American Gypsy Read online

  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.

  My beautiful grandmother Ksenia

  But it didn’t take my mother long to gain the Roma trust. I always suspected it happened because she was so much like them.

  At first, Dad wouldn’t let Mom perform—despite his own promiscuities he was the jealous type and believed his new wife would benefit more from embroidering his costumes than from doing shoulder-shimmies—but eventually she coaxed him into it. Turns out, she was an average dancer, but she made every rehearsal on time and, unlike half the performers, sober. The Roma, and especially Grandpa Andrei, took notice of her tenacity and of the fact that she acted like part of the troupe. With time, Mom became the band administrator, which, considering all the trouble the members were constantly getting into, was a feat.

  WAR AND NOT SO MUCH PEACE

  When I was five, Dad had a run-in with a group of skinheads at a club. It all started when a man in the audience made a request for a well-known Nazi tune.

  “Hey, Gypsy cock! ‘Horst-Wessel-Lied’ for me and my friends,” he shouted across the dance floor.

  “Up yours,” my father said into the mike, and was promptly asked to step outside and have a smoke, which was code for “fight.”

  There were two others waiting in the alleyway. One in a leather jacket was ready to leap at my father, who’d pulled out a knife he always carried at his waist.

  “Stop this,” said a man my father hadn’t noticed yet. He was short and bald. Gently he pushed the other two guys out of the way. “Don’t need violence to solve this, do we, Gypsy?”

  “I’m ready either way.”

  Shorty swung his brass-knuckled fist up into my father’s jaw. The back door opened and a waiter came out carrying a bin to the Dumpster. Using that distraction, my father took off.

  “They had a gun,” he said later that night on our way to the hospital. I’d stubbornly climbed into the ambulance, certain Dad would die without me. Rather than make a scene, Mom climbed in next to me and we were off. Dad looked furious as the nurse tried to assess his condition, and he kept explaining to Mom that he wanted to fight, really, but was outnumbered. Ditching a fight humiliated him more than being called a “Gypsy cock.” The nurse carefully tugged at hi
s lower lip to find that his jaw had been cracked down the middle. The left side of his gum line was higher than the right, the teeth like bone stairs.

  The doctors stapled Dad’s jaw together and packed it with medicine and gauze. He drank soup for days, but once he had healed he went back to that club with five of his largest cousins. The Roma and the skinheads trashed the club that night, and Dad lost his gig, but that was the way of things. On the surface, the Soviet Union was a picture of order, when in reality it was ruled by gangs. Some powerful, like the KGB mafia, others of the smalltime-crook variety. Their influence depended on the city they operated in and their financiers. The Roma were no different, because if you didn’t have “brothers” to watch your back, you were asking for everyone else to stab it.

  The men in our band went around with daggers and guns. They knew firsthand that order could be as delicate as ice on a lake: rock-solid under your feet until a hairline flaw sent you plunging into the waters. Ironically, the gadjee weren’t the only ones to worry about.

  Like the cultures of India, considered by many Romani to be our motherland, we are still divided into castes. There’s no peace between them, and many confrontations I remember were nothing more than reactions to centuries-old prejudices.

  Grandpa Andrei, for example, wouldn’t accept Roma artists of Hungarian descent. Tzigane, or Russian Gypsies, called them Lovari. “Lovari make trouble,” he said. “Reading palms backstage after the shows.” (This wasn’t entirely fair, since anyone in the Soviet Union with the knowledge of divination read fortunes when short on cash, which was most of the time.)

  In turn, most Lovari considered Tzigane to have sold their souls and their culture to the Soviet government. The majority of European Roma clans considered our dialect of the Rromanes language to have been watered down by Russian, a threadbare blanket with too many holes.

  Russian Roma, which include many clans of their own, are very different from the rest of the European clans, some of whom remain nomadic to this day, often because the communities they are in force them to move. The last nomadic Russian Roma settled during the seventies, when Khrushchev had ordered the building of all those neat apartments. One thing we were known for, even within the clans, was our music.

  The majority of the Roma I grew up with were performers. Not so glamorous, considering how even the most acclaimed artists made very little money—the average monthly salary of a top-paid actor in the eighties was about 300 rubles, or 480 U.S. dollars—but everywhere they went, people shook their hands as if they were national heroes. They performed because they couldn’t imagine doing anything else, knowing full well they’d never come close to the superstardom of Western celebrities. More often than not, people with serious money worked for the government. My own grandparents, who held the title of National Artists of the USSR—an equivalent of the Lifetime Achievement Award in the States—fared better than most, but they also saved every kopeika.

  To the European Roma, we were court jesters, doormats, quacks, but the mainstream society still considered us feral despite our polite handshakes. At the first sign of trouble the old stereotypes reappeared.

  I recall one particularly explosive brawl between the band members and a group of taxi drivers in front of a Moscow train station. (Soviet taxisty had the look and the punch of your best mixed martial arts fighters, and they were also one of the biggest mafias around.) When I asked my father what had started the fight, he claimed, “One of the assholes called Stepan a shit-eating Gypsy invalid. I couldn’t stand by and do nothing.”

  Dad and Stepan knew each other from the postwar streets of Kiev, back when they ran with a gang of Ukrainian kids, searching for food like the rest of the half-starved population. Once, Stepan dug up a can of food that turned out to be a grenade, which exploded, blowing away half his hand. Despite the injury, he became a virtuoso guitar player.

  All I remember of that evening, besides the Russian fur hats called ushanka flying in the air and men rolling in mud-smeared snow, is Mom sneaking hundred-ruble bills to the militzia, the Russian police, to keep the Roma boys out of jail.

  When my parents’ tour bus crashed into a bulldozer parked illegally on a country road one winter night, Dad spent four days in jail for thrashing the bulldozer driver, who’d decided to take a booze break in the shrubbery and had forgotten to turn on the emergency lights. The bus driver had died upon impact, and Grandma Ksenia had broken both legs. The next day, the Roma were urged by the town’s administration to either take the stage or not get paid. When they did, looking like war casualties, arms in slings, faces lacerated by broken glass, the audience started to laugh. “Look! The Gypsies were fighting again!”

  My mother said into the mike, “We had a terrible accident last night and lost a friend. This first song is dedicated to his memory.” The subdued audience behaved for the rest of the show, and later several locals brought food and drink to the hotel where the Gypsies were staying. A peace offering at a time when food began to disappear from markets and restaurants due to one of the worst recessions the Soviets ever experienced. This act of generosity from people who might not have had a full meal in months made Mom teary-eyed, while Dad rallied the band and the unlikely guests for an all-night vecherinka (party).

  God knows Dad needed constant supervision, otherwise he’d spend more time in jail or intensive care than onstage. And Mom was all too happy to keep rescuing him and his spirited brood, as if she thrived on pandemonium. Her flair for diplomatic magic staggered the Roma, who by nature trusted no one and whose tempers put wildfires to shame. My mother never ran out of occasions to exercise her skills.

  JOURNAL NUMBER 1

  Just weeks after my parents divorced, Mom resumed molding Roxy and me into Americans in case we ran into a brain surgeon or two.

  The three of us were sitting on our cots one night, and Mom stroked my hair as she described her vision of my wedding.

  “I’ll string your hair with natural pearls, one for each strand, and you’ll wear a diamond-studded gown embroidered with real golden thread. And I’ll fly in our family and friends from Russia and Armenia to sit on our silk-cushioned chairs and eat escargots from our golden spoons.”

  Roxy, who’d been brushing Mom’s hair this entire time, said, “What if her husband doesn’t have enough chairs?”

  “He will, because he’ll adore his mother-in-law and do anything to make her happy.”

  Like most girls, I grew up playing house with my dolls. Every type of divination Zhanna and I tried evolved around a single question: Will I get married? We read the tarot, but most often, we used the pendulum. All we needed were a needle and a thread as long as a child’s forearm. I’d hold the thread by the tip, steady, with the needle pointed at the ground. “Will I get married to the handsomest man in the world?” I’d ask, and silently beg the needle to swing in a circle, a sign for “yes.”

  But in America, I was no longer obsessed with marriage. I had convinced myself that I’d grow old and sprout hair on my face (like most females over fifty in my family) without a man to push my wheelchair or tweeze my chin. Truth is, I had known a boy once who owned not a single golden spoon. For him I’d have stitched a thousand wedding dresses.

  Ruslan and I met on a concert tour when I was six and he nine.

  The ensemble had performed the last show of the evening in the Ukrainian city of Uzhgorod, and most troupe members had returned to the Hotel Friendship. It was close to eleven, but on account of a raucous poker game going on inside our room, I was able to sneak out to explore the building, which, from the outside, looked like a flying saucer.

  I crept down the stairs to the second floor, and about ten feet away saw a woman beating a boy. He rolled into a fetal position as her fists flew into his ribs and face. I stood in the middle of the barely lit hallway in my pink pajamas, my feet momentarily growing roots. My parents never hit me, but I’d witnessed plenty of battles on the road, so I did what I’d seen other women do time and again.

  I rus
hed the boy’s assailant with a screech, waving my arms in the air. Shock registered on her face and that tiny reprieve gave him a chance to crawl out of reach. I grabbed hold of her arm and bit down, and the woman struggled to shake me loose. I remember still digging my fingertips into her flesh when somebody jerked me away from behind. Next thing I knew, my father had me up in his arms.

  The woman hollered, “I’m bleeding!” I recognized her then. Kristina, a dancer Grandpa Andrei had recently hired.

  “You’ll live,” my father said with a glance at the tooth marks on her forearm.

  People crowded the hallway. Their voices soon rose in argument.

  “You could’ve killed your own son,” someone said. “Have you no shame?”

  “He’s stronger than he looks,” Kristina said.

  I wrapped my arms around Dad’s neck, my eyes on the boy as he ran a sleeve across his nose, smearing blood over his face. He stood, one hand on the wall for support, and dipped his head at me in acknowledgment.

  Ruslan and I spent whatever time we could together. Only I knew that sometimes he slipped drops of valerian into his mother’s glass so that she slept through the night without chasing him with a knife, and no one but he knew I once stole a cucumber from the school cafeteria kitchen on a dare.

  It was not unusual for the Roma boys to perform (many preferred that to going to school), but Ruslan was obsessed, practicing his guitar for hours. Whenever he had to sit a number out, he’d pace until allowed to go back up. That’s how he was. Once he set his mind on something it swept him like an avalanche.