The Russian Word for Snow

by Janis Cooke Newman

  "I have an appointment with Dr. McKenzie," I told him.

  He regarded the equipment in my hands with alarm.

  "She's going to look at my videotape." I lifted the VCR to the height of his window.

  The man flipped through the wide pages of his appointment book. He had soft black hairs on his upper lip that had never been shaved, and I thought he might be a young relative of the doctor's.

  "Newman." I pointed to the name in his book with my chin.

  "Yes, yes," the young man said. He nodded many times. "You will be having a seat, please."

  I sat on a striped couch beside a stack of Highlight magazines. A small boy with a runny nose shuffled out of a back room with his mother. He stared at the little television at my feet.

  I'd found Dr. McKenzie myself. Gotten her number from the phone book after I'd called the last name on Jill's list. She was the only pediatrician who would agree to make a diagnosis from a videotape. After she told me what was wrong with Grisha, I didn't know who I would call.

  "You will be coming in now." The young Indian man stood in the door.

  I picked up the television and the VCR and followed him down a hallway. He walked so smoothly, his backless sandals never slapped against his heels.

  "This will be the room," he said. And I stood holding the

  VCR and the television while he pulled a new sheet of white paper over the examining table.

  "The doctor will be coming in soon." He turned to go by pivoting on the ball of one foot.

  I set the VCR and the small television on the examining table and crawled behind a rolling cabinet to plug them in. On the way up, I bumped the cabinet, rattling a metal tray full of sharp instruments. There was one chair, and I sat in it.

  "And where is this videotape I am supposed to watch?" said Dr. McKenzie as she came through the door. She was wearing a red sari flecked with gold threads beneath her white jacket.

  I pointed to the small television on the examining table.

  "So let us see it." She folded her arms over white cotton and red silk.

  Dr. McKenzie watched the tape standing in the doorway. I stood to offer her my seat, but she waved me down with the clinking sound of her gold bracelets.

  The doctor's eyes were perfectly round, echoes of the small red circle on her forehead. I watched her face, curious which of Grisha's small movements would be the first to disturb her.

  When I heard her laugh, a deep, throaty sound, I thought something had gone wrong with the tape—that it had stopped, and she was now watching a situation comedy or scenes from a soap opera.

  "That is a delightful expression." The doctor pointed a hand covered with rings at the television.

  Grisha was making the scrunched-up face, the expression that was not produced by any outside stimuli.

  "What do you think it is?" I asked her.

  "A smile."

  I made a sound that could have been either laughing or crying. Dr. McKenzie stepped closer and rested a hand on top of the television.

  "I do not see anything wrong with this child, except that he's in an orphanage."

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  "Thank you," I whispered.

  "Have you seen him yet?"

  "No."

  "I suggest you do. See him, and then go with your gut."

  She gave the handle of the small television a squeeze before turning to go, pivoting on one foot precisely as the young man had done.

  I put my hands over my face and saw Grisha using my fingers to count all the way to ten, throwing his arms around my legs in a hug, bringing me the drawing he would have to explain was a pirate ship; and it felt like waking beside someone you love after dreaming that you'd lost them.

  I called Ken's pager from a pay phone outside the doctor's office. "Doctor says Grisha is fine," I dictated to the person on the other end. "We should go to Moscow."

  Later he told me the message had come while he was sitting in a conference room with a client.

  "It was all garbled. All I could read was 'Grisha' and 'fine,' and something that looked like Moscow without any vowels."

  But it had been enough for him to excuse himself to go into the men's room and cry.

  The Blueberry Hat

  Smoke was coming out of Yuri's nose and his gray fur hat bristled. He shouted at Volodya jabbing a lit cigarette at him for emphasis. Volodya pumped the gas pedal of the stalled Lada, his long thin body bouncing up and down in time with his foot. The little car made a sound like a ticking bomb.

  Ken and I sat squeezed into the backseat with Anna, the translator Yuri had arranged for us. Anna sat with her stockinged knees pressed close together, her hands folded in her lap. I was in the middle, over the hump, and my shoes kept sliding down onto her polished high-heeled boots. In the backpack balanced on my lap were the presents Maggie had told us to bring for the women who worked at the orphanage: battery-operated flashlights, travel-sized bottles of hand lotion, postcards of San Francisco.

  "Why would they want a picture of a cable car?" I'd asked her.

  "They like anything American," she explained.

  The Lada was surrounded by cars, each one exhaling exhaust in thin blue clouds. A Jeep Cherokee drove onto the sidewalk to get around us, just missing three women in fur coats, who looked like bears with shopping bags. The women didn't turn around.

  "If you like while you are in Moscow," Anna said in her child's voice, "we go to Tretyakov Gallery." Her pale pink lips were three inches from my ear. "We see the umm . . . religious paintings." When Anna couldn't think of the English word

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  for something, she'd make a soft humming sound until it came to her.

  Yuri rolled down his window and blew smoke into the snarling faces of the drivers trying to pass the little Lada. A large man in a Mercedes shook an angry paw at us.

  Volodya pressed the pedal again, and the Lada filled with the smell of gasoline. Yuri lit another cigarette.

  "Do you do many adoptions?" I asked him, directing the question to the back of his fur hat.

  "Two, three each month." He sent the English words into the smoky air as if he had no confidence in their ability to convey meaning.

  "That's wonderful, finding homes for so many children."

  Yuri regarded me with small eyes. He fitted his cigarette between brown teeth, and looked back out the window.

  Anna was telling me about her daughter, Victoria. "She love The Lion King."

  "How old is she?" I asked.

  "Twelve." And then she told me how much Victoria liked American clothes and what her sizes were.

  Volodya reached for the key and rested his fingers on it. Tilting back his head and angling his long nose at a rip in the fabric of the Lada's roof, he moved his lips silently. Then he turned the key, and the little car started, shivering in the cold.

  We crawled along the wide streets of Moscow's, streets my guidebook claimed had been designed by Stalin so that planes could land in the city during wartime.

  "That is old KGB ummm . . . headquarters." Anna pointed to a granite building that spread over an entire block.

  "What do they do there now?" I asked.

  "The same thing," Yuri snorted. He laughed, and a curl of smoke rolled out of his mouth.

  "And that is Red Square," Anna said. Behind two gray walls I glimpsed a narrow slice of St. Basil's swirling domes, a fairy tale caught between the pages of a textbook.

  Volodya swerved to avoid a man who had stumbled into the street. My backpack toppled onto Anna's neat wool skirt.

  "Sorry," I said.

  Inside the pack, beneath the plastic flashlights and the pictures of the Golden Gate Bridge, was the graph Jill had sent me that charted all the things a ten-month-old baby should be able to do.

  Pulls to stand. Bangs two cubes. I'd spent the week before memorizing these skills. Regards own hand. Says Dada and Mama.

  "Why are you doing that?" Ken would ask, when he'd find me in the
bathroom chanting, Works for toy. Imitates sounds.

  "These are things we should know," I'd tell him.

  But the truth was that when I wasn't repeating one of the skills from the chart— Gets to sitting. Stands supported. —I'd imagine the babushkaed woman handing Grisha to me, his wrists like twigs, his hair brown feathers, and I'd be afraid that I wouldn't feel anything.

  I'd never been able to master the knack of falling in love with other people's babies; never begged to hold a stranger's wobbly-headed newborn, or asked a friend if I could sniff the scalp of her sleeping child.

  Ken had. Ken could be stopped on the street by a little girl in a sun hat like a French Foreign Legionnaire, and be unable to resist talking to her in the sputtering voice of Donald Duck.

  I must have something missing, I'd think, as he bent over the stroller and made the little girl laugh by saying her name in a duck's voice.

  But before this, it had never mattered.

  I looked out the window of the Lada. We'd left the city center and were driving past massive apartment buildings with tiny windows that seemed in danger of being squeezed shut by the brickwork around them.

  Volodya pulled into a short driveway and stopped the car in front of a green metal gate. Someone had painted the number 3 on the wall by hand, and small paint drips ran from the bottom curve like tears.

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  A door at the side of the gate opened, and a man wearing a policeman's hat marched to the car. He shouted into Yuri's open window, and Yuri shouted back at him, pointing to Ken and me in the backseat.

  "Nyet," the man in the policeman's hat told Yuri. "Nyet, nyet." And he shook his head, making the hat float from side to side.

  Yuri yelled out the window, his breath white clouds. Between sentences, he shot his pointed finger at Ken and me.

  The man in the policeman's hat repeated, "Nyet, nyet." His stomach was pressed against Yuri's door.

  Yuri threw his lit cigarette out the window, just missing the man's shoes. He pushed open his door, shoving the man out of his way, and marched through the gate. The man rushed after him, his arms waving, like a beetle that's been knocked onto its back.

  "What's happening?" Ken asked Anna. "Why aren't they letting us in?"

  "Who knows?" She shrugged her neat shoulders. "They do what they do." Then she said something to Volodya which she didn't translate.

  If I can swallow three times before Yuri comes back, I thought, they'll let us in. But my mouth was too dry.

  Cold air blew in through Yuri's open window. Volodya revved the Lada's engine to keep it from stalling. Anna stared out her window at a row of small winter trees that looked dead. I saw Ken gripping the door handle, and was afraid he'd leap out of the car and chase after Yuri and the man in the policeman's hat.

  Yuri burst back through the gate and threw himself into his seat.

  "Are we going in?" Ken asked him.

  He yanked off his fur hat and shouted in Russian.

  Without warning, the gate to the orphanage swung open. The man in the policeman's hat rapped his knuckles on the Lada's

  hood and waved us through with short irritated gestures, as if we were the ones who had kept him waiting.

  We drove down a gravel driveway, over sharp rocks that poked through the snow. In a narrow strip of yard, a group of three- and four-year-old children climbed around a swing set with ice-covered seats. The children were dressed in identical blue snowsuits that made their upper bodies seem puffed up with air.

  Ken and I got out of the Lada and the children came running across the snow. "Mama! Papa!" they cried, holding up their blue arms and reaching for our hands.

  I didn't know if I was allowed to clasp their uncovered fingers, touch one of their cold cheeks; but before I could decide, Yuri jumped out of the car and placed his body between them and us.

  "They say your son is sleeping now," Anna explained. "Someone will bring him when he wake up."

  Anna and I waited at a table covered with a vinyl cloth. Three women in white lab coats like the woman on Grisha's videotape sat across from us. The women wore thick foundation that looked dry and powdery, and too much hairspray had made their hair separate into stiff little clumps. They reminded me of high-school girls who teased their hair and wore too much makeup, a look that made them seem both hard and vulnerable.

  Ken was videotaping everything in the room: a couch covered with orange swirls, a pink plastic radio playing Russian disco music, Yuri scowling out the window at Volodya and the Lada. We'd borrowed the camera to record our first meeting with Grisha.

  Anna spoke to the white-coated women, referring to Ken and me as Amerikanski. When I smiled at them, they lowered their eyes and let the corners of their lipsticked mouths turn up only the slightest amount.

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  "Do you think I could use the bathroom?" I asked Anna.

  "The what?"

  "The toilet?"

  She led me down a long hallway that smelled of boiled cabbage. On the walls were framed pictures of babies that had been cut out of magazines. We stopped in front of a door with a raised bottom, like a door on a boat.

  "Here." Anna handed me a pack of tissues. "You not want to use what they use."

  The toilet had no seat, and I hovered over a porcelain rim with a chip like a bite taken out of it. At my feet was a pile of newspaper cut into small squares. When I was finished, I twisted the tap marked with a small r, for the Russian word for hot, but the water never became less icy. Above the sink, a stiff gray towel hung on a nail like a concrete sculpture. I wiped my hands on the back of my skirt.

  Yuri had taken my seat at the table. He was telling the women in the white coats a story that made them giggle into their hands.

  I looked out the window at the children playing in the ice-covered yard. One little boy was twisting the chains of a swing, walking round and round until he'd worn a bare patch in the snow. When he'd wound the chains as tight as they would go, he threw his body across the seat and lifted his feet, spinning around in a circle of blue. I could see his bare fingers gripping the icy swing, his face grim and determined. When the swing came to a stop, the little boy dropped his feet to the ground and began twisting the chains again.

  Other children came by, pulled on the little boy's snowsuit, or tried to grab the swing away from him, but he ignored them. He kept his eyes on the bare patch of ground, all his attention focused on the twisting chains.

  "You would like tea?" Anna asked.

  At the table, a woman with a white cloth tied over her head

  stood balancing glasses of black tea on a lacquered tray. I nodded, and the woman served me first. The glass was hot and burned my fingers. The tea tasted bitter and tannic.

  The pink radio switched from disco to news. Outside, Volodya raced the Lada's engine, making it sound as if he were trying to keep an angry drunk awake. I finished my tea and shook my head when one of the white-coated women tried to give me the untouched glass in front of her.

  "I think your son come now," Anna said, looking behind me.

  A woman with penciled-in eyebrows carried in a small child dressed in pink overalls. For a moment, I thought there'd been a mistake. This little boy was pale, much paler than the boy on the videotape. The feathery brown hair was blond, and the dark eyes gray blue. I tried to fit this pale little face onto the darker one I'd been carrying around with me.

  The little boy looked down and slipped the first two fingers of his right hand into his mouth. I reached up, and the woman with the penciled-in eyebrows put him on my lap.

  He smelled like the orphanage, like boiled cabbage, and a little like sleep. His hands were clenched into tight fists, and he sat with his back not touching my body anywhere. I wanted to turn him around, study his face, but I was afraid I might make him cry in front of the women in the white coats.

  The woman with the penciled eyebrows hovered over me, prepared to catch Grisha if I let him fall. Anna pushed a glass
of hot tea out of his reach. I sat very still, with my arms wrapped around the small boy in my lap.

  Ken knelt on the floor beside me. 'Grisha," he said, taking hold of the little boy's fist and waving it back and forth.

  Grisha kept his eyes on the table, staring at a place where the vinyl cloth had cracked and the soft gray flannel poked through.

  "Grisha," Ken said again.

  Grisha looked into Ken's face.

  "That's my boy," Ken told him.

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  He opened his hand, and Grisha brushed his fingers across his palm.

  "He's great, isn't he?" Ken said, smiling up at me.

  I unfolded my fingers and waited for Grisha to touch my palm.

  "Yuri say you must dress Grisha now for going to American Medical Center," Anna said.

  I stood, holding Grisha against my chest, and looked around the room.

  "You can put him on the umm . . . sofa," she told me.

  I sat Grisha on the patterned couch and worked at taking off the pink overalls. They were too big, and someone had pinned the straps together in the back. When I slid the pants down his legs, I saw that instead of a diaper, he wore a thin piece of cotton that had been folded several times and knotted on the sides.

  Ken brought me a small pair of navy sweatpants and a sweatshirt that had GAP written across the chest in red letters.

  "If you want to take Grisha out of the orphanage, you have to bring something for him to wear," Maggie had told me.

  "Why?"

  "The children can be taken out, but the clothes that belong to the orphanage have to stay inside."

  Two days before we left for Moscow, Ken and I had gone shopping at BabyGap.

  "Is this a gift?" asked the saleswoman in khaki pants.

  "No," Ken said, "it's for our son."

  "What size is he?"

  "We don't know," I told her.

  We'd bought the navy blue sweatpants and the sweatshirt with GAP written on it, as well as a ski parka that had light blue fur around the hood, estimating the length of an arm, a leg we'd seen only on videotape. Afterward, in a store that sold hand-knit sweaters, I found a knitted cap that looked like a blueberry with a green wool stem, and I bought that, too.