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.

She beat her son senseless and, from that day on, kept her books locked in a giant lacquered bookcase.

Baba Varya died in 1961, age ninety-seven, and Andrei did indeed bury her.

It wasn’t until 1973 that he decided to destroy the boxes full of his mother’s belongings. Mom was there that day. She told me that Grandma Ksenia sat at the kitchen table the entire time, cracking roasted sunflower seeds between her teeth, and it was Mom—belly full of me—who braved the steps down to the basement that morning to help her father-in-law erase his mother’s frightening legacy.

“Ksenia is afraid,” Grandpa told my mother. “But I don’t blame her. It took my mother very long to die, you know. She writhed on her deathbed for days, covered in blisters and sores.”

“What caused them?” Mom asked.

“Nobody knows. They spread and oozed pus over her skin one day. She carried the notion that the Devil kept her from dying because of all the horrible things she’d done, so she sent for a priest. To him she confessed every hex. Two days later she passed. And at her funeral not a person spoke, terrified that her restless spirit would shoot down their mouth and possess them.”

Tossing book after book into the furnace, Mom told me she fought the urge to keep at least one—a curiosity that she reined in perhaps out of respect for the man who had accepted her as his daughter. Mom helped him empty each box while he told stories from his childhood of the mother whom he loved and feared. Only one book escaped their notice, and it was now in my father’s possession.

Grandpa was never sure if Fokla had indeed predicted his siblings’ death or cast an “evil eye” and somehow willed them to expire. He feared either truth. When he found out that Dad had Baba Varya’s book, he offered to buy it back for two hundred rubles, just to burn it.

“I won’t sell it,” my father said.

“I tell you, son, the Devil never gives without expecting profit.”

“Don’t you think I know better than to deal in hexes and bloody rituals?” Dad said.

“What I know is that the more you practice, the less of yourself you keep.”

“What if I can fix it? Did you think about that?”

“You’re not a practitioner,” Grandpa said.

“Not yet.”

As always, my father had taken the path staked by his own father with “No Trespassing” signs.

I knew that Grandpa Andrei had been right. My father soon forgot that he started practicing to rid his family of Baba Varya’s supposed evil, infatuated as he was with the idea of tapping into a parallel world, of linking with beings that had chosen him as a receptor of their graces. He didn’t have as many clients as Olga, but those who came to see him cared little for entertaining tarot spreads. I was chilled every time one crossed the living room on the way to the séance room. Often they left an unsettling impression after they’d gone, an invisible but heavy residue that made you eager to step outside and gulp sweet air into your lungs.