The Russian Word for Snow

by Janis Cooke Newman

  "Who?" I asked, forgetting that Yuri had never mentioned

  the name of the man whose signatute we wete waiting fot. "Does it say what he does?"

  "He's an assistant to the mayor."

  "Isn't that who's supposed to sign our papers?"

  "I can't remember."

  "Is he all right?"

  I pulled the paper out of Ken's hands, tearing the corner that promised a day of fair weather.

  The story had been printed alongside a picture of the bombed car, the lines of text bumping up against the blown-open door, the charred driver's seat.

  "It doesn't say if he's alive," I said.

  "Continued on page six."

  I fumbled with the pages of the newly printed paper.

  "He's in stable condition, recovering from—"

  "From what? From what?" Ken was trying to read over my shoulder.

  "From having his hand blown off."

  We stood in the middle of Tverskaya Street, not sure whether we should laugh or cry.

  The next morning, we called Anna.

  "What is man's name again?"

  I read her the name from the story.

  "I think I do not know this name."

  "He's assistant to the mayor."

  "I do not know this man."

  "So he's not the one who signs our papers?"

  "I think, no."

  "You're sure?"

  "I cannot be sure."

  "We should ask Yuri when he comes."

  "Oh, Yuri and Volodya will not be coming," Anna said. She tried to explain why, but without the visual cues of her manicured

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  fingers flying through the air, imitating the signing of a document or the changing of a diaper, I had trouble understanding what she was telling me. I knew only that Volodya and Yuri would not be taking us to the orphanage that day, and would probably not come to take us for a while.

  I wouldn't miss Volodya's small, mean eyes, or the way Yuri lingered at the hotel after they dropped us off, waiting for the lunch we no longer bought. But I didn't want them to stop driving us. Their continued presence proved that they hadn't forgotten why we had come.

  "I will not be going to orphanage this day either," Anna told me. "I must go with Yuri."

  So all through breakfast, Ken studied the phrase book, memorizing expressions from a chapter called "Making Friends."

  Our new driver, Alexander, was a friend of Anna's. He spoke no English and greeted us by asking, "Newman?" while making driving motions with his hands. When we asked him his name, he squinted, as if trying to bring our words into sharper focus.

  Ken sat in the front seat of Alexander's car, looking for the seat belt that wasn't there, and paging through the phrase book.

  "Moy sin," Ken said. "Moy sin, Alexander." And I supposed he was telling our new driver that he shared a name with our son.

  Alexander darted his beat-up Fiat in and out of the Moscow traffic like a quick little fish. While we raced through the streets, he grabbed the phrase book from Ken to look up expressions, taking his hand off the wheel to point to the question he wanted to ask. Where do you live? What do you do? Each time, Ken would take the book back, answering him in phonetic Russian, so he wouldn't have to take his eyes off the road. But Alexander would only grab for the book again, more intent on Making Friends than on the cars swerving around us.

  How do you like Moscow? Alexander asked. Are you enjoying your stay?

  Ken answered him with a shrug that seemed particularly Russian.

  That afternoon, we asked Alexander to drop us off at Izmailovsky Park. Like the people around us—Russian families carrying plastic shopping bags, tourists with locked fanny packs turned to the front for greater security—we were going to the Sunday flea market.

  Along the concrete path to the park, people stood with their arms full of lacquer trays and fur hats, blue and white dishes and paintings of saints on pieces of wood. As we passed, they held out these items, offering them to us.

  Inside the park, the aisles were jammed with crowded stalls, each one filled with something different: hand-carved chess sets, enameled pins painted with tiny flowers, antique samovars that glinted in the sun. We climbed wide cement stairs, stepping around carpets from the Caucasus that had been spread out to attract customers. One long alley had nothing but painters, the walls of their stands covered with pictures of onion-domed churches and snowy landscapes.

  I stopped to look at a little boys shirt from the Ukraine. It had a high collar with buttons and a wide belt embroidered with snowflakes, and seemed much too big for Alex to ever grow into. When I walked away, a man ran after me.

  "Madame, look!" he cried. He was waving an oversized book. "Children's stories," he said. "Famous Russian fairy tales." And I wondered if he knew that I was here to adopt a Russian child.

  The man opened the book, flipping the pages beneath his dirty fingernails so I could see the Cyrillic characters on one side and the English words on the other. "Very famous stories," he assured me.

  Some of the English words were misspelled, and the drawings

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  of foxes and bears were rough and cartoonish. But I bought the book anyway.

  I caught up with Ken at a booth that sold matryoskka dolls.

  "Look at this," he said, pointing to a set of Russia's most recent political leaders. The continent-shaped birth mark on Gorbachev's forehead had been painted a lurid shade of purple. Brezhnev's eyebrows were drawn on with hundreds of tiny brushstrokes. Yeltsin, the current leader, was the biggest doll, his silver hair and bulbous nose making him look a little like W. C. Fields. I hoped that after the election, the artist would not have to make an even bigger doll, for the Communist candidate who didn't like Americans.

  At the back of the booth, I found a whole matryoshka family: a father playing an accordion, a grandmother carrying a golden samovar, a little boy holding a flute to his lips. The smallest doll was a tiny baby in a blue and white bunting with a red pacifier painted into its mouth.

  "I want this for Alex," I told Ken, picking up the mother matryoshka whose hair was bright yellow.

  While the man behind the counter packed up the matryoshka family, nesting each figure into the next largest, I conjured up a picture of Alex playing with these small round dolls and then filled the picture with details; the scraping sound the father with the accordion would make when Alex twisted him open, the way the top half of the grandmother would look if he tried to fit her over the striped legs of the little boy, what he might say to the yellow-haired mother who looked much more like him than I did. Standing beneath the warm sun in Izmailovsky Park, I added as many details as I could, believing each one a credit on the side of taking Alex away from here.

  Alexander drove us for the rest of the week. Sometimes Anna would arrive with him, but more often he came alone. On those days, Ken would try to talk to Irina himself, using the phrases he'd learned from Making Friends. Irina preferred to tell us long

  stories in Russian. The fact that we didn't understand Russian did not appear to bother her. She seemed to regard us as no different from the children in the big playpen, assuming that if she talked loud and long enough, eventually we'd understand.

  Days went by without hearing from Yuri, without knowing if he was any closer to getting our papers signed.

  Sometimes, when we left the orphanage, Ken would slam the door of Alexander's Fiat, knocking the sun visor out of its broken catch. All the way back to the Radisson, he'd tell me the things he wanted to tell Yuri—the threats and ultimatums—until I'd have to ask him to stop shouting, remind him I wasn't the one he was angry with.

  One morning, I came out of the shower and found Ken pounding his fists into the bed pillows. All around him, bits of dust and what looked like feathers flew up into the air. His eyes were squeezed shut, and each time he punched one of the pillows, he made a sound that was both primal and violent, like someone engaged in sex or c
hildbirth. It was such an intensely private activity, I went back into the bathroom and ran water into the sink until long after the pounding had stopped.

  Among the books I'd brought with me to Moscow was one a woman had written about her son's first year. Kate had given it to me, saying it was the book everyone gave to new mothers. On the cover was a picture of the woman's little boy dressed in a tiger costume. I kept the book facedown on the hotel night table, not wanting to read about a woman who already had her son.

  Instead, I read a book about Buddhism. To want something creates suffering, the book said. Learn to practice nonattachment. And each morning. I'd sit cross-legged on the floor, pretending I didn't really want Alex, that I hadn't become attached to the small boy with the permanent bruise on his forehead.

  One afternoon as we were leaving the orphanage, I burst into tears in the back of Alexander's car.

  "We go Sparrow Hill." Alexander pointed out the windshield, see view.

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  But I shook my head and told him no. A view would have been wasted on a woman who couldn't stop crying.

  Each morning, Ken and I would assess the other's mood. I'd listen to him in the shower, trying to hear if he banged on the hot-water faucet to make it work, if he muttered to himself when he dropped the soap. Over breakfast, he'd ask me what we were going to do after the orphanage, gauging my emotional state by whether I suggested the Pushkin Museum, or merely stared blankly as though incapable of thinking that far ahead. By these small signs, we determined which of us most needed to hear that nothing would go wrong.

  One day I showed Irina pictures of our house in California. She wiped her hands on the diaper-sized cloth she wore around her waist before touching the photographs. Over her shoulder, I saw the redwood deck where fuchsia like tiny ladies in petticoats tumbled out of Italian clay pots; the kitchen, filled with morning light and the terra-cotta chickens we'd brought back from Mexico; the small room next to ours with the painted dresser and cloth market made by hand in Peru.

  "Chic," Irina told me, pronouncing it "chick."

  Taking back the pictures, I felt as if I'd been showing her the home of an American celebrity. I couldn't believe I'd ever lived in all that clean, bright space.

  "I don't think I can stay here much longer," I told Ken one night, saying it to make myself feel that I had a choice.

  "Go home if you need to."

  "What will you do?"

  "Stay here. Visit Alex."

  He was reading the book with the little boy in the tiger costume on the cover.

  "I won't leave," I said because of course, I had no choice.

  Then I opened my book on Buddhism and read All things will end over and over until I fell asleep.

  One afternoon after the orphanage, Alexander took us to tec 1 small church that had recently been reopened. The church was painted in a frenzy of colored stripes and triangles that pulsed against the gray Moscow sky.

  Inside, the little church smelled of incense—sweet sandalwood and bitter sage, and the wax}- smoke of burning candles. There were no pews or seats of any kind. People stood or kneeled before painted icons of saints and apostles, while elderly women, their backs curved as if to accommodate their short-handled brooms, moved among the crowd, sweeping the stone floor around the worshipers" feet. From someplace near the ceiling, chanting, slow and sonorous, and continually revolving back upon itself, drifted over everyone.

  Along the walls, bearded men in cassocks, who I imagined must be priests, stood on small risers. In their smooth hands, they held icons—painted images of Christ, the Virgin, a wild-bearded John the Baptist. Men and women carrying plastic bags filled with tomatoes and bread and toilet paper climbed low staircases to reach these icons. At the top, they pressed their lips to Christ's brow, the Virgin's hand, before crossing themselves and backing away. The priest then passed a white cloth over the icon in a circular motion, wiping away the previous supplicant's saliva, preparing the image for the petition of the next person.

  A man stretched himself along the floor and kissed the ground beneath the icon of an angel. A woman cleaned burned wax out of a votive with crooked fingers and an expression of joy. I followed these people, standing on the spot where the man had laid his heart, touching the smooth glass of the cleaned and empty votive, as if whatever had made their faith so strong might still be lingering there.

  It was not their religion that attracted me, but the sur bility of their belief. These people had kept their faith even after Dmmunists had closed their churches and put their priests

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  in jail. I wanted such faith. Faith to keep believing that Alex would come home with me.

  In a far corner, I saw one of the priests holding an icon of a Byzantine Virgin. Her eyes were heavy-lidded, much too sultry for a virgin. And she was the first one I'd seen holding a child. The child in her arms was pressing his forehead into her cheek, blending the halo of light around his head with hers.

  The line in front of the sultry Virgin was short: a young woman wearing a white babushka, an old woman whose slippers were held on with rubber bands. I thought about taking the place behind them, climbing the low staircase to press my lips against the painted face of the icon and make my request. But I was afraid that the priest would know I wasn't a believer.

  From across the little church, I saw Ken watching me. He wore the same hopeful expression I saw on the faces of the faithful as they approached the icons.

  I closed my eyes and felt the chanting descend on my head like a benediction. Please, I begged, clasping my hands together, please let me have my child.

  When I opened my eyes, the man in the cassock was wiping the cloth across the Virgin's feature. The woman with the rubber-banded shoes backed down the staircase.

  I have just asked a painted icon in whom I do not believe for my son, I thought, and separated my hands.

  The old woman reached the bottom step and crossed herself before turning away from the icon. Even in the smoky dark, her eyes shone, as though the Virgin with the seductive eyes had already granted her request. I watched the woman shuffle her collapsed slippers across the floor with a sense of gratitude. Perhaps it would be enough that others believed.

  At fifteen months, Alex didn't talk. None of the children did. I never heard any of them try out a sound or string together a sentence of purposeful babble. When they played together in the

  big playpen, they were silent. Watching them was like watching television with the sound turned off.

  Some days, when she had time, Irina stepped out of her slippers and climbed into the playpen with them. Sitting on the floor, she held up an inflatable dog and pointed to its ears, its nose, its eyes, pronouncing the word for each. The children crowded around her, Olya holding onto her sleeve, Maxim crawling over to suck on her calf, the way he tried to suck on the arms and legs of the other children; all more interested in finding a place they could touch her, than in the word for tail or teeth. Once Irina had named all the body parts on the inflatable dog, she clapped her hands and sang what I thought must be a Russian song for children. The children never clapped along. They just clung to her more tightly, perhaps aware that when the song was over, she'd step out of the playpen, put on her slippers, and walk away.

  Ken and I knew that Alex could understand Russian. Once, when he was pushing the blue and yellow lawn mower around the room, he'd stopped at the chair where Irina was bottle-feeding the boy with no palate. Reaching up, he'd placed his hand on Irina's hip, and she'd looked down and said something that made him smile. Watching him touch the side of her hip, I'd felt like an outsider, excluded from some private communication.

  Ken and I talked to Alex constantly, jabbering on about the mangy cats that prowled the wall outside the orphanage window, the whale that was embroidered on the bib of his overalls. Sometimes I'd tell him long stories about camping near the ocean, or shopping for live crabs in Chinatown, things we would do once he came
to live with us; stories I told as much for myself as to accustom his ears to the sound of English.

  At the start of the second week, Ken began singing to Alex, carrying him around the room and sending his smooth voice into Alex's ear. Ken didn't know any children's songs, so he sang

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  standards: "The Way You Look Tonight" and "My Funny Valentine," "They Can't Take That Away from Me" and "I Get a Kick Out of You." I'd follow him from the row of cribs to the deep sink over which Irina suspended whichever child she was changing, keeping my hand on Alex's back.

  One day, stopping near the crib where the little girl whose mouth was too wide was playing with a Mickey Mouse mobile, Ken sang, "Someone to Watch over Me"—our wedding song. I leaned against his back and put my face near Alex's, so I could breathe in both their scents at one time. The little girl in the crib tugged Mickey's leg, smiling with the perfect side of her mouth.

  Ken sang the song twice through, and when he stopped, I could hear a soft, high voice continuing on. The words were unrecognizable, but enough of the melody was there.

  "Can you hear that?" Ken whispered.

  Alex was singing our wedding song.

  That night, we left the television on while we got dressed for dinner. The local programming was mostly old American police shows, dubbed into Russian over the original sound track, so the English dialogue could be heard in the background like a spoken version of the characters' thoughts. The Radisson pulled in programs by satellite, and it was possible to watch news in every language of Western Europe, as well as soccer games from South America. Mostly, we left the television tuned to CNN or some other English-language news station, to fill the hotel room with words we recognized.

  I stretched out the bottom my T-shirt, trying to decide if I could wear it to dinner, or if it had become too wrinkled from carrying Alex around. On the television, men and women were rushing up from someplace underground, their mouths covered by handkerchiefs or the tails of their shirts. These people ran into each other and collapsed on the pavement, blinking against