The Russian Word for Snow Read online

  Outside, Paolo's mother was dancing with her son, riding him on a hip and holding his arm up as if they were waltzing.

  "Maybe you should call Maggie," I told Ken.

  "It's Sunday."

  "You can leave her a message."

  "OK," he said. "I love you."

  "I'm going to hang up now so you can call."

  Outside, more women were dancing: Kate and the vegan and the speech therapist who had loved being pregnant. They swirled beneath a papier-mache parrot that hung above the patio.

  I reached into my pocket and took out the Polaroid. There never was an unborn child for me to mourn, I thought, never a name to send skyward. There is only this little boy.

  I put the photograph back and went to dance with the women beneath the bright bird.

  The address Maggie had given us was a small, dark house in the Berkeley hills. It slumped in a grove of peeling eucalyptus trees that made the air smell like Vicks VapoRub.

  We ran to the porch through rain that dripped off the sword-shaped leaves of the eucalyptus. Ken knocked on the door, bouncing a crystal that hung behind the window. I unrolled the collar of his jacket where it had bunched up; picked a piece of lint off my corduroy skirt and threw it into the rain.

  Maggie opened the door.

  "Good," she said, "you're here."

  She turned to lead us into the house, and I saw that the seat of her black leggings was covered with cat hair.

  "Just let me get something." She stopped at a small room that must have been her office.

  The screen of her computer was covered with overlapping Post-Its reminding her to buy cat litter and get gas. She had an old-fashioned fax machine that printed messages on rolls of curled paper, and a long fax had tumbled out of the machine and onto the floor like a paper waterfall.

  Maggie searched through the piles of paper on her desk, rearranging them into new configurations. Buried beneath a book about achieving financial freedom, she found a yellow folder covered with the rounded scribbles someone makes when they're testing a pen.

  "Why don't we go into the living room?" she said, waggling her fingers at the tiny office. We followed her down a dark hallway that smelled like mushrooms growing.

  I sat on the couch, trying not to touch a pillow that looked to be made of some kind of fur. Ken sat beside me, sinking into a cushion so soft it puffed up around his hips.

  "I don't know if the little boy you're interested in is still available." Maggie pulled a chair over from her kitchen table.

  "What do you mean?" Ken asked.

  "Yuri probably sent that tape to all the agencies he works with."

  "Yuri?"

  "Yuri's my Russian coordinator."

  Maggie brushed something off her seat.

  "Frankly," she said, "he's a bit of an asshole."

  Ken and I stared at her from the depths of the couch.

  "Anyway, I sent him an E-mail."

  "Can't you call him?" Ken asked.

  "I don't know where he is. I only have a number for his wife."

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  "What does she say?"

  Maggie shrugged. "Who knows? She doesn't speak English."

  "You mean there's no way to reach him?" Ken, who wore a pager that vibrated against his side whenever someone wanted him, did not believe in the unreachability of anyone.

  Maggie put her face close to us.

  "He's hiding from the Russian Mafia," she whispered.

  "Mafia?" Ken tried to raise himself out of the billowing cushion.

  "They broke into the apartment of a friend of Yuri's—another adoption coordinator." Maggie's face looked overheated. "They burned all his papers and smashed his computer."

  "Why?"

  "There's money in adoptions." Maggie sat back in her chair.

  I touched the furry pillow by accident and wiped my hands on my corduroy skirt.

  "Anyway, if it turns out that your child is available, you'll have to travel to Russia right away. Moscow wants families to see their children before they send in their paperwork."

  "You mean we see him and then we have to leave him behind in the orphanage?" I couldn't imagine how I would be able to hold that little boy, learn the smell of his skin, and then get back on the plane carrying only a paperback and an inflatable pillow. "Isn't that hard?"

  "Everybody does it." Maggie shrugged, but it seemed to me as fantastic as discovering that everybody breathed water or had X-ray vision.

  Maggie dug around in the scribbled-on folder, pulling out forms and little notes and shoving them under her thigh for safekeeping.

  "Here's a list of all your adoption expenses." She handed me a green paper. "My fee is $5,000." She pressed her finger against the page. "Yuri's is $10,000. A lot of his is used for bribes." Talking about bribes gave her that feverish look again.

  "What's this?" Ken asked. "Humanitarian aid, $1,000."

  "That's money you pay directly to the orphanage."

  "To buy food and things for the children?"

  "Sometimes that happens," Maggie said, and I remembered the bones along Grisha's spine, sticking up like a row of small mountains.

  Maggie handed me one of the papers from beneath her thigh. "This is a list of the documents you'll need to send to Moscow."

  According to the list, the Russians wanted us to be tested for HIV, TB, and the exact amount of albumin in our urine.

  "What should we do about the letter from our employer?" Ken asked. "We work for ourselves."

  "What do you do?"

  "Write comedy."

  Maggie frowned and crossed her legs, a couple of papers fluttered to the floor.

  "Trade-show scripts," I explained. "Very technical."

  "I guess you could just write your own letter," Maggie said, but she didn't sound certain..

  Maggie didn't sound certain about a number of things. "They don't need to see your tax returns," she told us, then a little later instructed us to make three—no, four—copies of our 1040s. "I think you'll have to wire over an I-17IH approval form," she said, although when she thought about it, it was possible that they'd changed that requirement. "Everything you send in must be apostilled," she explained, and when we asked her what apostilled meant, she told us it was something they did up in Sacramento which she'd never quite understood.

  "How many adoptions have you done?" I asked Maggie.

  She scratched at her leggings.

  "Three, maybe four."

  I waited for her to decide which it was.

  "I'm working on one now. A six-year-old girl from Siberia. The orphanage director doesn't want to let her go."

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  "Why not?"

  "I don't think he likes Americans."

  I stared at the arm of the couch where a cat had pulled fibers into a little forest of loops. I needed to make myself believe that Maggie could work the magic necessary to get Grisha out of the orphanage; that she and the man named Yuri she couldn't reach by telephone would be able to wave our documents and money and release him like a dove from a dark-sided box.

  "Anyway, this is all we can do until we hear from Yuri." Maggie stood. A yellow Post-It was stuck to the back of her leg.

  We followed her back through the damp little house.

  "You'll call us as soon as you hear from him?" Ken asked.

  "Of course."

  "When do you think that'll be?"

  Maggie's shoulders moved up in a shrug and stayed there as we went out into the rain.

  While we waited for Maggie's call, Ken bought books. Every day he'd come home with a new title: Raising the Adopted Child. Real Parents, Real Children. Are Those Kids Yours?

  He'd stack these books beside the bed and read to me from them at night; entire chapters about bonding and attachment, pages on the telltale signs of abandonment grief.

  "What if he's not available?" I'd say, turning onto my side and pushing my feet down to where the sheets were cool. "What if somebody e
lse saw him first?"

  But Ken would just keep reading, insisting that I listen to the section about the adopted preschooler.

  Ken told everybody about Grisha. "He's a little boy from Russia," he explained to his mother on the phone. "Didn't Daddy's family come from there?"

  "He sucks his first two fingers," he said to Kate, who'd called to talk to me. "The same ones I did."

  "We'll have to go to Moscow," he informed a man from a

  software company we were writing a script for. "Probably sometime this month."

  "What are you going to tell them if we don't get him?" I'd ask. "What are you going to say?"

  But he wouldn't answer me. And later I'd hear him on the phone, explaining to whoever had called that Grisha was the Russian diminutive for Grigori.

  "Where should we put his bed?" Ken wanted to know when we were supposed to be working. "Do you think he'll want to sleep with us?"

  "I don't know," I told him, trying to concentrate on a brochure with glossy photographs of people smiling at their computer terminals.

  But I'd be remembering the swimming motions Grisha had been making on the videotape, imagining the two of us in an ocean as warm as a bath, me holding him across the surface of the water, and him splashing me with drops that would leave my lips as salty as if I'd been kissing away tears.

  "Did you call the fertility clinic?" Ken asked me, at least once a day. "Did you cancel the in vitro?"

  "I will," I told him. But I kept putting it off.

  I couldn't see myself with any of the other children on Maggie's videotape; the dark-haired boy in the saggy diaper who was trying to climb the bars of his crib, the brother and sister with identical faces in different sizes. If the little boy with the inexpert smile couldn't be mine, I wanted my turn with the piercing needles and the urine of the postmenopausal nuns.

  It was three days before we heard from Maggie.

  "The phone!" Ken shouted. He was wearing a pink towel and his cheeks were covered with a green shaving gel that smelled seaweedy.

  "You get it," I said.

  He ran past me, still clutching the black handle of his razor.

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  "Hello? Hello?" He yelled into the receiver, like someone using a phone for the first time.

  I stood in the doorway of the bathroom, wet hair dripping down my neck.

  "It's Maggie," Ken mouthed. "She's heard from Yuri."

  If I can touch two pieces of wood before she says anything, I thought, nobody else will be taking him. I placed a hand on either side of the doorjamb.

  "Yes?" Ken was saying. "Yes?" And then he was nodding his head at me and wiggling his legs in a little dance beneath the pink towel.

  I waited in the doorway with my palms touching wood.

  "Thank you," Ken said into the phone. "Thanks so much."

  He put down the receiver and yanked off the pink towel, twirling it over his head.

  "He's ours, he's ours, he's ours!" he sang, dancing around the bed with his penis flapping.

  I ran across the room and caught him around the waist. The hair on his chest was springy and damp.

  "Let's ask Maggie for a copy of the tape," I said.

  "OK."

  "And more of those pictures."

  "All right."

  Ken wrapped his arms around me. The seaweedy gel made our cheeks stick together.

  "I think he should sleep with us," I told him. "Don't your books say that's better for bonding? Later, we could put a crib, or maybe a small bed, in the room next to ours, so we can hear if he has a bad dream."

  "All right," Ken kept saying into my wet hair. "OK."

  Perinatal Encephalopathy

  Kate and Dan lived in an old house they'd spent years renovating. Before they'd bought it, the house had come loose from its foundation, torquing itself around an old stone fireplace like a bent back. Kate and Dan had had to raise the entire structure in order to coax the house back into alignment.

  Ken and I walked up the stone steps, skipping the one that was loose.

  Inside, the house smelled like the Middle Eastern markets Dan was always taking us into; tiny grocery stores where he'd spend an hour poking his nose into jars of spices, before presenting us with little bags of the sweetest cardamom, the hottest clove.

  "Dan's making Moroccan lamb stew," Kate said. She stretched up for the wineglasses, her loose sleeves moving a second or two behind her. "He's been simmering it for three days."

  "It gives the spices time to get into the meat." Dan hugged Ken and me at the same time, the way an adult can hug two children at once.

  "Can I put this on?" Ken waved around the videotape Maggie had given us of Grisha in the orphanage.

  "In the living room," Kate said, but he was already gone.

  Ken aimed two remote controls at the television like a gun-fighter. Behind him was a photograph he'd taken in Mexico and given to Kate because she'd loved it: twin girls walking along a cobblestone street in white communion dresses, the girl in front examining her lace bib for stains.

  "Hey, Dan, which remote is it?"

  "The one that says Sony."

  "They both say Sony."

  Ken pressed a button, and the sound of a woman singing in Portuguese wailed out of speakers that flanked the fireplace like Easter Island statues.

  "I love this singer," Dan shouted over the woman's moaning. "She's Brazilian."

  Ken pressed the other remote, and Grisha popped up on the television. He seemed to be moving his legs in time to the Brazilian music.

  "It's on!"

  "Pause it!" I made little motions with an imaginary remote at the television.

  Ken pressed a button and silenced the singer from Brazil. Grisha continued moving his legs, as though he could still hear the music.

  "The other one," Kate said, touching Ken's shoulder as she went by.

  Ken froze Grisha with one leg in the air.

  Dan carried in a tray of gold-colored drinks, placing them on a New Yorker magazine that, because of an error in the subscription department, came addressed to Dan & Kate Ryan, Best in Frozen Foods.

  "I'm starting it." Ken pressed the remote and Grisha's legs started moving again.

  "Grisha! Grisha!" called the off-camera voice.

  Dan sat beside Kate on the couch.

  "Grisha is the nickname for Grigori," I explained, forgetting that Ken had already told them this.

  Dan repeated the name in the accent of a Russian cartoon character.

  The babushkaed woman on the television lifted Grisha, displaying his naked body for the camera.

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  "Look how long those legs are," Ken said, pointing with the remote. "I think he's going to be tall."

  "He will grow strong for to work for the people," Dan said in his Russian cartoon voice.

  The arms in the white sleeves appeared, clapping out the music for Russian dancers. Grisha pressed his eyes shut and lifted his lip, in his off-kilter smile.

  "I love that," Ken said.

  "Hmmm ..." Kate made the sound with her gold-colored drink pressed against her lips.

  Dan was still talking in his cartoon voice, referring to the little boy on the tape as "comrade."

  Grisha's face blurred, then cleared. He was closer now, his dark eyes staring out of Dan's wide-screen TV.

  Kate is going to cry, I thought. And I set my drink on the magazine addressed to Best in Frozen Foods, so I could watch her.

  Kate cried at things that were sad, and things that were happy. "Once I cried at the opening of a Kmart," she'd told me. And I'd never once doubted it was true. Every Thanksgiving, we'd gather with Dan's family at the cabin in the Sierras, and after dinner, we'd put on hats that hung from antler pegs—a plaid hunting cap, a rubber rain hat, a turban from a play Dan had been in—and go around the table telling the things we were thankful for. As each person listed his or her particular blessing, Kate would sit in a little felt pumpkin hat and cry.

/>   But now, with Grisha's solemn face wide across her television set, Kate's eyes were narrowed and dry.

  I turned back and watched Grisha disappear.

  Kate and Dan had told us where Tuscany was and explained why we would want to go there. They'd cooked the first cassoulet I'd ever eaten, the first posole. They'd taught us about the painted animals from Oaxaca, the music of Ben Webster, and how to make ice cream out of fresh peaches.

  Every New Year's Eve, the four of us would cook an elaborate

  dinner while wearing hats made of shiny paper. On their tenth anniversary, we'd all gone to Mexico, where we spent a week sampling the cocktails Dan invented and fishing out the iguanas that fell into the toilet. Once, to settle a bet, we took turns weighing our heads on an old bathroom scale.

  Now Ken and I needed to know what they thought of the little boy kicking his legs in a Russian orphanage.

  Ken rewound the tape, making everything on the screen happen backward.

  "You can see why we fell in love with him," he said.

  Something beeped in the kitchen.

  "The stew!" Dan ran out of the room, bumping the photograph of the girls in their communion dresses.

  Ken turned to Kate, spilling some of the gold-colored drink on his leg.

  "Incredible isn't he?" She was staring at the screen, watching the woman in the babushka push Grisha's fingers back into his mouth. "He's very cute."

  "Katie?" Dan poked his head in the room. "Did you remember to put in the tabil?"

  "The stuff in the little bowl?" She hopped off the couch, making waves in her drink. "I can't remember." And she followed him into the kitchen.

  On the television, Grisha's body was swinging back and forth like a bell in reverse. I watched with Ken for a while, and then went into the kitchen.

  The kitchen windows were steamy, the air peppery and damp.

  "Smell this." Dan held a small bowl of brown powder under my nose. It was sharp and spicy and burned a little, like breathing in cayenne.

  "Every one of my kids wants to be Martin Luther King, Jr.," Kate was saying. Kate taught preschoolers: three- and four-year-olds whom she spoke to in both Spanish and English. "We're doing a play for Martin Luther King Day, and I've got twenty little MLK, Jrs."