|
•
|
|
The Domovoi
by
I married Igor for all the right reasons, so the last thing I expected was that our union would summon the rage of a domovoi. I had no idea that American houses could have their own domovois. His visitations seemed shockingly out of place, like finding chicken Kiev on the menu of an American bistro. In Russia, each home has its own spirit that oversees the house, makes its balance possible. Some say he is a relative of the devil, others that he is the reincarnation of watchful ancestors. Generally benevolent and sometimes even affectionate (one domovoi was said to have lovingly brushed the long, brown hair of his mistress every single night), he can become violent if the household is not run in humble compliance with his wishes. It is widely held that a soft, furry touch from the domovoi in the middle of the night is a good omen, but a cold, prickly touch is a harbinger of much pain. He has also been known to kill.
When I met Igor at a Brighton Beach singles bar, I was running out of options. Many American women may not understand my urgency to get married, but as Mama so often pointed out, “You are 32 now. It is time to start living a respectable life.” He stood at the bar with a friend, one foot in a brown loafer tapping along to the disco music. Taking small sips of his whiskey, he kept looking at me with raised eyebrow and a tight, hopeful smile. By the time he walked over to me, I was already sipping my third bourbon and soda with a girlfriend—but it was clear he was affecting an aura of confidence. “Nu,” his look seemed to say, “Why not?” We spoke for a few minutes, his friend clearly married and bored but encouraging. He bought me and Maggie another round of drinks. “You like vodka?” he asked. “Who doesn’t?” I said. The shot glass of vodka looked ridiculously tiny in his inflated fingers. His pinkie seemed to be saluting the ceiling. “My name is Igor,” he sighed. “I came over because there is something about you.” “I used to hear that a lot,” I said. The bar was stifling and crowded. I edged my way over to an empty space on one of the couches and Igor followed. We yelled to each other over the music. I don’t remember what I said, but Igor responded by nodding gravely, purposefully. He punched my number into his phone and smiled. That night, I had to tiptoe back into the apartment because it was after midnight. “I met somebody,” I told Mama, who woke up as soon as I gently closed the door. I tried not to look into her creased, droopy eyes because her haplessness broke my heart. Her lipstick had smudged on the pillow and her slippers with the tear in the right heel were wedged into the elbow of the couch. “Do you hear that noise inside my head,” she said, fixing her flyaway hair, and then, “I’m so happy. I hope this will be the man who will finally love you and take care of you.” I brushed my teeth, changed into my white, oversized nightgown and sank into the military cot that was my bed. My father was snoring on the other side of the room. After a while, I heard other noises too.
For my date with Igor, I wore what I usually wear on first dates—tight, striped black pants and what Americans call a “wraparound” shirt. The shirt often needs some readjusting and I enjoy the flustered expression on the man’s face as he tries to avert his eyes by fishing the lemon out of his water. As I headed off for my date, Mama ran after me to spritz “Red Square” perfume on my hair. “For good luck,” she winked. “Don’t forget to walk out the door with your right foot.” Igor seemed to have all the manners my mother would expect a Russian man to have. He took me to an elegant Italian restaurant on the Upper East Side. He eagerly poured my glass of wine before his own, handed me a linen napkin after we sank into the velour chairs and sprang to pay the bill as soon as it was brought to him. He spoke about art, vaguely but confidently, about “people” he was working with to move it in and out of Russia. “There are so many Russian artists who are really good,” he said, his eyes blinking rapidly. “But they don’t get noticed in Russia at all. Nobody cares about art over there.” Something propelled me to say, “I care about art,” in a rather velvety, timorous way. He paused, obviously charmed, and continued, “Of course, because you are cultured.” He leaned toward me, his stomach straining against the waistband of his khaki pants. He looked so vulnerable that I immediately visualized myself sternly shaking my head at him in our beige-wallpapered house in Flushing insisting, “No, Igor, it’s time to get rid of those or lose some weight, dear.” I did not want to ask him which artists he liked, because I was afraid he would say “Monet” and that would herald the end of the date. I didn’t want to confront his tipichnost’ because men who answer Monet also have a lot of boring ideas about many things. Instead, over linguine crowded with clams, we spoke about what we wanted in life. He said “love” before I could stop him.
On our next date, we went to a Tom Cruise movie and Igor awkwardly put his arms around me in the theater. My heart was beating because I remembered that I would have to kiss him, even sleep with him if I were going to marry him. “You are so attractive,” he whispered just as Tom shot the man who was chasing him over rooftops with a machine gun. And then, “I can give you everything you need.” I closed my eyes and remembered the tongue twister that, in my childhood, had successfully allowed me to swallow my mother’s mamaliga, a pasty, salty pudding she force-fed me every other Tuesday—“Yekhal Greku Cherez Reku, Videl Greku v Reke Rak,” something about a Greek who saw a crab in the lake, repeated quickly, breathlessly. When I was five or six or seven or eight, when my mother had deep reserves of patience, she could make me eat simply by sitting beside me for hours. When the sun finally succumbed and we heard my father’s footsteps outside the door, I would be licking the last mealy spoonful. The other night, Mama told me, “You think you can escape your fate? You are alone and this Igor is your last chance.” As usual, there was no response I could give. “You’ll never get away with this you know,” said Tom Cruise or whoever he is playing onscreen, to a bald ruler of a backwards country. Why do Russian girls always believe that their mother’s words have a shuddering prescience? Perhaps because they do.
I met Igor’s parents for the first time at the Russian nightclub, Fabergé, in Brighton Beach. They looked me over slowly, his mother lingering on my damp forehead and dry, curly hair, his father on my breasts in my favorite silver lamé dress. They seemed pleased yet cautious, as though they feared Igor would never get married and if he did, she would be a woman to be wary of. “I’m not so bad,” I wanted to tell them, as the steaming zakuski were shepherded to the table. “ There are worse out there who would get to him if I didn’t.” The 40-ish singer onstage was all teeth. “You kiss me vonce, I kiss you tvice,” she crooned through slit eyes. I gave the first shashlik to Igor’s mother, as is proper. She accepted it and loaded some buttery potatoes onto her plate. “Nu, Lenachka, I hear you came over a bit later than we did. 1993, is that so?” she said. I watched her cut the meat and stuff it in her mouth with the same pleasure Igor expressed when devouring his food. She resembled a coolly polite but voracious rhinoceros. Mama reminded me that as a good Russian-American wife, I have to tolerate my future mother-in-law’s ample presence. Mama was married at 24, which was already “up there” in Russia. In one of our few black-and-white pictures from Tambov, she sits on a narrow divan looking out the window while I play with blocks at her feet. She looks lush and indescribably beautiful. Lately, after dinner, Mama has taken to drinking. “Do you think I wanted to?” she would spurt, precariously holding onto the sagging sleeve of our plastic, checkered tablecloth. “Don’t you think I too would have been happy going to bars and reading Dostoevsky or whatever, all romantic-like under these—what are they called—Tiffany lamps?” Papa would get up in disgust and move over to the couch, opening up his newspaper. “There’s no other life. It all adds up to the same thing in the end,” he would mutter. Igor asked me to dance and I caught sight of us in one of the wall mirrors. Circling around awkwardly, we looked like gruesome marionettes until I began to lead. Then our movements took on some tempo, though we still bumped into the swaying old couple next to us who gave us dirty looks. Igor shook a little in my arms. When we returned, flushed, to the table, dessert was already spread out and Igor’s mother looked displeased. “How well you dance,” she said, shaking her head and picking up a slice of watermelon. Pink juice started to dribble down her chin and she slurped it back into her mouth. I nodded and loaded a pile of fruit carcasses onto Igor’s plate. “Yes, it wasn’t so easy to get here in 1993.” Igor’s mother looked confused. I didn’t realize that I was answering her biographical questions now, at the end of the night. To me, they were only just beginning to be asked. “I will take her home,” Igor said after dessert and put on the coat I am least ashamed of. It is dark gray, but shimmers when held up to a certain light. It was the first indulgence in the new country, purchased at Burlington Coat Factory on sale as an “investment” —I told myself I would get married in this coat. When I was a teenager, Mama would take me aside during smoke-filled parties and brush away my hair lovingly. “This is my pride and joy, the only one left to me,” she would tell people, a glass of vodka in hand, while somebody strummed on a guitar in the kitchen. “Do you know what this beauty will do for us when she is married to a rich American?” “Umeret’, tozhe nado umet’” the man would hack, trying to do a good Okudzhava imitation. I would watch my mother sidle up to the musician and sway theatrically to his voice. Before I was 25, her eyes said to me, “You are my redemption,” and afterwards, “You are my curse.”
Igor proposed on our fifth date after an uninspiring meal at a Brazilian churrascaria around the corner from his place. A piece of meat was still stuck to his lower lip and I was too ashamed to tell him about it, hoping he would get the hint when I vigorously rubbed my own mouth with a napkin. His mouth was parted all night as though in preparation for an interminable sequence of meals. “Would you like a drink?” he asked afterwards and I nodded. Scotch and soda that made my heart ache a little with longing and pity. He sat down next to me on the bed and gingerly placed his hand on my left breast, as though it were the fragile head of a newborn baby. His duvet cover was dark blue and was imprinted with what resembled yellow isosceles triangles. I swiveled until my hair covered his hand—there was some shame in that movement, maybe. That night, I felt like a slurped kvas, but it was over quickly. Igor was gentle, almost nonexistent. He called me “my heart” and “my little bird” and “my wifey.” I sensed another presence there in the room with us, but I turned back to Igor and whispered, “Yes,” and let him rub my shoulders as though he was pinching a pie crust.
The wedding was celebrated in a glitzy Long Island synagogue six months later. Igor and I stood next to each other like two erect pickles, arms at our sides, eyes focused on the ancient rabbi’s mouth in scholarly concentration. Afterwards, Mama cried, the carnation on her silk blouse bobbing up and down, and she kissed Igor, who patted her on the shoulder sheepishly. We had sixty guests all together, most of them on Igor’s side. His mother weaved between tables in her garish red suit from Loehmann’s, greeting relatives I never had a chance to meet. “It’s Versace,” I heard her say a few times. “Only 350 dollars.” I was sweating in my angular dress, certain I was being dissected, my insides splayed out beneath a microscope. My friend Maggie was there. A former classmate from dental school, she was a shy, Korean ex-model. Her wedding gift was a pale yellow teddy that I wear for myself sometimes. After slipping into its supple contours, I put on lipstick and lie down next to my pillow, caressing a corner, taking it in my mouth, feeling the soft down press against my body. Late one night, I could have sworn I felt eyes on me; they were full of approval, but also of hate.
I was happy to discover that even after marriage Igor continued to open the door for me. His thick fingers rested on the back of my neck as I walked ahead of him. If he was still or ever moving art in and out of Russia, I stopped asking and he stopped mentioning it. But I never saw him appraise a painting and when I dragged him to the Met, he only cocked his head to one side and, as though speaking directly to Ingres, said, “Not bad. Very nice.” Eating my borscht happily, his face red from its steam, he began to make allusions to children, in his customarily indirect way. If my stomach hurt, his face mimicked the concern of an E.R. resident. “Is it… something more, you think?” I could not imagine having kids, though, no matter how hard I tried. I told Igor that I had to put my energy into the practice—some dumpy, Russian patients thrust upon me by Igor’s relatives and word-of-mouth. Despite hating the powdery smell of the office and the mechanical aftertaste of anything eaten in it, I stayed later and later, taking walk-ins, hysterical patients panicking about minor toothaches and missing fillings. Sometimes, I would read The Idiot into the night and call a cab home. “But you are so attractive, cultured. I knew as soon as I saw you that you would make a great mother,” Igor slipped in during dinner, between bites of pielmeni. Often, I thought about murdering my patients that sat so passively in the weathered leather chair. I could slit their throats and they would lie there like resigned cows, calmly looking up my nostrils. If I told them to undergo any major surgery, they would only sigh and agree, as though they always knew that some kind of price would have to be paid by Russian Jews who made it out.
A year after our wedding, the domovoi finally appeared just like I knew he would. By then, I was finding it difficult to hide my aversion to Igor’s pink, naked body, though I tried very hard, if only for my mother’s sake. I began to invite my parents to our apartment more often, because I could visualize their interactions at home and hoped to save them, if only for a single evening. Igor dreaded spending time with my parents, since inevitably by the end of the night, Mama would cry over her tea. “I’m so happy, Lenachka, you are a wife at last.” Or “Our family finally deserves a little happiness” or “We’re a long way from Tambov, yes?” She would gulp her tea Russian-style, through the density of our sugar cubes. My father would eventually navigate her gaunt frame towards the doorway. After they left one afternoon, Igor and I decided to go for a walk, as we do on most nights, to digest our meal. “Your mother is an embarrassment to us all,” he said suddenly, and I turned to him in disgust. He knew nothing, coming here as a child; reliant on his parents’ toil, coddled by American luxury, baked to perfection on its ambitions. “How dare you,” I said and he knew something was changed between us. The street was brightly lit, but I wished we were in the suburbs, sheltered by darkness, our house the only beacon to strive for. Instead, our surroundings didn’t look so different from Tambov, with all those irrelevant stores and the awkwardly cloned apartment complexes. I watched Igor let air in and out of his cheeks, resembling a bird that I once glimpsed on a beach in Riga. It was eating a worm. We walked back towards our stout building in silence. “Strange, Lena,” he said, when we walked through the door. The light in our living room was on. “I could have sworn we turned the lights off,” he said and shrugged, unfolding the Wall Street Journal. I stayed quiet, partially to show him I was still mad at him and was not about to let him forget I was in the right— but I knew it was no mistake. We left when it was still daytime and I always try to save money by turning on the light only when it is absolutely necessary. Our apartment induced nausea when it was bathed in this unnatural glow of the yellow light. I smiled a little while hanging up our coats. It was nice to be privy to a secret. “Bring me some tea, will you Lenachka?” Igor mumbled, his voice listlessly bouncing against the shield of the newspaper. “Of course.” I boiled water.
A few weeks later, we went out to dinner at Uncle Vanya with some of Igor’s business “colleagues”—pseudo-mafiosi, all thick and oily. They spoke perfect Russian, but conjugated certain English words as though they were Russian, like exportat or businessmeny or dollary. They stared at my breasts, when Igor was snapping his fingers for the waiter, and the large nosed, convex one wrapped one of my curls around his finger, as though he knew more about me than he really did. “You’re a real beauty,” he kept saying, grinning at me and then at Igor. “You got yourself a real beauty, Igor.” They used a lot of slang that I didn’t understand, trying to convince Igor to come with them to Russia. “C'mon, Igor. It’s a bit changed since you were there,” the taller one with the slicked back hair said. “Nah,” Igor said. “I will never go back there.” The restaurant was filling up, and the men kept passing money to the owner. I wanted to smile at Igor, squeeze his knee or give him my version of a plaintive expression, but the body by my side was stiff with pride. “Do you really like those guys?” I asked Igor, his keys scraping at the lock of our door. “They’re old friends,” Igor said. We walked in and I threw my shoes inside the closet carelessly. “You really should be more polite to them.” “Do they import art too?” I asked, unbuttoning my blazer. I heard no response, only a slow shuffling of the slippers. Suddenly, the apartment had an asymmetrical feel, as though its balance had shifted while we were gone. I glanced at our bookshelf—the books had been randomly rearranged, some spines upside down, some missing their jackets altogether. A few of the books were wedged out grotesquely as though in lewd invitation. “Igor!” I screamed. He waddled over and his eyes got fat. “My God,” he said. I didn’t touch the bookshelf, that would be dangerous. I explained to Igor that we had a domovoi and he was angry. “A what?” Igor said, again and again, shaking his head like a disoriented tourist. “What?” He said, “You are being ridiculous,” and “You are just like your mother,” and tried to stick his tongue in my ear. I swatted him away. “We should ‘take it easy’ for a while,” I said, as always trying out some American expressions, “sleep in separate bedrooms so we don’t disturb him, before he does something desperate, irreversible.” Once the domovoi becomes angry, there are no limits to his wrath. I told Igor the famous story of the displeased domovoi who he dragged one woman down the stairs by her thin, graying braid. “He must not get upset, do you understand,” I said, my voice an urgent whisper. After pleading with me in that watery way of his, Igor finally agreed to sleep in the other bedroom, the one he had reserved for “our child.” Reluctantly, I agreed to sex once a week, but asked my girlfriend from dental school to tell me about the Pill, something I could never get my hands on in Russia. It was a secret between the domovoi and myself, and nothing too unusual happened for a long time except a pair of theater tickets that disappeared the night Igor forgot our anniversary and a broken vase that my mother-in-law gave me for my birthday from a gaudy boutique on Madison Avenue. Another time, I cut my underarms with a razor and found myself fascinated by the beautiful trickle of red creeping down the edge of our cool, ceramic sink. All little acts that could be ignored. Still, I didn’t want to take any chances—the domovoi can always take the firstborn and trade it for a changeling. The baby would look normal for a few months, but perhaps one night, when I stumbled over to its crib in the middle of the night, I would discover a gurgle erupting from a foaming, cavernous mouth. My grandmother told me such stories when I was a little girl, when she would return weary from a long day of cleaning dachas for rich Muscovites on vacation. She told me that a domovoi used to visit Mama before I was born, which is why I never knew my brother Sasha, whose name my parents whispered when the weather just started to turn cold. “She deserved it, too, your mother,” my grandmother said, spitting the cracked shells of sunflower seeds into her hands. “And she knew it.” After the domovoi’s first visitation, all you can do is wait for his verdict, she told me—the inevitable moment when he forces you to face the unbending consequences of your choices. “We have to move,” Igor declared one morning, having woken up to the sounds of pots clanging in the kitchen. “I can’t take it anymore.” He said it was clear to him that the domovoi would eventually unravel the intricate creation of our marriage. Or something like that. I tried to remain calm. “I was just starting to get used to him.” “No,” he said. “This isn’t right.” That afternoon, Igor called the landlord and broke our lease. He also started to leave me dark chocolate truffles by my bedside, and when they remained there for several days—hard, solitary and stupidly bulbous-- he ate them himself.
“What can I do to make it better?” he asked one night. And
then, “Will moving really help?” When I didn’t work late, we sat in front of the television watching our favorite shows—mostly family sitcoms or action dramas. Sometimes our parents called and Igor would take the phone into the kitchen. During commercials, I noticed that the right side of the couch had developed a permanent crater. If I cried at all, it was painful and immediate, and by the time Igor returned from his phone call, I was dried-eyed, munching on Paul Newman pretzels.
The night before the move, we packed all our possessions into bulging, duct-taped boxes. Igor looked dispirited and I made him some tea before going to bed. In the bedroom, I put on the yellow teddy and pretended my pillow was the domovoi. Not the old man with the floor-sweeping, gray beard—the way we Russians have always imagined him—but like a sitcom husband melded with Tom Cruise. He was dependable and confidently gruff, lean and mystical, and insouciantly wealthy. I fell asleep tasting him in my mouth, savoring the essence of freedom. Sometime in the middle of the night, I felt a cold hand tap me on the back and I jumped up in bed. “What?” I screamed. It was Igor in his baby-blue pajamas. He peeled back the covers and slid in next to me. I waited, unmoving on the edge of the bed, for the domovoi to pronounce his final decree, but all I could hear was the sound of Igor’s snores—methodical and triumphant.
|