The Russian Word for Snow

by Janis Cooke Newman

  I never painted anything before, I said, never anything this big. And I described how I'd run the brush in one long line across the top so there wouldn't be any marks; how I'd painted even the places in the back that nobody would see unless they pulled the dresser away from the wall to retrieve a toy that had gotten trapped there.

  After I finished the dresser, Ken went out to cover it with a coat of polyurethane. "It's so perfect, I want to protect it."

  But the polyurethane pulled up the paint, made it streak and clump together.

  "Who said you could touch my dresser?!" I screamed at him.

  "I'll fix it," he told me. "I'll strip it back to the wood and paint it over myself."

  "No! Don't touch it! It's mine."

  And I used up four more of the nights we had to wait before we could get Alex, repainting the dresser.

  "Yuri says don't come until the end of the month," Maggie told me. I'd stopped by her house to pick up a list of Russian ex-

  pressions for children, sentences we wouldn't find in our phrase book: I'm your mother. Good boy. I love you.

  "So when can we go?" I said, rolling the list of expressions into something I could hit things with.

  "Sometime around Memorial Day."

  "That weekend?"

  "I think so. By the way, I'm leaving for Moscow on Sunday."

  "You?"

  "Just to touch base with my coordinators, maybe see a few orphanages."

  "Would you check on Alex for me? Make sure he's all right."

  "I'll do it the first day and call you."

  A week went by without hearing from Maggie.

  "You're sure she said she would call?" Ken asked me. "You're certain that's what she said?"

  "Yes," I told him. And then I touched the blue folders where we kept the extra copies of our paperwork for luck.

  Since we got back from Moscow, I'd been practicing a series of small enchantments meant to ensure that nothing take Alex away from us; lining up the blue folders so the edges met, tapping the horseshoe that hung by the front door with both hands, retyping entire sentences even if I'd only made a mistake in just one word.

  But as more days went by without hearing from Maggie, I was forced to invent new spells and incantations.

  If I can get the milk into the refrigerator before the door closes, I told myself, Alex will be all right. And when Ken came into the kitchen and saw me with half a gallon of spilled milk on the floor, he was surprised by how upsetting I found it.

  If I can go fast enough to get the car into fifth gear before the next light, I thought, Alex won't be sick. And I speeded up until Ken pressed his foot into the floor on the passenger side and yelled at me to slow down.

  It had been four months since we'd seen Alex. Four months

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  since the doctor at the American Medical Center told us he was small and undernourished. Now, I imagined him lying in a crib, too weak to raise his head, susceptible to all the childhood illnesses—polio and tuberculosis—that were still common in Russia.

  It wasn't until the second week that we heard from Maggie.

  "That is one unhappy little boy," she told us. We had the kind of long-distance connection that makes it seem as if the other person is thinking long and hard about every word. "All he does is rock back and forth on a yellow bear."

  "But he's all right?" Ken asked her. "He's healthy?"

  There was a long pause. I heard faint conversations in the background, like whispered secrets.

  "He's healthy, just not happy."

  I pictured Alex rocking back and forth on the yellow bear, his face serious and closed. And then I pictured the boy in the snowsuit, the child I'd watched from the window in the orphanage twisting the chains of the frozen swing and making himself spin without seeing the joy in it.

  "Yuri wants me to tell you not to come until the first week in June," Maggie was saying, her voice tiny and far away. "There's one signature he still has to get."

  "No," I told her. "I can't wait anymore."

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  Someone to Watch over Me

  • "*■*

  *>*C:

  It wis snowing flower petals in Moscow. Outside the orphanage windows, thin white ovals like paper disks blew oft the trees and landed on Volodya's car.

  This was a different Volodya. Yuri had gotten a new driver and didn't say what had happened to the tall man who'd nodded and smiled at us instead of speaking. This Volodya wore a shirt that reflected light, and had mean eyes. He made me think of men who stand smoking outside rooms where other people are being threatened.

  The new Volodya had a different car as w
  Inside the orphanage. Ken reached into a playpen with a pink and white railing and rocked a yellow bear, ringing the bell inside. '"Where are all the children?" he asked.

  "Perhaps the children sleep," Anna told him. She ran her hand along a row ot empty cribs, lined up end to end like cars in a train.

  This was not the same room we'd waited in four months earlier, the room where the women in the white coats took their tea. This room was on the second floor of the orphanage, up a wide staircase with short steps that forced me to climb more slowlv than I'd wanted.

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  "Look," Ken said. "They each have their own comb and washcloth."

  He showed me a wooden peg board decorated with decals of leaping lambs. Above each hook was a piece of tape printed with a child's name.

  "This is Alex's." Ken put his ringer on a name that began with a letter that looked like an unfinished "r." We studied the square of terry cloth and the pocket comb that belonged to our son.

  A woman in a white coat and men's ankle socks hurried through the door. She stopped when she saw us touching Alex's possessions.

  "She is Irina," Anna said, and the woman in the ankle socks made a little bow. Irina's features were rounded and soft, as though they had been made of rubber.

  "Irina say the children are sleeping outside on the umm . . ." Anna slid her palm across the air.

  "Balcony?" I asked.

  "Umm . . . yes, balcony. She will go to get your child."

  As she went out the door, Irina's slippers made a scuffing sound, like walking through leaves.

  "Are you excited?" Ken was smiling at the lambs leaping above the washcloths.

  "Yes." But I couldn't stop thinking that we were supposed to be taking Alex out of here, not leaving him behind to sleep in the little crib train, head to toe with the other children.

  "When do you think you'll get the signature?" Ken had asked Yuri last night in the marble lobby of the Radisson Hotel.

  "Maybe Friday, I think."

  "Friday?"

  "Yes, maybe."

  "Is there anything we can do to make sure it's Friday?" Ken pulled Yuri out of earshot of the woman who was checking us in. "With money?"

  "This man is too big," Yuri said, shaking his head. "I cannot get to him. Also I think he is in Urals with Yeltsin. For the election."

  We were three weeks away from Russia's first democratic election. On the drive in from the airport, we'd passed billboards put up by the Yeltsin campaign. One showed the current president and the mayor of Moscow, a bald man with an enormous round head, shaking hands. The city's skyline had been superimposed behind them, the buildings resting on the two men's arms. Another billboard showed a picture of a black-suited Yeltsin standing in the middle of a forest. His body was tilted at an angle, just touching a tree that appeared as stiff and unbending as he was.

  "So there's nothing we can do?" Ken had asked, keeping his back to the woman at the counter.

  Yuri shrugged. "I told you not to come."

  Irina carried in a child in a blue snowsuit. I thought she migh
t stop, pull back his hood, and show him to us, but she kept walking. We followed her to a metal changing table, where she untied the straps of the brown knit hat that fit him like a bathing cap. When she bent down to throw the brown hat onto a pile of hats exactly like it, I saw the small face I remembered mostly from photographs.

  While Irina pulled Alex's arms and legs out of the blue snow-suit, Ken and I hovered over her like party-goers observing the unwrapping of a present. Beneath the snowsuit, he was dressed in lavender overalls that had a blue whale stitched onto the bib. He was less thin than he'd been four months ago, but the dark circles under his eyes were still there. So was the brownish mark on his forehead we'd thought was a bruise, and now saw was a birthmark—a permanent smudge that people who didn't know him would try to wipe off with a wet thumb.

  Irina tied a white cloth around Alex's neck and held a china cup filled with purple juice to his lips. She called him Grishka,

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  and spoke to him in Russian, making the language sound more melodic than I'd heard before. He dripped purple juice onto his pointed chin, and she wiped it with the cloth from around his neck. When the cup was empty, she leaned over him, pressing the palms of her hands together.

  "Dastachnya, Grishka? Dastachnya?" Asking him, I supposed, if he'd had enough. She'd drawn her shoulders together the way people do when they see a tiny baby they want to hug.

  She loves him, I thought, both pleased and covetous of her right to wipe the purple from his lips.

  Irina untied the cloth and lifted Alex off the changing table. She set him down on an Oriental carpet, placing him in the center of a brown and white flower. Ken and I sat on the floor beside him.

  "Grisha," I said, wanting to call him Alex, but not feeling I had the right in front of the woman who'd just wiped his chin with such practiced ease.

  Alex pressed his forehead into the carpet and hid his face in the tufts of the brown and white flower.

  I thought of all the small enchantments I'd invoked to bring me here, the charms I'd repeated each time I touched the horseshoe above the front door, stepped around the painted lines in a parking lot. Over the past four months, I'd thought of nothing but this little boy—his slight weight in my arms, his skin that had smelled of cabbage and sleep. Now I sat beside him, his body curled into itself like a small animal who senses danger.

  "Grisha"—Ken's voice fell naturally into the singsong that is reserved for babies. "Look what I have." He held up a Plexiglas ball with a plastic butterfly trapped inside.

  Ken twisted the base of the ball, and it played "Three Blind Mice" in plinking notes. Inside, the trapped butterfly opened and closed its plastic wings in time to the music.

  It took until the farmer's wife cut off their tails with a carving

  knife before Alex would turn his head just enough to watch the butterfly opening and closing its wings. The entire song played through twice before he would sit up.

  When the music wound down, stopping in the middle of a phrase, Ken rewound the ball, and put it in Alex's lap. For almost an hour, until Yuri came to tell us it was time to go, we watched Alex make little grabbing motions over the clear plastic, as though trying to release the butterfly caught inside.

  After the orphanage, we drove in Volodya's shiny car to a restaurant near Red Square to have lunch.

  It was freezing inside the restaurant, the air conditioning a hard wall after the warm mugginess outside. Disco music with Russian words blared from speakers screwed into the ceiling.

  "Paht!" Yuri shouted at the maitre d'. He held up five fingers.

  The maitre d' studied a reservation book, and then surveyed the empty dining room. He turned his body all in one piece, his shoulders and torso and legs seeming incapable of independent movement. When he revolved back to us, he was shaking his head, and I thought we would have to leave. Then he picked up a stack of menus and led us to a table in the center of the room.

  Ken and I ordered vodka and caviar with blinis. Volodya waited until Yuri had ordered, and then asked for the same thing: a rare steak and a beer. Anna said, "A small salad, please," and pressed her lips and the edges of her menu together.

  The five of us sat in the cold dining room surrounded by music intended for dancing. Ken stared off into the middle distance, and didn't notice when I touched his leg under the table. Anna folded her hands so they made a neat ball on the cloth. Volodya gave me a smile that made me think of a crocodile.

  "How do people feel about the election?" I shouted across the table. "Do they think Yeltsin will win?"

  "I think so, yes." Yuri said.

  Volodya nodded his head.

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  "Many people will vote for Zyuganov." Anna directed her words at her folded hands.

  "Eh!" Yuri brushed nonexistent crumbs off the table. "Nobody wants the Communists back."

  "Zyuganov is Communist?" I asked.

  "Like the old Communists," Anna said. "He does not like Americans."

  "Can he win?" Ken shouted over electronic drums.

  "Some of the umm . . . polls say he will win."

  "But what will happen to adoptions?"

  Anna shrugged without unfolding her hands.

  Ken reached for his vodka, spilling some on the white tablecloth.

  "How soon after the election does the new president take over?" he asked.

  "Nobody knows."

  "Nobody knows?"

  "This is first election," Yuri said, sounding annoyed that we didn't know this.

  Until this moment, my fear that we wouldn't get Alex, that something would go wrong with the adoption, had been un-specific, formless enough to push away. Now it had a shape, a name—Zyuganov, the Communist who did not like Americans. I'd seen his picture in the English-language Moscow Times, left in the Radisson's lobby for tourists. He was big-shouldered and barrel-chested, someone who would not be easy to push away.

  The waiter brought Ken the bill before we were finished eating. Maggie had told us that we would be expected to pay for lunch. "The American families always buy," she'd said.

  Ken studied the check which was presented in dollars and paid in rubles. "Twenty-one dollars for water?" He showed the bill to Anna, as though her role as translator included interpreting the cost of things.

  "That is umm . . . twenty-one," she confirmed, pressing her straight spine against the back of her chair.

  "A bottle of water is twenty-one dollars?" Ken asked the waiter.

  "Yes." He reached for the credit card in Ken's hand.

  "How can it be twenty-one dollars for one bottle?"

  "Seven glasses in a bottle," the waiter explained. "Three dollars a glass." He made another grab for the card.

  "Can this be right?" Ken asked Yuri.

  Yuri shrugged and stood up.

  "I'm sure the menu didn't say twenty-one dollars," Ken said to Yuri's Gucci belt buckle.

  Yuri pushed his chair under the table. Volodya stood and lined his chair up with Yuri's. Anna smoothed imaginary wrinkles from her skirt.

  "I just don't think this is right," Ken told the waiter.

  They both had their hands on the credit card.

  Yuri disappeared into the men's room. Anna picked up her purse and hooked the strap into the crease of her elbow. Volodya shook his car keys in time with the music from the speakers.

  "I don't think anybody is going to help us," I said softly to Ken.

  He loosened his grip on the credit card, and the waiter left with it.

  On the second day, Irina let us feed Alex. She sat him in a child's chair that hooked onto the edge of a small Formica table and tied a piece of cotton around his neck, making a large knot at the back of his head.

  "What is this?" I asked Anna, pointing to the bowl in front of Alex. I'd read that parents should feed their adopted children the same things they ate in the orphanage, and I couldn't identify anything in Alex's lunch.

  Anna looked into the bowl which was fill
ed with a brown and yellow liquid the texture of oatmeal. "Meat and vegetables and soup. They umm ..." She moved her hands as if mashing something between them.

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  "Puree?"

  "Yes, yes. All together so it is easier to feed."

  Irina pressed a soup spoon into my hand. I put a tiny bit of the pureed food on the spoon and brought it to Alex's lips. He opened his mouth, letting me push in the spoon without looking at me. He didn't seem to be looking at anything, he just swallowed and then dropped his mouth open.

  Passing through the room, Irina gave Alex a hard crust of bread. Ken, who'd been videotaping us, took the camera away from his face.

  "Should he have that?" He pointed to the bread. "Isn't that one of the things he can choke on?"

  Two weeks before coming to Moscow, Ken and I had taken a class in infant CPR, the only couple in the room who wasn't pregnant. We'd practiced mouth-to-mouth resuscitation on a rubber doll and listened to tales of hot dogs that became stuck in children's windpipes, and toothbrushes that lodged in their throats. I knew that children weren't supposed to have nuts, raisins, or toys with pieces small enough to fit into the plastic tube they'd given us, the tube that was the size of a baby's esophagus. But I couldn't remember anything about bread.

  "Can't he choke on that?" Ken asked Anna.

  "I will tell you a story about choking," Anna said. "One day this boy, he is maybe four years old, he is eating carrot and it sticks in his throat so he cannot breathe. For a long time he cannot breathe. For so long that he gets umm . . . brain damage. After, he cannot move his arms or legs, cannot pick up his head. So his mother and father put him in orphanage."

  "Why do they put him in an orphanage?" I asked, unsure why Anna was telling us this story.

  "They do not want him."

  Anna turned to look at a child crying behind her, and Ken slipped the crust of bread out of Alex's fingers. Alex examined his empty hand, but did not seem surprised to find that some-