Moscow but Dreaming (6 page)

When Anton and Claudia moved into their new house in an Ohio suburb, they thought it was a sign of how things would be from now on—new and clean and brilliant. Now they could start a family, although Claudia disliked that expression.

“It’s not like we’re not a family,” she told Anton after another phone conversation with her mother. Claudia’s relatives, a loud clan of sun-baked, stocky Bulgars, intimidated Anton to such an extent that he loathed disagreeing with them, even in their absence.

“You know what she means,” he told his wife, and put his arm around her slender hips. “It’s just not the same without children.”

Claudia nodded and gently wrestled from under his heavy arm. “I better get the dinner started,” she said. She slipped into the kitchen and chopped onions and carrots, then tenderized chicken cutlets with a wooden mallet. She would never be enough for him, she thought. She wanted a baby, sure enough, but she wished it were not required to be complete.

When Anton started his new job, she stayed home, working in the garden, building a chicken coop, embroidering curtains and knitting baby jumpers, striped green, yellow, and red—her only rebellion against tradition, but she just couldn’t stomach any pink and blue. She fed the chickens, and made pancakes and crepes for Fat Tuesday. When March came, she made martenitsas—little red and white yarn dolls—and hung them over windows and doors to greet the arrival of spring. But she just couldn’t get pregnant.

At first, Claudia resisted seeing the doctor, afraid to give Anton more ammunition he would use to blame her for her inadequacy. Soon she ran out of excuses, and sat in the doctor’s office as the doctor explained the common causes of infertility. Anton’s gray gaze hung over Claudia like a rain cloud, and she knew he was not paying attention to the doctor, but quietly smoldering, furious that his wife was defective.

A few weeks later, when the doctor informed them that there was nothing wrong with her, Claudia felt a short-lived burst of satisfaction. It was Anton who had the problem.

The doctor suggested artificial insemination, anonymous donors. Claudia looked at Anton with hope. She did want a baby, after all, but Anton would not hear of it. Claudia proposed adoption, but he only sighed and shook his dark-haired head. It was expensive, he said; Claudia did not argue, knowing that Anton would not raise a child that was not his.

By the time March came again, Claudia busied herself with tying together bundles of red and white yarn, and hanging her martenitsas above every window and doorway. Most of the residents in Somerville, Ohio did not know what these dolls were, but other Bulgarians instantly recognized the traditional greeting of the springtime. And so did other Slavs, even those that weren’t quite human.

The first sign that something was amiss came when Claudia went into the basement to fetch some pickles and raspberry preserves she’d made last fall. She skipped down the steps, invigorated by the fresh bite in the air, and a large onion flew past her head.

Claudia gave a small cry of alarm, and squinted into the dusk of the basement. Another onion hit her in the shoulder, with little force but startling nonetheless.

“Who’s there?” Claudia said, in English and then Bulgarian. Another onion (that missed badly) was her only answer. Claudia ran over to the barrel with onions, and dodged

another projectile. Her assailant, moving with such speed that its outline blurred, rushed past her and up the stairs. She chased after, encouraged by the fact that her assailant was rather small.

Outside, there was no sign of the attacker, and when Anton came home, he only laughed at her story. However when a horrid racket woke them up in the middle of the night, Anton was not laughing. He grabbed the baseball bat he kept by the bed for such an occasion, and tiptoed into the kitchen, hitching up his pajama bottoms nervously. Claudia followed, less alarmed, feeling vindicated.

Their best china—wedding gifts from countless relatives— lay in shards on the kitchen tiles, glistening in the moonlight seeping through the window. The screen door flapped in the wind. The mysterious little troublemaker was nowhere in sight, but high-pitched shrieks and ululations started outside.

“What the hell?” Anton hefted his bat and headed outside.

The screams came from the chicken coop in the back yard, but quieted as soon as Anton and Claudia reached the door.

“Shh,” Claudia whispered. “Listen.”

“One, two, three,” came a little stuttering voice from inside the coop. “One, two, three . . . ”

Anton threw the door open, and in the swath of moonlight they saw a little girl, dressed in a poorly patched potato sack. She was counting chickens, but turned toward the sound of the opening door, her eyes flashing huge and dark, and shrieked. Before Claudia or Anton could react, she rushed outside, running so close to Claudia that she felt a brush of cloth and a gust of icy wind, but no flesh.

The mysterious girl carried on like that, throwing onions and potatoes, breaking dishes and preserve jars, and shrieking in the coop. She could only count to three, but that did not stop her obsessive attempts to count clucking, ruffled chickens.

“One, two, three,” she screamed, sending them into a wild flapping panic. “One, two, three!” All attempts to chase her away brought only temporary relief.

Claudia became convinced that the wild girl was not of any earthly agency. She asked her mother to send any and all books of fairytales and folk superstitions she could find. Claudia found the answer in one of the books describing the pagan Slavic traditions. Eastern peoples spoke of the malevolent house spirit called Kikimora. Claudia could not wait to tell Anton about her discovery.

For once, he listened. Dark circles under his eyes spoke of his lack of rest, and Claudia was certain that his willingness to listen was due to his exhaustion.

“See?” Claudia showed him the picture of a lopsided girl. “It says here, the kikimoras throw onions, break dishes and count livestock, but can’t go past three.”

“Yep,” Anton said. “Sounds like one of those things. What else does it say?”

“It says that they can’t sew, but try anyway. The stitches all come out crooked and weak. It says that before misfortune they make lace, and clicking and rattling of their bobbins keeps the inhabitants of the possessed house up all night.”

Anton yawned and rubbed his face. “Does it say how to get rid of them?”

Claudia paused for a moment, thinking of the best way to translate the words on the page in front of her. “If you catch her and cut the shape of a cross into her hair, she will become human.”

“What else?”

Claudia flipped through the book. “Doesn’t say anything else.”

“I suppose it could work,” Anton said. “If she becomes a person, we can hand her over to the police.”

Claudia nodded. Or we can keep her, she thought. Some things were best left unsaid, and thought about only in Bulgarian.

“How do we catch it?”

“It says the kikimoras can’t resist bobbins, warm milk, and unfinished sewing.”

“Let’s try all of those,” Anton said, his eyes glinting with unexpected enthusiasm.

Before they went to bed, they laid out their enticements on the kitchen table: Claudia’s mother’s birchwood bobbins, a cup of microwaved milk, and one of Anton’s shirts Claudia began to hem, but never got around to finishing. Next to the shirt they left thread and needles, turned off the lights, and stomped to the bedroom with an overwrought display of fatigue. They stretched, yawned, and told each other how tired they were; they giggled like children at their deceit, and whispered conspiratorially, their lips brushing past the other’s ears. Claudia could not remember the last time she felt so close to him; they lay in bed, listening, whispering, holding hands.

At midnight, the kikimora started her habitual wailing and screeching and shattering of now sparse glass, but soon she fell quiet. There was a brief clatter of the bobbins, and Claudia tensed and sat up, grabbing a pair of scissors from the bedside table. Anton and Claudia tiptoed back to the kitchen, and watched silently as the kikimora drained the milk in one long thirsty swallow, and started on sewing. She was no better at it than at counting, but persisted, quickly covering the bottom of Anton’s shirt in mismatched tracks of stitches and crooked seams that weaved through the fabric like the footprints of a drunk in the snow. She was so preoccupied with her task, her small soiled hands flying, that she did not notice when Claudia snuck up behind her.

Claudia grabbed the small body, disconcertingly cold and slippery, and hugged it tight to her chest. The kikimora shrieked and flailed with the strength surprising in someone so small. She almost kicked free, but Anton grabbed her reed-thin shoulders and pinned them to the floor. Her legs kicked up, blurring with speed, and she screamed and screamed, like a wounded animal. Claudia’s hands shook as she took the scissors to the creature’s wispy hair, and with two swift strokes exposed a cross-shaped patch of her white skull.

The girl went quiet and limp, her eyes rolling back in her head. For one dreary moment, Claudia feared that they killed her, and she shook the girl—so tiny, she couldn’t be more than three years old—until her eyes swiveled back and met Claudia’s. “Ba-ba,” the girl said.

“Where did you find her?” said the social worker, looking up with tired eyes from his paper-littered desk.

“She was hiding in our cellar,” Anton answered. “We found her yesterday.”

“We’ll check her against all missing persons reports,” the social worker said. “Thanks for bringing her in.”

The little girl, sensing that something was amiss, grabbed onto Claudia’s hand, looking at her with pleading dark eyes. She had quite a bit of a lazy eye, but Claudia did not care. To her, the little changeling was the most precious thing, no matter how lopsided or cross-eyed.

Claudia squeezed the girl’s hand. “What if no one claims her?” she said. “What will happen to her?”

“Foster care,” said the social worker. “What, you’re interested?”

“Yes,” Claudia said, avoiding looking at Anton. “Please keep us posted—I don’t want someone else taking her in.”

“Okay,” he said, and gave the little kikimora a thorough looking over. “Don’t worry, I’m sure the competition won’t be stiff.”

As they left the social services building, Claudia listened absently to the girl’s crying inside.

“Well?” Anton said. “What’s that foster nonsense?”

“She’s ours,” Claudia whispered fiercely. “She chose us, and we are not turning her away.”

“But—”

She spun around, cutting him off. “Anton, I never asked you for anything. I put up with a lot of shit. But you can’t deny me this.” She stared at Anton, silently challenging him. The cars passed by in the broad streets without sidewalks, and above them the cloudless May sky bloomed azure. The birds twittered in a few perfunctory maples lining the parking lot.

“I guess she did come to us,” Anton said, and patted his pockets for the car keys. “Maybe it is a sign.”

Satisfied, Claudia nodded and walked to the car. At home, she resumed her busy routine, but never strayed away from the phone for more than a few minutes at a time.

Despite her irrational fears, there were no living relatives uncovered, and no desperate couples rushed to adopt the girl. She had scoliosis, and her eyes were badly crossed. She did not speak, but seemed relieved to be brought back to the home where she first became human, comforted by familiar sounds of the chickens clucking in the back yard, and smells of the first preserves of the season.

Anton never took more than a perfunctory interest in the child, but Claudia did not mind. Tina, as she named the girl, seemed content to follow Claudia around the house and the backyard, and watched her every movement with quiet intensity. For a few weeks Claudia felt happy—as happy as she was when she and Anton first moved into the house, full of hope. And just as then, the happiness soon gave way to discontent.

She could’ve coped with an ill child—she could’ve spent nights sitting up soothing fevers, administering injections, giving sponge baths. But she did not know what to do when Tina went rigid and screamed and screamed without any visible provocation, without an end, growing hoarse but still screaming and moaning, the back of her throat shredded with exertion. She couldn’t cope when the girl banged her head against the table, the pulsing blue vein in her forehead vehemently searching for the sharp edge, when the girl clawed her own face, gouging deep parallel ravines into her translucent skin.

“What will we do?” Claudia asked Anton, as Tina napped in her lap, temporarily consoled, curled up like a shrimp.

“I don’t know,” Anton said. He had good grace not to add, You wanted this. “Maybe she needs to see a doctor.”

Claudia’s fingers ran through the girl’s hair absently. “Maybe.”

Tina did not like the idea of leaving the house—she kicked when they loaded her into the car and strapped her down in a plastic safety seat. She bit Anton’s arm as he buckled the seatbelt over her. Two crescent wounds swelled with blood. He frowned and got into the driver’s seat.

Claudia looked out of the window at the fluffy clouds littering the sky and kept quiet. She did not want to admit that Anton was right, and stubbornly hoped that things would work out. They just had to.

They had to wait in the reception area, and Claudia blushed and lowered her head under the disapproving eyes of the receptionist and a few parents. Tina twisted and hissed, slid off her chair as if she had no bones, and tried to bang her head on the coffee table, littered with colorful fans of magazines.

“Shh,” Claudia whispered, and held Tina’s head. “It’s all right, it’s all right.”

Anton stared at the wall opposite him, his hands thrust deep into his pockets. He wanted nothing to do with either of them, and didn’t even try to hide it.

When they were finally called in, Claudia had to resist an urge to jerk Tina by her arm, just drag her along like a floppy doll. Instead, she carried her. The girl tried to slide through her arms like soap.

The doctor, a nice young woman just a little older than Claudia, listened to her sympathetically, every now and again giving Tina a penetrating look. Tina still hissed, but remained still in the cocoon formed by Claudia’s arms and lap, squirming only occasionally.