Autumn clutched the city with cold, translucent claws. The air rang with brittle coolness, and underfoot the withered leaves rustled, crackling like old parchment. Elena was coming back from the hospital, and each step sent a dull, familiar throb of hopelessness into her temples. Not from a physical wound—from humiliation. From the shame she carried at the very tips of her fingers, on the backs of her hands.
Her hands. Once people compared them to a pianist’s—long, graceful fingers, slender, almost transparent wrists, delicate porcelain skin. Now they were a landscape of despair, studded with disgusting, flesh-colored bumps. Warts. A trifle, it would seem, a minor cosmetic defect. But for Elena, a young, beautiful twenty-eight-year-old woman, it was a brand, a leprosy turning her life into a quiet hell.
She stepped into the entryway, dank and smelling of cooled cabbage soup, and automatically shoved her hand into her coat pocket, hiding it even from herself.
“Well, how’s the world-famous luminary?” came Dmitry’s voice from the living room. His voice, usually velvety and warm, grated today with a false cheerfulness. He came out to meet her, neat, smelling of expensive aftershave, in a perfectly pressed shirt. His glance slid to her hand, and Elena caught the instant, carefully concealed disgust in his eyes. “Again they found nothing? Maybe you’ll finally admit that as a child you did catch that frog in the bushes after all? They say they pee on people—there’s your result.”
“Stop it, Dima,” she exhaled, taking off her coat and trying to do it with her left hand alone. “I’m not five years old. And it’s not funny. It’s some kind of curse.”
She went into the bathroom, turned on the water, and stared at her reflection in the mirror. Her face still held traces of former beauty: large gray eyes, regular features. But those eyes had taken in a permanent weariness, and her lips trembled with suppressed tears. She looked at her hands resting on the edge of the sink. An archipelago of shame. Every remedy had been thrown into the battle: the caustic ointments prescribed by doctors, burning acids, cryotherapy that made the skin peel off in shreds, exposing pink, tender flesh—and a week later new, even uglier growths sprouted. Then the folk methods were brought in—garlic pastes that ate at the skin, the poisonous sap of celandine turning her hands into a leopard pattern of yellow and brown spots. She tied slices of potato on at night, dusted with chalk, scraped with pumice and a wire brush until she bled, freezing each morning in anticipation of a miracle. And then she would undo the bandages—and see the same hated bumps. If she was lucky, no new ones had appeared.
“Mama!” Six-year-old Alisa—her sunshine, her little ray—burst into the room. The girl hugged her around the legs and then reached for her hand. Elena flinched instinctively, pulling her palm away. Alisa’s little face clouded. “Mom, when will your hands be pretty again? The girls at kindergarten ask what that is on you…”
It was the last stone crashing down on the fragile dam of her self-control. Elena bolted from the apartment, unable to hold back her sobs. She walked along the new boulevard built between the gray panel giants, and the young lindens on either side, not yet shed of their leaves, rustled after her as if laughing. She thought about her hands, how they disfigured her life, about her husband’s look, about her daughter’s question. “What if they spread? To my face? My neck? I’ll become a monster. Dima will leave. Everyone will point at me.” Tears streamed down her cheeks without stopping, salty and bitter. She felt utterly alone in this world of freshly polished new builds, gleaming like icing on a cake, of seams between panels and cars rushing past with indifference.
And then her tear-blurred gaze snagged on a bright spot. Coming toward her, hips swaying smoothly, glided a gypsy woman. Around forty, in a dazzling scarlet skirt embroidered with gold, a flowery blouse, heavy earrings swinging down to her shoulders. Elena, sunk in her grief, would have paid her no mind, but something made her raise her eyes.
The gypsy woman was already looking at her. Not glancing—looking, intently, piercingly, as if she saw straight through her, reading every thought, every grain of despair. Her dark, almost black eyes were full not of idle curiosity but of a strange, focused understanding. Elena felt as though she were voicing her complaints out loud and this woman heard them all.
“Now she’ll start pestering me,” Elena thought with a sigh. “She’ll want to tell my fortune, ask for money. Probably from that settlement behind our house.” And suddenly she caught herself thinking: “So what! Let her tell my fortune. Maybe she’ll hint at something. I’m ready for anything. God, how much do I have? Some change… I’ll give it all! Everything!”
They met on the narrow path. The gypsy stopped three paces away without saying a word. Elena froze, feeling gooseflesh run down her back under that heavy gaze, sticky as tar. The woman slowly lowered her eyes to Elena’s hands, still hidden in her pockets. It seemed she saw them through the fabric. Then she said something quickly and sharply in her own tongue—guttural, sing-song, a strange mix of Romanian and Romani. It sounded like an ancient spell. She fell silent, spat loudly over her left shoulder, and looked at Elena with the air of a powerful sovereign regarding a beggar on whom she had just bestowed unheard-of mercy. She turned and walked away.
A second of stupefaction—and Elena rushed after her.
“Excuse me! Listen! I wanted to ask…”
The gypsy turned only halfway. In her eyes—dark bottomless lakes—little devils of mockery danced.
“It’s nothing. Consider it a gift. You made me feel sorry for you,” she tossed in a voice hoarse from cigarettes and wind.
“What’s nothing?” Elena didn’t understand.
“You’ll see tomorrow,” the gypsy gave a rough chuckle and swayed her hips gracefully, making the gold coins on her skirt jingle with a taunting chime. “If it’s something more serious—come. You know where to find me. Ask for Radzhi.”
And she left, trailing a wake of expensive perfume, wormwood, and something wild, of the steppe. “Ai-la-lai…” her song drifted back to Elena. “You know where to find me…” A cold trickle of fear ran down Elena’s spine. The thought of the gypsy encampment had flashed only in her head; she hadn’t spoken it aloud! This woman… she had read her thoughts.
The next morning Elena, trembling with fear and hope, stepped up to the washbasin. She squeezed her eyes shut, filled her palms with water, and only then looked at her skin.
She didn’t believe her eyes. The large warts had noticeably shrunk, shriveled as if dehydrated, and the tiniest ones… were gone. Completely. In three days her hands were almost clear, and in a week nothing remained of the years-long nightmare. Her skin was pink, smooth, renewed. It was a miracle. A real, tangible miracle.
She floated with happiness. When she met the neighbors she boasted, showed off her slender hands freed from the blight, told with delight about the mysterious gypsy woman. Only one detail she left out—the strange, almost mystical exchange and the name Radzhi. Why tempt fate? And why draw attention to the gypsy camp? Let it remain her little secret.
Life in their building—a new co-op on the very edge of the city—went on as usual. All the residents were young, friendly; they visited one another for tea, went on picnics by the river together. The families on the first floor became especially close: Elena with Dmitry; Irina with her husband, Sergey, who was eight years older than the rest; and one more couple. An idyll. But Elena soon began to notice that a small, poisonous gnat of jealousy had infested that idyll.
Irina, a lush, vivid brunette with eyes dewy like a doe’s, clearly fancied Dmitry. And Dmitry—handsome, well-groomed, smelling of success and pricey cologne—seemed to catch her admiring looks and secretly preen under them. At picnics Irina curved herself before him like a vine, served him first, looked for an excuse to speak with him alone. Dmitry brushed it off: “Oh, come on, Masyanya, she’s married! We’re just friends.” But the biting smoke of suspicion gnawed at Elena from within, poisoning the simplest joys.
Then disaster struck. Sergey, Irina’s husband, suffered heart failure. Forty-four years old, diabetes—and he was gone. Dmitry became a pillar for “poor, unfortunate Irochka.” He stopped by her place first thing after work, comforted her, helped with the house. And then stayed for dinner.
“You have to understand, she’s grieving!” he justified himself to Elena. “We’re friends! By the way, she makes exquisite cutlets, you should learn—juicy, and you can’t taste the bread at all. Yours you always over-fry.”
“Dima, I don’t like this!” Elena exploded. “We have our own family! People are already talking!”
“Talking about what?” Dmitry widened his eyes in feigned surprise.
“About the two of you having an affair!”
He looked away, fussing with his cuffs.
“Your people are fools. I’m tired, stop badgering me.”
Two months after the funeral he came home, pale but resolute. A packed suitcase stood by the door.
“I’m leaving for Ira. We’re in love. Forgive me and let me go. Alisa’s already big, she’ll understand. You only get one life; I want to live it with the person I love.”
The world collapsed. With the crash of falling slabs, with the roar of an earthquake. Everything she believed in turned out to be a lie. Everything she had built—a house of cards. “Liar! Bastard! How many years you led me by the nose!” she screamed, flying at him with her fists. He shoved her away roughly: “Behave with dignity! We’re adults!” And left. Not far—only two floors up.
Hell began. Dmitry lived one floor above with blossoming, triumphant Irina. Elena, gaunt, gray, with dark circles under her eyes, became a pariah, the heroine of miserable, shameful gossip. She saw the looks—curious, pitying, gloating. She heard how conversations fell silent when she appeared. Her daughter Alisa hated her father with a fierce, wordless hatred.
And three months later Dmitry came back. Guilt, homesickness, the icy reception from his daughter had done their work. He grovelled at Elena’s feet, begged forgiveness, swore it had been a delusion. She, exhausted and lonely, forgave him. And once again became the laughingstock of the whole building: “Look, she took the mutt back! No pride at all!”
But a month passed, then another… And the suitcase creaked across the parquet again. Unable to master his passion, Dmitry ran upstairs once more, to Irina. The click-click of his heels on the concrete stairs echoed in Elena’s heart like the tolls of a funeral bell. Then—another return. New humiliating pleas. And another flight.
This macabre dance lasted more than a year. Elena withered, turning into a shadow. Her hair thinned, her skin took on an earthy cast, her eyes grew empty. Irina, meanwhile, bloomed, walked about with a provocative, victorious air, her black eyes laughing at the whole world—and at Elena most of all. She let Dmitry go easily and took him back just as easily, as if playing some refined, cruel game.
One day their eyes met in the entryway. Silent. Furious. It seemed the air between them cracked with hatred. And in that instant, something in Elena broke. Finally and irrevocably. Emptiness gave way to a cold, steely resolve.
“She dares look at me like that?” a hurricane raged inside her. “All sleek with happiness, with those alive, brazen eyes! And me? No. This won’t do. Enough.”
Early on a Saturday morning, while the courtyard still slept, Elena left the house. She wasn’t just walking—she was on a mission. Through the sleeping city, along the shallowed autumn river, straight to the gypsy settlement, the very one huddled a kilometer and a half away beyond the railway embankment. An old neighbor taking laundry off the balcony followed her with an anxious gaze, thinking the poor woman had finally decided to drown herself.
The settlement smelled of smoke, horseflesh, and something foreign, unearthly. At the very first man she saw—a stocky gypsy with a sullen face—Elena asked, stumbling and tangling her words:
“I need… the woman… Radzhi. Do you know where I can find her?”
Surprisingly, without asking any extra questions, he waved her on toward the depths of the camp. The name was known.
Half a year passed. Autumn turned into a cold, snowy winter, and then an early, slushy spring.
Two pieces of news came to their building. One terrible: Dmitry died suddenly. The doctors said—aneurysm, a brain hemorrhage. “But he was a healthy man! Devilry…” the neighbors shook their heads. “Nerves,” others found an explanation. “Being tossed from one woman to another—would break even a strong man’s heart.”
The second news was strange. Irina went blind. Completely and irreversibly. She now walked with a white cane, by feel, and lived on disability benefits. Her bright, darting eyes had dimmed, gone cloudy and sightless. “Maybe now she’ll stop ogling other women’s husbands,” people sneered in the courtyard.
Only one woman—her most loyal friend—sat at Elena’s kitchen table over tea, studying her with a steady, knowing look. Elena had blossomed. Incredibly, she looked ten years younger. Her eyes shone again, her cheeks were rosy; she’d grown out her hair and dyed it a dazzling white that set off her new, icy beauty. A new man had appeared in the house—a calm, attentive widower. Life was settling.
“Good for you, Lenka,” her friend said once, lowering her voice. “You did the right thing. Scoundrels like that—only one cure. A gypsy curse.”
Elena lifted her shining, perfectly clear eyes to her. In their depths rolled a secret, cold and bottomless as a whirlpool. She slowly, with a light, almost innocent smile, raised the porcelain cup to her lips. Her hand—the same one, slender, with the long fingers of a pianist—did not tremble by a millimeter.
“What are you talking about?” she murmured, almost in a whisper. “I didn’t do anything. It just… worked out that way.”
Her friend nodded approvingly, pressing a finger to her lips.
“Of course, of course, dear. I’m on your side. Shhh… Only support. Only complete understanding.”
Elena sipped her tea and turned to the window. Outside, the very boulevard rustled with fresh leaves. Somewhere out there, a kilometer and a half away, a fire smoked, a foreign tongue sounded, and there lived a woman named Radzhi. A woman who gave gifts—and took payment for them that wasn’t in money at all.
And Elena had no intention of moving anywhere. She would stay forever in that house on the edge of the city. Walk that boulevard. Look at that river. And remember. Remember that justice comes in many forms. Sometimes quiet. Sometimes beautiful. Sometimes—terrifying.