American Gypsy by Oksana Marafioti

Author:Oksana Marafioti
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux

BLACK MAGIC

Dad’s gigs did not turn out as much cash as Olga’s readings. He refused to read tarot cards or palms; those things are done primarily by women. Instead he started to get deeper into the occult. My grandfather called it chornaya magia (black magic), though not everything occult is black.

For the longest time I didn’t understand his aversion to metaphysical practices, but one day I came across my grandparents’ photo album, where I found a picture of a young girl laid out for a funeral viewing. When I asked about her, Grandpa got so upset he locked the album in his desk drawer. Years later, Mom told me the story behind the girl’s image.

When Grandpa Andrei was thirteen, Baba Varya traveled to the southern outskirts of Kiev to see a local soothsayer named Fokla, a blind man of indeterminate age. He lived in a hut with a dirt floor, surviving on the townsfolk’s charity.

Baba Varya had come to Fokla hoping for guidance in a difficult situation. After her husband had died, she was barely able to keep her family from the streets. Baba Varya practiced magic by then, but like the majority of practitioners, she lacked the capability to foretell her own future.

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.

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