Between Orléans and
Meung-sur-Loire, June
It was six days since they’d left Paris. Already nearly all of Magdalena’s euros were gone, the shoelaces she’d been using to carry the box with Lina’s ashes had broken, and most of the skin on her feet had been replaced by Band-Aids. Sometimes she and the others walked from town to town on little paths through fields of vegetables or in between planned forests of strange geometry, straight white poplars and birch planted neatly row on row with vines strung drunkenly between them. Other times they walked single file along the shoulder of the highway, where signs showed the towns still had French names for considerable distances ahead. She tried to ask the old man with the walking stick how far they were from Spain, but he couldn’t understand her, and neither could the nuns, who had started tearing off the ends of their sandwiches and giving them to Magdalena when they stopped for lunch.
Up till then Magdalena had kept her distance from the English speakers in their group, preferring not to get too close to the familiar words on arms and elbows and sunburned knees. But realizing that she would need someone to split the price of a bunk with her at the next hostel—either that or sleep outside—Magdalena let herself fall back behind the group a bit to walk with Rachel, who, Magdalena had noticed, also slipped pieces of bread into her pockets when they stayed the night at a place with free breakfast.
Rachel had been born and would die in Clapham and, though she claimed to be one of the pagans, she told anyone who would listen that she was counting on the saint at the end of the road to wipe away the particular sin of having started a son out in life with a heroin habit.
“What’s the box for?” Rachel asked her as they walked.
“My friend,” Magdalena said.
“Like a present?” Rachel said.
“No,” Magdalena said.
“Yeah, all right,” Rachel said, and for a while neither of them said anything.
Rachel seemed to have twice as much skin as everyone else. It swelled the space between the top of her shorts and the bottom of her tank top and stretched the leather cords of the pendants around her neck. All that skin had a number of sad things written on it, some of which Rachel told her in not quite the same versions as they walked, Rachel panting a little and wiping the sweat from her forehead with the loose insides of her arms, where Magdalena read starving on the left and broken by Colin with a date a year in the future on the right.
“Are you walking for penitence?” Rachel asked.
“I don’t know,” Magdalena said, because she didn’t understand the word.
“I’m doing a cleansing,” Rachel said. Rachel didn’t believe in guilt, she said, or negative thinking. Magdalena nodded. They walked for a little while and then Rachel said, “And also for penitence, yeah. You know.” Magdalena didn’t say anything, but pretty soon Rachel was repeating the story that everyone, even the French nuns who couldn’t understand, had already heard, about falling pregnant and how they’d taken her son away when he was born and put him in care. “He was in a bad way, shakes, you know, and problems with his lungs. You know?” She kept asking Magdalena if she knew. Magdalena nodded. He’d been born too small, too early, with a long list of poisons in his little veins that Rachel wore, in alphabetical order, down her arm. “I don’t even know if he made out alright. They told me, you know, maybe he wouldn’t.” Still Magdalena didn’t say anything, though she did know, the answer was set out clearly along Rachel’s hairline, almost exactly where on Lina’s face the word apricots had been.
That night she and Rachel split the cost of a bed at the hostel. The nuns brushed their teeth and Magdalena eased her feet out of her sandals and ran a needle and thread through each of her blisters, like her mother used to do when she got home from work, cutting the thread after every stitch so that the ends stuck out of the blister on either side. “What are you doing that for?” Rachel said.
“For letting the water out,” Magdalena said. “So they don’t get big. I can do for you too.”
“Fuck no,” Rachel said. “Trying to stay away from needles, yeah?”
Rachel watched Magdalena for a little while, then said, “Want me to read your Tarot?” Magdalena didn’t know what she was talking about, but she said okay, and Rachel took a small wooden box wrapped in a blue silk scarf out of her backpack. “Blue is my aura,” she said, and opened the box. She spread the scarf out on the bed and shuffled a deck of fortune-telling cards.
Some of the markets in Vilnius had gypsies or old Russian women who read fortunes, and once Lina and Magdalena had paid to have theirs told from a deck of cards with the corners all gone. Magdalena couldn’t remember whose idea it had been, probably Lina’s. They’d taken the money out of what Magdalena’s mother had given them to buy vegetables, and her mother must have known what they’d done when they came home empty-handed except for a few cucumbers, flushed with conspiracy and awed by the images of blindfolded men with swords, lovers, the Hanged Man, and the Fool.
Rachel shuffled the cards and told Magdalena to cut them, then dealt a few face down in a semicircle on the blue scarf. She flipped them over one by one. Magdalena only half-listened, wondering why people who had a choice would want to know what was coming. She remembered the cards the gypsy woman had used, thick and oily from so many years of being stroked by dark fingers.
Magdalena and Lina had been too young then to care much about the future; they’d only wanted to find out if the boys they would marry were in their class at school, and Lina had asked the gypsy woman when her mother would be coming home. The woman caressed the cards with her fingertips as if she were coaxing Time to give the answer up, then said that for a question like that they would need to pay extra. Magdalena said no, but Lina made her give what was left of the vegetable money to the woman, who closed her eyes, turned over a final card, and let her fingers play across it. “She will come by this time next month,” the woman said. Lina was so happy she ran all the way home, leaving Magdalena to hunt for a few spotted cucumbers that had been thrown away, so she’d have something to give her mother. But a month passed, then two and three, and still Ruta didn’t come.
When Rachel had finished explaining Magdalena’s cards to her, telling her she would find love and warning her to stay away from Virgos, Magdalena put her glasses on and asked if she could try. She shuffled the cards as Rachel had done and laid them out across the scarf.
Magdalena knew that Rachel had probably asked the cards a thousand times for news about her son, and she needed to make sure that this time Rachel believed them. So, as she turned the cards over, Magdalena scanned Rachel’s face and neck for dates, picking out the ones that had already passed and looking for bits of information that Rachel would recognize. “You have one young sister I think,” Magdalena said.
“It says that?” Rachel said.
“It’s here,” Magdalena said. “This card with the woman by the gate means sister. You have been taking care of her, I think, when you are a child.”
“Yeah,” Rachel said. “What else does it say?”
“You have some hard things in your life. You have some problems with health when you are young. Things with the heart.”
“Where does it say that?” Rachel said.
“Oh, just there,” Magdalena said, and when Rachel pressed her for how she knew how to read the cards so well, Magdalena told her a story about a grandmother who was a gypsy and had taught her all the old ways.
Magdalena turned over more cards until she found some that looked like they could mean what she wanted to say.
“And here and here in the pieces of money and this with the child on the horse, this is about your son.”
“What does it say?” Rachel said.
“He is doing okay,” Magdalena said.
“Yeah?” Rachel said.
“He will have brown eyes and draw you a picture.”
“Yeah?” Rachel said again. “You’re sure?”
“This is for sure,” Magdalena said. “He lives with some nice people, you will see him some day.” She didn’t want to say too much more, so she turned over another card.
“But what about that?” Rachel said. The next card was the Devil.
“This one says only you have one not-so-good man in your life,” Magdalena said.
“Is that supposed to be Andy, does it say?” Rachel asked, squinting at the figure on the card.
“Colin,” Magdalena said, not thinking. Rachel looked at her strangely.
“How do you know about Colin?” she said.
Magdalena remembered the way the gypsy woman had spread her fingers over the cards, as if she were pulling meanings out through the paper. She had talked in a singing voice and wore a silver shawl over her clothes to hide the fact that she was just a poor woman selling stories. “All in the pictures,” Magdalena said.
“Nobody knows about Colin,” Rachel said, very quietly.
Magdalena laughed. “This is just for playing, okay?” But Rachel didn’t laugh, so Magdalena said, “I am hearing you say this name Colin when you are dreaming or something in the night.”
“That fuck,” Rachel said. “I hope I didn’t say too much.”
“No, it’s okay, no one else is even hearing I think,” Magdalena said, and turned over a card with a picture of a woman kneeling at a stream, filling pots of water under the stars. She didn’t dare read anything else off of Rachel, so she made one up. “You will be very lucky with business,” she said. “You are going to make money like water.”
The next morning the woman who’d slept in the bunk above theirs came over as Magdalena was making a replacement strap for her sandal out of a piece of Sellotape that Brit and Olaf, retirees from Norway, had given her. “I hear you give Tarot readings,” the woman said.
“It was only for a game,” Magdalena said.
“Your friend said you learned from your grandmother.”
“Just some little things,” Magdalena said.
“Do you have time?” the woman asked. “There’s something I really need to know.” Then she said, “Your friend said ten euros, right?” and Magdalena nodded. Rachel cleared them a place on a bench outside and spread the blue scarf out in front of Magdalena, then stood a little way back to watch. Magdalena set the cards out in the pattern Rachel had used the night before and flipped them face up one by one for the woman who, it turned out, was following the pilgrimage not to where the remains of the saint were buried, but to get to the shrine of a pre-Christian fertility goddess. The man she was traveling with had turned back, she told Magdalena. Should she go on without him? Magdalena had no idea. She could see no names or birthdates of children on the woman’s face or shoulders or arms, but there was a wedding in the future, to a man whose name could only be Spanish, and on the woman’s calf was a ledger of mortgage payments to be made on an apartment in Madrid.
Magdalena turned over more cards and pretended to study them. “I think you will find something new in Spain to make you happy,” Magdalena said. The woman nodded but she didn’t look like she believed it. “You will find love,” Magdalena said.
“Mmm,” the woman said. Dates of another marriage and a divorce from a man named Jim were written on her cheek. Along her jaw it said A courthouse wedding, no white dress. He said the beach would be too expensive but really, he never liked the sand.
“You are married before, but this is not working.”
“That’s right,” the woman said, looking more interested.
“You have the dream of a marriage by the sea.”
“Well, yes,” the woman said. “A long time ago.”
Magdalena tilted her head as if she were thinking and read Level A2 instructor, Instituto Cervantes. A list of verb conjugations wrapped around the woman’s elbow. “You are a teacher for Spanish, right?”
“That’s right,” the woman said. Magdalena traced her finger across a card with a picture of a hand coming out of the sky, and leaned closer to read what was written along the woman’s shoulder.
“And you have wanted to come to Spain to work, but this couldn’t happen.” The first husband had something to do with it, Magdalena read, but what exactly was buried in the woman’s armpit.
“Yes, yes,” the woman said.
“There is a new marriage for you, by the sea, and you will live in Spain, I think, with a man who is better than the first,” Magdalena said, and gathered up the cards quickly, wondering if the woman would press her for details. But the woman was already taking some bills out of the pocket of her shorts. She added an extra five euros. “For the good news,” she said.
That afternoon Rachel caught up with Magdalena as they walked and suggested that now might be the time to fulfill the money-making prophecy Magdalena had seen in Rachel’s cards. Rachel would bring the customers and Magdalena would use what her gypsy grandmother had taught her to pay their way to Spain. Magdalena laughed at her at first, but that night when they stopped at an abbey where anyone with a stamp of a scallop shell from the previous town could stay for free, Rachel found her three more customers, all from a Swedish backpacking group, and told them the price was fifteen euros each. The words on their skin were all in Swedish, but Magdalena could pick out a few names and dates, and as it turned out, she didn’t need to do much more than mention the name of a person or a place to make the backpackers look at each other and laugh, a little nervously. Then whatever Magdalena told them next—generalities about luck or love or a phrase she remembered from the gypsy woman in the market—would strike the person listening as truth, decoded from the pictures on the cards as if they were precise hieroglyphics only Magdalena could understand.
And so, after spending all her literate life trying to avoid seeing the things written on the people around her, Magdalena became, almost by accident, a professional fortune-teller. As they made their way toward Spain she started wearing her glasses all the time, not only because they let her walk faster but because she might pass someone resting along the way with their sleeves rolled up and certain details about their life exposed, and then meet that person at a pilgrims’ hostel later on, when it was cool and everyone was wearing sweaters, and be asked to tell their fortune. She learned to mix stock fortune-telling phrases into her readings, finding that saying a thing like “There is a man in your life, you aren’t sure of his commitment” or “You are not quite satisfied in your profession”—things that were always true—put her customers at ease, and more often than not, despite pressing her for details of the future, it was really the vaguer warnings and assurances they wanted to hear.
She made mistakes sometimes, or accidentally revealed information that even the cards weren’t supposed to know. Once or twice in the beginning people made her put the deck away before she was finished and hurried off, looking at Magdalena oddly and crossing themselves. But as they went along she developed the techniques of a confidence man or a sideshow illusionist, deciding first what she was going to reveal to her customers and then asking them questions that came just close enough to the answers she wanted that they left impressed, not knowing how, exactly, but assuming that Magdalena was using some sort of subtle hypnosis or psychological sleight-of-hand.
Sometimes as she walked Magdalena wondered if any of the gypsy women in the markets had the problem of knowing more than was profitable. She’d tried for such a long time not to think too much about why she saw words where she did or if she was the only one. Knowing madness or worse might be hiding underneath questions that went too deep, Magdalena had always tiptoed through her own mind when she had to, and stayed out when she could. But maybe it was the way the road to Spain stretched in front of her until it narrowed to a pinprick and disappeared into blue, or the way fields and hills rose and fell for as far as she could see. Surrounded by so much space and sky Magdalena began letting go of her old habit of pinching off her thoughts before they could get away from her, and for the first time in a long time she let them roll all the way to their ends.
She thought about the things that made no sense: the Scottish nun they’d met whose skin was taken up entirely with the names of wild birds. Or a teacher she’d had in high school who had a recipe for buckwheat soup on her forehead. There was someone else, she couldn’t remember who, whose skin was covered with a list of library books a lifetime long, and the dates that they were due. She remembered the man she’d met on the street in Paris, who’d sounded like an American but had an old saying that her mother liked written in Lithuanian across his face.
She thought about the words on her mother’s skin, as familiar to Magdalena as the sound of her voice. Her mother had Juozas, the name of Magdalena’s baby brother, on her arm, and Rimantas, the name of Magdalena’s father, on her forehead—that was where, her mother had told her, her father had gotten flustered and kissed her, instead of on the lips, as they stood at the altar. The details of a gall bladder operation that her mother had had as a girl circled a scar on her stomach, and a patch of skin without a scar described a hysterectomy with minor complications. On the back of her mother’s wrist was her favorite joke about the priest and the tailor, which made her laugh so much when she told it that she always skipped the best part, and her mother’s thighs were wrapped in superstitions—if you drop a comb be sure to step on it, never sleep in moonlight, a dream of brown bread means a happy home, a rabbit means life, a barking dog means death, the devil dances at weddings, never whistle indoors—things she’d learned from Magdalena’s great-grandmother, who, as an old woman, had saved her fingernail clippings in little bags, knowing she would need them to climb the icy mountain that in the old Lithuanian stories was the only way to Paradise.
But as they walked toward Spain there were days when the only thing that could take Magdalena’s mind off her feet was to think about her father. Her mother hardly ever talked about him, and they’d never had anything to do with Magdalena’s aunts and uncles and cousins on his side, who blamed Magdalena’s mother for the things that had gone wrong. “You have his eyes,” her mother sometimes said to her, and when Magdalena was young and her mother was sad, sometimes Magdalena would feel her way around the house, keeping them closed so her mother wouldn’t be reminded of the man in the photographs, who had strong hands and a tired face and eyes as clear as glass.
“He thought about things too much,” her mother said once. “He went around in circles in his mind, and after Juozas was born he couldn’t take it anymore.” Magdalena remembered that her mother had said “after Juozas was born,” not “after Juozas died.” The two things had happened on the same day, and it was possible that Magdalena’s mother thought of the two events as one, or that she said it like that because she couldn’t bring herself, still, after all the years, to say it the other way. But as she walked, Magdalena let herself wonder, out loud inside her own head for the first time, if it was possible that her father had stopped wanting to go on living when his son was born and he saw that there was just one date written on the baby’s skin.
They walked through fields dense with tiny flowers that left streaks of pollen across their ankles. Rachel had fits of rasping sneezes—hay fever it said across the bridge of her nose—and Magdalena wondered if her father had ever guessed that there might be others like him. In London it had happened to her twice. Magdalena had seen them, or she might have—both times she’d tried so hard not to believe it that now she couldn’t be sure. There had been a man with no shoes in a tube station who’d looked at her with eyes like mirrors in an empty room and smiled in recognition. The other time it was a child, a little boy she’d seen at an outdoor market in Islington whose pale gaze was all the more noticeable because his skin was dark. He’d been holding his mother’s hand, watching the people pass by, mouthing the words.
They passed a market on the outskirts of a little town. The nuns bought a bucket of tomatoes and Rachel and Magdalena ate them like apples as they walked. Magdalena thought about how her father had died right around the time she learned the alphabet. She wondered if he’d ever taken her to a place crowded with people and watched to see if she moved her lips.
She thought about the list that began at the nape of her mother’s neck and continued in small print all down her back, recording each drink she’d had in the days and weeks and months after Magdalena’s father died. The last entry came just above her mother’s pants line—it sometimes showed when she bent over and her shirt rode up—saying 3.2 liters Stumbras Vodka under birches. Out of the whole world only Magdalena could possibly know it was a reference to the day when, having lost a baby and a husband, and then, if the log was right, 152 nights to Stumbras, Magdalena’s mother had bundled Magdalena, age four, into her snowsuit, collected the bottles under her arm, and together they’d gone into the woods behind their old apartment building, where they unscrewed and dumped each one, holding their noses and watching the liquid burn little holes in the snow under a stand of birch trees, which, Magdalena’s great-grandmother used to say, house the spirits of men who die too soon.
The roads were getting steeper. The Pyrenees, Olaf said. Brit told them to be sure they were drinking plenty of water. As they hiked up hillsides covered with olive groves, Magdalena listened to Rachel talk about her days doing junk, sleeping in doorways and robbing her mum, and it occurred to Magdalena that the things she’d gotten used to reading as her mother reached for a pan or changed her skirt or stretched out her toes to let the polish dry had something in common. They were stories Magdalena had heard as a little girl, or they were hints of stories her mother might someday decide to tell her, and a number included phrases in the imperative tense—don’t pick the thin-stemmed mushrooms, check that the butcher’s scale is zero to begin with—as if her mother had made notes across her skin of the things that Magdalena ought to know.
But Magdalena’s mother’s body did not say Magdalena anywhere, and as they walked and she listened to Rachel cycle through the stories of her life, Magdalena let herself wonder why. Maybe, like Lina, her mother had things written under her hair. Maybe Magdalena’s name had gotten lost in her ear or covered over by the birthmark behind her mother’s knee. There had been no Magdalena on Lina either, or on Ivan or Andrius, Magdalena’s boyfriend in high school, or on Marija or Ruta or even Rachel, but it couldn’t be that Magdalena was meant to come and go without leaving so much as her name; she had seen herself on Neil: Magdalena Bikauskaitė unmistakable in the hollow of his eye. In the station in Paris, when she’d lifted the bit of hair that stuck out over Neil’s ear, she hadn’t seen any words of explanation. Her name was a fact on his face, like his blood type and the dates his children would be born and the place he went to high school, and she thought about this too as the languages on the other pilgrims became more varied, leaving her understanding only the names—Marias, Paolos, Gottfrieds, Kristofers, Josés, and Adriennes—on strangers’ cheeks and hands and dusty legs. When she told the fortune of somebody covered in a language she couldn’t understand she learned to choose a name and say it carefully, and often she was able to tell from the look on the customer’s face whether Paolo or Kristofer was that person’s father or their son, a lost love, ex-husband, or favorite saint. She wondered what Neil would say if a stranger on the road looked into a crystal or fussed with a deck of cards and then said “Magdalena Bikauskaitė” to him. Would he look confused? Or would he recognize a logic to that name that no one else would understand?
They crossed the border into Spain. The roads were busy with pilgrims hurrying to finish in time for the saint’s feast day and every time they stopped to rest, Rachel found someone who wanted a fortune told. They could buy sandwiches now, and they had their own bunks at the pilgrims’ hostels. Calluses formed around the threads in Magdalena’s feet. Rachel said it was disgusting, but she had to admit that Magdalena had been right, it stopped the blisters.
By then Magdalena had enough money for a decent pair of boots. Brit offered to take her shopping for the kind that breathed, but when they came to a town that had all the big outlet stores, Magdalena told Brit that she’d decided to use the money for something else. Of all the things written on her mother’s skin, there was one story that Magdalena knew the beginning to, but not the end—and besides, she’d spent her childhood reading pay your debts off the inside of her mother’s elbow whenever she rolled up her sleeves. When they stopped for the night, Magdalena asked at the desk for paper and an envelope and she got out the napkin where Neil had written his address. His last name struck her as a familiar fact. She’d seen those letters all her life on the soft skin below her mother’s collarbone, where the name Neil had said was his father’s had been given Lithuanian grammatical endings—Richardui Beartui—the dative form looking clumsy on those foreign words. It meant to Richard Beart or for him, turning Neil’s father into a noun whose meaning was incomplete standing alone like that, as if her mother had hugged the letters of the alphabet to her chest and come away with an unfinished sentence about a man in America claiming her heart.
Magdalena looked at the piece of blank paper the clerk had given her. Hello my dear Neil she wrote at the top, and stopped to think. She didn’t know quite how to make him understand, or where to begin. Rachel had met a group of German Wiccans and gone off to have a beer, so Magdalena had to ask one of the French nuns who taught school to help her with the English.
When she was finished she wrapped the letter around Neil’s sixty euros. She sealed the envelope and took it to the post office on their way out of town the next morning—though she knew from the warning across the back of her mother’s left knee that one should never send cash through the mail.