‘Hello,’ said a woman’s voice.
‘Is this Katerina?’ I said.
‘Yes.’
‘I’ve got one of your handbills and I think I need a no-bullshit modern psychic. Can I make an appointment to see you?’
She didn’t answer. After a few seconds I said, ‘Hello? Are you there?’
‘Sorry, I was still listening to your voice.’ Her own voice was very shapely, with a slight German accent. ‘You want to see me?’ She said it as if she meant the actual seeing, and there came to mind the Caspar David Friedrich painting of his wife, seen from behind, standing at a window and looking across the River Elbe at a row of distant poplars.
‘Yes,’ I said. ‘You sound as if you’re standing at a window looking across a river.’
‘Like the Friedrich painting? No, I’m standing in the kitchen looking at a dripping tap. What is your name, please?’
‘Jonathan Fitch.’
‘Your voice troubles me, Mr Fitch. What do you think I can do for you?’
‘I don’t know, but talking to you seems to be the next thing for me to do. What do you charge?’
‘Twenty-five pounds if I can do something, nothing if I cannot. It comes and goes – sometimes yes and sometimes no. I’m seeing blue eyes, fair hair. Am I right?’
‘Yes. What else do you see?’
‘Nothing. I’m hearing that you’re afraid, yes?’
‘Yes.’
‘Me too. This is not unnatural to the human condition. Even sometimes it is useful. Can you be here in a quarter of an hour or so?’
‘Yes, I can.’
‘OK, you come, we talk – we see how it goes.’ She gave me her address. ‘I am Flat A; the name on the buzzer is Bechstein, like the piano.’
She was in Earl’s Court Road, a little way past the Waterstone’s at the corner of Penywern Road, in one of those big white Victorian houses converted to flats. When I came up the steps I saw a silver-haired woman looking out of the front window. I buzzed the Bechstein button, said I was Jonathan Fitch, and she came to the door. In her sixties, I thought; hair in a Psyche knot. She would have been a beauty when young – quite tall, with the daring look of one who might have parachuted behind enemy lines. Wearing an old grey cardigan and a faded print dress. Black stockings and snakeskin shoes that must have been fifty years old. I wondered if she was seeing into my mind where my night with Mr Rinyo-Clacton was replaying itself more or less continuously.
‘So,’ she said, shaking my hand, ‘here are you and it’s very bad, that I already feel. Come in.’ From the next floor came the sound of Pelléas et Mélisande. Also the smell of something with a lot of garlic. ‘Mr Perez,’ she said, ‘in the flat above me, is a heavy Debussy-user.’
‘It’s a small world.’
‘He wears two-tone shoes, carries a malacca cane, and has an extensive record collection that I have come to know very well. Being psychic I predict Ravel within the next hour.’ Pelléas and the smell receded as she closed the door of her flat behind us.
The high-ceilinged front room, the one I’d seen from the street, had nothing in it but a table and two chairs. There was an Art Nouveau lamp on the table making a little pool of light in the dusk that was gathering in the room. The white walls were bare except for a large framed print of Dürer’s Melencolia.
I hadn’t looked at that engraving for a long time, and seeing the darkly brooding winged woman or angel now I was struck by the energy of her brooding, the power in it; her thinking was not simply contemplative, it was going to make something happen: what with the dividers in her hand, the plane and saw, the hammer and tongs and other ironmongery, she seemed to be in the planning stages of some decisive action. The sandglass behind her right wing – surely that indicated that time was running out. And the bell nearby – for whom and for what would it ring? Or had it already rung? That sleeping dog, was she going to let it lie? And what about the polyhedron – was that not a reminder of the many sides of everything? Angel or woman, Melencolia with her wings could rise above the immediate problem for a longer view. The dog, such a very thin dog with its ribs sticking out, looked like a greyhound, a dog that hunts not by scent but by sight – it sees its prey and gives chase. On the wall behind the figure in the picture was a magic square in which all the numbers added up to thirty-four whether you did them vertically, horizontally, or on the diagonal.
Melencolia was not alone in the picture. Seated by a ladder and a pair of scales (Justice?), either close by or on the polyhedron (hard to make out which), was a surly winged infant, possibly asleep or perhaps just sulking. Was he the child of Melencolia? The picture seemed full of clues and portents, like a whole deck of Tarot cards. Undoubtedly Dürer, when he engraved Melencolia in 1514, had his own symbology in mind but now the picture was alone and independent of its maker; it could say what it liked, speak freely to any stranger and differently to each. I was troubled by that surly child; what would he grow up to be?
‘You like melancholy?’ said Katerina. ‘For you it’s a normal state, yes?’
‘It is now.’
‘Maybe before now also. It’s a natural state, melancholy – like fear. Both belong to the human condition. Now I am going to tell you something that I’m wondering about: apart from this session we’re going to have now I have a feeling that some kind of connection exists or is going to exist between you and me, a link of some sort, a Verbindung. Strange, yes? Do you feel that?’
‘I don’t know – when the handbill was given to me I felt as if I’d been waiting for it.’
She moved behind me. ‘I’m just going to put my hand on the back of your neck,’ she said. Her touch was light, her hand cool and dry. ‘Now, come and sit down. We talk about this.’
We sat at the table facing each other. She was wearing silver earrings, little owls. It was getting dark outside and the two of us in the lamplight were reflected in the window. The room behind us was lost in shadow. The glass bell-flower shade of the lamp was a delicate blue; the light through it seemed to come from a time when all kinds of questions had better answers than they do now. At the base of the lamp was a graceful little woman, bronze not spelter, whose figure was more revealed than concealed by the clinging drapery loosely belted at her hips. She had a quill pen in her right hand and her left held one end of a scroll that was balanced on her thigh. Her bare right foot was forward; her left rested lightly on a book. Her hair was loosely pinned up at the back and she wore a wreath in it – laurel, I thought. Her eyes were downcast, her sweet face pensive. I put my hand around her and ran my thumb over her belly and down her thigh. The room grew darker beyond the circle of the lamplight.
Katerina was looking towards the street and absently rubbing her left arm. The sleeve of the cardigan slid up and I saw numbers on her wrist. She offered me a cigarette; I shook my head. Did I mind if she smoked, she asked, and when I said no she lit up, took a deep drag, and coughed for a while. ‘I thought I am already dying from so many cigarettes,’ she said, ‘but no, still I am here. Many times I have foreseen my death and many times it has not happened. Some psychic I am. Give me your hands. May I call you Jonathan?’
‘Please do.’
‘Jonathan, do you know why I put my hand on the back of your neck?’
‘I think so.’
‘Shall I say what I am feeling? I think it will not be a big surprise for you.’
‘Yes, say it.’
‘Death is following you.’
‘I’m not sure whether it’s following me or I’m following it.’
‘I can feel your uncertainty and I feel the closeness of death but I don’t know what this is all about.’
‘I’d rather not explain just yet; first I’d like to know what you’re getting from me because I don’t quite know where I am with what’s happening.’
‘OK – I try to feel what goes on in you where the words are not. Two, I get: death times two. Here I am confused with these two deaths.’ She let go of my hands and brought her own together on her chest with their knuckles touching. ‘One is real, it threatens from the outside; the other is in the mind and it threatens with the mind, yes?’
‘I hope it’s only in the mind. I’ve got three months ahead of me before I can be HIV-tested.’
‘You have been with a man?’
‘Once only, last night.’
‘No protection?’
‘No protection.’
She was quiet for a few moments. Upstairs the murmurous sea-changes of Pelléas, still in Act One, stopped and the Ravel trio for piano, violin and cello, the one featured in the film Un Cœur en Hiver, began. Serafina and I had listened to that trio in my flat the first time we made love; I remembered her undressing for me, the poignancy of her body in the lamplight, the pearliness and the shadows.
‘So,’ said Katerina, ‘you have played arsehole roulette and now you are afraid. I have several clients who have come to me like this. Sometimes, not always, I can see what other people cannot but I have never been able to see into the future and I can’t say what will be three months from now.’
She took my hands again. ‘In each of us lives the little animal of the self: nothing to do with the mind, it goes its own way; there is no talking to it. Sometimes it wants to live; sometimes it wants to die. Maybe you are in hospital for surgery, and while you are anaesthetised the little animal of the self makes up its mind. “OK,” it says, “this time I don’t die.” Or it says, “That’s it – I have had enough and it’s time to pack it in.” So now I listen for what the little animal of you is saying and it says yes and also it says no. It’s a little confused, I think.’
‘So am I.’ Upstairs, Ravel was cut off halfway through the first movement and Berlioz came on with Symphonie Fantastique.
‘What is it with this Mr Perez?’ I said.
She shook her head. ‘His thoughts are sad; he has many regrets. Talk to me about yourself. Have you now become a convert to love between men?’
‘No, it’s just that I seem to have come unglued since Serafina left me.’ Then of course I had to tell her all about Serafina.
‘Jonathan,’ said Katerina, ‘this that you have told me about you and Serafina is of course a big thing in your life but it is not – how shall I say it? – too much off the beaten track. Left to yourselves, the two of you would either find a way of getting past this together or going ahead separately. What I think is the big priority here is this death business. Something comes into my mind now and I say it; perhaps it is stupid but I say it anyhow. Have you ever read a book by the American writer John O’Hara, Appointment in Samarra?’
‘No.’
‘In the front of it, for an epigraph, there is a tiny little story, only a paragraph it is, by Somerset Maugham: a merchant in Baghdad sends his servant to the market and there the servant is jostled by a woman whom he recognises as Death. She makes what he thinks is a threatening gesture so he hurries home and says to his master, “Please lend me your horse. I saw Death in the market and she threatened me, so I want to ride to Samarra to get away from her.” The merchant lends him the horse and then he goes to the market and accosts Death. “Why did you threaten my servant?” he says. “That was not a threatening gesture,” says Death. “It was one of surprise. I was startled to see that man in Baghdad today because I have an appointment with him this evening in Samarra.”’ She blew out a big cloud of smoke. ‘Tell me your thoughts about this story.’
‘My first thought is that in this story Death is a woman. Until now, whenever I’ve read of Death as a person or seen it pictured it’s been male. Somerset Maugham was homosexual; maybe for him Death was a woman. Of course there’s a feminine element in every man.’
‘In you?’
‘In every man.’
‘What do you think it wants, your feminine element?’
‘Katerina, I thought you were a clairvoyant, not a shrink.’
‘Have you ever watched Oprah Winfrey? These days everybody is a shrink. Don’t answer me if you don’t want to.’
‘I don’t know what my feminine element wants but I think my masculine element is tired and full of uncertainty.’
Katerina held up her right index finger and made it go from side to side like a windscreen wiper. ‘So – which way is the needle pointing now?’
‘You mean, towards male or female?’
‘What you like – maybe life or death, I don’t know.’
‘Death, I guess.’
‘Mr Rinyo-Clacton, what in your mind does he represent?’
‘Death, I guess. But he’s no one I’m attracted to.’
‘Don’t worry about it, every kind of thing goes on in the mind all the time. Say more about the story.’
‘Well, if Death is out to get you there’s no escaping, is there. It’ll find you in Earl’s Court or Piccadilly Circus or Belgravia or wherever. Maybe when it’s time you put out signals without knowing it and Death homes in on them.’
‘Say more. Look at Melancolia. Look at her face, the polyhedron, the dog. What about that winged infant perched just behind her? A boy, do you think? Is he asleep? Sulking? Is he the child of Melencolia?’ She held both my hands tightly. ‘Maybe – no, I don’t want to put thoughts in your head. Is she sexy, Melencolia? She’s well-built, not? Her eyes, how they burn, eh?’
We were quiet for a while. Upstairs Berlioz, like a musical Delacroix, moved on to the next part of his crowded canvas, the tenebrous waltz of the second movement – a cast of thousands, all of them shadows. I was thinking of Mr Rinyo-Clacton and my death that I had seen in his eyes. I remembered the sound of his weeping and tried to move my mind away from it. In the print on the wall the eyes of the winged woman burned with … what? What was she thinking of?
‘Eros and Thanatos,’ said Katerina.
‘What about them?’
‘I don’t know; my mind is a big confusion and words come out of my mouth. So rarely is anything separate from anything else. Nothing is simple. Sometimes we move towards what we think we move away from.’
The white walls seemed to vibrate. Her hands felt full of the voices of the dead. I closed my eyes and tried to see Serafina but I couldn’t. Katerina pulled her hands away and as I opened my eyes she was covering her face. ‘What is it?’ I said.
She removed her hands; her eyes were very big. For a moment I saw her as a young woman, a woman to fall in love with. ‘I don’t know,’ she said.
‘Are you all right?’
‘Yes, but I don’t think I can do any more today. I don’t know whether I’ve helped you at all.’
‘You have, in some way that I don’t quite understand.’ She looked awfully tired. God knew knew what she had to deal with at twenty-five pounds a time. As I paid her I felt a surge of pity for her, that this woman who had worn, perhaps danced in, those snakeskin shoes, should have to do this for a living. ‘Can I come and see you again?’ I said.
‘Yes, but I don’t want any more money from you – just come and talk to me when you feel like it, yes?’
‘Yes, thank you.’ I kissed her hand.
‘Such gallantry!’ she said with a bewitching smile. ‘I see you out.’
As we left the room I noticed a box of sheet music on the floor with something by Debussy on top. On the worn carpet were several places that looked less worn. ‘You play the piano?’ I said.
She flushed. ‘I sold it. I like to play late at night and people bang on the door and shout.’ At the front door she took my hand in hers for a moment. ‘Be careful,’ she said. ‘Come safe to your house.’
‘Thank you,’ I said. ‘See you.’ As I left, Berlioz was into the fourth movement, and the muffled thunder of drums announced March to the Scaffold.