This philosophizing on plants and the past used to make me laugh. A few minutes of conversation with Alya would leave me feeling like we were sitting in some rainforest thousands of years ago. I could almost hear the swish of gigantic butterflies, the rush of water through Amazon trees. And Alya always in her scruffy clothes, the loose men’s shirts and the trousers that dropped to the floor as soon as she stepped indoors, where she would sit, silent and seductive, hair a tangle and her eyes as green as the forests in her mind. I would feel the pulse of distant drums, would sway to their beat and cry out like an animal when they fell still. I would cry out, her eyes wide-open before me, her voice away in registers where I could not follow.

But one night she woke up, and woke me. Her terrified voice in the dark, repeating:

“Something is going to happen. Something bad is going to happen.”

I hardly lifted my head from the pillow, but I reached out my hand to touch her face.

“What is it, darling?”

And I waited for her to tell me her dream, the nightmare.

But she didn’t. “What dream?” she said, bewildered. “I wasn’t dreaming. What do dreams have to do with the future? You don’t believe in that nonsense, do you?”

I smiled, “But don’t you have the gift of prophecy?”

With pride, as though her words were the very pinnacle of rationality, she replied, “Not prophecy. It’s a feeling, and it hasn’t misled me yet.”

After that, Alya never left my side. Literally. She went everywhere with me. If I got up to get a drink or go to the bathroom, she’d pad after me like a kitten. “Tied to your leg,” she said, wryly, “that’s what my grandmother used to say.”

“Do the sound of a cat.”

She frowned, “This isn’t a puppet show.”

And I pictured her as a puppet, dancing in a booth, enchanting the children the way she’d enchanted me.

“Won’t you tell me about your dream?” I pressed her from time to time, but she gave me nothing.

“There was no dream.” But laying her head in my lap, she’d lift her gaze to mine, and say, “Hold me tight. Something bad is going to happen.”

My heart a handkerchief, pegged out on the line in a storm.