American Gypsy (6 page)

“Strong-smelling tea?”

Esmeralda tousled my hair. “How much sugar?”

“Three lumps. So why do it thirteen times? Is that like a magic number?”

“It's
my
magic number. You'll have to find your own.”

For a while I'd stopped adding new recipes to my collection. Other matters, like getting used to living without a father and learning to answer the phone in English, took precedence. But in my mother's tiny L.A. kitchen, I started up the old habit, finding its familiarity comforting.

According to my notes, the first step to making
tort-salat
was to boil some beef the same way you would if making beef broth. Mom would then put it through a meat grinder she'd purchased at the local Russian market. At the same time, she'd cook eggs, carrots, beets, and potatoes in water until they were soft but not soggy, and then grate them. Next, she'd start building the salad: a layer of potatoes, followed by a layer of beef, eggs, and the rest of the vegetables. A little mayonnaise, spread between each layer, kept everything moist. Mom would repeat the process several more times, and sprinkle some grated cold butter and a generous amount of parsley, dill, and cilantro on top.

I'd been known to eat
tort-salat
every day for breakfast, lunch, and dinner, so Mom always made extra, or guarded it from me if guests were coming.

During those first months in America, we found solace in the familiar foods or in the songs Mom sang under her breath, many of them centuries-old Armenian melodies.

Ov, sirun, sirun. Inchu motezar?

Sertis gahtnike inchu imatsar?

Mi unmech sirov, yes kes siretzi

Isk do anyraf davachanetsir.

 

Oh, my beautiful. Why did you come near?

Secrets of my heart, just how did you hear?

With an innocent love, I have fallen for you

Shamelessly betrayed, your love so untrue.

We often sat on our cots and read out loud from the books we'd brought with us. Mom's sister, Aunt Siranoosh, lived in Kirovakan with Grandma Rose, and the walls of their living room hid behind enormous bookshelves stuffed with classics, large and leather-bound and intimidating. Aunt Siranoosh used to send me parcels of books from her collection a couple of times a year.

I'd brought several of them with me to L.A.
Alexander der Grosse
, by Fritz Schachermeyr, read like an epic adventure of courage, something we needed now. Every time I reached the part when Alexander tamed Bucephalus, his legendary horse, Roxy would exclaim, “Victory!” and shake her fists in the air.

Our neighborhood looked and felt nothing like the America from my father's friend Vova's stories, with houses the size of Iceland and flower beds that bloomed year-round. But maybe this was how people started out before they got their dream. Maybe living in a dump, on a street with cracked pavement and skeletons of cars, made them tough and ready for all that glory they would experience later. I felt determined to find out.

 

RUNNING AWAY

Most Romani don't give a rat's ass about fitting in. Instead, they shape the world around them, bend it like a spoon. But it mattered to me, and it mattered to my mother even more. Once in America, she wanted nothing to do with her Romani past, which had been anything but typical. For Roxy and me, she envisioned a more conventional future, and soon after Dad left, she developed but one goal in addition to having the most spotless apartment in our building: finding wealthy American husbands for her two girls. Like any devoted immigrant mother, she suffered for the sake of her offspring. “You are Americans now,” she often reminded us. “You don't need any of your father's nonsense. I didn't sacrifice my youth, my status, for you to turn out like his brood. I had more admirers than stars in the sky, decent men … and who did I end up with?”

“Yes, Mom,” we'd say.

Mom's eyebrows would lower into dangerous angles. “I curse the day I laid eyes on your shit-eating gigolo of a father. The bastard lured me in with his guitar and smooth tongue. I won't let you two make the same mistake. You'll marry nice American doctors or lawyers.”

I woke up one morning to find Mom ironing one of her dresses on an ironing board in the kitchen. In Moscow, sheets, socks, underwear, and mounds of handkerchiefs regularly underwent this treatment. The last time she ironed was when she got a call from an old friend from Moscow who wanted to let Mom know that Dad had bought two return tickets to America. One for him and another for his mistress. My father, being a real spoon bender, didn't move across the ocean to change. He knew that no matter what, he'd always be Rom, but that at least in America, nobody cared. He took his outsider status to even greater heights by getting engaged to his longtime mistress, a notorious fortune-teller with eyes the color of chimney smoke and a soul a shade darker. The day my mother heard that Dad was bringing his fiancée to the States, she steam-ironed all the curtains in our apartment.

Now she was at it again.

“Are you going somewhere?” I asked.

“When your sister wakes up, get her breakfast, don't forget. And make sure she doesn't stay at the neighbors' too long. She could eat what I cook for once.”

I went to the fridge to get orange juice. The way that dress was being ironed, I figured the farther away from her, the better.

“Your father and I are getting a divorce,” Mom said to the dress.

She looked up at me, and I dropped onto a kitchen chair.

“He's bringing his hussy over from Russia. I bet that's why he disappeared before we even moved out of Arsen's place. Didn't have the decency to wait.”

“You've been married seventeen years.”

Mom's cheeks were flushed, and she concentrated on the areas around the buttons of the dress as if she were setting a diamond into a ring. “He's running,” she said. “Wish I could run, too, but I have you and your sister to look after. He's my punishment for walking out on Leonid all those years ago, I know it now. No matter. I won't let you make the same mistakes. I will keep you safe.”

*   *   *

I don't think she would've ever told me who Leonid was if it weren't for my habit of rummaging through her dresser for money. One day in Los Angeles, I was looking for change for a pack of rubber bracelets and came across a picture, hidden beneath Mom's nightdresses, of a handsome man with blue eyes. I thought it was Montgomery Clift and took it into the kitchen, where Mom was shredding cabbages for homemade sauerkraut. Completely overlooking the fact that I wasn't supposed to be going through her things, I said, “Can I put him up on my wall?” Mom snatched the picture from my hands and gave me a halfhearted lecture on stealing. She didn't ground me, though, seeming distracted by my find. My curiosity kept me after her for weeks. Her confession shocked me.

Handsome and a well-respected member of the intelligentsia, Leonid was a music professor at a university in Krasnodar in southern Russia. He'd had the bad luck of falling in love with one of his students, who came from a well-to-do Armenian Greek family. They loved each other, my mother told me, with the tenderness and modesty one finds in old black-and-white films.

Once married, Mom left the university to avoid a scandal. Leonid built a boat as a wedding gift to her, and on the weekends they sailed the Kuban River, fishing, talking about philosophy, and planning to see the world.

The marriage lasted a year. Then a traveling Gypsy ensemble came to town, bringing my father with it.

In the USSR, art belonged to the masses. That's why our ensemble was officially called a collective or a troupe; the members worked for the government, their official job to entertain the public. Every corner of the country, no matter how isolated or poor, boasted a performing arts center where concerts, plays, and exhibits took place. But who got to perform where was up to the government. All fifteen republics had an arts branch that oversaw artist placement in their cities. An artist's reputation depended on these placements. To gig in Moscow, you had to be either brilliant or very well connected.

Leonid was appointed as the fine arts inspector in Krasnodarskiy Krai—the area between the Black and the Caspian seas. His job consisted of auditioning the hopefuls to determine the quality of their performance, and it was he who happened to audition my grandfather's ensemble.

Leonid and my mother, who often accompanied him, were standing in the hotel hallway, talking business with Andrei Kopylenko. The man was a giant, close to seven feet tall. He had a long beard, a booming voice, and piercing green eyes.

That's when my father sauntered into the frame, and as she tells it, her heart stammered. With his catlike amber eyes and long hair, he looked to her like Edmond Dantès from
The Count of Monte Cristo
. Two giggling women hung on his arms. He held a half-empty wine bottle in one hand and a seven-string guitar in the other. As he passed, his eyes ignited her, and she was lost.

That night, she tells me, I was conceived.

Mom divorced Leonid, and she and Dad got married a week after the papers came. Her relatives were in an uproar. Dad's Romani family protested his decision to marry a
gadjee
—a female outsider. Though not a common practice, some Roma men found wives outside their culture, and these women were often kept at a tense distance by the rest of the community. On the other hand, if a Romani woman married a
gadjo
, she would most likely be cut off forever and even her children would not be considered Romani. Dad's own mother, Ksenia, was Russian Greek, and she never quite gained Romani trust. Yet, instead of siding with a potential friend, she objected the loudest.

Since circumstances surrounding my conception had begun with an affair, all kinds of questions arose. The main one being, whose daughter was I, really? A question that haunted my father for a long time and Grandma Ksenia for even longer.

Grandma could've written a manual on proper diva behavior—she accomplished it with aplomb—and as divas often do, she reigned from behind the closed doors of her dressing room. To her, my slanted eyes were too … slanted. She speculated that, considering my mother's wanton tendencies, my real father could've been a Chukchi from eastern Siberia. The Chukchi are indigenous to the area around the Bering Sea, their isolated and nomadic lifestyle similar to that of the Eskimos. For a long while Grandma Ksenia wanted nothing to do with me.

*   *   *

The parallels between Mom's and Grandma Ksenia's stories are remarkable. Grandma had been eighteen when she met my grandfather in Krasnoarmeysk, Ukraine. She was a singer in an all-girl trio at a local day club, an equivalent of an American USO club. “I had followed her voice from the street,” Grandpa once said, “and found a diamond to be worshipped.” But her parents, a Russian schoolteacher and a Greek-born general in the Red Army, wouldn't suffer a marriage between Ksenia and a Gypsy eleven years her senior. My grandparents ended up running away together. It might sound romantic, except that the news had devastated Grandpa's wife, a full-blooded Roma named Gala, and their four kids.

My father claims that because of Grandpa's decision to marry a
gadjee
and break his Roma family, we remain forever cursed by Baba Varya, Grandpa's mother and a notorious Romani practitioner of black magic. Every misfortune to befall our clan since came as a direct result of that curse, and my father believed this so fully that in his twenties he began to dabble in an effort to find a countercurse.

“Baba Varya collected dirt from where stray cats fought,” Dad once told me, “and would sprinkle a pinch inside my parents' bedsheets. They'd end up quarreling for days.”

Baba Varya had once tried to poison Ksenia with a homemade
piroshki
, a stuffed fried bun, which made her vomit violently. She spent days at the hospital. Later, Grandpa asked if she'd taken any food from Baba Varya.

“Just one
piroshki
,” Ksenia had said.

Grandpa had a terrible fight with his mother and ordered her to never touch the stove again.

When I heard that particular story, I couldn't help but wonder how much truth there was to the poisoned apple in
Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs
.

I don't know if Grandma Ksenia's desire for the stage eclipsed my mother's, but it must've been close, since she'd given up an easy life to hop a train with a Gypsy musician, and endured ridicule and scorn from the Roma. Her yearning must've been immense, because adventure wasn't in Grandma's nature. She had the manners of a princess, knew a fork by its course, and worked at little, preferring to have things done for her. And so she never assimilated, her talent as a singer remaining the only link to her husband's culture. She was the star, the one people came to see, and the Roma grudgingly accepted at least that.