The Russian Word for Snow Read online

"Can't we go to the orphanage? Just for a little while?"

  Anna sighed.

  "Come with me," she coaxed. "I charge only forty dollars."

  "It's too cold to go out," I told her and hung up.

  "Let's go to Red Square ourselves," I said to Ken.

  "It's freezing out."

  "We have to be able to tell Alex something about Moscow. Something besides the orphanage."

  So we put on all the winter clothes we'd brought—long underwear, thermal socks, glove liners—saying the name of each thing aloud, as though invoking its power to keep us warm.

  The guards outside of Lenin's tomb had little puffs of steam coming out of their nostrils like dragons. In the building behind

  them, the body of Vladimir Ilyich Lenin, dead since 1924 and preserved with formaldehyde, lay in a glass sarcophagus.

  " Tor a quarter of a million dollars,' " I read to Ken from the guidebook, " 'y° u too can have the Eternal Lenin Deluxe package.' "

  The guidebook also listed several "Travelers' Tips" for avoiding the "inevitable long lines to view the dead leader"; but other than the two cold-looking guards and us, nobody else appeared interested in the father of the Soviet Union.

  "I don't think it's open," Ken said.

  "It's supposed to be.

  We walked back and forth in front of the low building.

  "I can't even see where the entrance is."

  "Maybe we should ask one of the guards," I said. But the guards did not seem approachable, in spite of the wide-brimmed military hats that made them look like children playing dress-up.

  Ken and I walked across the square to St. Basil's Cathedral, its green-and-yellow striped domes like hot-air balloons tethered against the cold blue sky. At a little kiosk, an ancient woman wearing two woolen babushkas over her head sold us tickets for more rubles than any of the prices printed on her sign.

  Inside the cathedral, the walls and ceilings seemed to have been painted in a rush with wide-eyed Madonnas and red and turquoise flowers. But a thick film of smoke and dust lay over everything, making the Madonnas look tired and sad. Icy wind blew through windows where the glass had been replaced with chicken wire, and after ten minutes we were too cold to explore all the little chapels under the fanciful domes. Shivering, we hurried back out into the thin sunlight.

  "Let's go to the Kremlin," I said. "It's mostly buildings; some of them have to be heated."

  We walked beneath the high wall that surrounded what was once the center of Soviet government, its turrets and gold-faced clock tower reminding me of a castle in a storybook. Small

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  openings had been worked into the bticks at the top of the wall, and I imagined sentties with crossbows looking down on us.

  At last we came to a tall, narrow gate flanked by guatds holding guns. When we ttied to enter, one of them rushed over, wagging his finger and shouting, "Nyet! Nyet!"

  We backed away, feeling embarrassed and unwelcome. I opened the guidebook to see if there was another entrance.

  "Watch it!" Ken shouted, pulling me out of the path of a black limousine that had come roaring out of the narrow gate.

  "I don't want to stay here anymore," I told him. "Let's go have lunch."

  "Where?"

  ' The Slavyansky Bazaar serves blinis in an atmosphere that hasn't changed since Stanislavsky sat in a corner booth dreaming up the Moscow Arts Theatre,' " I read.

  "What street is it on?" Ken led to unfold a Moscow city map in the wind.

  "Nikolskaya."

  "What does a Russian N look like?"

  "Like an H."

  I stamped my frozen feet on the cobbles of Red Square while Ken looked at the map.

  "It's not here," he said. He tried to show me, but the wind whipped away a corner of the map and flattened it against his coat.

  " 'Until 1991,' " I read, " 'Nikolskaya Street was called Twenty-fifth of October Street.' "

  "What does that look like in Russian letters?"

  "It doesn't say."

  A man with several bottles of vodka clinking against each other in a shopping bag pushed past us.

  "Nikolskaya?" Ken called after him.

  "Nikolskaya?" the man repeated. He shook his head.

  "Slavyansky Bazaar?"

  "Slavyansky, da, da." The man nodded, and he grabbed Ken by the arm and dragged him down the street.

  I ran after them, pushing my way past men who were trying to sell me fur hats. When I caught up, the man with the shopping bag was pointing to a small alley across the street.

  "Nikolskaya," he said. And before we could think of the Russian word for "thank you," he hurried away, his vodka bottles jingling like sleigh bells.

  To get across to Nikolskaya Street, we had to take an underground walkway beneath the road. The walkway was damp and smelled as if many people had peed against its concrete walls. A man in sandals and rough wool socks squatted before a display of music cassettes he'd set up on a cardboard box. A little farther on, a gypsy woman dressed in overlapping pieces of material without any sleeves or legs sewn in, was nursing a baby and holding out her hand. Her child looked to be the same age as Alex, and I wanted to put something in her dirty palm, but I was uncertain of the value of the rubles in my pocket, and all the zeros made me think it might be too much.

  When we came up from under the street, the sky had clouded over and it was much colder. I wrapped my scarf over my mouth. The moisture from my breath froze there and made the wool feel scratchy against my face. Ken and I walked the length of Nikolskaya Street, searching for a sign with a letter C followed by something that looked like a little end table.

  "You're sure you have the right address?" Ken said.

  "Nineteen Nikolskaya Street," I told him.

  At the end of the block, we turned and walked back, thinking we must have missed it.

  Halfway up the street, Ken stopped in front of a padlocked building with Moorish windows. "Hang on a minute," he said. He climbed the wooden steps, and rubbed at a dirty sign with his fist. "This is it."

  The curved windows were covered by thin plywood. I pulled

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  back a corner. Inside, overturned tables, metal sinks, and the cast-iron burners from a stove had been thrown around the bare wood floor. A crumpled steel oven was pushed up against the door, as if it had been used as a barricade.

  I let my breath cloud the glass until I could no longer see inside. What will I tell Alex, I wondered, when he is ten or twelve or fifteen and wants to know about the city he was born in? As it is, I can tell him nothing about his Russian mother or father, nothing about his family. The only history I have to give him is my experience of this cold city; its abandoned attractions and ruined restaurants.

  Ken tugged on my arm, pulling me away from the Slavyansky Bazaar. "Let's go back to Red Square," he said. "We'll find something to eat there."

  We trudged past shops that sold tinned herring and dusty canister vacuum cleaners. At the edge of Red Square, we came to the back entrance of GUM, the Russian department store, and went inside.

  The GUM building stretched out for over a mile, with three levels of tiny shops connected by black iron footbridges. The front of every shop was blocked by the backs of women in fur coats, and I could see what was being sold inside only when one of them turned to examine a piece of linen, or a child's dress in the light that fell from an arched glass ceiling.

  The glass in the ceiling was grimy, and the stucco walls had gouges in them as though they'd been nibbled on. We found the bathrooms down a flight of broken tile steps, and I got on the end of a long line.

  In front of the door to the ladies' toilet, a woman in gray ankle socks sat at a small table, collecting a coin from each woman before allowing her inside. I searched my pockets for a coin the same size and shape as the one the woman was grabbing out of each hand, her fingers pointed like the beak of a ravenous bird. When it was my turn I waited until I felt the dry rasp of
<
br />   the woman's fingertips in my palm before moving toward an open stall.

  I was holding the thin metal doot in my hand when the woman who'd been standing behind me called out something in Russian. She flutteted het fingers as if plucking something out of the air, and pointed with her other hand at a pile of small squares of brown paper on a shelf.

  I picked up a couple of the rough squares and waved them at the woman to show that I'd understood. She nodded her head and smiled, pleased with me.

  "Spasebah," I thanked her. Spasebah for this small kind gesture I could one day tell Alex about.

  It was still dark the next morning when Volodya came to take us to the airport. Ken tried to help him load the suitcases into the Lada's tiny trunk, but Volodya kept grabbing the bags away from him, all the while nodding and smiling the way people do when they cannot understand anything you're saying.

  I'd woken with a migraine headache. There was a sharp pain on the left side of my head, and a metallic taste in my mouth as though I'd spent the night sucking on nickels. The long silk underwear I'd put on under my clothes itched and scratched like mohair.

  The Lada smelled of cold and gasoline. As we drove through the dark streets to the airport, I counted the lit windows in the massive apartment buildings, trying to imagine the Russians who lived in these narrow squares of light. I pictured them brewing glasses of bitter tea and listening to the news on plastic radios.

  When we arrived at Sheremetevo Airport, Volodya unloaded our bags and then nodded and smiled us through the big double doors.

  Inside, a few sleepy-looking travelers scraped their suitcases across the floor. Only a few of the overhead lights had been

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  turned on, and the long halls to the departure gates disappeared into blackness.

  I bought a cup of coffee from a woman who still had sleep in her eyes, hoping the caffeine might ease the throbbing in my head. The coffee was oily and undrinkable, but I held onto the Styrofoam cup because it was warm.

  Ken and I sat on molded plastic chairs that felt cold through our clothes. After a while, a woman carrying a portable computer sat beside us. She had Batman stickers stuck to the front of her computer case.

  " 'Morning," said the woman. She had an American accent and freckles.

  " 'Morning," Ken said. And while we waited for the flight to be called, he told the woman all about Alex and the orphanage, and why we didn't have him with us.

  "Do you have any children?" I asked the woman.

  "Two boys." She opened a Velcroed pocket on her computer case and took out a book of photographs.

  I flipped through the pictures: a freckled boy of six or seven riding a bicycle with a helmet like a colander; a slightly older boy hugging a basketball and trying to keep his lips closed over braces.

  "This is our son," Ken said, handing the woman the blurry Polaroid Maggie had taken from her television.

  "He's adorable."

  "We have a lot more pictures." Ken showed her a lead bag filled with rolls of exposed film. "And we have a video we took at the orphanage."

  But she has the little boys, I thought. And when the flight is over, she'll go home and hug them. Then she'll let them tear through her suitcase looking for the presents she's hidden there. Later, after they've fallen asleep, she'll sneak into their bedroom and listen to them breathe.

  When we get home, we'll put our rolls of exposed film into

  envelopes and wait for the processing lab to show us our son. Later, we'll hook up the video camera and watch him being carried away by a woman in a white coat.

  The flight to San Francisco was only half filled. We took over a whole row, and I shut my eyes and slept until we were somewhere above Iceland.

  "What was three months ago?" Ken said. "Thanksgiving?"

  "Halloween. Why?"

  "I'm trying to see how long it'll feel until we can bring Alex home." He twisted the plastic latch on his tray table. "Halloween doesn't seem that far back."

  "Try remembering everything that's happened since then," I said. And I thought about how our carved pumpkins had turned soft and furry in the warm weather the week before Halloween, the night we'd cut tracings of our hands to make turkey-shaped place cards for Thanksgiving, the afternoon we'd forced an eight-foot Christmas tree in through the front door, and the day we pushed that same tree out, dry and dropping needles in the January rain.

  It seemed such a long time that I wished I could be put to sleep, the way people are put to sleep during a surgery. I wanted to be given anesthesia, asked to count backwards from one hundred, and wake up three months later, feeling I'd gotten only to ninety-six.

  I stretched across the seats, pressing the place where my head hurt against the cold buckle of the seat belt, and didn't move until we'd begun our descent into San Francisco.

  Spells and Incantations

  Ken started getting up at 6:00 every morning to call the cities on the East Coast where we'd been born and got married. At 7:30 I'd find him still on the phone in his bathrobe, his hair sticking up where he'd slept on it.

  "I need to get a letter of exemplification for my birth certificate," he'd be saying. "Well, what department should I call?"

  On his desk was a little stack of color reprints of the photograph Maggie had given us, reprints we included with every letter we sent out. Please forward five certified copies of Marriage License #20-89, the letters said. And, Could you have this document authenticated? At the bottom, Ken would explain that we needed these papers in order to get our son out of a Russian orphanage. Then he'd enclose one of the reproductions of Alex's face, a small messenger sent to encourage a quick response.

  We sent these letters by overnight mail, and included envelopes from Federal Express with our credit-card number for the documents to travel back to us.

  "Isn't this going to get expensive?" I asked Ken.

  "Maybe, but it's faster."

  Maggie had instructed us to get our paperwork together as soon as possible. "Yuri's already asking for it."

  "But Grisha doesn't come off the database until April 15."

  "He's got twenty-three signatures to get."

  Nearly every day, a package would arrive from a county courthouse or a hospital administration office. Sometimes these

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  packages contained the documents we'd requested, and sometimes our Federal Express envelopes would have been used to return Ken's letter back to him.

  One day I picked up the phone and heard Ken asking a woman why she hadn't sent him the authenticated copy of his birth certificate.

  "The department of health does not make change," the woman explained.

  "But it was only a couple of extra dollars—you could have kept it."

  "Oh, no, we can't do that," she said, "the department of health does not make change."

  "But I have to have this certificate right away. It's for an adoption."

  "I understand that," the woman informed him, "but the department of health does not make change."

  "You'll need a set of fingerprints to send to the FBI," Maggie told us. So we went to a one-hour photo shop that did fingerprinting in a back room. The teenager who took our prints worked with his tongue sticking out of the corner of his mouth, like a child using a stamp kit. I half-expected to see the inked outline of a horse or a dinosaur when he lifted my finger.

  "Maggie says we have to get a good-conduct letter from the local police," Ken told me one day.

  "How can they tell if our conduct is good? They don't even know us."

  "Maybe that's how," he said.

  All the documents that came from Yuri had to be notarized; pages he'd fax to Maggie that were entirely in Russian, the Cyrillic characters looking more like decorative strips than sentences.

  "Just sign any blank lines you see," Maggie told us, shrugging.

  We took Yuri's documents to a notary public near the immigration office.

  "I can't notarize
this," said the woman behind the counter. She wore orangey lipstick that had been applied with great precision.

  "Why not?" Ken asked her.

  "It's in Russian."

  "But all you're notarizing are our signatures, and they're in English."

  "But I can't read this document."

  "That's OK." Ken smiled at her. "Neither can we."

  "You're signing a document you can't read?" The woman raised her eyebrows.

  Ken nodded, and she put her gold-handled notarizing stamp back in its place behind the counter.

  We could not adopt Alex unless we had an approved 1-171H form from the Immigration and Naturalization Service, which we couldn't get until we'd completed an 1-600 Orphan Petition, but could be expedited by submitting an I-600A Advance Processing of Orphan Petition, and delivering it by hand.

  We rode up the elevator at the INS office with an elderly Chinese woman who leaned on the arm of her granddaughter, and a Mexican family with faces like Aztec carvings. Ken and I towered over all of them. The Mexican children stared up at us until their mother noticed and turned their heads away.

  "I brought a FedEx mailer," Ken said to Sarah Choy, the woman who handled foreign adoptions for the INS, "so you can overnight our fingerprints to Washington."

  "Oh, the government can't accept Federal Express."

  "But I put our credit-card number on it." Ken waved the air bill over Sarah Choy's desk, each page fluttering like a paper wing.

  "The government doesn't have the mechanism in place to accept Federal Express," she told him. And I imagined a long mechanical arm lying on the floor of a government building, waiting to be installed.

  "Then how do you usually send the fingerprints?" Ken asked.

  "United States Postal Service," Sarah Choy said proudly.

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  "It takes at least two weeks for fingerprints to show up in our system," the woman at the FBI explained to Ken.

  "It's been three," he told her.

  "That doesn't mean anything."