She brought her children with her to the hut: Andrei, Boris, and Anna, the oldest at eighteen. But when they stepped inside, Fokla ordered the eldest two to wait in the yard.
Grandpa Andrei wished he could wait outside with them. Some claimed that Fokla had made a pact with the Devil: his sight in exchange for precognition. Looking around a room that he said smelled like a raw grave, Grandpa Andrei couldn’t help but believe those rumors.
The old man rested on a sagging cot, both hands on top of an intricately carved cane. Grandpa Andrei, who was already into wood carving, said the cane was unlike anything he’d ever seen, especially the knob, the head of a roaring bear.
After a respectful greeting, Baba Varya placed her offering—a sack of freshly picked beans—on the kitchen table and then lowered herself into a chair across from the soothsayer. She said nothing else. No one came to Fokla with a list of questions. Instead, like Agrefina’s, his gift consisted of sporadic visions of the future, and the client had to wait quietly in order for the old man to “see.”
Fokla raised his head as if coming out of deep slumber. “The two outside will die young,” he told Baba Varya, unprovoked. His milky eyes settled on Grandpa Andrei. Pointing an arthritic finger at the boy, he added, “But this one will accomplish much, and be the one to bury you.”
Within five years Boris and Anna were dead of pneumonia.
On the day of Anna’s funeral, Andrei sneaked into the soothsayer’s hut through the cracked window in the back, stole his cane, and burned it to ashes in the stove, along with as many of his mother’s magic books as he could carry. When he went back for more, Baba Varya was waiting on the basement stairs.
She beat her son senseless and, from that day on, kept her books locked in a giant lacquered bookcase.
Baba Varya died in 1961, age ninety-seven, and Andrei did indeed bury her.
It wasn’t until 1973 that he decided to destroy the boxes full of his mother’s belongings. Mom was there that day. She told me that Grandma Ksenia sat at the kitchen table the entire time, cracking roasted sunflower seeds between her teeth, and it was Mom—belly full of me—who braved the steps down to the basement that morning to help her father-in-law erase his mother’s frightening legacy.
“Ksenia is afraid,” Grandpa told my mother. “But I don’t blame her. It took my mother very long to die, you know. She writhed on her deathbed for days, covered in blisters and sores.”
“What caused them?” Mom asked.
“Nobody knows. They spread and oozed pus over her skin one day. She carried the notion that the Devil kept her from dying because of all the horrible things she’d done, so she sent for a priest. To him she confessed every hex. Two days later she passed. And at her funeral not a person spoke, terrified that her restless spirit would shoot down their mouth and possess them.”
Tossing book after book into the furnace, Mom told me she fought the urge to keep at least one—a curiosity that she reined in perhaps out of respect for the man who had accepted her as his daughter. Mom helped him empty each box while he told stories from his childhood of the mother whom he loved and feared. Only one book escaped their notice, and it was now in my father’s possession.
Grandpa was never sure if Fokla had indeed predicted his siblings’ death or cast an “evil eye” and somehow willed them to expire. He feared either truth. When he found out that Dad had Baba Varya’s book, he offered to buy it back for two hundred rubles, just to burn it.
“I won’t sell it,” my father said.
“I tell you, son, the Devil never gives without expecting profit.”
“Don’t you think I know better than to deal in hexes and bloody rituals?” Dad said.
“What I know is that the more you practice, the less of yourself you keep.”
“What if I can fix it? Did you think about that?”
“You’re not a practitioner,” Grandpa said.
“Not yet.”
As always, my father had taken the path staked by his own father with “No Trespassing” signs.
I knew that Grandpa Andrei had been right. My father soon forgot that he started practicing to rid his family of Baba Varya’s supposed evil, infatuated as he was with the idea of tapping into a parallel world, of linking with beings that had chosen him as a receptor of their graces. He didn’t have as many clients as Olga, but those who came to see him cared little for entertaining tarot spreads. I was chilled every time one crossed the living room on the way to the séance room. Often they left an unsettling impression after they’d gone, an invisible but heavy residue that made you eager to step outside and gulp sweet air into your lungs.
LEAVING LEXINGTON
Mom came back from Las Vegas three days later, the bags under her eyes and the crumpled clothes suggesting she had slept little. We were still poor, but she smiled more than usual and kept hugging us tightly. I’d missed her more than I’d expected, despite the unceremonious dumping of us at Dad’s. Our apartment, ratty as it was, felt somehow cleaner, and I breathed easier as soon as we walked inside.
Roxy and I had tons of questions about Mom’s trip. In Russia people who saw Vegas held a unique status, as if they’d had tea with the queen of England. Sure enough, the things she told us about the buffets, the beautiful uniforms, the twenty-four-hour life, and the machines that could make a millionaire out of an ordinary person all sounded like pure fantasy.
“Did you win lots of money?” Roxy asked, breathless.
“Better. I decided that we will move there.”
My sister and I exchanged surprised looks.
“We’re gonna live in a casino?” Roxy asked. Having heard things about Vegas from travelers back in Russia, we knew that it was in the middle of a desert where nothing but cacti survived.
“Don’t be dumb,” I said. “They probably fly people in for work and take them back later.”
“Girls. Nobody has to live in a casino, and we’re definitely not flying.”
“Why?” I said, resisting the answer I already suspected.
“I didn’t immigrate to America to live off charity. In Vegas, I will finally get my chance to start a booziness!”
Before we were granted permission to leave Moscow, Mom had been scouting the city for a potential site of a nightclub she’d designed on sheets of graph paper she pinched from my school folder. “In case we end up stuck here,” she said. So close to the fall of the USSR, smaller businesses called “cooperatives” started to pop up, though still heavily regulated by the government or the mafia. Mom’s dream had always been to be a business owner. It had lain forgotten under the pall of divorce and welfare checks until Shubi, the Indian woman at the DollarDream, suggested Vegas as the place with high enough salaries to save up for a down payment on Mom’s nightclub.
“But what about school?” I asked.
“You’ll transfer.” Mom’s initial excitement ebbed a little. “What are you so worried about? I’m telling you, this will be great.”
As soon as she mentioned the word “transfer,” I panicked.
“You mean kids live there?” Roxy asked.
“Lots. And you know what else? You’ll have all new clothes and toys, and loads of new friends. We’ll have more money, too.”
“Wow! Will we get to win a million dollars on one of those machines?”
“No, silly. I found a job. The manager at our motel was Russian, and her sister works at the Gold Coast Casino. She’s in charge of sluts there—that’s what you call those machines. I told her about our situation, you know, the real version. And she said, ‘If you’re good with money, I’ll have my sister give you a job.’”
“But you’re terrible with money,” I said.
Her smile fell. “I thought you’d be happy. We’ll be living in Las Vegas. The Las Vegas. Can you imagine how jealous everyone will be? Can you see their faces when they hear that Nora has opened her own booziness?”
“Business, Mom. It’s called a business. And I won’t go,” I said. “I like my s
chool.”
“Look at you. First I have to force your ass back in school, and now you’re suddenly Miss Devoted. We’re going, Oksana. I’ve already decided.”
“You can’t do that. I’m sixteen.”
“Watch me.”
Mom had good reasons for wanting to get out of L.A., where hundreds of émigrés lived comfortably on their welfare checks.She was eager for something better. Nobody in Russia knew the truth about our circumstances. Where we came from, senior citizens and the disabled received pensions and veterans’ benefits. The rest were considered capable of taking care of themselves.
“We could start fresh. Save money. In a bank,” Mom said, pinching my cheek playfully.
“Why can’t you find work here?”
“And make shit the Russians call ‘pay’ for baking bread in the backs of their markets all day?”
I tore into her optimism like an angry paper shredder. We talked long into the night, but nothing swayed me, which, to be honest, surprised us both.
As a kid I hadn’t minded moving around. I grew up in train cars, watching Russian pine forests give way to the pebbled shores of the Black Sea where maples and spruces greened the countryside. I loved the stern Armenian mountains crested with the ancient observatories of Karahunj and Metsamor and riddled with the Christian monastery caves of Geghard, and I loved the villages of central Asia where people kept homemade wine in cellars beneath mud huts and marinated fish in barrels filled with sour milk. They all belonged to me, the entire fifteen republics with all their curiosities.
But now it seemed I was recalling someone else’s life. Those places lay far away, and I’d begun to grow fond of my new surroundings. I liked the idea of belonging. In the past months, pride and a sense of accomplishment had filled me like water fills a well. Now all of it could evaporate. Did I have the strength to start over again?
The closer it got to the end of the summer, the more Mom and I argued. She had a month to relocate, and by God, nobody, not even her stubborn daughter, could stop her. I begged Dad to intercede, even though the idea of living in the same house with Olga gave me instant heartburn. More and more people were coming each day to have their fortunes read, and Olga was smugger than ever: “Not bad for a country girl, huh?”
When I started threatening to run away, Mom finally stopped pushing. Not that she gave up her mission; more like she changed her tactics. For days, we didn’t exchange a word. Every time Dad called and asked to speak with Mom, she locked the bedroom door. Both my parents rock-climbed life, but instead of spotting each other as partners, each went solo to see who’d summit first. Dad took Mom’s new plan as a direct challenge to his psychic business endeavor.
“Your mother has always tried to outdo me. In business, in our relationship, she always had to prove she did things better. But this time, this whole Vegas business is gonna be her downfall. This time she has reached too high,” he said, also pointing out her inability to take on something that required commitment and less drinking. Dad and I both knew Mom tended to run from trouble instead of facing it. Always she was filled with blind hope that things would work out as long as she could start fresh.
But she refused to give up on Vegas.
Finally she conceded that I could stay with Dad until graduation, two years later, but only if I’d give Vegas a go for one year after that. Roxy, though, was going with her. I readily agreed, certain they would be back in L.A. by then.
For the next month, Mom packed continuously. Between the curbside sprees and the neighbors’ donations, we’d accumulated a three-bedroom apartment’s worth of stuff. Mom refused to give away anything, even the plastic flowers she’d found on our very first excursion to Beverly Hills.
On the morning of moving day Rosa went to pick up Mom’s U-Haul. I helped pack the loads of sheets and skillets Mom wouldn’t hear of leaving behind. My stomach clenched. When I walked into the bedroom, stripped of its George Michael posters, I did so with lowered eyes. I’d tried to spend more time with Roxy, knowing I’d miss her outlandish humor and the way she got excited over our trips to the DollarDream or when she swiped one of Mom’s lipsticks. She was still at that age when love was an unconditional thing she passed out to people like balloons. She was the only good thing our family had left.
My sister had stuffed her Barbies and bottles of nail polish inside a hot-pink princess backpack Maria had given her as a parting gift. Going to Vegas constituted adventure, and she couldn’t wait to get on the road.
Rosa walked in through the front door, her white sneakers beaming in contrast to a brown sweater and aquamarine sweatpants. “I parked the truck in back,” she said, taking a seat on one of the two remaining chairs.
Mom came in from the kitchen with two steaming cups of coffee, handing one to Rosa. She’d been washing the last of the dishes and still had the kitchen towel slung over one shoulder. “I so tired, so tired I cannot speak.”
“Relax, mija. The drive will probably take seven hours.”
“You okay to drive big truck? How you think?” Mom had gotten her license two months before, but still said no to the freeway.
Rosa accepted the coffee and waved a dismissive hand. “Easy. We get to Vegas tonight, rent a car tomorrow.”
“Oh, Slava Bogoo! Thank God. How you drive on American freeway, I never know. Is scare me.”
Mom and Rosa exchanged one of those meaningful looks people always assume go unnoticed by others.
“Ju should go, Oksana,” Rosa said. “Is a great place for a teenager, no?”
“She can’t leave her Brazilian boyfriend.”
I had forgotten all about Roxy until she opened her big mouth.
“Oksana, is that what this is all about?” Mom asked in Russian.
“I want to graduate from a decent school where they know me. We agreed, remember?”
Mom nodded knowingly. “Very good. You finish school, then you live with me. If not, I’ll send you back to Moscow.” Then she added, with a no-nonsense wag of a finger, “And none of that boyfriend rubbish. I didn’t suffer all those years in Russia and move our entire family here only to see you marry some rock-star wannabe.”
“Why not? You married one.”
I raced out of the apartment when Mom swiped at me with the kitchen towel. She chased me down the stairs, shouting at the top of her lungs, with Rosa and Roxy at her heels. We raced around the pool fence, one lap, another. My mother ordered me to stop so she could whip me with the towel. Her slippers kept falling off and Roxy kept picking them up and handing them back, laughing loud enough to attract an audience.
On the ride to Dad’s house, Mom tried to make peace, but I was having none of it. If she wanted a battle, she’d get a war. As I got out of the car she tried to hug me, but I wriggled out of her embrace.
She and Roxy drove away with the Vegas lights bright in their eyes. I held my breath as anger was quickly replaced by something heavier. Our life on Lexington was really over. I’d never go back to the apartment or the people who had propped up our shaky beginning.
Just like that, we had moved on again.
THINGS UNSEEN
During my first months living at my father’s, our conversations ran in shallow streams of dinner talk (helmed mostly by Olga), discussions of the supernatural, and music-related topics, where it was safe. We’d been strangers for so long, Dad and I. The reasons are sharp and at the same time fuzzy inside my head, like memories I might’ve stolen from the life of someone I used to know. What had made us like this?
According to my sources, aka relatives who get sloshed at parties, one reason might’ve been the fact that Mom became pregnant with me the first night my parents spent together. Perhaps Dad married her only because he had to.
The problem with beginning as my parents did is once the heat subsides and two people realize they’d rather join the Communist Party than spend a minute in each other’s company, their child becomes a padlock that keeps them in that cold place.
Of course, growi
ng up I had no inkling that I was the whisk that truly stirred my parents into chaos. Oftentimes Grandma Ksenia called me a “child of sinful passion” when I misbehaved, which naturally made me think she was alluding to my wicked temperament. As I matured, my father’s tough love bared its roots. In our culture, a child conceived out of wedlock brings bad luck, as it belongs to the dark spirit that rules our darkest impulse: lust. Little good is expected from it, but evil is assigned naturally. To some, I might as well have stepped out of The Omen, as Damien’s female doppelgänger, and once I knew that, my honorary title made sense. And never more so than on the day I revealed to my parents a terrible secret.
When I was seven, our next-door neighbor was a beautiful blond man with a beautiful blond family: his wife, Brigita, with a voice as fragile as the spring buds of a pussy willow; his daughter, Gala, who was my age; and a toddler boy who went by Ponchik (“Doughnut”). Peteris was in his mid-thirties. I remember watching him cook for his family in their tiny kitchen, peeling potatoes for a farmer’s omelet and feeding all of us kids the raw slices before tossing the rest into a skillet that sizzled with butter. I never knew that you could eat raw potatoes, but he assured us that in the old days Slavs used to eat them this way. I loved playing with Gala, who kept a burlap sack full of her brother’s old baby clothes for us to dress our dolls in. I’d bring my own bag of Roxy’s cloth diapers and onesies. We’d swap outfits for hours. On the nights my parents were gone performing, Peteris and Brigita often stayed at our place to watch over us kids.
One night I woke up.
My parents’ bedroom overlooked the backyard, where birds sang even at the latest of hours. We had so many trees, they probably assumed we were part of the forest that spread around our neighborhood like a mantle made of pine needles. I felt safest in that room, in my parents’ oversize bed, curled in their sheets, surrounded by their scent. To my left eight-month-old Roxy slept in her crib. To my right the moon peeked through Mom’s curtains. Above me the ceiling whirled between light and shadows cast by the trees outside. And below me was Peteris. He’d pulled me on top of him, and the fingers of his one hand were inside my underwear, the other tugging my shirt to my chin.
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