Ekaterina Netchitailova

In the early 1990s, Moscow was in a peculiar state. I’ve already told you about Kashpirovsky, who had a prime-time TV slot to hypnotize the whole nation, but it didn’t stop there.

Wherever you looked, there were “witches” – and I put the word in quotation marks because real, ethical witches would never do what some of these people did in Moscow back then.

Psychic parlors were everywhere, and many people went to them out of despair. These were very hard years. The shops were empty; there was nothing to eat. My grandmother and I relied on the American aid I received at school: a box of powdered milk and almost inedible sausage. But it was food, and we ate it. Sometimes we were lucky enough to buy bread, and Mars or Snickers bars from the local lareks – ugly, improvised kiosks that competed with the regular supermarkets, whose shelves stood empty.

The self-proclaimed witches also simply sat on the streets of Moscow and offered every kind of reading: astrology charts, Tarot, palm reading.

Once, I walked along the Arbat with my beloved cousin Olga. It is one of Moscow’s most famous pedestrian streets, popular with the bohemian crowd. Poets read their poems, bands played their songs, painters offered to paint your portrait. And there, in the middle of it all, sat a palm reader with a queue.

My cousin and I were fourteen or fifteen, and of course we were terribly curious, so we joined the queue. I was wearing a top my mother had brought me from Italy. It was gorgeous, but quite revealing: sleeveless, and it showed my cleavage. I noticed the palm reader staring at it. She was a stocky woman with dark eyes, and I didn’t like her, but we were already in the queue, and curiosity won.

My cousin went first, and hers was a nice reading. The usual: she would meet a good man, marry and have children. But when my turn came, the woman suddenly stood up and announced she was closing.

Looking back, I think it was a sign from God not to pursue it. But I was fourteen, and of course I wanted to hear about my future.

I went back the next day, wearing a different top. The palm reader was there, and she recognized me at once. I don’t know why, but she didn’t like me. When my turn came, she glanced briefly at my palm and said I shouldn’t work as a teacher or a doctor. She said nothing about marriage, children or a good life.

Maybe she was right after all, and not a complete charlatan. I never married, and my life has been tough. But I have a son, whom I am raising on my own. And I have been teaching at universities for years, because teaching, together with writing, is my passion.

So much for her advice.

Still, I learned a lesson back then: it is better to stay away from self-proclaimed psychics, and not to ask false oracles about your future.

(Image made with Grok Imagine)