonlight can make anything look beautiful, child.” The woman tapped the card. “The moonlight can make anyplace seem beautiful, but when you awake, in the full light of day, you realize that the place is not a garden but a desert filled with dogs and hyenas and even scorpions”—she pointed to the smallest of the figures on the card—“biting at your heels and chasing you further away from where you want to be. The Moon is a card of dishonesty and deception. It is a warning to pay attention, to pay attention not to what things look like but to pay attention how things actually are. To listen to the truth, not to what you want to hear. It tells you that actions are more important than words and to pay attention to how people act, not what they say.”

  The sounds of human groaning and metal creaking through the wall became more insistent and more difficult to ignore. Magdalena gripped her shoulder bag tighter.

  “And the six of Coins, reversed?” she asked, trying to block out her dawning awareness of what was going on around her in the other small rooms of the storefront and why there seemed to be such a constant flow of coming and going in the hallway. Especially of men, since men were usually the least interested in having their fortunes told back home.

  “Ah, yes. The six of Coins reversed. What does it show, my dear?” The old woman seemed grateful for the distraction of the sound of Magdalena’s voice as well.

  Magdalena studied the card a moment. She and her friends had done a few tarot readings for each other but not enough to have memorized what each card looked like or to recognize it immediately for what it stood for. “It shows a man, a wealthy man, with a scale in one hand. There are beggars at his feet and he is dropping coins into the hands of one of them.” She sat up, as if proud of her ability to describe the card to this old woman.

  “You are right, child. It shows a man giving alms. But the card is reversed. He expects something back from those he gives alms to. The gift is not freely given but comes with a heavy price. An obligation. Something the beggars may or may not be able to fulfill.

  “Beware, my girl. Someone will offer you help, help you may dearly want or need. But that assistance can also prove your undoing if the price attached to it becomes too great. The card is a warning to beware of offers of assistance that come with such a high price attached.” The woman drew herself up as well. “What do these three cards warn you to beware of in your search for growth, for experience?” she asked Magdalena.

/>   Magdalena licked her lips. Would she be able to remember what the woman had told? “The Ace of Cups is a new beginning of my inner, emotional and spiritual, life. It can be too much, too headstrong, and sweep me away.” She pointed to the Moon card. “This is about being careful to let myself be lied to. And this”—she pointed to the reversed almsgiver—“is about accepting a gift with too high a price attached.” She looked up at the gypsy’s face for approval.

  “Very good, child. Remember those warnings and you should survive.” The old woman seemed unduly serious. The sounds next door reached a thundering crescendo and then a sudden silence filled the room.

  “I should really have asked you for five dollars after the first three cards,” the old gypsy finally said, sweeping her hand across the top row of cards she had first revealed.

  “Oh, yes… Yes,” Magdalena agreed, fumbling in her shoulder bag for her wallet with U.S. dollars.

  The old gypsy woman turned her face to one side and stared at the wall as if embarrassed to watch Magdalena search. Magdalena finally retrieved the five dollar bill, uncrumpled it, and reached across the table to hand it to the woman. The gypsy turned back to face her and shifted her weight on the pillow. Magdalena recognized her grandmother’s struggle to sit comfortably in the gypsy’s effort to find the one remaining soft spot for her bony hips in the pillow’s otherwise crushed stuffing.

  “Helena will be furious. This is taking too long, for only five dollars,” she muttered to herself. She stared at the money in Magdalena’s hand a moment before she reached out and took it, hiding it away in the folds of her dress or somewhere under her shawl. In a louder voice, directly to Magdalena, she said, “I really shouldn’t do this my dear, but I want to help you. You said you’ve come to New York for a visit. Where are you from? Prague? Your accent sounds Czech.”

  Magdalena nodded, wide-eyed. What was about to happen?