Your future: It’s in the cards

By : Dolores Cruz

   Sometime halfway through my tarot card reading with Wrozka Hari – wrozka being the Polish word for fortune-teller – I began to wonder if I really wanted to hear what she was about to tell me.

   “These are strange cards,” she ruminated, gently running her tiny fingers over the playing cards spread before her. A long pause followed.

   “Very bad cards actually ... You may receive information; a message, that something bad has happened,” she said. “Maybe someone was beaten. It can be related to your job, so be careful. It’s a warning. It doesn’t have to happen, but it may.”

   I was thinking that maybe this violent incident could happen right there and then. After all, I was seeing Wrozka Hari for work, and she was telling me all this bad stuff. Really bad stuff! A few days earlier, when I had suggested to my editor that I write a piece about consulting a variety of Warsaw-based esoteric services to see what’s in store for me in 2001, it seemed look a fun idea. Now I wasn’t so sure.

   According to Wrozka Hari, not only have I got to look out for violence around me, but there’s a nervous man at work who could cause problems and a dark-haired woman who is going to become an obstacle. Now, every time I go to the kitchen to make a cup of tea, I’m looking to see if any of the lads look twitchy and if any dark-haired female co-workers are being obstinate.

   And it wasn’t only Wrozka Hari with bad news. After seeing astrologer Barbara Radzko, I went into deep shock. And in the presence of bioenergy therapist, Gra?yna Rozmyslowicz (and our WBJ translator who now knows all my deepest, darkest secrets) I burst into tears at the mere mention of my father.

   So what does it all mean? Don’t ask me! I’m more confused than ever. Maybe with the power of hindsight I can answer that question, but instead, I think I should let these esoteric practitioners talk for themselves. Let’s continue with Wrozka Hari.

   A pint-sized woman with pale green eyes, Wrozka Hari works days as a probation and parole officer. She prefers to keep her tarot-reading talents a little quiet (despite being on the books of Warsaw’s own esoteric services bureau, Astrologiczny Salon Gwiazda) because she says some people can be a little skeptical. But tarot reading is a skill she’s practiced since she was very young. Her mother and grandmother were both readers.

   “When I lay out the cards, at the moment I’m doing it I see stories,” she said. “They are really stories. It’s not clairvoyance,” she explained via my translator.

   Yeah, but how come so many of these stories are unpleasant? According to Wrozka Hari’s cards, I could become violent toward my partner (better watch out Bucko!) and someone in my sister-in-law’s family is going to require hospitalization. I have to take care of my lungs and heart, and my brother has to watch out for a kidney problem, “but there is nothing really tragic in his life.” Phew!

   At one point during the hour-long reading, I was asked to draw a single card from the deck – a nine of spades. “This represents travel; a long journey,” she said. “It’s also a warning about troubles you can get yourself into, so it will be your fault if you get into trouble.”

   Great! Here’s me on the verge of hopping on a plane for the hideously long flight back home!

   “Well,” said Wrozka Hari, with a tone suggesting that the cards are always right, “you may find out about something really disturbing when you get there. It may be sickness, but nothing really tragic. It may be an illness.”

   On a high note, I’m about to get some BIG money through work (so I better go and warn my boss now), love is going to feature heavily this year, and I’m going to score a bargain in the real estate market – I’m hoping for a Tuscan villa, myself.

   Across town, just off ulica Pulawska, Grazyna Rozmyslowicz saw a much happier future for me. A serene woman with a soft voice, she’s a bioenergy therapist. I’m still not quite sure what it is exactly, but I think it’s something like this: We are all born with an energy matrix and through life we accumulate energy from other people – both good and bad – that influences us emotionally, mentally and physically. Grazyna helps repair this disorder. She also sees past and future lives. Grazyna herself has existed on a number of other planets including Pluto and Neptune. In her next life, she will return as a man and she will live in Arkansas, in America.

   “Next to Bill Clinton’s old house?” I cheekily asked.

   “No,” came Grazyna’s serious reply. But she does know who her future husband and two children will be. “I met him two years ago,” she said. “He’s Russian. He’s my first real love.”

   To begin treatment, Grazyna made me lie down on a pullout bed in her sunny home office. Placing a hand on my chest, we concentrated on my breathing. Within seconds she was straight into a monologue about my mum and dad. I don’t want to go in to the nitty-gritty (for personal reasons, as I’m sure you’ll understand) but I just spontaneously burst into tears (and so did Grazyna), which was a bit embarrassing, but strangely soothing too.

   Next, she started talking about all my human frailties, which was also rather spot on and disconcerting. And I cried again when she told me she could see me in the past as a Jewish man in Jerusalem praying for his sick family! She told me I’m going to have children and move to Australia (strangely, I didn’t cry upon hearing this) and my mission in life is to keep writing.

   “I think there might be sand in your right kidney,” she said out of the blue.

   “Oh, that must be from all the ocean swimming I used to do,” I suggested.

   “No,” she corrected me, “it’s because of fear.”

   Grazyna used her hands to send energy to my kidney and now the “sand” has gone, thank goodness! I have to confess that I left her place almost two hours later feeling decidedly peaceful ... and not so sandy.

   So, after the warm ‘motherliness’ of Grazyna, meeting astrologer, Dr Barbara Radzko, felt a bit like felt like being trapped in a room with my old school principal. A gray-haired woman, who speaks rapid fire, I was too scared to contradict anything she had to say about my character faults – and there were plenty of them.

   A doctor of sociology, Dr Radzko has been reading the stars for more than 20 years. She’s also on the books of Salon Gwiazda. Armed with a folder of notes and various astrological charts, she started off by talking about my character, then moved on to future developments and my relationships.

   Hearing someone talk about you ad nauseum is strangely engaging, but also irritating. A lot of the stuff, I really didn’t want to hear about. It’s much more pleasant being reassured and besides, I think I prefer the process of self-discovery. But Dr Radzko believes it is her duty to tell everything the stars reveal. I think sometimes, such talk can be irresponsible.

   “I’m not a person who says compliments. I just establish fact; I don’t care who is sitting in front of me, I just say it,” she explained.

   At one point she said to me: “You’re very touchy about your personal pride, but your brain and heart are great”, causing me to grin widely.

   “Don’t smile please because we will come to worse,” was her short reply...and yes, that did hurt my pride! And she was right about there being worse to come too. Basically, she pushed every emotional button – I think a lot of them were correct, but I think that’s because she knows the symptoms of the human condition, rather than my own situation. Do I sound like I’m backpeddling here?

   Anyway, as I stepped out of her office in a state of shock, I was out of the fire and in to the frying pan: One of Salon Gwiazda’s clairvoyants was loitering in the waiting room and she was staring at me.

   “I think there will be new opportunities for you soon,” she said. Yikes! By then, I’d had enough of people telling me what was going to happen; what my problems were and how they can be fixed. What’s wrong with me just the way I am?

   I think that’s enough revelation about my most inner secrets. I’ve got to get home to rebuild my relationship with my boyfriend; to phone my mother and father and redress my loveless childhood. Oh, and while I’m at it, I might buy a set of tapes to help boost my flagging self-esteem!