Looking back, it seems obvious this was about power. I had demonstrated my worth as a player. I had won tournaments. I had climbed the rankings. It was clear, to anyone who had spent time around the junior tour, that before too long I would turn pro. After that, money would start coming in. Sekou had to attach himself to me now, while I was still at this early stage, if he wanted to be a part of the team later, if he wanted to hook on to a percentage of the big reward. For a person in his position, this would mean getting between the player and the parent. Sekou said that if I wanted to stay at El Conquistador, my father would have to find another place to work.
Seeing as my father would no longer be working at the school, Sekou said we’d have to start paying just like everyone else. I’d be picked up and driven to El Conquistador each morning, taken to events and tournaments, then dropped back at the apartment each night. Yuri would be billed once a month, the amount determined by just how much Sekou and his staff worked with me, which was even worse. Not knowing how much we’d have to pay made it impossible for us to plan or prepare. Even worse, Sekou was also still holding Yuri’s visa and passport. He just kept finding reasons not to give them back. As long as he hung on to them, we were trapped. I don’t know what was in his mind, of course, but it seemed as if Sekou was trying to make us feel insecure and off balance, as if he were ripening Yuri like an apple on a tree, preparing him for the harvest.
In other words, Yuri had to find work again. Immediately. He went here and there, before finally bringing the problem to our landlady, the Russian woman who rented us her living room and part of her kitchen. She had an obvious interest in my father’s financial security: come the first of every month, we owed her $250. Meanwhile, she was dating a man who was a kind of contractor, a big guy who owned a landscaping company. He rode around in a clanking white pickup truck, dropping off and picking up his crew of workers, guys who weeded and planted and cut grass and fertilized flower beds in parks and at country clubs—the sort of work my father had done before. The man offered my father a place on his crew. My father jumped at the job. He needed money to keep me in shoes and tennis rackets, and to keep both of us housed and fed.
The work started at once. It must have been so hard for my father. He’d wake each morning at 4:00 a.m. and get dressed in the dark, make me breakfast, and leave it on the table with a note, just a few words, a bit of instruction. On those days when he had to leave for work especially early, he’d wake up, cook me rice, and put the pot under his pillow to keep it warm—that’s what I would eat when I woke up. Like Yuri, the other guys on the crew were immigrants who spoke little English. Only they were not Russian, but Mexican and Honduran and Guatemalan, and the language they spoke was Spanish. They were also much younger than Yuri. Ten years or so, in better shape, with better joints and better knees. But they were friendly and warm and took to my father, and he actually came to look forward to riding with them through the cool Florida dawn. He laughed at their stories in broken English and told stories of his own. He learned to swear in Spanish and came to love his little group. Among them, he was the mysterious Russian.
Most days they worked on the golf course at a big country club—a fancy place. The crew would split up when they arrived, head off in different directions. Yuri would walk the fairways and the greens, planting sod, replacing divots, weeding, whatever—I am not an expert in any of this—early in the morning, before the sun came up. It all had to be done before the first golfers teed off at around 6:00 a.m. Then he continued to work throughout the day, sometimes with other members of the crew, sometimes alone. He was back home by 5:00 each night, in time to make me dinner. It was a weird period in our lives that went on for months and months. He was gone each morning when I woke up, then home to feed me each night, then in that fold-out couch, where he spent hours reading books about tennis and taking notes.
He’d always had trouble with his back. It started in Russia, when he was working on those smokestacks. He would forget about it for weeks or even years, then, out of the blue, the pain would return. Working on that landscaping crew was probably not the best sort of job for a man in his condition. One day, and it was very early in the morning, when he was working on a green at the country club, his back went out. It’s easy for me to write that, of course. “His back went out.” But I can’t really understand how it felt. He said it was excruciating, the most pain he’s ever experienced in his life—bolts of lightning burning through his spine. It knocked him to the ground. Literally. All he could do was lie there, flat on his back, muttering and grimacing, alone in the dark, getting wet from the dew and the sprinklers, which never let the grass dry. He does not know exactly how long he lay there. He was in a delirium, fading in and out. The sky turned pale. Then he saw the trees. Then he saw the leaves on the trees. Then the sky turned blue and it got very hot. Finally, a man spotted him—this lone figure, stretched out on the green, groaning—and raced over in a golf cart. He tried to talk to Yuri and get him up, but Yuri just muttered in Russian and could not be moved. At first, the guy assumed my father was drunk. Look what turned up on the fifteenth green! A drunk Russian. Probably one of the oligarchs! He finally realized that Yuri was not drunk—he was in pain and asking for help. The guy went and got some of the other workers from the landscaping crew. They stood around Yuri, trying to help. They finally lifted him off the ground, put him in a cart, and brought him to the clubhouse, where he was laid out in back, moaning.
One of Yuri’s coworkers called the boss. He told him that Yuri was in bad shape and needed to get to the hospital. He wanted to call an ambulance. The boss said no—ambulances are expensive. He said he’d be there soon and would take Yuri to the hospital himself. In fact, he did not show up till the end of the day. Yuri lay groaning in that back room for hours and hours.
He was in and out of the hospital in a few hours. They let him go with a bottle of painkillers, instructions for rehab exercises, and an order to stay off his feet as much as possible. I did not learn about any of this until later, when Yuri called from the hospital. It must have been 7:00 p.m. The whole time, one of the workers told me, he’d been saying, “Masha, Masha, I’ve got to get home to make dinner for Masha.”
Yuri spent two weeks in bed. He was in the worst shape. We hid all this from my mother. When she called, we pretended everything was good, fine, perfect. Meanwhile, I was doing my best to take care of him. I did the grocery shopping, made the meals, fed him. I made breakfast before I left for El Conquistador in the morning, then came straight back to the apartment following my afternoon match. It seemed to me that what he really needed was a swimming pool. That would be the best place for him to exercise, stretch his back, and recover. I went up and down the street, knocking on doors, asking whoever answered if they had a swimming pool and could we use it. It sounds like a crazy strategy, but I finally found a nice old lady who agreed to let us use her pool several times a week. That’s when Yuri finally began to recover. After three weeks rehabbing in that pool, he was good enough to stand and walk and shop and so on, but I didn’t think he’d ever be able to do manual labor again.
In the meantime, we’d stopped making money. You’d think the boss of the crew, who was, after all, dating our landlady, would have at least paid Yuri for the time off, or covered some of the medical bills. After all, he’d been injured while working for this man. Nope. Nada. Nothing. In fact, my father thinks he actually prorated the day Yuri got hurt, paid him for just the two hours when he’d been pulling weeds, not the six other hours he’d been stretched out groaning. Very soon, we had to stop paying bills. That’s when the landlady began looking at us in a new, unfriendly way. We stopped being tenants and started being a problem. One afternoon, she walked a strange man through our rooms, showing him around but saying nothing. A few days later, she reminded Yuri about the rent. “If you can’t pay me, you and Maria will have to leave,” she said. “I have another tenant ready to move in.”