“In 1907,“once on the Epiphany evening, the girls were guessing,”and among them was my future grandmother, a 16-year-old girl named Anna. Two large mirrors were placed in the bath, one opposite the other. The girls went to guess the fortune one by one, having previously removed their pectoral cross.
With a sinking heart, Anna entered the cold, dark bathhouse, dimly lit by the moonlight falling from a small window. She sat down between the mirrors, lit two candles, placing them to her right and left, and saw in the mirror something like a corridor framed by two rows of lights.
"The betrothed-mummer, come out, show yourself", Anna whispered, peering into the mirror, and pretty soon saw a figure of a man in the back of the corridor. An old man with a red beard was walking towards the girl, growing in size before our eyes. It was impossible to look at the vision for a long time. Anna has heard that if you gape, the image can materialize, come out of the mirror and slap in the face, leaving an indelible, ugly red spot on your face. With trembling hands, she put out the candles and ran out of the bath.
The rest of the fortune-telling participants saw nothing in the mirror, except for one more girl,
- that one saw a coffin. In the summer she drowned in the river. And in the next morning in the house of my future grandmother's parents, a commotion arose - a matchmaker arrived. Colored ribbons were woven into the horses' manes, the matchmaker was burly and vociferous, in a crimson velvet coat. Entering the house, she shouted: "You have goods, we have a merchant!" Anna got married.
When the girl was introduced to the groom, she gasped: it was the same red-bearded old man she had seen during her fortune-telling. I cannot but stand up for my grandfather: he was not an old man at all, but a strong 43-year-old man who had served in the tsarist cavalry for 25 years.
In my old years, my grandmother told me that she regretted fortune telling. She believed that contact with evil spirits affected the fate of her descendants. All three of her sons were killed in the war; my daughter, my mother, died at the age of 36 on the operating table, leaving two orphans; three grandchildren died. "Children are responsible for the sins of fathers," sighed the grandmother and prayed."
Promotional video:
Lyudmila Vikoruk
Based on materials from the newspaper "Secret Power"