‘Can’t I even have something to drink, granny?’ I asked, raising my voice.
‘It’s there, in the tub,’ the old woman nodded.
The water tasted brackish, of the marsh. Thanking the old woman, though she paid me not the least attention, I asked her how I could get back to the road.
She suddenly lifted up her head, stared at me with her cold birdlike eyes, and murmured hurriedly:
‘Go, go ... young man, go away. You have nothing to do here. There’s a time for guests and a time for none.... Go, my dear sir, go.’
So nothing was left to me but to go. But there flashed into my mind a last resource to soften the sternness of the old woman, if only a little. I took out of my pocket a new silver sixpence and held it out to Manuilikha. I was not mistaken; at the sight of the money the old woman began to stir, her eyes widened, and she stretched out her crooked, knotted, trembling fingers for the coin.
‘Oh no, Granny Manuilikha, I shan’t give it to you for nothing,’ I teased, hiding the coin. ‘Tell me my fortune.’
The brown wrinkled face of the witch changed to a discontented grimace. She hesitated and looked irresolutely at my hand that closed over the coin. Her greed prevailed.
‘Very well then, come on,’ she mumbled, getting up from the floor with difficulty. ‘I don’t tell anybody’s fortune nowadays, my dear.... I have forgotten.... I am old, my eyes don’t see. But I’ll do it for you.’
Holding on to the wall, her bent body shaking at every step, she got to the table, took a pack of dirty cards, thick with age, and pushed them over to me.