The Russian Word for Snow Read online

  That night, I'd laid the blue clothes out on my bed, setting them down in the shape of a little boy.

  While the women in the white coats watched, I pulled the sweatshirt over Grisha's head. He sat staring at the swirled fabric of the couch between his feet, the neckline of the too-big shirt dipping down below his collarbones.

  "Grisha," I called. But I must have said it too quietly for even him to hear.

  I took his wrist and tucked his arm into the shirt, but had no idea which way to bend his elbow to make it fit into the sleeve. I could feel the woman with the penciled eyebrows watching me, those half circles above her lids rising with concern.

  "Would you like to do this?" I asked Ken.

  He looked at Grisha, at the sleeves of the sweatshirt that dangled from his shoulders like flattened wings. "Sure." He handed me the camera.

  Through the lens, I watched Ken ease Grisha's arms into the sweatshirt, bunch the striped socks we'd brought so the heel unfolded magically in the right place. Inside the camera, the two of them were black-and-white, like people on an old television show.

  The moment Grisha was dressed, Yuri stood. "We go," he said.

  Ken gathered the pink and purple gift bags with the flashlights and pictures of San Francisco, and placed them on the table in front of the women in the white coats.

  "For you," he told them. And he made a sweeping gesture with his arm, as though displaying the valuable prizes they'd won.

  "Spasebah," the women said, using the Russian word for "thank you." They smiled but did not touch the bright bags.

  Yuri raced down the hall, his fur hat bobbing. I walked past the cutout pictures of babies, my arms tight around Grisha.

  When I got to the door, the woman with the penciled eyebrows ran up with a small blanket covered with rabbits. She wrapped the blanket around Grisha, tucking it between his

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  blue fur parka and my jacket. For just a moment, she let her hand rest on the knitted hat that looked like a blueberry. Then the Lada's horn beeped twice, and we rushed out into the cold.

  The waiting room at the American Medical Center was filled with Russians; men in plastic shoes stained white from the salt on the roads, women wearing thick socks that poked above snow boots. The Russians sat with their coats on, though the room was heated with dry air that made my hair crackle with electricity. They kept their hands in their laps and their eyes lowered to a small table that held nothing but English-language magazines.

  Ken and I sat side by side, Anna next to us. Yuri stood with his back against the wall, staring at his shoes. He'd left his fur hat in the Lada. Without it, he seemed shorter and somehow diminished.

  I balanced Grisha on my lap, unwrapping the rabbit blanket and pulling off the blueberry hat. His wispy hair stood straight up like a cartoon of someone who'd been badly frightened. I tried to smooth it down, and it clung to my hand.

  A Russian woman in a thick handmade sweater smiled at me, and I wondered if she could tell that Grisha had come from an orphanage.

  Ken and I had our name called before any of the Russians.

  "You want I come with you?" Anna asked.

  "No, thanks," we both told her.

  The doctor was young and wore sneakers with tiny air bubbles in the soles. She'd only just come to Moscow to practice medicine, and still seemed to think of it as a great adventure.

  "Let's see how much this little guy weighs." She took Grisha from me and set him on a scale like the ones butchers use to weigh meat.

  He looked up at her and waved his arms.

  "Seven-point-one kilograms," she said, and I tried to work out how much that was in pounds.

  "Stretch him out on that paper there, so we can see how long he is." She pointed to a gray examining table.

  I lowered Grisha onto the paper. When I let him go, he flipped over and began crawling toward the edge.

  Crawls forward, I thought.

  "You'd better hold onto him," the doctor smiled.

  I turned Grisha onto his back and held him still with my hand on his chest.

  "His heart's beating so fast," I said.

  "Babies' hearts do beat fast."

  She drew a line on the paper where Grisha's heels touched, then brushed back his hair to draw one above his head.

  "What's that?" asked Ken, rubbing his thumb over a brownish mark on Grisha's forehead.

  "It looks like a bruise," the doctor said. "I suspect he got it from pressing his head against the bars of his crib."

  Holds head steady, I thought, so I wouldn't think about Grisha wanting to get out of his crib so badly that he'd bruised his forehead.

  "Go ahead and undress him," the doctor told me, measuring the distance between the two lines.

  Grisha kept his hands in his lap while I took off his clothes, making me think of the Russians in the waiting room. I had trouble untying the cloth rag he wore as a diaper, and when I got it off, I saw that the knots had left small indentations in the skin at his hips.

  The doctor listened to Grisha's heart, and his lungs, pressed her fingers into his armpits and the place where his legs joined his body. She stretched out his arms into a T, and then watched how quickly he pulled them back.

  Ken and I hovered over the examining table, stepping out of the way of the doctor as she circled Grisha, her air-filled sneakers

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  squeaking on the floor. I kept reminding myself that Maggie had told us that Yuri wouldn't take children who weren't healthy, because the sick ones didn't bring as much money.

  "Hold him in your lap, and we'll take a look at his throat," the doctor said.

  The paper made a snapping sound when I sat on it. The doctor unwrapped a wooden tongue depressor, and scooted over on a little wheeled stool.

  The moment Grisha saw the tongue depressor, he started to scream. It was the first sound we'd heard him make.

  He twisted his body around in my lap, and I was afraid he'd throw himself on the floor. I wrapped my arms tight around his shoulders, pinning his arms to his sides. Ken grabbed his ankles to stop his legs from beating against the table. The doctor pushed herself closer, trying to grab onto his chin. Grisha rocked his head from side to side, digging a hole in my chest.

  "Keep his head steady," the doctor said.

  She held onto his jaw and forced his mouth open. I flattened my palm on his forehead, pressing against the mark that looked like a bruise.

  Grisha was coughing and crying, and his nose was running. The doctor poked the stick deeper into his mouth and pushed down on his tongue. I felt his body convulse against my chest; I felt the gagging in my own throat.

  "That's enough." I pulled Grisha's head away. My chest was pounding, and I couldn't tell for certain whether it was my heart or his.

  The doctor sat for a moment, holding the tongue depressor in the air between us. I knew that if she tried to force it back into Grisha's mouth, I would push her away, send her rolling across the examining room on her little wheeled stool.

  "All right." She threw the wooden stick into a trash can. "Just let me look in his ears."

  I turned Grisha's head to the side and wiped the tears from his face, remembering something that had happened when I was

  three, maybe four years old. I'd been driving with my mother in our old Pontiac, speeding down the highway, when the door next to me—which must not have been closed all the way— flew open. Nobody wore seat belts then, and the force of the air outside tugged at my legs, pulling my body out of the car. I was screaming, clutching at the smooth vinyl of the seat, but my mother never once took her eyes off the road. She just clamped her hand on my wrist, holding it so tightly that it was bruised purple for days afterward.

  "How were you able to hang on with only one hand?" my father had asked her afterward.

  "I just did," she'd told him.

  Now, looking down at Grisha's dark lashes that the tears had bunched into little stars, I knew what it was that ha
d kept me from flying out of the car. It was the fierce protectiveness that came from the hard edge of love.

  "You're very lucky," the doctor said, sitting back. "The only thing wrong with this little guy is that he's undernourished."

  She showed us a chart with curved lines that represented the range of normal heights and weights for children Grisha's age. Then she drew two small circles below the lines to indicate the places where his numbers fell.

  "Is there something we can leave at the orphanage for him?" Ken asked. "Some kind of formula?"

  "You can't leave anything powdered, because the water here is full of parasites, and they won't take the time to boil it. And liquid formula's expensive, so there's not much chance he'll actually get any of it."

  Grisha chewed the edge of the paper with the curved lines.

  "You'll just have to wait until you bring him home before you can beef him up. Do you know when that'll be?"

  "Not for three months," I said, telling her what Maggie had told me. "The Russians put all orphans in a database for three months."

  "Why?"

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  "Because they're hoping a Russian family will adopt them first."

  The doctor tapped the height and weight chart with her fingertips. "Three months," she said. And she shook her head.

  Back at the orphanage, the woman with the penciled-in eyebrows took Grisha out of my arms as soon as I stepped into the cabbage-smelling hallway.

  "She say Grisha is late for his lunch," Anna translated.

  The woman began walking away.

  I grabbed the edge of the rabbit blanket, stopping her.

  "I love you," I told Grisha, slipping my fingers under the blue fur of his hood to touch his cheek.

  "Dasvedanya," the women said, Russian for "good-bye."

  They walked down the hallway, Grisha lost in the woman's arms. All I could see of him was the knitted cap that made his head look like a blueberry.

  Hot Slotyana

  The taxi driver let us out on a dark, empty street.

  "Kolkbida?" Ken said, leaning in the window.

  "Da, da," the driver nodded, pointing down a narrow alleyway.

  "Are you sure about this place?" he asked me.

  " 'Kolkhida is a lively Georgian restaurant, where a canary sings along with the various musical groups,' " I read from my guidebook.

  It was snowing, wet flakes that felt sharp and icy against our faces.

  "We should have stayed at the hotel," Ken said.

  "Is better you eat dinner at Radisson." That's what Anna had told us, when we'd asked her to recommend a Russian restaurant. "Moscow is a umm . . . dangerous place for foreigners."

  But I hadn't wanted to eat at the Radisson, which served hamburgers and salads to American and British and German businessmen. Tonight I wanted to eat Russian food in a Russian restaurant to celebrate the fact that Grisha could Crawl forward. Get to sitting. And make me love somebody else's child.

  The taxi driver rapped his knuckles on the glass, the sound a small explosion in the quiet street. He waved his hands, shooing us away.

  Ken and I walked down the alley looking for the pectopah sign that hung outside every Russian restaurant, but we saw nothing except concrete and fast-falling snow.

  Footsteps crunched along the ice behind us. We turned and saw the taxi driver running down the alley.

  "What do you want?" Ken shouted at him.

  The driver took his hand out of his pocket and raised his arm.

  "What!" Ken shouted. "What!"

  "Kolkhida," the driver said, pointing with his raised arm.

  We looked up and saw a small metal door a few steps up from the street.

  The driver pressed a rusted doorbell, and the alley rilled with the clanking of locks being turned. After a minute, the door was opened by a man with hair so white it seemed to glow in the dark.

  "Kolkhida?" Ken asked him.

  "Da, da." The man waved us in from the cold.

  The walls of the restaurant were covered with shiny silver paper painted with white palm fronds. All the lights in the ceiling had been turned on bright, and the dazzling glare pushed against my eyes.

  The man with the white hair sat us next to the only other people in the restaurant, two Russian couples who were sitting together and smoking furiously.

  At the end of the room, a woman in a silver dress played an electric keyboard. Beside her, a big man strummed on a balalaika, his large hands making the small instrument look like a child's guitar. They were playing Russian folksongs and songs from American movies sung in phonetic English.

  A woman with gold hoop earrings appeared at our table with a pad and pencil. We sent her away with a request for vodka, which was ordered by the dram.

  "According to this," said Ken, comparing the menu with his phrase book, "the special is either fried halibut or roast suckling pig."

  "Is there a translation for 'What do you recommend?' "

  "No. But I would be able to say, 'The meat does not appear to be fresh.' "

  The woman in the gold earrings returned with the vodka in a clear glass beaker, like something from a lab.

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  I ordered a dish called Hot Slotyana, because it sounded like the name of a Russian porno actress. Ken pointed to several items on the menu, but the woman shook her earrings at each of them, so he wound up ordering the thing that was either fried halibut or roast suckling pig. It turned out to be neither, but a meat stew that was spicy and good.

  We ate eggplant with pistachio nuts and broiled mushrooms in sour cream, and ordered another 150 drams of vodka. The woman in the silver dress and the man with the balalaika played "Lara's Theme" from Dr. Zhivago, and "New York, New York." I looked around for the singing canary, but could find only an empty birdcage hanging near the ceiling.

  The two women at the table next to us got up and started dancing together. They had long black hair that they shook across their shoulders.

  Ken raised his glass of vodka over my Hot Slotyana.

  "To Alex," he said.

  Alex was the name we'd chosen for Grisha, after Ken's father, who had died exactly a year after my mother.

  Ken and I had been trying to get pregnant when his father went to the doctor about stomach pains that wouldn't go away. Ken was having his sperm counted the day he got the news, just handing over the specimen jar when his pager went off.

  "My father has stomach cancer," he told me from a pay phone. "They said it's infiltrating, and can't be operated on."

  It took him a while to tell me where he was so I could go and pick him up.

  "Go and see your father," I told him. "Don't wait."

  Ken flew back to New York with vitamin supplements believed to decrease the size of tumors, and books about people who'd made remarkable recoveries from inoperable cancers.

  Every morning for five days, Ken and his father would go fishing at Rockland Lake.

  "What do you talk about?" I asked when he called.

  "Photography and Marx Brothers movies and fish," he told me. "And about how he's going to get better."

  On the sixth morning, Ken and his father went to the hospital instead of Rockland Lake, and Ken's father had his first chemotherapy treatment.

  On the seventh morning, he told Ken he was a little too tired to go fishing.

  Twenty-four hours after Ken flew home, his father had a fatal heart attack, brought on by the drugs that were meant to slow the tiny tumors that had blossomed in the lining of his stomach. He was sixty-three years old.

  After the funeral, we served cake in the small house where Ken's mother now lived alone, surrounded by the photographs Ken's father had taken. I'd never seen my father-in-law without a camera around his neck, never known him to take a picture of anyone in which they weren't revealing their best selves.

  Two of Ken's sisters were pregnant at the funeral: Lynne, who was due in two months, and was only a little younger than me; and Becka,
who was just beginning to show. "This will be so good for your mother," said the friends of the family, patting Lynne's belly, taking Becka's hand, "such a blessing for everyone." And I remember sitting among the half-eaten coffee cake, wishing I had a baby to offer up to everybody's grief.

  "In the Jewish tradition, you don't name people after someone who is still living, Ken had once explained to me."

  "Why not?"

  "They say it steals their soul." My father-in-law's name had been Albert. When Lynne had her baby, she gave her son Allen as a middle name. Becka chose Alicia for her daughter.

  "I want to name Grisha Alexander," Ken said, the first time we talked about names. "Alexander for my father, and because it's Russian."

  It sounded so right that we never mentioned another name.

  I poured more vodka into my glass. "To Alex," I said, knowing

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  that no matter what we called him in front of Maggie or Anna or Yuri, he would now be Alex between us.

  "Let's dance."

  In the narrow space between the tables, Ken spun me around so fast, the silver wallpaper flew by like a shiny high-speed train. The musicians played "Hava Nagila," and we called for more vodka. Linking arms with the long-haired women, we danced in a circle, tripping over the wires that spilled from the back of the electric keyboard. When the taxi driver returned for us, we bought him a small carafe of vodka and continued to spin round to the music until he'd finished it.

  "I want to go back to the orphanage," I told Anna when she called the next morning.

  "Is not possible. I take you to Red Square instead."

  "But I want to see Grisha again."

  "Is too much work for them."

  "Can't you just ask Yuri?"

  "Yuri will say you should come with me to Red Square."

  "But I don't want to go to Red Square."

  "Tretyakov Gallery, then."