American Gypsy

by Oksana Marafioti

  Dad hadn’t decorated on his own. One thing he couldn’t stand was ethnic or folksy art on his walls. “Modern” was his motto. Our Moscow house had images of British flags painted on the bathroom walls, Miles Davis above the fireplace, and Japanese concubines in the kitchen. He had a style all his own. All signs pointed to one thing—my father’s mistress was in the house—and before I had time to imagine myself charging at her with fists on the ready like a cocksure Irishman, she floated into the room to greet us.

  “Girls, welcome. I am so happy you are here! Sit. Sit now, and I will make tea.” Her dress sparkled like a Vegas showgirl’s. Threaded heavily with sequins, it fell to her feet. Golden hoop earrings clinked through a mass of long black wavy hair. When she grinned, two golden teeth winked out of her mouth. She hugged Roxy and me zealously, an assortment of golden bracelets jingling on her wrists.

  People often comment on Gypsies’ obsession with gold. Sometimes you can pick out Romani by the amount of jewelry they wear. This habit comes from a time when the wandering caravans didn’t possess the freedom to settle anyplace long enough to grow roots, so wagons, forests, and riverbanks became their homes. But the wagons were often vandalized by outsiders, most of the forests belonged to uncharitable nobles, and the rivers were as unpredictable as the towns around them. The Romani learned to trust no one. They developed a tradition of carrying their wealth in the safest place they found—on themselves.

  “How did you get here?” I blurted out, not expecting to see Olga, our old family acquaintance from Moscow, in my father’s living room.

  She flashed a diamond ring, and grinned. “We’re married.”

  “What?” Roxy and I shouted in unison. This was the woman my father had gone back to Russia for? Olga was eighteen years Dad’s junior, and besides the fact that she was not our mother, her reputation didn’t stand out as exemplary. Olga was one of those Romani women whom tourists are warned about before their overseas trips; the kind we were warned about by Grandpa Andrei all our lives. She told fortunes for a living and would do anything to rid people of their money short of actually digging in their pockets. You’d never find her losing sleep over an unpaid bill or planning for retirement. If she had money enough to invite twenty guests for dinner, she would, even if it meant that she would have to eat cheese sandwiches for the rest of the month. Many of my Romani relatives considered her attitude too risky for modern times. But Olga always said, “You can’t plan life.” A street-reared Romani, she’d come from a family that practiced but one motto: “Survive the day by all means necessary and start over tomorrow.”

  Although Olga danced fairly well, my grandfather had refused to have her in his shows, claiming she reinforced the stereotypes he’d worked to eradicate. So how did my father end up married to her?

  It was about five years after my parents’ divorce that I learned their affair had gone on for years before our move to the States. When Mom found out, just months before coming to America, Dad promised to stop seeing Olga. Turned out he’d been planning to bring her over all along and had waited until after the move to ditch us and send Olga a tourist visa. The marriage my mother was hoping to save was the furthest thing from his mind. Of course Olga had no intention of going back to Russia, but long-term resident visas were almost impossible to get. With a tourist visa Olga had a chance to come to America and get lost in the system.

  My own father, an adulterer. In the past, every time Mom had accused Dad of sleeping around, I hadn’t wanted to believe it. But the reality, I knew, was that many women thought of him as a catch. He was not only good-looking but also rich (at least in terms of Soviet-era Russians) by way of his parents.

  * * *

  Sitting around the kitchen table, Dad, Roxy, Olga, and I were soon drinking black tea together as if this were the natural order of things. On the outside, I was doing my best impression of a girl with manners. On the inside, I was a hunter with a fresh kill. I was dragging Olga by her hair out of the kitchen, across the scratchy living-room carpet, into the front yard, where I could skin her with my curved dagger. This Oksana was uncharacteristically ruthless, and I almost felt remorse until my mother’s face came to mind. For Mom I was ready not only to mount Olga’s head above a fireplace but to do so with Dad watching.

  Olga had arrived in Los Angeles a few weeks earlier but had already come to the conclusion that Hollywood was a place with broken hearts galore. Plenty of immigrants meant great business potential. The woman never changed her ways—you could drop her in the middle of the Bible Belt, and she would not only find a way out but inevitably make cash doing so.

  “I have already placed an ad in the local Russian paper,” she told us through a cloud of Marlboro smoke. “‘Famous Gypsy fortune-teller Olga, with extraordinary abilities to predict the future, will help you in your quest for happiness. Call, and see your troubles fly away.’”

  “It’s coming out next week. It’ll be premium,” Dad added, sitting between us and her at the head of the table. He bit into an open-faced salami sandwich, a trail of bread crumbs in his beard. Then he smiled at Olga. “You did a great job, my little sparrow.”

  They exchanged sweet looks. I was speechless and a little sick to my stomach. My father had never spoken a word of lovey-doveyness before.

  “Ah, I can’t wait to begin,” Olga said.

  I wasn’t sure if she was exuding such enthusiasm for our father’s benefit or ours. I had heard that she lived and breathed everything occult, as much at ease channeling spirits as she was shopping for shoes.

  “But it’s the holidays,” I protested.

  “Exactly. The best time for hooking the shunned, the desperate, the hopeful, and all the rest of the assholes who want miracles for pennies. Plus, the nights are more favorable for séances around Christmas and New Year’s—you know that.”

  “But you were going to start playing again, Dad. You said you were buying equipment.”

  He shrugged. “Too many musicians in L.A. We’re like rats scampering after a crumb of cheese. Remember my plan? This is it. I’ve got three gigs booked in February, and I need my instruments before that. But I can see already that no matter how many gigs you have, you can’t make a decent living playing gadjen weddings in L.A. In this city, you need serious money to survive.”

  “But, Dad…” I said, still uncomfortable with the idea of Olga’s psychic business. In the Soviet Union, practicing occultism or paganism was against the law.

  Occultism might have persisted more in Russia than in the rest of Europe because we never truly experienced the Renaissance or the Enlightenment. If it weren’t for Peter the Great introducing French culture to his country, ordering his ministers to shave off their “heathen beards” to appear more civilized, Russia might not have discovered progress for centuries to come. But Russians are stubborn people. Two hundred years after Peter, many still followed their ancestors’ traditions steeped in thousands of years of superstition. Some believed in both Christianity and paganism, the practice called dvoeverie (two faiths), and I first encountered it when I was thirteen. Mom used to go to this ancient woman for readings, and if I insisted enough, she’d take me along.

  Agrefina lived in a derevnia, a small hamlet, two hours north of Moscow. She was an oracle of sorts, a seer, but she never read for money. Mom brought her sacks of groceries one could find only in large cities. Toblerone chocolate bars were Agrefina’s favorite. She’d cut them into chunks and share them with me.

  I remember first seeing her house and thinking that I’d stepped into a fairy tale. It was made of logs, with a rooster-topped ridgepole on the roof and ornamental woodwork around the windowsills and doorframes. I thought they were for looks until Agrefina explained they were symbols of protection. The most important was a circular carving with a six-petaled rose in the middle, called gromovoi znak, or the thunder sign. It belonged to Rod, a pagan god of light and creation. Inside the house, a candle burned next to an icon of Jesus set high on a shelf. A large hand-carved cross hun
g over the threshold, and from it dangled a number of talismans in the form of gems and dried-herb sachets.

  Having never seen anything like it, I asked Agrefina about the cross. She patted my head and replied, “The Lord minds not how we pray so long as we mean it.”

  I’d immediately drawn my own version of gromovoi znak in my journal. People like Agrefina fascinated me. Like Romani, they adapted to changing reality while retaining their beliefs. But what Olga had in mind had little to do with tradition and a lot with making money.

  I didn’t want Dad to be a part of it, especially not with Olga, whose Devil tarot depicted menacing figures with impish eyes. But she’d hooked him on the idea, and I could tell by the animation in his voice that he couldn’t be persuaded to give it up. At least not by me. Maybe not even by his own father, who’d always been against divination.

  Many Roma found Grandpa Andrei’s attitude strange, particularly since his own mother, Baba Varya, had been a notorious magicker who performed spells in addition to being a healer and a midwife.

  The very first thing I remember hearing about Baba Varya was that she was a giantess. The second, everyone was afraid of her. But according to the stories I’d collected over the years, she wasn’t always a witch. She’d led a rather normal life as the wife of a farmer. They had three children who all helped tend the family plot. But one day her husband died unexpectedly and everything changed.

  Grandpa Andrei said that after that, his mother withdrew from life for a very long time. She wasn’t able to tend the land on her own and spent her time in a roomful of black-magic books. She started doing spells for the townsfolk, barely making enough money to support the family. Eventually they lost the land. All three kids left school to work, but they never lived as well as they had when their father was alive. All the stories after this painted Baba Varya as a vedma (black witch).

  But then I heard this from Aunt Laura: during World War II Grandpa Andrei went to prison in Siberia for faking food-ration tickets for his Roma band; the Communists didn’t consider Gypsies to be model citizens yet, and the rations were issued first to those loyal to the Red Party. The sentence was ten years. Grandpa and a couple of inmates attempted escape from their labor camp in Gulak, but got lost in the tundra for days. By the time the authorities found them, Grandpa had developed gangrene in his frostbitten toes, and the prison doctor gave him no more than a couple of months before his feet would have to be amputated. Grandpa sent Baba Varya a letter. At this time, Baba Varya traveled with various caravans and only the Roma knew her whereabouts. They used something they called Tziganskaya pochta, or Roma mail, to contact one another. Even those Roma who didn’t travel in caravans visited with relatives throughout the year. It wasn’t unusual for grandparents to stay at each of their kid’s houses for months, and the local Roma were always aware if someone new showed up in town. The mail was passed from hand to hand without the need for postal service. That’s why Grandpa’s letter was addressed to:

  Varya Nikolaevna,

  In care of the Roma at the central Kiev marketplace

  Baba Varya immediately set off for Siberia, carrying a jar of homemade ointment, and once at the prison, she bribed the infirmary medic to allow her entrance. Grandma Ksenia claimed that the jar’s contents were pure black magic, made from puppy fat, but it could have been a simple folk remedy. No one knows for sure. Black magic or not, Baba Varya saved her son.

  Still, Grandpa Andrei had constantly lectured his employees about the harm that practicing occultism could do to their reputation as legitimate artists. Society didn’t know the difference between gifted practitioners and scam artists. Once, he found out about Dad’s spirit-channeling sessions; Dad defended his actions by claiming that he had the “gift” to help him lift the family curse. They got into a terrible fight over it and didn’t speak for almost a year.

  And now Olga had rekindled my father’s fascination with everything occult.

  “Girls, I know that the business will do well. I have seen it. Besides, your father is too old for the stage,” Olga said, a sly glint narrowing her heavily penciled eyes. “Isn’t that so, my honeylambshank?”

  Roxy’s face lit up. “He’s, like, Santa’s age! It’s true.”

  Olga winked at Dad. “Hey, Valerio? Those picks getting too heavy for you?”

  Dad dropped his sandwich on the table with an indignant frown. “Who’s old? Me? Your dipshit ex-husband is old, that’s who! If I have to, I can wrestle a bear.”

  “Lucky for us there are no bears in Hollywood for you to terrorize.”

  Okay. So they acted like they had been cozily married for years; so what? I smiled politely, not completely sold on this show of domestic incivility.

  “Oh, come on,” Olga said, catching the lukewarm set of my lips. “I’m kidding. Your dad is a great musician. I’ll bet you right now he’ll soon be playing until his fingers fall off. I only think we can make more money by doing this on the side.”

  “Yeah, right,” I said. “Nobody’s going to pay you for reading their palms. This is America.”

  “So what? Everybody wants to believe something else controls their lives. That way, we don’t have to feel responsible for what happens to us.”

  “But you can’t lie to people to make them feel better.”

  “Who said anything about lying? I tell them what they want to hear. Like a head doctor, no? But instead of giving people pills, I have them sprinkle dirt in their husband’s shoes and pray he will stop cheating.”

  “Dirt does not have superpowers,” I said.

  “No, but faith does.”

  NO JOAN OF ARC

  My parents were married for seventeen years before they split. During that time, my Armenian and Roma families tolerated each other, but barely. Though not openly hostile, each side secretly regarded itself superior to the other, more cultured and sophisticated. Ironically, love of superstition was the biggest thing they had in common.

  The Armenians spit over their shoulders and knocked on wood, while the Romani crossed themselves when yawning, to prevent evil spirits from entering their bodies, and poured salt around the foundations of their houses to keep them out. Every time Mom and I got on the train from Kirovakan, her hometown, to go back to Moscow, Aunt Siranoosh splashed water from a ceramic bowl onto the platform to ensure a safe journey.

  At wakes, my Romani relatives poured vodka shots for the deceased so they would not feel parched on their way to Heaven, and my Armenian relatives covered the mirrors with swaths of black cloth so the dead wouldn’t get lost by walking through them into the realm of the living and become ghosts.

  In each culture, nearly everything was construed as a sign. Back in Moscow, if Dad missed a turn on the way to a party, he’d turn around and drive home. No one sat at the table corners unless they didn’t want to ever get married. If you dropped a spoon on the floor, a woman would come calling soon; a knife signified a man; and if it happened to be a fork, the powers to be were not 100 percent sure on the gender. The signs are endless and move inside me like mice in a wheat field. To this day, I catch myself skimming tea bubbles off the top of a steaming cup and dabbing them on the crown of my head in hopes of acquiring a large sum of money.

  According to Russian Roma legend, the period between December 21 and January 14 is when spirits come down (or up, depending on your viewpoint) to walk the earth in celebration of the winter solstice. If you dream of discussing Macbeth’s foolish ambitions with Shakespeare himself, your chances of success increase greatly during these magical days.

  The season is marked by ceremonies to divine, cleanse, and renew. The enthusiasm with which the Roma carry out these acts can be contagious, especially if there’s a chance of seeing what your future husband might look like.

  At well past midnight, Dad, Olga, and I sat in a tight circle around the table. A candle burned on top of the kitchen counter, next to a sink full of dirty dishes and a bottle of Jack Daniel’s. In my opinion, it conveyed great disrespect to summon spi
rits amidst the pungent smell of fried carp and the slowly gyrating curls of cigarette smoke coming from my stepmother’s lips. But I did not voice these thoughts, preferring to watch Dad watch Olga with great interest.

  A piece of white poster board lay on the table. In the middle, all the letters of the Russian alphabet were arranged in a wide circle. Olga placed a small white plate marked with a single arrow at one edge in the center of the circle. “Porcelain,” she said. “The purer the material, the better the reception.”

  I’d seen the plate before. It was one of the few items Dad had brought with him from Russia, where he had kept it locked away. Any object used in divination was off-limits to kids. As a little girl I once made the mistake of playing with Esmeralda’s personal tarot deck. When she found me gently lowering the king of hearts onto the roof of my newly built house of cards, she moaned, “How could this have happened?” as if I’d stolen bonbons out of the special Richart chocolate box she opened only for dates with the most “marriage” potential.

  I gathered the cards. “I was careful. Didn’t even bend them, see?”

  With a sigh, Esmeralda kneeled on the floor next to me. “They won’t work anymore, sweetie. I’ll have to buy a new deck.”

  “I broke them?”

  “Cards are part good, part bad, God and Devil all in one. Kinda like grown-ups. They need both in order to work, but kids are all good, you see? So when you played with the cards, they lost their Devil.”

  Esmeralda’s cards, after I’d ruined them