The Russian Word for Snow Read online

  the camera lights like moles that have been unearthed unexpectedly.

  "A bomb exploded in the Moscow subway . . . ," the newscaster was saying, pronouncing the last syllable of the city "cow" instead of "coe," the way I did. For a moment, I wondered which was right. Then I realized that the frightened blinking people were in the same city I was.

  "Did he say Moscow?" Ken flew out of the bathroom.

  We stared at a woman whose eyes shone white from a sooty face.

  "The incident occurred on the Zamoskvoretskaya line," said the newscaster.

  A woman on a stretcher was crying, both hands over her face.

  "We've been on that line." Ken dropped onto the bed.

  On the television, a man with bloody sideburns was helped to an ambulance. Another man, who was drunk or disoriented, stumbled out of the subway, still clutching a newspaper under his arm.

  "Sources believe that the bombing in Moscow is related to the upcoming election."

  " 'Cow' or 'coe'?" I repeated, trying to make that the only thing that was uncertain about this city. Moscow was coming apart. There would be more bombs, more explosions, more people crying with both hands over their faces. Soon no one will have time to worry about a small boy in an orphanage who has learned the melody of an American song.

  I grabbed onto Ken's fingers, willing this city with the undecided pronunciation to hold together until we could get Alex out of it.

  The Hairy Hand on the Metro

  The carpets in the room at the Intourist Hotel were worn down to the burlap netting, and the furniture was covered with cracked yellow veneer that made it look like peanut brittle.

  "Do you have a crib?" Ken asked the man from the hotel.

  The man shook his head to show he hadn't understood.

  Ken mimed rocking a baby, laying it down to sleep.

  "No," the man replied, "no, crib." Then he showed us how we could push two chairs up against the couch that had been built into the wall. "Crib," he told us.

  We were leaving the Radisson, moving to the less-expensive Intourist, where Anna knew someone who would give us a special rate. But when we arrived with all our suitcases, the special rate was $50 higher than she'd quoted, and it was unclear whether the man had ever met Anna.

  "You take?" asked the man from the hotel.

  "Yes, we take." Ken gave the man enough dollars for a week's worth of nights.

  After the man left, I put the chairs back. Seeing them pushed against the couch, protecting no one, depressed me.

  "At least there's a view," Ken said.

  We were on the twelfth floor, overlooking the Kremlin. Above the brick towers and yellow walls of the government buildings, I could see the five gilded domes of the Assumption Cathedral. But the Intourist windows hadn't been washed in some time, and everything on the other side—the buildings, and even the air—looked dim and oily.

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  "You can hear the Turks working on the underground mall," I said.

  The room vibrated with a steady pounding, like a subterranean heartbeat.

  "They are building umm . . . shopping mall beneath Red Square," Anna had told us. "Government wants it finished by anniversary of Moscow, so they use Turks because they will work twenty-fours hours each day."

  "Let's get some lunch," Ken said. And we took the elevator down to look for a restaurant.

  On the way to the lobby, we passed a long bench filled with tourists—chubby middle-aged Americans clutching meal vouchers, European travelers in their twenties with rucksacks, Russian couples of all ages holding cardboard suitcases on their laps. They sat submissively, shoulder to shoulder, as though they'd all been infected with the same strain of despair. I assumed they were waiting to begin their tour of Lenin's tomb or Tolstoy's house, but they seemed to hold very little hope of actually going.

  In the lobby, Russian men in suits that creased across their forearms stood talking into tiny cell phones, eyeing everyone who walked by. They made me remember reading in the Moscow Times that it was possible to have a person killed in this city for $2,000.

  Next door to the Intourist, we found Patio Pizza, a Western-style restaurant with a salad bar protected by a sneeze guard so enormous, I had to strain my neck away when I scooped up the hard little croutons.

  Like most of the people in Patio Pizza, the woman sitting next to us was American. I watched her feeding tiny spoonfuls of chicken and stars soup to the little girl who sat in her lap. The girl had the same thin blond hair as Alex, the same thousand-yard stare when she ate. When she lifted her shoulder to brush away a star that had stuck to the corner of her mouth, I saw that her left arm was too short. Bits of skin that looked

  like the beginnings of fingers stuck out from the place where the elbow should have been.

  "This is Madeline Grace Rose." The woman beamed at us. She had the slurred, smooth consonants of the South. "I'm adopting her."

  "She's very pretty," I told the woman, pulling my eyes away from the little starts of fingers.

  The woman smiled at the compliment, unsurprised that I'd commented on the loveliness of her daughter.

  She fed the little girl all the stars in the bowl, and when she wiped the girl's hands, I noticed that she passed the napkin gently over all her fingers, even the tiny ones where the elbow should have been.

  I thought of Alex's hands, and the way he'd taken to resting them on either side of my neck when I held him.

  "I think that's Olya out there," Ken said, peering through the orphanage windows.

  Near the swing set, a woman was hugging Olya so tightly that her small arms stuck out like a doll's.

  "Who's that holding her?"

  "I can't tell." Ken put the video camera to his eye and pressed the button to make it zoom. "There's a woman and a man. I think they're here to adopt Olya."

  "How do you know?"

  "The man just kissed the top of her head."

  Ken gave me the camera, and I saw the part in the woman's reddish hair, the glint of the man's wedding ring as he patted the back of Olya's terry-cloth pajamas. The couple stayed in the yard until the three-year-olds came out, running toward the swings in identical brown oxford shoes.

  Coming up the stairs, the woman talked to Olya. "You're such a sweet little girl," she said, "such an angel." Her singsong voice echoed and bounced off the walls, so that it sounded as if Olya

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  was being addressed by more than one woman. "My baby," the woman exclaimed, "my precious, precious baby." All the way up, she showered Olya with English endearments that must have sounded like passionate gibberish to the child in her arms.

  Inside the room with the big playpen, the woman's husband hovered over his wife, waiting for her to relinquish her hold on Olya. He wore thick glasses that made his eyes look large and childlike, and he kept tucking the little girl's light brown hair behind her ear whenever it fell forward.

  "You're American?" Ken asked.

  "From New Jersey," the man said.

  "I feel like I'm going to cry," the woman burst out, hugging Olya's stiff body against her soft chest. "I'm just so happy!"

  Ken and I showed them around the room, introduced them to Alex, and explained about the signature we were waiting for.

  "You've been here two weeks?" The man's enormous eyes were baffled.

  "Twelve days," I corrected him.

  It was the couple from New Jersey's first visit to Moscow. They had their American adoption coordinator with them.

  "Elizabeth Edwards International Families." The woman made the agency sound like part of her name.

  Elizabeth Edwards wore glasses attached to a string of amber beads and could speak fluent Russian. Irina kept her head bowed whenever she spoke to her.

  I remembered that Maggie had been trying to learn Russian. Each time I'd gone to her house, I saw the same Russian primer on her kitchen table, a book that appeared to have been written for children with a picture of a cat and a
ball on the cover. I didn't think Maggie ever opened the book—there were always toast crumbs scattered over the childish drawings.

  "Elizabeth flew here with us," said the woman from New Jersey, wrapping her free arm around the coordinator's shoulder. "She's just made everything so easy, hasn't she?" She appeared

  to address the question to Olya, and kissed her cheek loudly. The small girl touched the spot and then examined her own fingers.

  I picked up Alex, who'd been running the blue and yellow lawn mower over my feet.

  "Where's your coordinator?" Elizabeth asked.

  "Back in Berkeley," I told her.

  I'd been leaving messages on Maggie's machine every day for over a week. "You can always reach us after 9:00 P.M. That's 8:00 in the morning your time." Every night, Ken and I would rush back from dinner and sit up in our shabby room at the Intourist, waiting for her call until we couldn't stay awake any longer.

  "Don't you think she'd want to know that our papers haven't been signed?" I asked Ken. "Doesn't she care that we don't have a translator anymore, that we hardly ever see Yuri?"

  "I guess not."

  But still I'd pick up the phone and dial the long string of numbers that connected me to Maggie's damp little house. We'd given her $5,000 to help us adopt Alex. I was certain there was something she could do, somebody she could call. Even if it was just Yuri, to keep him from forgetting about us.

  Irina brought in a tray of steaming bowls and set them down on the small Formica table. The man leaned over to see what was inside, clouding up his thick glasses.

  "Ohh . . . looks like it's lunchtime," the woman told Olya, giving her an excited squeeze.

  I slid Alex into one of the chairs that clipped onto the edge of the table and tied a piece of cotton around his neck. Then I waited until Irina let me know which bowl was his. The other children stood at the pink and white railings, crying and lifting up their arms.

  While I fed Alex, Elizabeth Edwards reviewed the couple's itinerary: how long they could stay at the orphanage, what time they would return in the afternoon, when they'd have to leave

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  for the airport. All the while she was talking, the man kept touching the row of pens in his shirt pocket, as if wishing he could be writing this down.

  His wife was watching Irina feed Nashty.

  After nearly two weeks, I'd gotten used to the choking sounds the children made when the pureed meat and vegetables were poured down their throats. But this was the first time the woman from New Jersey had seen it. She stood with her hand over her mouth and made a little gagging sound whenever Nashty spit up some food, trying to take a breath.

  "Will you feed Olya for me?" the woman said softly next to my ear. "Whenever you can?"

  "Of course," I told her, though I wasn't certain Irina would allow it. "When do you come back for her?"

  "In six weeks," Elizabeth Edwards announced. "Perhaps less."

  "Hope you guys aren't still here," the husband joked, wiping his glasses with a little chamois cloth he kept in his back pocket. Without the thick lenses, his eyes looked small and squinty. He probably couldn't see that we weren't smiling.

  "I need to change a return flight," I told the woman in the United Airlines office. Over the phone, I could hear the clicking of a keyboard and the soft murmurings of other voices.

  "I'm sorry, but you can't do that."

  "I have to," I explained. "There's no way we can leave on June 15th."

  "I'm afraid your tickets are not changeable."

  "But they're frequent-flyer tickets. Frequent-flyer tickets are always changeable."

  "Usually, yes. But we don't have an office in Moscow."

  "Can't you just change them on the phone?"

  "I'm afraid not."

  "But my husband and I are here trying to adopt a little boy and—"

  "I'm showing that you had a child with you on the way out."

  "That was a mistake."

  When I booked the tickets, I'd told the airlines that we would be traveling with a child on the return only, but somehow this information had not gone into their computer. The morning we arrived at the airport, the man at the check-in counter told me. "We've separated you and your husband, so that one of you will be in a seat with a child-sized oxygen mask." Even after I'd explained that we didn't have our child yet, he'd refused to put us back together, saying it would be against FAA safety regulations.

  "Look," I said to the man, who had a pair of little wings clipped to his shirt, "do you see a child with me?" I held up the empty backpack carrier we were bringing to Moscow.

  "It says 'child' in the computer," he replied, without looking up from the screen.

  "Mistake or not," the woman in the United office was saying, "if you want to use those tickets, you'll have to return on June fifteenth."

  "But I can't!"

  "There's no need to shout."

  I heard clicking in the background, and I wondered if she was typing in that I'd yelled at her.

  "Please," I said, making my voice soft and sorry, "isn't there anything you can do?"

  "I'm afraid your tickets are not changeable."

  "But we're here adopting a baby."

  "I understand," the woman said.

  I could hear something in her voice that was supposed to sound sympathetic, but it was more of an approximation, as if someone had told her, "This is what sympathy sounds like."

  "You don't understand!" I was shouting again. "If you did, you would help me."

  "I'm doing the best I can, ma'am."

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  "My son is in an orphanage." I was angry with the way my voice was wavering. "We want to leave with him on June fifteenth, but we can't because our paperwork isn't signed, and the election is less than a week away, and we don't know what'll happen if the Communists start a civil war, and you're telling me that if we don't get on that plane on June fifteenth, we won't even have a ticket home, and there's nothing you can do about it?"

  "I'm very sorry, ma'am."

  "No, you're not!" And I hung up, because I didn't want the woman in the United office to know that she'd made me cry.

  I threw myself on the couch we were supposed to turn into a crib and started to wail—big heaving sobs that did not sound anything like my own voice.

  "We'll just buy another ticket," Ken kept telling me. "We'll put it on the credit card." And he tried to rub my back, but I wouldn't let him.

  "It's not fair!" I screamed. "Those bastards!" I shouted, not exactly sure which bastards I meant, but intending it for all of them.

  I pounded my fists on the cushions of the sofa and sobbed as loud as I could. Ken stood away from my flailing fists, his hands dangling at his sides.

  It was a long time before I felt like stopping. A long time before I put my face down on the cushions, the scratchy fabric making my wet cheeks itch. And when I lifted my head to tell Ken that it was over, that I was all right, I had no voice.

  Nobody at the Kafe Shokoladnitsa was paying any attention to us. No maitre d' stood behind the little podium with the big reservation book. No one who worked for the restaurant hovered about the dining room, waiting to be of service. From time to time, a waiter would appear from behind a set of double doors, carrying trays of food to other tables, then disappearing back into the kitchen for long stretches of time.

  "Afetsyant!" (Waiter!) Ken shouted, whenever one of the tray-carrying men pushed open the double doors. "Menyu!" he called out to a retreating figure.

  Around us, groups of Russians in twos and threes sat eating enormous plates of food without speaking to one other.

  "I think there are menus over on that podium," I whispered. I still had no voice. That morning, when Alexander had driven us to the orphanage, he'd advised me to drink warm vodka infused with chamomile, two ingredients which seemed to constitute the Russian cure for everything.

  Ken walked to the podium, keeping his head down. He slipped two menus off
the pile and hurried back to his seat with quick little steps.

  The menu was handwritten entirely in Cyrillic. To translate it, we had to look up each letter in the phrase book and convert it into something we recognized, then string all the letters together before trying to find it in the "What's on the Menu?" section. It took a long time, but it didn't matter. No one appeared interested in taking our order.

  "The guidebook recommends their solyanka soup," I whispered.

  "Don't whisper, it'll strain your throat."

  "Their specialty is blini with chocolate sauce," I croaked.

  Ken waved his menu at a waiter who had just placed a deep bubbling bowl in front of a fat couple. "We'd like to order," he shouted in Russian at the disappearing waiter's back. "Maybe I'm supposed to tackle them." He got up and went to wait by the double doors.

  Ken was the only person standing in the big dining room, but nobody looked up at him. He still had the menu in his hand, and he kept fanning himself with it, although the restaurant was freezing. When a waiter finally pushed through the doors and saw Ken, he was so startled, he jumped back, splashing bright purple borscht out of the bowl on his tray. Ken

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  repeated the Russian for "We'd like to order," and waved the menu around. The waiter used his chin to point at our table, indicating that there would be no ordering until Ken was back in his seat.

  When the waiter finally arrived, we asked for the solyanka soup followed by chocolate blinis. But all the food came at the same time. "What's on the Menu?" described solyanka as fish soup with salted cucumbers. What was in my bowl looked thin and watery, and I could see bits of something that resembled gray cardboard floating in it.

  "This looks like old dishwater," I told Ken.

  "Try the blinis," he suggested, although I could see he hadn't touched his.

  The blinis were rubbery. The chocolate tasted greasy and sour.

  "This is going to make me sick." Ken threw his napkin on the plate of blinis where it soaked up the chocolate, leaving a greenish yellow stain.