She wed our father in the early days of gridiron Oblya, municipally planned Oblya, right before the tsar freed the serfs with the slash of his pen. The tsar’s edict hacked up the land of the feudal lords like it was a big dead sow. My father wrapped his land in blood-soaked butcher paper and sold each parcel of it to the highest bidder—mostly Yehuli men, but some Ionik merchants as well. Meanwhile our mother worried in the foyer, her measured footsteps matching the ticks of our grandfather clock. She held me on her hip; Undine and Rose hid in her skirts.
The Yehuli man in the sitting room had a horned devil’s silhouette, Undine said when she peered out. The Ionik man was soaking wet and had silverfish crawling all over his suit, Rose said. They left with Papa’s land in their teeth, or so our mother said, and then she blew her nose into a lace doily. There was a water stain on the chaise longue that never came off.
Then Papa had only the house, and the garden, and half the number of servants that we used to because he had to pay them all the tsar’s wage instead of mortgaging their work in exchange for tilling his squares of land. That was the time when our goblin came to us, weeping out of his one big eye, when the marshes were drained and made into the foundation of a beet refinery.
Our mother’s tears splattered the mahogany floor. She wiped them onto the cheeks of our marble busts.
“My mother warned me not to marry a wizard,” she sobbed. “What will we do now, Zmiy? There is no market for sorcery in Oblya, not anymore. The poor want to smoke narghiles in Merzani coffeehouses and play dominoes in gambling dens, and the rich want to build dachas along the shore and take mud baths at the sanatorium. No one wants to see their cat turned into a cat-vase, or their carriage turned into a gourd. There is already magic lining every road—electric streetlamps!—and inside every newspaper print shop—rotary presses!—and at every booth on the boardwalk where you can get a daguerreotype of your children for two rubles. They only charge two rubles for a photograph, Zmiy. How much do you charge to turn their parasol into a preening swan?”
“Quiet, woman,” Papa said. “If you didn’t want us to starve, you would have given me a son instead of three useless daughters.” He didn’t know, yet, that we were witches.
But he went anyway to one of the copy shops and asked them to print up a hundred notices that all said the same thing: Titka Whiskers asks for the gouged eye of a second-born son as payment for her work. Titka Whiskers has Yehuli blood. Titka Whiskers fornicated with a leshy and gives birth to stick and moss babies, and then they go out and brawl with the day laborers at night.
Soon all her clients fled from her doorstep in fear. Soon the Grand Inspector came and boarded up her shopfront and gave it to a Yehuli couple who opened a pharmacy. Soon Titka Whiskers was outside, pale-faced and dressed in dark rags, rattling our gate. I remembered her yellow eyes opening and closing sideways from behind the bars of the fence, her fingers so thin and white they looked already dead.
“Hear me, Zmiy Vashchenko,” she called in her warbling crow’s voice. “Never again will you feel sated after a fat meal. Never again will you wake refreshed after a long sleep. Never again will you look upon a sunset and marvel at its beauty. Never again will you look upon your daughters and feel your heart swell with vast and mighty affection. From now on your belly will always ache as if it is empty, and your eyelids will always droop as if you have not slept since your cradle days, and every sunset will look drained of its color, and your daughters will always appear to you like nettlesome strangers.”
And then she closed her eyes and fell over and died. Her body turned into a mass of writhing black vipers, which leached into our garden like dark tree roots. It was another year before we finally trapped and killed the last one; our maid fried it in a pan and served it to my father with boiled potatoes.
He was already whittled as thin as a wishbone by then, and our mother had moved up to the third floor of the house, where she combed her hair for hours in front of the mirror that never lies and drank only sour-cherry kvass. I climbed the steps every day to see her, so that she could comb my hair, but I was too big to sit in her lap by then, and I was too afraid to look into the mirror that never lies.
“Don’t marry a wizard, Marlinchen,” she always said. “Your father is a dragon of a man. Even before the curse, he ate up everything his hands could reach. When he was young, he was as handsome as Tsar Koschei, and I was a fool. Wait for your Ivan, dear Marlinchen. He won’t care that you are plain of face.”