THINGS UNSEEN

During my first months living at my father’s, our conversations ran in shallow streams of dinner talk (helmed mostly by Olga), discussions of the supernatural, and music-related topics, where it was safe. We’d been strangers for so long, Dad and I. The reasons are sharp and at the same time fuzzy inside my head, like memories I might’ve stolen from the life of someone I used to know. What had made us like this?

According to my sources, aka relatives who get sloshed at parties, one reason might’ve been the fact that Mom became pregnant with me the first night my parents spent together. Perhaps Dad married her only because he had to.

The problem with beginning as my parents did is once the heat subsides and two people realize they’d rather join the Communist Party than spend a minute in each other’s company, their child becomes a padlock that keeps them in that cold place.

Of course, growing up I had no inkling that I was the whisk that truly stirred my parents into chaos. Oftentimes Grandma Ksenia called me a “child of sinful passion” when I misbehaved, which naturally made me think she was alluding to my wicked temperament. As I matured, my father’s tough love bared its roots. In our culture, a child conceived out of wedlock brings bad luck, as it belongs to the dark spirit that rules our darkest impulse: lust. Little good is expected from it, but evil is assigned naturally. To some, I might as well have stepped out of The Omen, as Damien’s female doppelgänger, and once I knew that, my honorary title made sense. And never more so than on the day I revealed to my parents a terrible secret.

When I was seven, our next-door neighbor was a beautiful blond man with a beautiful blond family: his wife, Brigita, with a voice as fragile as the spring buds of a pussy willow; his daughter, Gala, who was my age; and a toddler boy who went by Ponchik (“Doughnut”). Peteris was in his mid-thirties. I remember watching him cook for his family in their tiny kitchen, peeling potatoes for a farmer’s omelet and feeding all of us kids the raw slices before tossing the rest into a skillet that sizzled with butter. I never knew that you could eat raw potatoes, but he assured us that in the old days Slavs used to eat them this way. I loved playing with Gala, who kept a burlap sack full of her brother’s old baby clothes for us to dress our dolls in. I’d bring my own bag of Roxy’s cloth diapers and onesies. We’d swap outfits for hours. On the nights my parents were gone performing, Peteris and Brigita often stayed at our place to watch over us kids.

One night I woke up.

My parents’ bedroom overlooked the backyard, where birds sang even at the latest of hours. We had so many trees, they probably assumed we were part of the forest that spread around our neighborhood like a mantle made of pine needles. I felt safest in that room, in my parents’ oversize bed, curled in their sheets, surrounded by their scent. To my left eight-month-old Roxy slept in her crib. To my right the moon peeked through Mom’s curtains. Above me the ceiling whirled between light and shadows cast by the trees outside. And below me was Peteris. He’d pulled me on top of him, and the fingers of his one hand were inside my underwear, the other tugging my shirt to my chin.

“What are you doing?”

“You’re dreaming. Close your eyes.”

“I’ll tell Mom.”

“No you won’t. If you do she’ll be mad, and you and Gala won’t be friends anymore.”

“I’ll tell.”

He rolled me off him, and I drifted back to sleep.

The next morning I sat on the kitchen floor dressing Sipsik, my favorite doll, while Mom swirled a whisk through a pan of farina on top of the stove. She was humming a song from Ironiya Sudby (The Irony of Fate), a famous Russian romantic comedy.

“Mom, Peteris woke me up last night.”

She leaned an elbow on the counter and continued to stir with the other hand.

“Why, sladkaya (sweet)? Did he have the TV on too loud?”

“He touched me.”

I felt my mother vault through the kitchen and crouch before me. The farina will be all ruined now, I thought, black clumps and everything. She lifted my chin, and as Peteris had predicted, she was angry.

“What are you talking about?”

I said no more. Sipsik needed a change. I made to get up, but Mom planted her hands on my shoulders.

“Where? Where did he touch you?”

With each place I showed her, her fingers ground me harder into the floor.

“He said it was a dream.”

I told her even though I knew I’d get in trouble. But I wanted to prove Peteris wrong. He’d sounded so smug. By all accounts I was a child who routinely defied orders. (Grandpa once told me I was lucky to be a girl, as I’d make a poor foot soldier.)

I was more scared of her reaction than of the actual incident. Why was she ripping the covers from around my sleeping father’s body, exploding with threats of dismembering his good friend? Why was she dragging him half naked down the stairs and out the back door, and hollering for Peteris and Brigita to come out? Within five minutes the five of us stood in front of the wooden fence with our neighbors on the other side. Mom was shouting and cursing, Brigita crying. She asked me over and over, “Did he really touch you there?” And every time I said yes, her face cracked as if I’d put a hammer to it. I also wanted to cry, not for me but as an instinctive response to Brigita; her hysteria indicated something awful had happened. I wished I could understand what it was. In all this confusion and melodrama, Peteris and my father, who insisted that I dreamed the whole thing, were calm.

“I wasn’t in the bedroom, Oksana.” Peteris winked at me, and I lowered my head. Something made it difficult to meet his eyes.

“You were.”

“She’s a kid,” my father said. “We don’t need to make such a big deal of this. Why destroy a great friendship over a child’s imagination?”

My mother’s hands flew to her face. “What kind of a child imagines something like that?”

Dad looked down at me. A wicked kind.

Soon after, Peteris and his family moved away. Having nothing to compare the incident to, my mind quickly pushed it down the basement stairs and locked the door. For years I never thought of that night. Not until I saw Peteris again when I was fourteen.

A month after Ruslan’s death, our doorbell rang at close to midnight. Mom wasn’t home and I thought it was her. I peeked out of my room and saw a tall figure in a black wool coat embracing my father. Even from behind I recognized him, and my breath grew shallow like I was breathing through a thick layer of gauze. I hurriedly shut my bedroom door, blasted the TV, and sat in the corner on the plastic chair I never used. The voices outside that door were cheerful, the way they usually were when we had company. My fingers clawed the chair’s hard edges, and I pressed my knees together so tight it hurt. I had only two thoughts:

1. God, please don’t let him come in here.

2. How could Dad allow him into our house again?

The door opened. My father ushered Peteris in and swept an arm in my direction.

“And here’s our Oksana. All grown up.”

I wasn’t mad at him for not smashing Peteris’s face back at that fence: I can imagine that the two of them being such good friends made it impossible for Dad to believe in the other man’s betrayal. After all, it’s not easy to see those we love or trust as villains. But I’ve never felt more humiliated than in that room, more invisible to my father, and this made a bigger impact on me than the incident in my parents’ bedroom.

Dad’s instincts sided with his friend, and some would say that it made him a good friend and that there’s nothing wrong with that. Only there was. Peteris could’ve survived a punch in the mug and a few Gypsy curses. I, on the other hand, didn’t fare so well. My father’s instincts wedged themselves between us like a drunk on a crowded subway.

He didn’t believe me.

The very last time I saw Agrefina, she said something so bizarre that I didn’t understand it for years. She and I were inside her house, warming our hands on a bench near the stove. Mom had gone to use the outhouse. This was one of the coldest winter days, and before Mom and I took the taxi from Moscow, I’d bundled up in a yellow faux-fur coat that made me look like I carried a lion cub on my back. The coat hung on a hook near the door, crystalline snowflakes melting on the wooden floor below.

Agrefina gently tapped my hand with her index finger. “Your beautiful coat has a rip, detochka (little child).”

I looked over my shoulder.

“You won’t see it now. It’s been there for years, though it’s still tiny. But when you do see it, remember that it will grow if not mended.”

All I could do was frown, worried. In this weather a hole in a coat could mean an awful cold later.

She smoothed my hair out of my face. “I’m not worried. You have a very good coat. Warm and sturdy. I’m not worried at all.”

Not once did she point to or look at the coat in question. Back home I shook it and turned it inside out, but found nothing. At fourteen I wasn’t too fluent in metaphors, but now I know what she meant. I wish it hadn’t taken so long.