The Russian Word for Snow

by Janis Cooke Newman

  54 THE RUSSIAN WORD FOR SNOW

  She lifted the lid on a steaming pot of fennel, letting loose the smell of licorice.

  "Do you think he's a little thin?" I asked her.

  She poked at a fennel bulb with a fork.

  "That's to be expected."

  "We have to go to Moscow soon to see him."

  "You should try to get some Cuban cigars, while you're there." Dan leaned over the fennel pot.

  "They want us to make sure we want him."

  "That fennel is done."

  Then Ken came in and asked Dan a question about the way he'd hooked up his speakers, and Dan went into the other room, saying he wanted Ken to listen to something by a new band made up of musicians from an old band he remembered Ken liking. Kate said the couscous was probably ready and wouldn't be good cold, and Dan opened a bottle of red wine he'd found in a North Berkeley wine shop that reminded him of a meal he and Kate had eaten in Spain. Then we all sat down to dinner, and Ken tried to remember the name of a movie he'd seen in college that he thought took place in Morocco, and Dan told us about a play he was thinking of doing which would require him to learn several accents, though none of them would be Moroccan, and Kate said that North Africa was supposed to be beautiful and we should all try to take a trip there, and somehow the conversation never came back to what it was Kate had or hadn't seen on the videotape.

  Kate called the next day.

  "I'm giving you the name and number of a specialist in child development. I think you should show her your videotape."

  "Why?"

  "She'll know if he's doing all the things a nine-month-old should be doing."

  "From a tape?"

  "You can tell a lot from a tape."

  I doodled on the number she'd given me, turning the eight into a little man with a hat.

  "You really think I should do this?"

  "Just so you know."

  I added a pair of running legs to the little man, remembering the boy in the helmet. He was twelve, maybe thirteen years old, and couldn't control his limbs, so that he had to wear a Styro-foam helmet whenever he went out. Now and then, I'd see him with his mother in the grocery store; the mother making one-word exclamations—"Apple!" "Carrot!" "Pear!"—and the son repeating them.

  I didn't want to be doing that, I thought. I didn't want to be teaching my teenaged son the names of the most common fruits and vegetables.

  "All right," I told Kate, "I'll show her the tape."

  "That was heartbreaking," said the specialist in childhood development.

  The director who was sitting beside her nodded, her glasses inching down her nose.

  The specialist's name was Jill. She had big, bony hands, and when she shook mine, she'd made it look like a child's.

  The director's name was Sharon. She was round and hard, like the small European ladies who push you out of their way at the market.

  "Could we watch it again?" asked Jill.

  Ken rewound the tape, the sound like a small motor racing.

  I looked around the room. In a corner, someone had set up a puzzle board with cutouts in the shapes of ducks and chickens and horses. The wooden pieces that fit these cutouts had been scattered over the floor, and I imagined a child struggling to find the right place for the wooden rooster while a specialist stood over him, taking notes.

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  The tape stopped winding, and Ken pressed the remote. Grisha appeared, swimming across the screen.

  I watched Jill's face, but she kept its broad planes blank, like the featureless masks that are sold at Halloween, masks that are often more frightening than those made to look like goblins or monsters.

  "There's no vocalizing here," she said. For a moment I thought she was speaking to me.

  "And no evidence of crawling ability," Sharon replied.

  "I don't remember him tracking that squeeze toy."

  "The giraffe."

  "Did you notice the arms and legs?"

  "Very rigid." Sharon made a fist with her fat little hand.

  "But it's that expression that concerns me." Jill put a long finger on Grisha's sideways smile. "It doesn't seem to be caused by any outside stimuli."

  Sharon hitched her chair closer. The backs of the two women were blocking the television. Grisha poked his face out from between their heads, as if looking for me.

  "Heartbreaking," Jill repeated when the tape went to blue.

  "What are you seeing?" I asked her.

  "What we're looking for are developmental milestones," Sharon explained, "as well as evidence of basic neurological functions."

  "Are you seeing something wrong?"

  The room filled with the loud frightening sound of static.

  "Sorry," Ken said, pressing buttons until the television turned off.

  "Let me show you something." Sharon stood and I could see she was not much taller than a child herself. "I think you'll find this helpful."

  She walked to a bookcase filled with videotapes and brought one back.

  "May I?" she said to Ken, who had not let go of the remote.

  On the screen, a middle-aged man in a suit sat beside a little girl with an elastic bow stretched around her bald head. The little girl looked to be about the same age as Grisha.

  "This man is an expert in assessing childhood development." Sharon gave his image a little pat with her finger.

  The man in the suit placed a tower of plastic blocks in front of the little girl, and watched with delight as she took them apart. He put a plastic dump truck in her lap, and clapped when the little girl pushed it over to him. He hid a stuffed monkey under his jacket and waited for the girl to find it. "Good job," he repeated each time the child completed a task. "Good job."

  I wondered if Sharon meant to show us that Grisha was not like the little girl with the bow on her head? Wanted us to see that he would not be able to take apart the blocks, or push the truck? That the stuffed monkey would remain lost to him?

  "Perhaps that's enough," Jill said, when the man began singing "The Itsy-Bitsy Spider."

  Sharon turned off the television.

  "Do you have any other information on this child?" Jill asked.

  "Just this," Ken said. He pushed a paper across the shiny conference table.

  Jill read the words out loud, the medical diagnosis for the child we wanted to adopt. "Perinatal encephalopathy. Muscular distony. Hypotrophy. Where did you get this?"

  "From our adoption coordinator."

  "Vegeto-visceral syndrome?"

  "She thought it might mean he was allergic to vegetables."

  Jill pushed the paper back to him.

  "Some of these diagnoses are left over from the time Russian children couldn't be adopted by foreigners, unless they had something wrong with them," Ken explained, repeating what Maggie had told us. "They don't really mean anything."

  The two women sat across the table from us without saying

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  anything, and I began to believe that I'd been unclear about why we'd wanted them to watch the tape.

  "So, what can you tell us about Grisha?" Ken finally asked.

  "Normally, what we talk about with the parents is therapy," Sharon told him. "Various treatments for the developmental issues we've observed."

  "But in this case, you're not yet the parents of this little boy," Jill said. "Correct?"

  "Is there something wrong with him? Something bad?"

  "We don't ever use terms like 'bad.' " Sharon smiled.

  Jill put her large wrists on the table. I thought she was going to reach for my hand.

  "There is every evidence that this child's development is severely delayed," she said.

  "What does that mean? That he won't put sentences together until he's four or five? Or that he'll never learn to read or write?"

  "It's impossible to predict how the delay will manifest itself," Sharon explained.

  "But you said there are treatments to help h
im catch up," Ken reminded her.

  "Again, we don't like to make predictions."

  "But all we're talking about are learning delays, right?"

  Jill leaned across the table. "I also believe there's neurological damage, based on that odd facial expression."

  "Couldn't it have been a smile?" Ken asked, twisting up the corners of his own mouth to demonstrate.

  "I didn't see anything in his environment likely to produce a smile."

  Jill pushed back from the table. Her large hands left opaque prints on the waxy surface.

  "Do you think we should take him?" I asked her.

  "That's not a question I'm ever asked. It's generally not an option for the parents who come to me."

  "And as I mentioned," Sharon repeated, "our recommendations are strictly in the area of treatment."

  "But if you do adopt him," Jill continued, "expect that he'll require some kind of therapy—for how long and whether it'll ultimately help, I can't tell you."

  The four of us examined the smudges on the table.

  "Well, if that's it then." Sharon rose.

  Jill stood beside her, and their disparate heights made me feel queasy. I walked around the table, stepping on a cutout duck.

  "I'm sorry," Jill said, when we went through the door. But I didn't know whether her apology had been for what she'd told me about Grisha, or for bumping me with her long arm.

  Ken and I sat in the parked car with our seat belts fastened.

  "They might be wrong," he said. He was flicking his finger on the edge of a key chain—a flat metal square with the masks of comedy and tragedy on either side.

  "He wasn't crawling."

  "Maybe they wouldn't let him."

  "And he wasn't sitting up by himself."

  "He might be too young."

  "At nine months?"

  "It's possible."

  I pushed on the button that made the window go down, forgetting it wouldn't work when the car was off.

  "He wasn't anything like that little girl," I said. "He didn't do any of the same things."

  "Nobody was giving him any toys."

  "They gave him a giraffe."

  "They didn't give it to him. They just squeezed it next to his ear."

  I stared at an enormous bougainvillea that seemed in the process of swallowing the building we'd just left.

  "Do you think they're wrong?" I asked.

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  Ken watched a woman dragging a small boy past our bumper.

  "Probably not."

  "I don't think I can raise a special-needs child." I pressed my knee against the door handle until it hurt.

  "Are you saying you don't want him?"

  "He could be severely delayed."

  "We could fix that—after we get him."

  "They say he has neurological damage."

  "How can they tell that from a videotape?"

  I leaned my head against the window I couldn't open. My face was reflected in the side mirror, and I moved so I wouldn't have to look at it.

  "We're forty years older than this little boy," I told Ken. "Do you see us at sixty, or seventy, holding the hand of our grownup child so he can cross the street?"

  Ken flipped the key chain. Showed me comedy, tragedy.

  "Do you think you can raise a special-needs child?" I asked him.

  "No, I don't think so."

  "I can't believe you're not going to take that little boy." Maggie's voice quavered on the other end of the phone, making our connection sound watery.

  "We're not the right parents for a special-needs child," I told her.

  I was pacing the kitchen with a sponge in my hand, wiping at spots that were part of the tile. Ken sat at the table with the portable phone pushed against his ear.

  "He is not a special-needs child," Maggie insisted.

  "They told us he had neurological damage."

  "They're wrong."

  "These women are experts—this is what they do."

  "I've been to these orphanages. I've seen these children."

  "They showed us a videotape."

  "There is nothing wrong with that little boy."

  I scrubbed at a brown ring in the shape of a coffee cup.

  "We might still considet Russian adoption sometime in the futute," I told her.

  "I can't believe you're not going to take that little boy."

  "You should tell Yuri we'te not coming."

  "Just go to Moscow. See him. I've met these childten and—"

  "We'te not the tight—"

  "Let net finish," Ken said.

  I squeezed the watet out of the sponge, waited to heat what Maggie would say.

  "He just felt like youts."

  My hand was wet and smelled musty.

  "Take some time and think about it," Maggie said.

  Ken looked at me and nodded.

  "We'te just not the tight people."

  Maggie sighed.

  "I'll wait a few days befote I e-mail Yuri, just in case."

  "Whatevet you want."

  "I just can't believe you'te not going to take that little boy."

  Jill called the next day with the phone numbets of a pediattic neutologist, an infant-bonding thetapist, and a child psychiattist.

  "All these people wotk with childten ftom Eastetn Eutopean otphanages. I want you to call them."

  "Why?"

  "They can tell you what to expect if you adopt that little boy."

  "We've alteady decided not to take him."

  "You'te sute?"

  "It's what we told out cootdinatot."

  "Call these people anyway. I want you to be certain."

  I wtote down the numbets and called each one in tutn.

  "Without dtugs, some of these childten can't sit still long enough to wtite theit names," explained the pediattic neutologist. "Othets have to be testtained to keep ftom banging theit heads against the wall."

  "Growing up in an otphanage can ptoduce attachment

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  disorder," said the infant-bonding specialist. "What you wind up with are children who cannot tolerate being touched by their parents."

  "The inability to bond causes sociopathic behavior," the child psychiatrist informed me. "I've treated one child who broke his biological brother's arm, and another who tried to set his grandparents' house on fire."

  After I finished talking with these experts, I went out to hike the mountain that kept the southern light from reaching our house. I chose the steepest path and didn't stop walking until my heart was pounding in my ears and I was choking down air that smelled of mud and rainwater and decaying leaves.

  The next day, Jill mailed me a magazine article. On the cover, the words "Disturbed, Detached, Unreachable" were printed over the blurred photograph of a screaming child. Inside, I saw that all the photographs were blurred, as if these children had been too badly damaged to create a clear image.

  Beneath the out-of-focus faces, I read about the little boy from Romania who flinches whenever his mother tries to hug him, the girl from Russia who has threatened to kill her parents while they're sleeping, the nine-year-old from Moscow who must take medication before being allowed out to play.

  Along with the article, Jill enclosed a graph that charted at what age a child should be able to smile spontaneously, balance on one foot. According to the graph, 90 percent of the children tested could sit up by themselves before nine months.

  I put the blurry children and the graph back into the envelope and called Kate, asked her to meet me at an Indian restaurant where the curries were so hot they made your ears itch.

  "This doesn't feel like deciding not to take a child I never had," I told her, wiping away tears caused by the chicken vin-daloo. "It feels like losing one I did."

  "All you saw was a videotape. Everything else you imagined."

  So I imagined myself singing the letters of the alphabet to Grisha and watching him walk away before I'd gotten t
o M; telling him, "No," and having him hit me so hard I'd be left with a bruise; trying to kiss him good night while he whipped his head from side to side on the pillow.

  Yet whenever I looked at his small face in Maggie's photograph, he still felt like mine.

  Jill continued to call me with the phone numbers of other specialists. I'd write these numbers down in a notebook covered with Chinese silk, leaving a blank page between them.

  "Why do you keep calling these people?" Ken asked me.

  "I'm waiting for one of them to tell me something different," and I'd remember the experiment with the lines.

  It was a college experiment for a psychology class, and the subject had been a freshman with a mouth full of braces. He was put in a room with five of us from the class, and everyone was asked to choose one line from a selection of three that most closely matched a sample. It wasn't a difficult choice; of the three lines, only one was a clear match. Yet the five of us were told to choose a line that was much longer.

  At first the freshman with the braces stuck with his choice, measuring the lines with the side of his finger to show us that his was the better match. But after we'd been given a number of sample lines and hadn't once agreed with him, the freshman began to doubt his perception. Before long, he was choosing whatever line the group chose.

  Then the freshman was given an ally—one person who saw the lines the way he did. That changed everything. Now, when the five of us chose a line that was too long or too short, the freshman no longer went along with us. Even when fifteen more people were added to the experiment, fifteen people who didn't see what he saw, the freshman stuck with what he believed to be true—as long as he had one ally.

  That was what I was looking for: an ally. One person among

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  all the names in the Chinese notebook who would look at Grisha and see what I saw.

  The door to the pediatrician's office kept closing on me as I struggled to get a small television and a portable VCR into the waiting room.

  The thin, dark head of a man who looked to be from India poked itself out of the receptionist's window. The man's mouth was a little oval of surprise.