The Russian Word for Snow Page 9

  When our fingerprints didn't show up in the system by the end of the fourth week, the woman said it still didn't prove they were lost. "They might be downstairs," she said, making it sound as if the things that wound up downstairs would surface only in their own time, like lumbering sea creatures that rarely came up for air.

  Ken called the unpublished phone number of the FBI fingerprint-expediting office. He'd gotten the number from the Internet, from a chat group of people who were also in the process of adopting from Russia.

  "How did you get this number?" asked the woman at the expediting office.

  "From a friend."

  The woman gave Ken the government address at which the mechanism to accept Federal Express was in place. Ken sent off a second set of our fingerprints, and then published the address on the Internet.

  Every piece of paper that had been notarized also had to be apos tilled.

  "What is apostilling, anyway?" I asked Ken.

  "It's like notarizing a notary," he explained.

  "You're making that up," I told him.

  Apostilling could be done only in Sacramento, and could be turned around in less than three days only if the documents were delivered in person.

  "I'll go," Ken said.

  "No, I'll go." And so we both went, leaving behind an unfinished script about the workstation of the future.

  It was the kind of thing we were doing more and more often.

  "Your script's going to be a little late," Ken would tell our

  clients, "we're still looking over your materials." Then we'd run out to drop off another document at Sarah Choy's office.

  "We need to get some work done," I'd say to Ken, when we'd fall too far behind. But it was impossible to stay in the office writing about features and benefits when we could be doing something to get Alex out of the orphanage.

  Our paperwork was completed on March 3.

  "That gives Yuri a month to get the signatures before Alex comes off the database," I told Maggie. I'd stopped by her dark little house to pick up the applications for our Russian visas.

  "Oh, Yuri won't even start getting the signatures until after April fifteenth."

  From Maggie's screen porch I heard a sound like an angry baby howling.

  "I'm mating my cat," she said. "I don't think she likes it."

  "You mean we won't be able to get Alex on the fifteenth?"

  "It'll probably be more like the thirtieth."

  Something crashed on the porch.

  "Possibly even the beginning of May."

  "We have to wait two more weeks?" I wished I could lock Maggie on the screen porch with the unhappy cat.

  Doing nothing turned out to be more difficult than doing the paperwork. Every couple of days, Ken would scatter all of our duplicate documents—the ones we'd collected in case the first set got lost—across the kitchen table.

  "Did we send this bank statement to Moscow?" he'd ask me.

  "That was for INS, not the Russians."

  "What about the copies of our passports?"

  One night he convinced himself we'd forgotten to apostille the results of his lab tests.

  "Let's go away somewhere," I said.

  "We can't."

  108 THE RUSSIAN WORD FOR SNOW

  "What about this camping trip?" I showed him a picture of people in bandannas standing on an enormous rock in Arizona.

  "I'm sure we forgot to do this." Ken clutched the paper that attested to the state of his health.

  A week later, Ken and I stood in the Arizona sun while a retired schoolteacher weighed our backpacks to make sure they didn't exceed the Sierra Club weight limit.

  "Why don't we all introduce ourselves," said the retired schoolteacher's wife. She and her husband were from the Midwest, and they spoke with the hard, flat vowels people in that part of the country developed to match the hard, flat plains.

  "I have a grandchild who will be six months old at exactly seven thirty-one tonight," declared a woman with an Ace bandage on her knee.

  "I've got three daughters," said a man wearing pants covered with pockets. "Fifteen, thirteen, and twelve." He wiped imaginary sweat from his forehead.

  "My son was just accepted to Stanford and he's only sixteen," a woman in a pink baseball cap told us. She puffed up the chest of her khaki shirt and pointed her pink brim at me.

  "I have a son who'll turn one year old this week," I announced, shifting around on the hard-packed sand. "He's in Moscow."

  The pink brim cocked itself at me.

  "We're adopting him," I told it.

  That first afternoon, a man named Loyal dropped back to walk with Ken and me. In the middle of the desert, he wore a hat covered with the fake bugs and caterpillars that are used for fly fishing.

  "Both of my children are adopted," Loyal told us. "A boy and a girl."

  He touched a spot near his heart when he spoke of them.

  "They're grown now. Great kids."

  Then before we could say anything, he walked ahead of us,

  leaving me with the sight of a bright green worm bouncing on the back of his hat.

  That night, in the pale blue world of the tent, Ken and I zipped our sleeping bags together and talked about Alex.

  "We'll take him next time we go camping," Ken said. "He'll fit right here between us."

  He moved closer to the wall of the tent, making a space for Alex, and we slept around it all night.

  The second day, we stopped for lunch along a steep path covered with barrel cactus topped by red blooms, like short ladies with flowers in their hair. Ken and I walked to the top of the trail, searching for a spot away from the pale young woman who used every mealtime to discuss her allergies, inventorying for us all the foods that caused her to produce mucus.

  As we sat on rocks, eating the peanut butter and jelly sandwiches the retired schoolteacher's wife made for us, we watched Robbie trudge up the hill.

  Robbie was twenty-six years old and had just been given a new heart. "His old one had some kind of congenital defect," the retired schoolteacher had told us, after Robbie had gone into his tent early one night. "Something hereditary." Now the drugs Robbie took to keep from rejecting the new heart made his muscles cramp. On the trail, he moved slowly and often fell behind. When he got too far back, the schoolteacher would suggest that we stop and admire the view.

  Robbie dropped his pack beside us, raising a little cloud of pink dust. He collapsed on the ground and opened the Tupper-ware container with his peanut butter and jelly sandwich.

  "I'm adopted," he said, keeping his head down so that it looked as if he was telling the sandwich. "I think that's why it took them so long to figure out what was wrong with my heart."

  The three of us sat chewing peanut butter, our tongues sticky and thick.

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  "It's a good thing you're doing, adopting that little boy,"

  For the rest of that afternoon, Ken and I walked at the back of the group with Robbie.

  The third day was Alex's birthday.

  That evening we sat around a fire and ate Hungry Man mashed potatoes mixed with Spam.

  "I see a lot of adopted Russian kids in my practice, and they all have one problem or another," said a man who'd told us he was a psychiatrist.

  The schoolteacher's wife cleared her throat. Robbie pushed pieces of pink meat around in his Sierra cup. Loyal sat with his mouth open, revealing partially chewed mashed potatoes.

  "Tell me," Ken said to the pale young woman, "is it all cheese you're allergic to? Or just cow's milk?"

  "All cheese," the woman replied, wriggling with delight in her camp chair. "They just go right to my sinuses."

  I gave Ken my last Oreo.

  Later that night, Ken and I sat beneath the stars and listened to the man who was a pilot playing the flute. The pilot always set up his tent away from the others—the way we did— and every night the sound of his flute would float over us like a continuous ribbon; sometimes twining itself aro
und the high-pitched wail of a coyote, sometimes curling against the short whistle of a night bird. We never mentioned the flute playing to the pilot, in case it would make him stop.

  "Do you think they'll do anything for Alex's birthday?" Ken asked. "I mean, at the orphanage?"

  I shrugged in the dark, thinking of the woman who had given birth to Alex a year ago. I imagined her walking home in the early darkness of the Russian winter and stopping suddenly on the street when she remembered what day it was. I saw her standing in the cold, milk and bread in a plastic bag, while people pushed past her, hurrying to get out of the wind.

  I wondered if she'd held Alex the day he was born, and if

  she'd given him any explanation before she'd let him go. And I hoped, as she stood remembeting on the icy streets of Moscow, that she didn't want him back.

  Ken unzipped the tent and took out the plastic flask we'd filled with bourbon. We were rationing it, allowing ourselves only two small sips a night.

  "Happy birthday, Alex," he said, lifting the flask to the stars.

  "Happy birthday," I said to the night sky. The bourbon was warm and tasted a little like plastic. I drank all of it.

  Once we got back from Arizona, I began to read everything I could about child development. I'd stand in the aisles of bookstores next to pregnant women, and women with children asleep on their backs, reading about motor skills that were described as fine and gross.

  Climbing develops mathematical ability, the books said. Puzzles are a prereading activity. I copied these pronouncements into the Chinese notebook where I'd once listed the names of pediatric neurologists and child psychologists.

  Choose toys that are interactive. Make up songs and sing them to your child. I underlined these pieces of instruction, wondering if this advice had been passed on to the white-coated women who worked in the orphanage.

  Take your child everywhere — even a trip to the grocery store can be stimulating. Hold your child whenever you can — physical contact aids brain development.

  "Sometimes these children don't get out of their cribs," Maggie had once told me. "Sometimes they spend the whole day there."

  The first three years are the most important time in a child's development. Nothing you do afterward will have as much impact.

  Alex would be nearly fourteen months old when we went back to get him.

  H2 THE RUSSIAN WORD FOR SNOW

  The first week in April, we traveled to New York. Ken was working a trade show, delivering the same presentation to a different audience every twenty minutes.

  "Why don't you call my sister?" he suggested.

  I was sitting on the hotel bed, reading a book about developing your child's artistic potential.

  "She'd love to see you."

  Lynne met me at a gallery in Soho, pushing into the white space with a stroller, a diaper bag, half a banana, and my eight-month-old nephew, Wesley.

  We'd come to see an exhibit of taxidermy mice—small stuffed rodents that had been dressed in pearls and little vests and placed in front of miniature paintings like tiny art lovers. Wesley lay on the gallery floor next to them, pressing his cheek into the polished wood.

  "Mice," Lynne told him.

  He touched a mouse wearing a beret tilted over one ear.

  Tactile stimulation, I thought.

  Wesley was the baby Lynne had been carrying when Ken's father died. Ken and I had only just flown home from the funeral when we got the call that Lynne was in labor. Wesley was born two months early. "Probably the shock," everybody said.

  "It's like Daddy's come back," Lynne had told us, when we called to ask about the new baby. "He looks just like him."

  She was right. Now and then, the little boy would lift an eyebrow or twist his mouth, and it would be as if the older man's face had been projected onto the smooth screen of his grandson's skin.

  We let Wesley crawl around with the taxidermy mice until a gallery woman with straight black bangs frowned at us. Then we stepped out into early spring air that smelled of flowers even in New York. A fish truck rumbled past on the cobblestones, heading toward Chinatown. A boy in an 7 ¥ New York T-shirt used a magnet to determine which of the buildings along Greene Street were really cast iron.

  Lynne dropped Wesley into a stroller with a little plastic steering wheel attached to the front. He pounded his fist on the horn, making a loud beeping sound and frightening a pigeon that had been pecking at a sooty bagel.

  Cause and effect, I noted.

  We walked for a while and then went into another gallery. Here, the exhibit was a raised floor made of a kind of gel that would hold a footprint for a minute or two, before filling it in like waves on a beach. A pile of shoes had been left at the base of the raised floor—Doc Martens and boots with platforms like enormous bars of black soap.

  Lynne set Wesley on the raised floor, and he crawled across it to a man wearing glasses with lenses no bigger than quarters. Looking over his shoulder, the little boy marveled at the imprints his star-shaped hands made.

  The ability to change his environment.

  Wesley reached the wall and tried to turn on the gel surface, but he lost his balance and tumbled off onto a pair of suede clogs.

  Lynne rushed to pick him up, touching him all over with her hands.

  "It's all right," she murmured, letting some of his hair curl into her mouth. "It's all right."

  Watching her, I remembered the boy in the blue overalls on Maggie's tape—the one who'd been learning to walk and had fallen and lay crying with his face in the carpet while the legs of the woman walked back and forth behind him.

  I yanked off my shoes and stomped onto the gel platform, leaving a trail of deep footprints. The man in the glasses scooted over to the side and put on a pair of leopard-print loafers.

  "Are you OK?" Lynne asked me.

  I sat against the wall, making an indentation the exact width of my hips. "I want to go get my son."

  She sat beside me, making her own indentation.

  "It'll be all right," she murmured. "It'll be all right," repeating the phrase the way she'd done for Wesley.

  Lynne had been certain that her father would see his first grandchild. "He'll hang on till my baby is born," she'd kept telling everyone. "It'll be all right."

  But of course it hadn't been.

  And now, we sat side by side, sinking into a piece of art.

  "May Day is a very big deal in Russia," Maggie said. "Everybody goes to their dacha in the country."

  "What does that mean?" I asked.

  "Nobody's going to be signing papers the first week of May."

  "Do we have to change our travel date?"

  "Make it the second week."

  "The beginning of the second week?"

  "Better make it the end."

  "A crib, a changing table, a diaper pail with locking lid." Ken was reading from a paper that had drawings of storks around the edges. It was the middle of April, and Alex was off the database. Now Ken wanted to get the small room next to ours ready for him.

  "The old Italians wouldn't give me a baby shower until you came home from the hospital," my mother had once told me, eyes squinting from resentment and cigarette smoke. "They thought it was bad luck."

  "I don't want to buy anything, not until it's closer to when we're going," I said.

  But a week later, in a store that sold painted Madonnas and bright red devils, I saw the wall hanging of the market.

  The market had been made in Peru, stitched from bits of colored fabric into brown-faced vendors who sold cotton cabbages and tiny Peruvian hats. Along the bottom of the market, cloth women held babies swaddled in squares of striped burlap, and cloth men walked along with perfectly formed raffia sombreros on their heads.

  "It's wonderful, isn't it?" said a saleswoman wearing an embroidered blouse. "All made by hand."

  "How much is it?" I wanted to buy the little cloth market for Alex; wanted to hang it in the small room next to ours, so that after he came to live with us,
I could lift him up and teach him the words for "corn" and "tamales" and "baby."

  The saleswoman folded over a corner stitched with tiny sausages. "Two hundred and fifty dollars."

  "That's a lot," I said. And I turned to examine a Madonna with toothpicks stuck round her head in an effort to depict radiant light.

  "It is all made by hand," the saleswoman repeated. She picked up a devil by his penis and dusted the shelf beneath him.

  "The old Italians were superstitious," my mother had told me. "They wanted me to pierce your ears, pin a little horn on your baby undershirt to keep away the evil eye. But I wouldn't do it. I said that in America there was no evil eye. And when I was pregnant with your brothers, I made your father take me out to buy a second crib."

  My mother had laughed when she told me this story, joyous bursts that had come out with little puffs of smoke. And I'd admired her bravery, the way she could laugh smoke into the evil eye.

  "I'm going to take this," I told the saleswoman, touching the market near where the women walked with their babies.

  I bought the wall hanging and a table with a blue coyote painted on it. At the last minute, I also bought a wooden cross wrapped in yarn that the saleswoman told me was used to protect children from the evil eye, just in case my mother had been wrong.

  "I've been meaning to call you," Maggie said, fingering asparagus thin as chopsticks. "I heard from Yuri." It was the beginning of May, and I'd run into her at a Berkeley produce market, where I was filling a plastic bag with cherries, eating every fifth or sixth one.

  n6 THE RUSSIAN WORD FOR SNOW

  "What did he say?"

  "He thinks it would be better if you traveled after May twentieth."

  "Why?"

  "He hasn't got all the signatures yet."

  "He hasn't?"

  "I told you this was a difficult process." She rejected the asparagus. "I said there'd be delays." She wandered into the next aisle.

  I watched her go, spitting out a chewed red pulp that looked like a small battered heart and did not taste quite ripe.

  The next week, Ken and I bought Alex a dresser of unfinished wood, and for four nights I put on paper overalls and went out to the garage to work on it. While I sanded and primed and painted, I told Alex the story of the dresser.