612
PARTISAN REVIEW
All three of them looked at me with hope-something I don't like to
arouse in people.
"[ hope you'll also tell Hline," I said, fal tering.
"She doesn't have it easy either," Sonya added and took me by the
hand. "Life is a burden, ladies. Jana there," she pointed to a tiny dark
woman who looked Sicilian, "will certainly read for you. She'll tell you
what you can expect and what you can't avoid. But how about some cof–
fee-Gabby?"
The giant hostess rushed behind the curtains into the kitchen and I
remembered that the best fortune-tellers in the world are supposedly found
in Sicily. Wealthy women from Milan and Florence travel there to see
them.
"I work with Gabina at the office," the Sicilian woman said, smiling at
me, "We tell each other's fortunes each morning, afternoon, and evening.
We read all three coffees we drink during the day."
"But she's always saying the same thing," Gabina shouted from the
kitchen. "I'll drop dead of a heart attack from so much coffee and my lover
will still be sitting at home. The things she's pronilsed me-I couldn't even
begin to tell you."
"Finish my cards, Jana, okay?" begged Hilda, a tender little blonde
whose complexion was interwoven with a web of blue veins. She resem–
bled a porcelain doll I once received for my birthday. It had been my
mother's, and had a straw hat with tiny roses sitting on its curls, and I was
so happy at the time that I didn't wish for anything else in the world. A
few days later, in a rage at my mother, I threw the doll out the window as
revenge. I don't know whose pain was worse. We both cried and Mother
strung the blue porcelain eyes on a wire and put them in a cup in the cup–
board. They tortured me there for years with their winking gaze. Hilda
awoke pangs of conscience in me even now, but I didn't know her well
enough to adnilt to the murder.
Sonya and Gabina were in the kitchen whispering behind the curtain.
Perhaps Sonya was telling her how it first occurred to me that I could see
the future. It was on an island in the Adriatic. We were lying on a stone
plateau which inclined to the sea, and from the west a storm was nearing–
but we didn't see it, because it was behind the rock-face, and we didn't hear
it, because the sea rattled pebbles at our feet. Only when the sky turned
green and the waves washed over our feet, splashing the boulders beneath
us, did we get dressed and run over the island to the one pub, located near
the dock. Lightning was already zig-zagging across the sky and falling into
the sea, and gray-white rain poured down on us.
In the pub I stared for a long while into the black-and-white picture
in the coffee cup and suddenly things began to connect. Figures entered
