Come Hell or High Water, Part 1: Wellspring – Sample Chapters

 

The Moon

(March 2002)

 Magdalena stood on the New York City sidewalk, trying not to look at the sign in the storefront window. Crowds swirled and parted around her like river water that surrounds a rock, parting and passing around it, then continues on with no memory of the obstacle encountered. She turned away, bit her lip, and saw the crosswalk sign change from “Walk” to “Don’t Walk.” Traffic snarled in the street, horns blaring. People surged out between the cars and charged ahead to wherever they were going. It was the middle of a weekday afternoon, a Friday, but there still seemed like more people out on the streets and sidewalks than lived in some of the small towns or villages back home in the Czech Republic. She turned back to the storefront with its alluring temptation. She took a deep breath and plunged through the door.

A small bell chimed as the door swung shut behind her. She had seen the sign in the window, “Tarot Cards—Readings Available—$5,” in the midst of a collection of candles and occult-looking paraphernalia: a crystal ball, a gold statue of Nefertiti and another of an unknown pharaoh, a faded chart of the zodiac, a plastic replica of a human skull. Through the window, she had seen the small waiting room in which she now stood. An overstuffed armchair was against one wall and two folding metal chairs were next to the window. An old woman stood in front of the overstuffed chair, as if caught in the act of being about to sit down. She had a bandana over her head and a shawl over her black dress. She looked at Magdalena and smiled. The wrinkles that lined her face rippled out from kind, gentle eyes, like ripples that radiate out from two stones thrown by a youngster into a country pond. A curtained doorway seemed to lead further back into the storefront. She heard voices, and then another woman parted the curtain and stepped into the waiting room with them.

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?

“My grandfather came from Romania. Northern Transylvania, actually. My grandmother came from the countryside of old Estonia but her brother ran away to Prague and disappeared. No one ever heard from him again. Perhaps he married and had children. We are family, perhaps, child. My grandmother looked for her brother in Prague on her way to New York with my grandfather but never found him. She learned how to read the cards while she was there, in Prague. She taught me how to read the cards when I was a little girl, here in New York.” The woman looked at her and smiled. “You seem so lost, child. So very, very lost. How can I help you find your way?

“Yes! I will give you a really splendid reading with the cards. For other people, my child, I would have to charge fifty dollars for this. But I will give it to you, give it with the hope that it will help you find your way in this world. Would you like that, child?” she asked.

Magdalena was speechless. Her throat was dry. She nodded and licked her lips with anticipation.

The gypsy shuffled the tarot deck again, the cards crackling in her fingers as they flew from hand to hand. She cut the deck and laid the cards out: three in a descending line, three more ascending, making a “V.” She added another card at the downward point. Seven cards altogether. She studied them.

“This is an old Czech way to spread the cards, dear.” She looked at Magdalena and smiled. “Did you think to come to New York and have cards read for you in an old Bohemian style?”

Magdalena shook her head without taking her eyes from the cards spread out on the table.

The old woman turned her attention back to the first card she had laid down. It showed a blindfolded woman, her arms tied behind her, standing in a swampy marshy area. Swords were planted in the mud around her, eight of them. It was the eight of Swords.

“At home and with your family and friends you have always felt afraid, tied down, paralyzed,” the fortuneteller began. “You were so afraid of making a mistake that it seemed better not to act at all.” The gypsy paused and shook her head slightly. Magdalena thought she heard the old woman cluck her tongue quietly. Just like her grandmother. Magdalena nodded. This underscored the message of the Hierophant card in the first row of three the gypsy had put down.

“Next, this card about your hopes is the High Priestess. You know the universe is larger than that part which you can see, touch, taste, or smell. There is more to the world than you have seen or experienced. You know that. The invisible reality is so much grander, but you have not been able to access it. You are hoping to contact that larger, invisible aspect of the universe and establish yourself in relation to it. You want to enter that portion of the world but don’t know how. Yet.

“The Hermit is in the ‘friends’ and ‘relationship’ position. You are very quiet around your friends. You watch. You listen. You learn. But you feel alone. You take in everything but say little in return. You chew on what you have heard and sometimes you agree and sometimes you don’t. You hold yourself back somewhat from the group and feel yourself not really a part of your friends.

“This next card is very important. If the High Priestess is about your hopes, it is about hopes that you are conscious of, aware of. This next card is about your deepest dream, your deepest wish. Maybe something you are not even aware of.”

Magdalena peered at the card, close to the old woman but far from where Magdalena sat. “I see a woman and child in a boat, being rowed across the river,” she said. “By a man. But the boat is full of swords and the water on one side of the river is rough while the water on the other side is smooth.”

“Very true,” the card reader agreed. “The mother and child are trying to avoid a conflict, hugging the edge of the water as they make their way across it. But the card is reversed. So they are unable to avoid the conflict and they must face it, in all its depth and tragedy. The sorrow they most want to evade chases them down and confronts them, forcing them to acknowledge it. This is always the message of the Six of Swords: conflict, tragedy. The question is whether it can be avoided.” The woman paused and looked into Magdalena’s eyes. “Do you know, dear, what it is you so deeply want to avoid? Or that you want—more than anything—to confront?” One eyebrow arched up.

Magdalena sat dumbfounded. There were many things she might have wanted to avoid in her life, but they all seemed petty and superficial compared to what the woman was telling her about now. But confrontation? She had always dreamed of confronting life itself, of being bigger than herself, and braver. But she could never envisage herself doing that. She shook her head in mute denial.

The woman looked at her a moment longer, clearly not believing her. Then she continued with the next card.

She pointed to the cards that began their line of ascent. “This card is about the forces that can hold you back you or push you along. It is the card of Justice. And it is reversed. See how the crowned woman holds the scales in one hand and the naked sword in her other? If the card had been upright, it would have signified that aspect of Justice found in doing what is right, what is appropriate for another person. But reversed, it signifies that aspect of Justice found in simply following the rules, in obedience, in seeing everything as black and white and ignoring all the shades of gray in between. This desire to ‘follow the rules’ can either save you or undo you.

“The Queen of Swords is about your short-term achievements. She is an angry woman, a sad woman. Maybe you, maybe someone else. Probably, but not necessarily, even a woman. But a dark force in your life—of shame and loss and vengeance.

“Finally, the longer-term resolution of this chapter in your life is the two of Swords. See how the blindfolded one holds the swords in each hand as she sits beneath the moon, in front of the sea? The scene seems still. But it is not. The tide is always flowing, either coming in or going out. The moon is always waxing or waning. And the swords are heavy. Eventually she must set one down or it will drop. She must choose and act, but not immediately. She has time to make her choice and consider her actions, but not forever.

“That blindfolded girl with the swords is you, dear child. You have time to think, to choose. But you must act. You must choose, whether you want to or not. If you do not choose for yourself, another will choose for you. It is always better for you to decide yourself rather than let another decide for you. But a decision will need to be made and an action taken. Whether it is your decision is for you…”

The woman’s voice trailed off. Magdalena became aware again of the world outside this little room: the footsteps in the hall, a phone ringing occasionally, the sounds coming from the other rooms down the hall. She realized that while the gypsy had been speaking, all those things had faded from her consciousness. Only she and the old woman had existed. The little room had been the sum total of the world. But now it was time to get up and go back to that other world, that world outside of this room. Out into the hallway, out into the street, back into the vast crowds of New York and then back to Prague.

“Thank you, thank you so very much,” Magdalena gasped to the old woman, gathering up her things and standing. “Thank you—more than I can ever say.” She leaned across the table and kissed the old woman’s cheek. Then she stepped out the door and was gone, down the hall and out the door.

 

That night, in her hotel room, Magdalena tried to relive the events of the afternoon and recall everything the cards had revealed. “I wish I had taken notes as the gypsy was talking,” she said to herself.

 

 

Back in Prague, Magdalena told her co-workers about her trip to New York. She told her small circle of girlfriends about the gypsy who had read the tarot cards for her. It was this small circle of other women like her that had tried to read the cards for each other but had not been very successful. Nothing they had predicted had ever come true. Even in their search for “spirituality,” the little bit of Wicca that they practiced together never seemed to accomplish much: they tried simple spells to find love or to make the day sunny but nothing seemed to change in their lives. They followed the directions in the books. They cast the magic circles and burned the right candles, repeated the correct rhymes. But no new man came into Magdalena’s life to sweep her off her feet. Or even to invite her to dinner. Or coffee.

It was late March in Prague and the weather was extremely unpredictable. Some years it snowed: large fluffy, white flakes that descended on the city and made it look as if it had been dusted with confectioner’s sugar. Other years it was warm and sunny and felt almost like midsummer. This year it was neither. Days were gray with drizzle or overcast, but comfortable. The winter seemed to be over and the snow gone until next year. The sun also seemed less anxious to make its appearance, and so a comfortable in-between season developed.

Magdalena returned to her work in the office of the Literature and Folklore Department of Charles University. The grand old mansion on Politickych veznu Street, just off Vaclavske namesti (Wenceslaus Square, as the tourist books called it), was a beautiful place to work. She threw herself into her typing and filing, keeping track of Professor Hron’s appointments and preparing his articles for publication. She preferred to spend her lunch hour reading whatever new book about folktales, legends, and mythology was available. Many were sent to the professor for his opinion and he was happy to pass them on to her when he was finished. In many ways, her life after the trip to New York was no different from her life before the trip.

One thing was different, though. She couldn’t keep the images of the tarot cards out of her mind.

One day at lunchtime, instead of reading while she ate the sandwich she brought from home, she sat with her friend Victoria in a small park just up the street.

“I can’t forget those cards, Victoria. Especially that one, the Six of Swords. The one about my deepest dreams and wishes.”

“But do you have any idea yet what that dream might be?” Victoria asked, chewing a bite of her sandwich. She worked nearby and seemed happy to have this chance to spend her lunch hour with her friend.

“No, but I keep thinking about it. Especially at night. I think I must be having trouble with this jet lag, because I’m waking up at odd hours and can’t get back to sleep. So I think about the images on those cards, and what she said. Especially that card. The woman and child in the boat, with the swords and the water—rough on one side and smooth on the other. I think about what her face must look like under her cloak. I wonder where she is going and what she is running away from. And I try to think of what there is about me in that image.” Magdalena couldn’t bring herself to say out loud her intuitions about what she was trying to evade. Or confront. Victoria was fun, a girlfriend, but she couldn’t stop talking and Magdalena didn’t really trust her with the deepest suspicions of her heart: that she wanted to be that woman in the boat, heading into some new, unknown territory and not the same places every day, where she did the same things.

“Well,” said Victoria, chewing thoughtfully, “maybe you should do a reading for yourself about what that might mean. Or I could do it for you,” she added brightly, perking up.

Magdalena shook her head. “I don’t think we’re supposed to ever do readings for ourselves, remember? Too much conflict of interest, the books all say. And I don’t think we know enough about the cards to help each other in that way, anyway. It would just confuse me. I could have asked her more then, but she was already doing me a huge favor to tell me that much for just five dollars. Besides,” she said, looking into Victoria’s eyes, “I had to go all the way to New York for someone who knew how to do a traditional Bohemian card spread for me. How likely is it that we could improve on what she said, if we don’t even know our own country’s traditional way of reading the cards?” Both women looked at each other, and then laughed.

“But,” Magdalena continued, chewing another bite of her sandwich and sipping from her container of juice, “I will drive myself crazy if I don’t come to some kind of resolution about that image on the card. Maybe I can find out more from someone at work. You know, it never occurred to any of us—you or me or any of our friends—to ask if any of the instructors in your department knows anything about the tarot cards. You know, old stories, explanations of the images, that sort of thing. Maybe Professor Hron might know something,” she said. “Or he could at least suggest someone to talk to or a direction to head in.”

Victoria nodded, her mouth full of sandwich. “Why didn’t we think of that before?” she finally got out. Magdalena shrugged.

“Who knows?” she replied. “We don’t even know enough to know what we don’t know!” Both laughed again at themselves. Magdalena felt better here, sitting and talking and laughing with her friend. Maybe she would find a way forward after all. But she never really intended to ask Professor Hron about the cards. It would be too embarrassing to admit that she dabbled in such occult practices. Or worse, that she was fascinated by them. It might even mean she would inadvertently tell him about her interest in Wicca. What would he think of her? What might he say about her? Instead of chatting with her and passing on the books she so loved to read, he might decide that she was a crazy woman and avoid her. He might stop his friendly overtures and find someone else to pass the books on to. She couldn’t bear that. No, she would keep quiet at work about the cards and try not to let her fascination with them get in the way of her professional life.

 

 

A week later, Magdalena sat bolt upright in bed. It was dark in her bedroom in the back of her apartment, and little light from the street reached that far. The kitchen, next to the bedroom, had a large window that opened onto the courtyard behind, which served as a small garden for her apartment. There were no lights there either, as it was surrounded by the back courts of all the other buildings around, especially by one particularly grand mansion. The digital alarm clock on the bedside table read 2:31 a.m. The only sound she could hear was her own labored breathing.

In the days since her lunch with Victoria, the Six of Swords had come not simply to be an object of fascination during odd, available moments at night when she couldn’t sleep but to haunt her waking life as well. She saw it in her mind’s eye as she was at work: as she was filing paperwork unlikely to ever be looked at again, as she was typing address labels for packages that would doubtless be discarded upon delivery, as she filled the pot with water to make the professor’s morning coffee. Her contemplation of the image was not limited to her sleepless periods at night, either. It filled her dreams. The image became a central touchstone, an anchor that would suddenly intrude into whatever dream she was having. It would grow larger and larger, crowding out whatever image had been present the moment before. As it grew, she could see every wrinkle in the woman’s cloak as she huddled in the boat, every ripple in the water, every muscle straining as the man paddled forward. She could hear the swift “plop” and “swish” as the paddles entered and swung through the water. She could hear the rower’s heavy breathing, the soft and muffled tears—the remnants of great, heartfelt sobbing—of the woman. Even without seeing the child’s face, she could sense the curiosity of a child facing forward, leaning forward to both look down into the water and to see what was approaching as the boat was propelled to someplace unknown. The image obsessed her.

Now, she sat there, gasping for breath as if she had been the boatman pushing the boat through the rough water. The instant before she had been fast asleep, inhabiting the reality of the image: first, as the mother trying to find solace; then as the child, eager for adventure; then as the boatman, doing the mother and child a favor by bringing them to wherever it was that only the boatman knew. She was sweating, though the night was cool. She shivered, the sweat evaporating into the night.

This last vision of the image on the card had been so realistic, so alive, it seemed more real than most of her waking life recently. She had to find the place depicted on the card. She had to touch it, experience it herself, now that she was awake. She stood and quickly dressed in the darkness, putting on a handy sweater to keep herself warm—but not too warm.

She stepped out into the dark hall of the apartment building. Luckily, she lived on the ground floor (which was why she had the small back garden) and did not need the hallway lit to make her way out of the building. The landlady lived upstairs and insisted that the electric bills were driving her into bankruptcy. She turned the lights off in the hallways if a tenant ever left them on and Magdalena had heard—on more than one occasion—a tenant coming home in the early morning hours, drunk enough to be unsteady on his feet, loudly cursing the landlady’s frugality. Magdalena slipped out into the night.

Her building was a block or two up a side street from the American embassy in Prague, on the Little Town side of the great Charles Bridge. She made it down the narrow, twisting cobblestone way to the embassy and then turned left towards the Little Town Square and the Charles Bridge. There were a very few others out on the streets at that hour, mostly people straggling home after a drinking binge or indulgence in one of the other so-called pleasures of the flesh. No one seemed to notice her.

She came out onto Mostecká, the main street through this lower portion of the Little Town and turned toward the river. The tourist shops were all closed, the restaurant windows all dark. A dog barked momentarily. Her dream-vision of the card seemed to be drawing her to the one place in Prague that might replicate the image she had seen in New York: the riverbank under the foundations of the bridge.

She passed a courtyard on her left with the Biskupsky Dum Hotel. If Magdalena had continued walking straight ahead a few more feet, she would have begun to cross the Vltava River on the great Charles Bridge, passing the statues of St. Vaclav, “Good King Wenceslaus,” on one side and that of the Turk with his stone prison holding Christian hostages for ransom on the other. Instead, she veered to the left and passed between the bridge’s foundations and the small restaurant abutting the stonework beginning its graceful leap across the river. A few feet further along, as the narrow way descended, she found herself standing at the edge of the small cove where the river swirled under the bridge. On the other side of the bridge, the river parted, a small arm of it slicing through the neighborhood known as Little Venice, while the main river ran through Prague and constituted one of the major natural highways of Central Europe.

She stood at the brink of the stonework, which gave the cove a gentle curve. In the daytime, there were often rowboats tied up along the cove’s edge, to take tourists through the canals of Little Venice to see the waterwheels and backs of the picturesque medieval houses along the water. She could see the inky blackness of the water stretching away from her under the bridge. This was very much the scene of the Six of Swords. One of those rowboats, just pulling away from the quay and into the smoothly flowing river, would complete the scene perfectly. The river water, rippling back from the foundations of the bridge—like sound echoing back from a mountain it had encountered—would create surface tension on one side of the boat just as the water on the other side flowed smoothly out to rejoin the liquid highway. It was the exact replica of the card’s image. She realized she had been holding her breath, tense with anticipation. She let the air out of her lungs and relaxed. She had not simply been haunted by the image of the Six of Swords. She was being driven by the image. The image of the card she had seen in New York had driven her here for a purpose; but what that purpose was, she knew not. She sat on one of the stone pilings and waited.

It was quiet, though not entirely silent: the river lapped the stones along the edge of the cove. There was a distant creak as one of the waterwheels turned further up the canal from the bridge. No one was walking across the bridge above her, though, which was unusual. There was always a vast throng in the daytime and almost always, a lone figure could be seen crossing the bridge during the hours of the night. The stars glittered above her. She closed her eyes and leaned back, as far as she dared, balancing on the narrow stone beneath her.

“Oh, Grandmother,” she sighed. “You used to tell me about the river here. How a troll lived under the bridge and would catch the souls of suicides who jumped from the bridge or swimmers who drowned. Or who would offer to row people across the river—before the bridge was built—and then murder them to steal their souls, dropping the bodies overboard in the middle of the river or hiding them in the rushes and grasses on the other side.” She suddenly missed her grandmother intensely, acutely aware of the old woman’s long absence. How she wished she could sit on that lap again in the rocking chair and lay her head against that bony shoulder, wrapped in her grandmother’s arms as they gently rocked together, the old woman telling the little girl her tales of the magic of Prague.

As she leaned back there, her face to the stars, reliving those moments in her grandmother’s lap, she thought she could hear a distant but consistent plop, swish… plop, swish from the river. She opened her eyes and peered into the opaque shadows under the bridge.

The sounds grew more distinct. It was clearly not the quiet lapping of the river along the stonework. Plop. Swish. Pause. Plop. Swish. A rowboat. She was sure of it. A rowboat was being propelled along the river, gliding a few feet between dips of the oar. It was definitely one oar, not two, that she heard breaking the water’s surface and pushing the boat forward. She stood and leaned out over the water as far as she dared, straining to see.

Then it appeared. The boat slid around the corner of the cove from the large central portion of the river, where it must have been hugging the edge to make such a sharp turn. It was headed against the current, which meant the rowing must have been hard work. As the boat came into the cove, it seemed to come straight towards the pilings where the tourists would board during the daylight. As it came closer, Magdalena gasped. Her hand flew to cover her mouth.

Standing in the back of the boat was a cloaked figure, holding a great oar, which swung methodically thorough the water, first on one side of the boat and then the other. It was a large figure, tall and dark against the even darker shadows. As the rowboat drew up alongside where she stood, Magdalena realized that the great hulking figure that towered above her was a woman. Seven feet tall, at least. Maybe eight. Long, tangled locks of dark hair, streaked with gray and seaweed, cascaded down her shoulders and back. Alongside the edge of the cove, in the bit of light available, her skin seemed to have an unusual pallor, even for that hour and limited light. Her cloak, which swirled as gracefully around her as she moved as the water swirled around the oar as it dipped and glided through the river, was a dark but indefinable color. Strands of seaweed seemed to be held in its creases as well. Her hands seemed strong as they gripped the long pole of the oar and the oarswoman steadied her craft by wedging the lower end of the oar in the mortar between the stones under the water’s surface. The boat bobbed up and down alongside the stonework but did not move forwards or backwards.

Before the large female figure with the oar, another form huddled in the rowboat. In the shadows, it was hard to tell more than that a figure was there, but Magdalena could hear the wooden seat creak as the smaller figure shifted its weight. The figure’s feet moved slightly, causing a hollow “thud” to echo under the bridge.

“Hello, dear.” The person in the front of the boat spoke. It was a woman’s voice. An old woman, with a voice thin and reedy. Not loud. In fact, barely audible above the sound of the river lapping the stones and the boat gently rocking on the small waves. The boat shifted slightly in the gloom and Magdalena could see the woman who spoke to her.

She was small, huddled over in the boat, her head twisted at an odd angle as she looked up at Magdalena standing on the edge of the quay. A scarf covered her head and an apron covered the front of her dress. A matted curl of hair hung out from the right side of her scarf, although it was impossible to see any real colors in the night under the bridge. The dress and hair seemed to be dark, though; Magdalena could tell that much. The apron was white (or at least a much lighter color), and the scarf was an indeterminate halfway-in-between color. Magdalena could see a shimmer of water, reflecting what light there was, in the bottom of the boat under the woman’s boots. Was the boat slowly leaking or was the woman herself wet, river water dripping off her clothing into the bottom of the boat?

The old woman spoke again. “Magdalena. I’ve been waiting for you.”

Magdalena gasped as her heart leapt into her throat. How did this shadowy woman of the night in her strange boat with her even stranger companion know who she as? How long had they been waiting?

“Magdalena, I’ve been waiting for you,” the old woman repeated. “I’ve needed your assistance for quite some time. I’m glad you’ve finally come.”

Magdalena was finally able to swallow and find her voice, but unable to speak much more loudly than the woman who addressed her. “What can I do for you? How long have you been waiting?” She paused and forced herself to take a deep breath. “Who are you?” she added.

“My, my, child. So many questions. So little time.” The woman leaned forward in the boat towards where Magdalena was standing. Magdalena could see now that the old woman on the river was missing several teeth and seemed to be squinting as she looked up. Were the street lights next to the restaurant windows behind Magdalena that bright? She glanced over her shoulder to check, but the woman’s voice snapped her attention back to the scene before her.

“Magdalena, I need your help. I need you to get justice for me.”

“Justice for you? How? For what?” Magdalena was intrigued.

The rowboat bobbed up and down at Magdalena’s feet, held in position by the large oarswoman who kept her oar wedged in the stonework. A thought flitted through Magdalena’s mind: “That can’t be easy.” The oarswoman stood there silently, gazing slowly back and forth from her passenger to Magdalena on dry land. The long tresses hid most of her face in shadow, but Magdalena guessed that the woman was probably neither young nor beautiful. The smaller passenger continued her tale.

“I lived here, in what was countryside across the river in those days, although now it has been swallowed by the city. I lived alone. I had lived alone most of my life, away from the prying eyes of strangers. I had one friend as we were growing up together in the Old Town, but she married and had a family and would sometimes bring her children—or later, grandchildren—to visit, but she died and then no one came.” The crone seemed almost wistful as she paused and bit her lip, glancing away from Magdalena and looking into the corners of the shadows dancing along the river’s surface toward the back of the cove.

“But others did come. Not to visit but because they wanted something. Always wanting favors, they did. Always asking for something. ‘Help me with this, Fen’ka,’ they said. ‘Fen’ka, help me with that.’ It was deafening, always listening to the cries for help, begging for assistance. And did they ever ask, ‘What can we do for you, Fen’ka? Fen’ka, what do you need?’ No, that never crossed their lips or even occurred to them. Only took from me, they did. Every one of them a lupič, a robber. Every one of them.”

Fen’ka, for that was apparently her name, looked back at Magdalena.

“And were they grateful, Magdalena? No, child. No lupič ever shows any gratitude for what they have been given. When I couldn’t give them what they wanted, they came to kill me. Tied me up and threw me in the river, they did. Threw me in the water to see if I was a čarodějka, they did. And when I wouldn’t drown, they took me to the square and burned me as a čarodějnice! Imagine—me, a čarodějnice! Those foolish townspeople didn’t know what they were doing. All led on by that German priest, they were. Father Conrad!” She spat in the water with disgust as she said his name.

Magdalena’s head whirled. “Threw you in the river? A čarodějnice? What are you talking about? Burned you?” None of this made any sense to her.

Fen’ka recovered her composure and swallowed. “Yes, child. Burned me at the stake in Staromestské namesti, the Old Town Square—right there on the square they did!” Seeing Magdalena’s perplexed stare, she paused and her voice lost its harsh, angry edge. She reached over the edge of the boat and trailed her hand in the water, lazily drawing a circle or two in the river. “Yes, child. It’s true. They killed me. I am dead. Then they threw my ashes in the river here, near where the Jewish Quarter comes down to the riverbank.” She pulled her hand from the river and Magdalena gasped.

The hand of the old woman had vanished in the water. Her arm ended in a stump just beyond her sleeve and water dripped from the charred flesh. Greasy ashes swirled in the river where the woman had been drawing circles not a moment before. Then, as Magdalena watched, the hand grew slowly back from the burned and broken bone and flesh. She shook the remaining drops of water from her hand and pulled it back inside the boat. “That’s when Jarnvithja met me.” Fen’ka nodded to the oarswoman, who turned to Magdalena and nodded.

Magdalena’s skin crawled. Who was this she was speaking with? Could it truly be a woman who had been burned as a witch sometime in the Middle Ages? If Fen’ka was a dead witch, who was Jarnvithja? “But they never burned witches here, in Bohemia,” Magdalena finally sputtered.

Fen’ka seemed to understand what was going through Magdalena’s mind. “It was in 1356,” she said. “September, 1356. It wasn’t a trial, with lawyers and judges and a sentence. It was a mob, riled up by that German priest”—she spat in the river again—“that did it. The king tried to stop it, but the soldiers were too late. That is why there are no records of it, child. Officially, it never happened. In reality, people walk over the place of my murder every day. But now, no one remembers. Even then, they tried to make themselves forget….” Her voice trailed off again.

A moment later she continued. “You know who Jarnvithja is, child. You may not know her name. Your grandmother may not have known her name. But your grandmother knew Jarnvithja and told you about her, child.”

Magdalena racked her brain. What stories had her grandmother told her that might be about this creature before her?

“You mean…” Magdalena began, half conscious of the thought forming itself in her mind. “You mean that Jarnvithja is the troll that hides under the bridge? How can that be? Trolls are little old men!”

Fen’ka laughed. “That is what they tell you nowadays, now that the oldest of the old stories have been forgotten and the truest of the old truths branded lies. The trolls were great women, nearly goddesses who simply tried to protect themselves—and what was theirs. Jarnvithja has been responsible for those who died in the river, either while swimming or who drowned when a boat capsized, since before Queen Judith built the first bridge here. Because my ashes were thrown into the river, the townspeople gave me over into Jarnvithja’s domain. I have traveled with her ever since, watching the city grow and change, and biding my time. Waiting for justice. That time has come. Justice will finally be done to those who conspired to murder me.”

“Now? How do you know? What makes you think that? Why is now different from any other time?” She didn’t even have time to consider how Fen’ka’s version of Jarnvithja’s activities differed from her grandmother’s tales.

“How do I know? Because you are here, child. Because you heard the call, and you answered it. You are one of the few in this town who have ever been capable of hearing the cries for justice from beyond the river and across the graves and—of those few—you are the only one willing to respond. You came here. Tonight. So my waiting has come to an end.” Fen’ka seemed to almost smile at Magdalena.

“Me? Listen?” She hadn’t listened to a cry for justice. She had been unable to ignore that image of a woman in the rowboat from the tarot deck. Now that scene from the card had come to life. Not just in the sense of a female passenger in a rowboat on the river, under the bridge. Wraiths from the dead had materialized and were waiting for her assistance to deliver them from the sorrow and injustice they had been trapped by for several hundred years.

“I know you want to help, child. You are a good girl. A woman of valor. Compassion. A woman who seeks after what is right. But you do not understand how to accomplish these things. I understand that. It seems like a large and difficult task.

“But you are humble, modest. You underestimate your strengths and skills. You do not know your own capabilities. It is a large and difficult task, but I do not ask you to attempt this by yourself. You will need help, assistance. Never be afraid to ask for a pomocník, someone to assist you.”

Magdalena did feel compassion for this specter, this woman unjustly lynched by the mob so many centuries ago. Magdalena felt ashamed to be descended from citizens of this beautiful city who could do such a thing to a helpless old woman. Magdalena did want to vindicate Fen’ka and accomplish justice for her.

“Where can I turn for help?” Magdalena was truly at a loss. Who would believe her story of a woman burned for witchcraft by a mob in the Old Town Square in 1356 and whom she had met on the river under the bridge one night? The whole story was too fantastic to expect anyone else to believe. If it hadn’t happened to her, Magdalena was sure that not even she would have believed it.

“Help? Turn to Halphas and Flauros. They will show you who you can trust, who will be able and willing to get justice done for poor old Fen’ka.” Jarnvithja shifted her shoulders and pushed the rowboat away from the stones Magdalena stood on.

“Halphas? Flauros? Who are they? Where do I find them?” Magdalena did not recognize those names. How would she find them in a city of more than a million people? She almost stepped forward to catch the rowboat and make Jarnvithja wait a moment, but caught herself just as she was about to step out from the quay and fall into the river.

The boat turned in the water to head back out into the open river. Fen’ka shifted, turning slightly and speaking to Magdalena a moment longer.

“Flauros and Halphas will answer your questions. If I had not been so headstrong and had been willing to ask for help, I might not have been attacked in the way that I was. Thank you, Magdalena. Thank you, child, for answering the call and coming to the aid of an old woman.”

“Fen’ka.” Magdalena spoke the old woman’s name for the first time. “Will I see you again here?” she called across the water as loudly as she dared. The river lapped against the stones and her voice echoed slightly under the bridge.

Fen’ka shifted her weight in the rowboat and the boat rocked gently in the water. She raised her hand, the one that had dissolved into ashes in the water before, and waved towards Magdalena. Jarnvithja propelled the boat forward with a few powerful strokes of the oar. Plop. Swish. The boat swung around the great stone supports of the bridge and was gone.