American Gypsy

by Oksana Marafioti

  No one was allowed to touch Dad’s plate, kid or adult. And now Olga pawed it while discussing its quality. As I got ready to say something wicked, she closed her eyes, touched her fingertips to the plate’s rim, and began to chant along with my dad.

  I knew what was coming, had seen this done numerous times before. It was kind of like using a Ouija board without having to pay $19.99 for the fancy lettering. But to my family, it wasn’t a game.

  When I was eleven, I’d overheard my parents and some of their friends channeling one night in our Moscow kitchen. I didn’t see spirits, only Dad reading an incantation from a tattered book with a black leather cover. It had belonged to Baba Varya. At that age I knew her only as a vedma, so seeing my father use her book terrified me.

  I used to love driving to the outskirts of Moscow with my mother to visit Agrefina or watch some other ancient Russian crone predict our future using stagnant water. Mom nursed not an ounce of skepticism for these peculiar practices, as if she were taking in a doctor’s diagnosis. Even our own priest discussed the future with a fortune-teller’s poise. I grew up with God and the Devil and every other idol in between at my doorstep. Opening that door was just a formality. Every December I participated in various divination ceremonies, and on Christmas Eve, Zhanna and I made sure to place saucers of springwater under our beds, hoping to dream about our future husbands.

  At Dad and Olga’s table, my heart thrashed like a cat in a sack, with a mixture of anticipation and fear. Channeling, to me, has always been like deep-cave diving: a daredevil sport.

  The air around my shoulders wavered. Chills ran up and down my arms. I scooted forward in my seat just a touch.

  Dad raised his head, hair shining in the abruptly frenzied candlelight. He opened his eyes and looked up to the ceiling. “Spirit, I thank you for responding. I am Valerio, and I do not bind you by any act of artifice or vengeance. Will you choose to confer?”

  The plate slid to “Yes.” Olga’s fingers barely touched it.

  My pulse drummed inside my ears.

  “Thank you,” Dad continued, exchanging a satisfied smile with Olga. “What is your name?”

  “Avadata,” the plate spelled out.

  A quarter of an hour later, we knew a lot about Avadata, although it did not make me any less scared. She had been born in 1888, but would reveal neither where nor any of the details of her death. According to her, the afterlife consisted of seven levels, number seven being Heaven and number one, Hell. A soul worked its way up by aiding the living and being generally virtuous. Presently, Avadata resided on level three, which, she informed us, was “a dastardly place.” But she wished to raise her status and so had been searching for ways to increase her chances. She adored cats, and often took possession of people fond of liquor and opium, a habit she had been trying to break herself of.

  I glanced nervously at the half-empty whiskey bottle, then back at the plate, which was crawling to “No” in response to Olga’s question of whether she’d soon become a millionaire.

  “Ask her something,” Dad said to me. “We don’t know how long this connection will last.”

  “Like what?” I asked.

  “Anything. How about your past life? You’re always asking me about it.”

  I cleared my throat. “Ms. Avadata, could you tell me who I was in the past life … please?”

  For a while, nothing happened. I began to think, with some relief, that perhaps Avadata had grown bored and left. But then—

  “It’s moving,” Dad whispered, and leaned closer, stringing the letters into words as the plate slid around the circle. “1943. Le-nin-grad. Or-pha-nage 72. Head. Mis-tress.”

  “How glamorous,” Olga said, clapping her hands.

  I had hoped for Nefertiti, or at least Joan of Arc, but the headmistress of an orphanage?

  “Maybe she’s making stuff up, like the way you do,” I suggested to Olga.

  “No, it makes sense. That’s why you’re always bossing Roxy around. So cool, so serious, like a gendarme. I bet you wore your hair in a tight bun and everything. A whip and a ruler are in your blood, my girl.”

  “How would you know? You’re not our mother.”

  “Stop that,” Dad interrupted. “You’re acting like children. Concentrate or the spirit will feel the discord and leave.”

  I shot Olga black looks as if she had had something to do with Avadata’s ridiculous claim.

  “Ask another,” Olga said to me. “Ask who you’re going to marry. Chicken?”

  My hands pulsed with the urge to hit her. Even if no real animosity marked her attitude, she had this annoying habit of always looking perky and amused at someone else’s expense. I had to keep reminding myself that she meant no harm. Or else I’d wind up giving her the opportunity to replace the rest of her teeth with gold nuggets.

  “Don’t be a baby. Come on.”

  “If you call me a baby one more time, Olga, I will cut off your hair and make a stuffed cat out of it.”

  She roared with laughter. “So you’re not all spineless Armenian like your mother. You’ve got a temper after all. I was wondering where you were hiding it.”

  “Don’t talk about my mother.”

  “That, right there,” she said. “That’s your Roma fire, girl. Don’t keep it caged up.”

  “I’m only half Gypsy. In case you haven’t noticed, we’re Americans now.”

  “Darling, you’re no more American than pizza. Your father is Rom, and that makes you one, too, whether you like it or not. Be proud.”

  Her words rang true, and I hated her for it. “It’s late,” I said, standing up, not caring about hurting even the spirit’s feelings anymore.

  Olga pelted me with laughter like a skillful bully with a slingshot.

  “Leave her be, woman,” Dad said.

  Without waiting for a response, I stormed out of the kitchen.

  That night, I lay wide-eyed and restless on the living-room pullout couch, seriously considering leaving my father’s house for good.

  I wished Grandpa Andrei were there to talk sense into Dad.

  Perhaps he’d remind him about all those times the band members got arrested in marketplaces because the police assumed that no Gypsy could resist the urge to read a palm when in public places.

  Of course not all Soviets held these views.

  Russian kids watching one of Grandpa Andrei’s earliest shows, Kiev, 1939

  During World War II, wounded soldiers often found refuge among the Gypsies. Many a time Romani aided the partisans by carrying messages between military posts across hostile territories; Roma mail became of much use. Romancy, Russian songs that were a vital element of Russian culture, were a fusion of Roma and Russian styles. Great writers like Tolstoy and Pushkin had been known to disappear with the caravans for weeks. Tolstoy mentions it in his writings more than once. Every time he feels dejected, it’s off to party with the Gypsies. Pushkin was enamored with their romanticism, their wildness, and their bond with nature, and even dedicated an entire narrative poem to them, The Gypsies.

  The Gypsies in a boisterous throng,

  through steppe of Bessarabia wander.

  Their dingy camp is pitched along

  The bank above the river yonder.

  How free, how cheerful their tents lie

  With tranquil dreams beneath the sky.

  Between the wheels of carts half slung

  With tapestries and threadbare rugs,

  The meal is done, the bonfire’s blazing,

  The horses in the field are grazing.

  There were Soviets who proudly confessed to having “the blood” in their family tree, and there were those who clutched their purses as soon as the word “Gypsy” grazed their ears. According to my grandparents, the country had always been divided this way. But so were the Russian Roma.

  Zhanna and I came across a group of Roma women once, right after Zhanna had turned fourteen. It was a beautiful spring day and we had decided to take the metro from my parent
s’ house to Esmeralda’s on the other side of town, which would give us a chance not only to people-watch but also to show off the new French denim vest Zhanna got on her birthday. At the Tretyakovskaya station we followed the midday crowd outside, where we were suddenly surrounded by a flock of women in colorful skirts. They were Roma, although their dialect, as they admired my gold earrings and Zhanna’s vest, sounded slightly different from the Rromanes my family spoke.

  “Beautiful girl,” one of them addressed me. She wore a scarf that only partially covered a bruise on her neck. “I’m a famous Gypsy fortune-teller. Let me tell your fortune.” She accosted my hand and with one finger drew a circle in the middle of my palm. Next she pressed a pocket-size mirror into it. “You have five rubles? If we put it under the mirror you’ll see your future husband’s face.” From the corner of my eye I saw another young woman place an identical mirror in Zhanna’s palm, and I heard my fortune-teller tell Zhanna’s fortune-teller, in Rromanes, to hurry it up before the next train came.

  “Do you know us?” Zhanna said with a kind smile.

  “Yes, yes.” The woman extended her other hand. “I’ll only borrow the money.”

  “We’re Andrei Kopylenko’s granddaughters.”

  As soon as the women heard that, the mirrors returned to the pockets of their skirts and they let go of our hands.

  “Devlo,” my fortune-teller exclaimed. “You Romani girls? We had no idea. Why didn’t you say so?”

  We gave them money anyway, because we knew that most likely they had husbands back home who’d beat them if they didn’t return with enough earnings for alcohol and cigarettes. We’d also give the change in our pockets to the Roma kids begging near churches. We knew where the scratches and the bruises on their skinny arms came from.

  I was so afraid that my father, like those women, would pigeonhole himself. I’d hoped that when we moved to America, we could avoid those kinds of assumptions about us, as long as my family behaved.

  Only now, instead of moving away from the one thing that could hurtle us out to the fringes of society, he was preparing to announce it to the entire population of Los Angeles.

  HONEYLAMBSHANK

  The next morning I walked the six miles home. I’d shaken Roxy awake, but she pulled the covers over her head and rolled onto her side, snoring before I was even dressed. Sneaking out of the house was a breeze because Dad stayed up all night and usually slept all day. Apparently so did his new wife. No doubt Mom would begin her interrogations the moment I came through the door, but better that than waking up to Olga’s loaded comments about our little spat.

  After I’d seen Dad’s nice new place, the reality of our situation became that much more apparent. We were living in the Dumpster of Los Angeles. But if I told Mom, she’d go nuts, especially if she heard about Olga renting a house around the corner from Beverly Hills. And who could blame her? It didn’t seem fair that we had to live in a shithole while the witch was enjoying the good life in a house she’d nearly suffocated with her rugs.

  I bet Olga doesn’t have to deal with roaches, I thought to myself as I shut the front door after a quick survey of the floor. I dropped my backpack in the corner, looking forward to getting some actual sleep. Something whistled in the kitchen. As I tried to sneak by, Mom turned and cleared her throat, holding a steaming kettle in one hand. “What happened?”

  “Nothing,” I said, which in teenage language means “Everything.”

  “You hungry? You look starved. Did they not feed you at all? Is Roxy eating all right? Is she with you?”

  “She’s fine. She’s gonna stay for the rest of the week.”

  “Well, all right.” Mom looked disappointed. “Goodness, you have such bags under your eyes. Sit down. I’ll make something light.”

  I took a chair at the kitchen table with a sigh, bracing myself.

  “I thought you were going to stay until New Year’s.”

  “Change of plans.”

  Mom placed a plate of toast in front of me and sat down.

  “If you don’t want to tell me what happened, you don’t have to.”

  “Okay.”

  “I don’t care to hear anything concerning your asshole father anyway.” She eyed me from over the rim of her coffee cup.

  “That’s good.”

  There was a very long moment of silence. I munched on my toast. Mom’s staring meant the conversation was far from over. But for a little while neither one of us spoke.

  “We need to talk about school,” she said out of the blue.

  “Nothing to talk about. I’m not going.”

  “Oksanochka. We came all this way for you to have a better life. Don’t start it as a high-school dropout.”

  “I read, I write, I know my numbers,” I said. “What can I possibly learn that I don’t already know?”

  “You’re right,” she said.

  I hadn’t expected that and made the mistake of looking surprised.

  Then she continued with “But…”

  “We just moved, Mom. I need time to adjust.”

  With a skeptical huff, Mom got up and poured herself another cup, adding a splash of brandy. “It’s a matter of principle. We must show everybody that we can make it in America. You need to have a goal, Oksana, and you might not think school is so important, but wait until you’re thirty and cleaning toilets because of a stupid mistake.”

  “What’s wrong with cleaning toilets?”

  “Absolutely nothing,” she said. “As long as you’re doing it by choice.”

  Pride wouldn’t let me tell her that my not wanting to go to school had nothing to do with school itself but with the other people there. And I wasn’t against having goals. As a little girl, I was convinced that I’d grow up to be a famous dancer.

  It was only when I started school that I realized the foolishness of dreaming so big. My goals diminished in size and grandeur down to one: Don’t get beat up. Who was to guarantee that Hollywood would be any different from Moscow?

  Mom sighed. “Does my suffering mean nothing to you?” she said. “Look at how skinny I have become. If it wasn’t for my coffee and cigarettes, I’d be walking on crutches by now. Oksana, you must try. To give me hope in these hard times. To show me that there is someone in this world who cares for me.”

  I hated it when she said things like that, especially when she used that small, defeated voice accompanied by melodramatic sighs. She could’ve written The Idiot’s Guide to Ruining Your Child’s Life with Sighs.

  “Fine. After the New Year,” I said. “Happy now?”

  When she sat back down, her eyes sparkled, like she was congratulating herself on her theatrical outburst.

  I was ready to lock myself in the bedroom for the rest of the week, but she was staring again and I knew I wouldn’t be able to leave the kitchen without telling her what she wanted and didn’t want to hear.

  “So,” she said finally. “Are they happy?”

  “Mom, do we really have to do this?”

  “I’m just asking. Not that I care. Just making conversation.”

  I took another bite, making sure my mouth was too full to answer. But then an image popped into my mind. I giggled through the toast. “She calls him honeylambshank.”

  “A what?”

  “A honeylambshank.”

  Mom plunked down the cup, spilling coffee everywhere. We both knew how absolutely my father was not a honeylambshank. “Oh, Oksana. Really?”

  “Yeah. And … and you know what he calls her back?”

  “I’m afraid to find out.”

  “His little sparrow.”

  She slapped both palms on the table, her face tomato-red. We laughed until my sides ached.

  COFFEE BEAN

  Every morning in our little apartment, I woke up to the comforting aroma of strong coffee.

  Mom drank it in a tiny espresso cup, always black and barely sweetened, a cigarette poised in one hand. It was one of the most prevalent customs of Armenian life; a young gir
l’s ability to make a good cup of coffee increased her chances of catching a husband.

  After she’d finished and the grounds had settled thickly at the bottom of the cup, Mom would turn it over on the saucer to allow the remnants to run down the sides and dry. When the dried grains had transformed into intricate designs, the fun part began: the telling of one’s fortune.

  Usually Mom read only her own cup or those of other adults. But sometimes I convinced her to let me have a drink so that she could glimpse my future, too. “My dear,” she’d say, “you are destined to marry a prince and have so many diamonds you could use them for backgammon pieces.”

  Unlike Olga’s fortune-telling services, my mother’s coffee reading was a hobby, one shared by plenty of Armenian women who regularly gathered at one another’s houses. Aunt Siranoosh claimed that this interest in divination might’ve come from the time when Romani travelers first camped out on Armenian land, sometime in the eleventh century. When Romani made their way from India to Europe (a journey that took hundreds of years to complete), it was the first country to allow the travelers to settle on its land. They stayed for so long that even today many Romani dialects contain Armenian words.

  Mom reminded me of Agrefina. She was remarkably accurate in her predictions without the use of incantations or the need to stage a “spiritual place” to get people in the mood.

  Rosa marveled at Mom’s ability to see things in the black grounds, and I found our landlady’s fascination with fortune-telling puzzling. Was Olga onto something with her predictions that she could make money in this city?

  Inside a week, the neighbors came knocking on our door, each with an apologetic smile and a strong premonition about their mother, their job, their sex life, their dog’s eating habits.

  “This is good!” Rosa said as she paced our kitchen one morning, strategizing. “Susan from B12 asked about her son. He’s in the military and he has gas problems. She hope is no cancer.”

  “Why is good?” Mom said. “I no hev much coffee.”

  “I tell you why, Nora. Because I tole her to pay you ten dollars and she said yes.”