A Fortune-Teller Told Me (56 page)

Some tough-looking soldiers in camouflage uniforms, armed with big truncheons, boarded the train. Militiamen. They went back and forth collecting money from the Mongols. A thousand rubles for smoking in the corridor—or just to avoid trouble.

Gradually the hubbub subsided. Vladimir and one of his assistants dragged the drunken Mongols out of the restaurant car and dumped them in the corridor of economy class. A few men were still going in and out of compartment 5.

And then a new, long-awaited sound: the clickety-clack of the wheels assumed a more urgent rhythm, like a dialogue between various voices. The train slowed down, whistled, swerved as it negotiated a series of switches, and we entered a big city. The head conductor knocked on the
doors of the drunks and sleepers, shouting in a joyous voice:
“Moskva! Moskva!”

It was three in the morning and a fine rain was falling on the platform when, with enormous pleasure, I at last set foot on the ground. We were six hours late. My Mongolian companion shook my hand and vanished in the crowd. He was wearing an elegant dark jacket and blue jeans. In his hand he had a “businessman’s” briefcase, which I knew held stacks of rubles and a pistol.

From Moscow the rest of the journey was easy. A day to cross Belorussia. Then Brest, the last station of what used to be the Soviet empire. Again the carriages were driven into a shed and lifted to replace the wide-wheel trucks with some of narrower gauge. A last border guard watched us with binoculars as we crossed into Poland. In the distance, through the trees, I saw the shape of a church. Europe! The stations became tidier, the railwaymen’s uniforms cleaner.

Soon I was home. I unpacked my bag and distributed all the oils, powders, envelopes, magic cards and other lucky charms I had accumulated en route. What I could not get rid of was the disquieting memory of those huge masses of humanity—desperate, disorientated, angry and ravenous—which, from Vietnam to China, from Mongolia to Russia, I had left in my wake. If I had traveled by air I would have seen none of it.

M
y book
Goodnight, Mister Lenin
came out at exactly the right time, according to the Bangkok fortune-teller, to be a success. Just as she had prescribed, it was neither too long nor too short, the cover was in pastel colors, and there was a man’s name in the title. But when I arrived in London, though the book was displayed in the windows, I found no queues outside the bookshops: another proof, if I needed it, that one should not put too much faith in fortune-tellers. At least not where details are concerned, because otherwise my visit to London was a great success. Just to arrive there by train, after crossing the Channel and seeing the white cliffs of Dover once again from the deck of the ferry, was a great pleasure. One that I owed to a fortune-teller.

But even that sensible separation, which for centuries has made the British British and the rest of us “Continentals,” has now disappeared because of a claustrophobic tunnel under the sea. Somewhere there is someone who is pushing to make the world turn faster and faster, and to make people more and more the same—in the name of something called “globalization,” the meaning of which few understand and still fewer have said they want.

In London I was in the hands of my publisher. Between one appointment and another I asked my “minder” if she could help me to find a fortune-teller. She made an appointment for me at an address in Monmouth Street; I was to ask for Mr. Norman.

I stepped out of the taxi somewhat embarrassed. It is one thing to visit an old lama in Ulan Bator as an explorer, a journalist looking for some truth, and another to go to a fortune-teller in the middle of
London. There one feels the need of an alibi, even for oneself. But I had none.

My embarrassment increased when I found that the address I had been given was a shop with “Mysteries” painted on the window. It was a sort of supermarket, or school, or temple, of the occult. It was surprisingly crowded with young “alternative” people: punks, apprentice wizards and young witches on active service. For sale on the shelves were all the books of magic, miracles, mystery, all the tomes on Buddhism, Oriental philosophy, astrology and chiromancy, that one could imagine. Anything you might want to know was there. Everything which I imagined I had sniffed out myself could undoubtedly be found in one or other of those little books or those records and videos lined up on the shelves.

At the cash register was a girl with fiery red hair in great long curls. I paid her $15, went up a stairway covered with a straw mat, and arrived in a room divided into many cubicles, each with its fortune-teller and its posters of Indian or Buddhist divinities. In one I even saw a glass ball.

“I am Norman. Do you have an appointment?” The man was about sixty; he had a sallow complexion, a prominent chin, hair receding at the temples. He was wearing a black leather jacket and dark trousers. In his hand he held a lighted cigarette. He took me into his cubicle and had me sit across from him at a cheap little table. There were some psychedelic posters on the walls. I was entitled to half an hour of consultation, he said, and to get my money’s worth we had better begin at once.

He handed me a pack of cards with pictures in bright colors and asked me to shuffle them three times. Then he took every seventh card from the deck, laid them out in a pattern, and began his analysis:
“You are beginning a new cycle of your life, and you are about to take some steps in the dark. As you are a man who likes challenges, you will meet with success. Great success, no doubt about it. Look—in this pack there are four powerful cards, and you have three of them here, all together. So I tell you: just do whatever you like and you’ll succeed. Only you must take care of your health, because you are a man who uses a great deal of energy. At times too much. Try to keep your battery always well charged.”

I interrupted to ask him to tell me everything, absolutely everything he saw, even if he saw horrible things.

“There is nothing negative in what I see in the cards. Of course you too will die one day, like me, like everyone, but the cards do not tell me when. I don’t see your death here. Perhaps an astrologer could do it. You’re a man who likes to be under pressure, to be in danger, to take risks; but if a bullet comes along it misses you, perhaps by a fraction of an inch, and you survive. This is what the cards say. Your whole life is under a precise sign: ‘Lucky rather than rich.’ Here are the cards, see?”
(I saw nothing but some pictures which meant nothing to me.)
“These are the cards of fortune, but there are none of the cards of wealth, not even one. In the cards I also see a woman, a woman with a strong character who plays a great part in your life.”

Norman went on for twenty minutes, chain-smoking, reshuffling the cards, having me choose one and laying out his patterns again before pronouncing on various themes that I knew well by now. They were the same in Bangkok, in Ulan Bator and in London: the death of a person close to me in recent months or in the months to come; a person younger than me whom I should try to get along with during October; a friend who might betray me; long journeys between October 10 and November 20, and so on.

I looked at my watch and decided to use the last ten minutes to talk about Norman rather than about myself. I interrupted again and asked him if he believed the things he said he saw in the cards.

“Not 100 percent, otherwise we would no longer have any responsibility for our actions,”
he said.
“The cards read the shadows of things, of events. What I can do is help people to change the position of the light, and then, with free will, they can change the shadows. That I really do believe: you can change the shadows.”

This seemed one of the best descriptions I had heard of fortune-tellers’ work: changing the shadows. Accurate too, if, as Pirandello and
Rashomon
have taught us, there is not one truth but many, depending on who looks at things and how he does so.

I told Norman why I was there, and in return, lighting yet another cigarette, he told me why he was there. For years he had been a teller in a bank. He couldn’t stand it anymore, and left. He went from one job to another, and none of them paid enough to live on or gave him as much satisfaction as reading the cards. Of the $15 fee half went to him, the other half to the shop. At the end of the day he felt he had truly helped at least a couple of people.

I liked Norman. By no means did he have special powers—if he had, he would have stopped smoking!—but he had a good deal of common sense. I felt that he was sincere, and that once in a while he really did help someone dispel a bit of shadow and bring more light into his life. Like the fortune-teller in Betong who could tell by “feeling” when a girl had AIDS, like the woman in Hanoi, like the witch of Ulan Bator.

I would have liked to board a ship in London and sail down the Thames to the sea, like one of Conrad’s voyagers, but the ship for Hamburg departed from Harwich, so I had to take a train to the coast. Even that was enjoyable, though, as it gave me time to take in the beautiful, orderly English countryside, unspoiled by anything, not even the usual high-tension pylons. It seemed as though particular care had been taken of the landscape to preserve its naturalness. And that was heartening. From the minute I arrived in Europe, I had been struck by how well this continent carried its age. It had not tried to give itself another face; it was proud of the one it had, and made an effort to preserve it. After the Asian mania for self-destruction this was a great relief.

The ship left Harwich in the early afternoon, and at dawn the next day we reached the mouth of the Elbe. It was six more hours before we docked at Altona, but they were six very pleasant hours, slowly sailing between the elegant banks of this river which has seen so much history, and which has brought Hamburg all its wealth.

Hamburg is a port: something I have always known but never truly understood until, like a Hanseatic sailor returning after months at sea, I saw on the horizon first the roofs of Cuxhaven, then the small houses of the captains and the white mansions of the rich merchants shining through the majestic trees at Blankenaese, and at last the green copper church spires of the city. I had been in Hamburg dozens of times, but it had taken a Hong Kong fortune-teller to make me feel its true soul.

That was not the only surprise. When I went to see the chief editors of
Der Spiegel
they said: “We know you want to go and live in India. Good. The job of correspondent will be free at the end of this year. From January 1 we would like you to be in Delhi.”

Well, well. The old blind man in Bangkok was right, and so were all the fortune-tellers who said I would move to another country in 1994.
I said nothing, but the thing did seem strange. However, it would be a problem for me to leave Bangkok so soon. And how would I go? By plane? I remembered that one of my fortune-tellers had said that a good time to move would be after April 8. After some discussion it was agreed that I would move to India on May 1, 1994, which would satisfy everyone’s needs—even those of my destiny.