The Russian Word for Snow

by Janis Cooke Newman

  "Ehh ... ehh . . ."

  "It's OK."

  "Ehh . . ."

  "Here, I'll show you."

  I took his hand and stretched it toward the bananas. He pulled his arm back, resisting me.

  "Alex, it's only a banana."

  I pushed his hand into the bowl, mashing the yellow slices.

  Alex looked at the squishy bits of banana stuck to his fingers, and began to cry.

  "It's all right." I wiped his hand with a paper towel, waited until he stopped crying, and then put a small piece of banana in his mouth.

  He ate it and looked up at me.

  "See?" I said. "Yum."

  "Ehh . . . ehh ..." He leaned toward the shallow bowl and bounced in my lap.

  "Now you take some."

  "Ehh . . . ehh ..." He bounced a little harder.

  "It's a banana, for chrissakes. Just pick it up."

  Ken sat at the table with us. "He wasn't allowed to touch his food at the orphanage, remember?" He reached into the bowl and held up a banana slice.

  Alex stopped crying and opened his mouth to be fed.

  "Ehh ..." A tear trembled on his bottom lashes while he chewed.

  I fed the rest of the banana to him piece by piece, astonished at the number of mistakes I could make in so short a time.

  When Alex lived at the orphanage, he napped twice a day. So at precisely the same time Irina had taken him from us, Ken and I put him in the crib meant for American families and shut the curtains in Anna's living room. Then we went into the kitchen where Anna kept the television.

  Anna had a small supply of English-language videos she'd bought for the Americans who stayed in her apartment—the second Batman movie, a made-for-TV version of Anastasia. While Alex napped, Ken and I would watch movies on the little daybed next to the refrigerator, the one Anna slept on when one of her families was using the velvet sofa.

  At first, Alex would take his afternoon nap, sleeping about as

  208 THE RUSSIAN WORD FOR SNOW

  long as one of Anna's videos. But after a couple of days, he stopped sleeping, and as soon as we left the room, he'd start screaming.

  "We're supposed to let him cry it out," Ken told me. "I read it in Spock."

  "Really?"

  "We're teaching him to comfort himself."

  And so we'd sit on the floor outside of Alex's room and listen to him cry.

  We lasted three days, and then we gave up. Sometimes at night, Alex would fall asleep between spoonfuls of minestrone at Patio Pizza, and I'd sit with a teaspoon of white beans in my hand, feeling guilty.

  In order to get his visa to enter the United States, Alex needed to have a physical examination. "Is much cheaper to use Russian doctor," Yuri told us. So we let Volodya drive us to a doctor who practiced in a small building near the orphanage.

  "This boy has many neurological problem," the doctor announced when he came into the room. He was holding a paper I supposed must be the same medical diagnosis we'd gotten from Maggie. "But these neurological problem, they have now gone away by themself." The doctor nodded his head at this miraculous recovery.

  The doctor sat at his desk and filled in a form with a black pen, taking most of his answers from a separate piece of paper, like someone cheating on an exam. He did not ask us any questions, nor did he examine Alex.

  When he finished, he blew on the completed form before handing it to us. "This is for visa."

  "Can we ask you something?" Ken said.

  "Yes?"

  "This rash," Ken touched the small red bumps that had come out near Alex's mouth, "could it be measles?"

  "No. No measles."

  "What is it then?"

  "Is fash."

  "Well, what should we put on it?"

  "Chamomile."

  We went out and bought a big box of chamomile tea at 7 Continents. Back at Anna's apartment, I boiled a cup of water and dunked a tea bag. Then I put the bag in the refrigerator to cool it off.

  Alex did not like having a tea bag rubbed across his mouth.

  "Maybe it's too cold," Ken suggested.

  So I boiled another cup of water and dunked another bag. This one I let sit for half an hour in a little dish on Anna's kitchen table before I tried to put it on Alex's face. When I rubbed it around his mouth, he cried and grabbed for the bag until it tore open, spattering wet apple-scented leaves on the cookware calendar.

  "I give up," I said.

  After a couple of days, the rash went away by itself.

  Sometimes at night, I was awakened by the unsettled screaming of a car alarm or the angry blare of a police siren and I'd go to sit at the side of Alex's crib and touch his arm through the bars. Everything I didn't know about taking care of him was made worse by everything I didn't know about Moscow. And every mistake I made felt more perilous in this city that always seemed poised on the edge of some kind of violence.

  Sitting in the dark, I tallied all the things that could hurt Alex: an out-of-control car, an angry stranger who'd drunk too much vodka, an illness that could cripple his legs or destroy his lungs. And while the city's sirens called to one another across the ripped-open streets, I'd watch Alex dream, amazed I'd gotten him through another day.

  210 THE RUSSIAN WORD FOR SNOW

  At Detsky Mir, all the toys wete kept under guard: the stuffed bears and wetting dolls locked away on shelves, the plastic dinosaurs and Power Rangers trapped behind counters, everything watched over by women in gray cotton coats.

  Detsky Mir was the largest children's store in Moscow. The day we took Alex there, it was raining, and the people walking the aisles in their wet clothes seemed like beings from a colorless planet who'd been transplanted into a world of turquoise trikes and orange playhouses.

  "TuflyaP" (Shoe?) Ken asked a woman leaning on a counter. He reached around to Alex in the baby carrier and took hold of his foot. ''TuflyaP" he repeated, showing her Alex's striped sock.

  The woman lifted a meaty forearm and pointed to the ceiling.

  We took the stairs to the second floor where we found sneakers that lit up whenever the wearer took a step.

  "Tuflya," Ken told the woman at the counter, pointing to Alex's foot.

  The woman shook her head and held her hands apart, demonstrating that the flashing shoes would be too big for Alex.

  We wandered among baseball jackets that sported made-up team names in English, girls' tights with pictures of the Little Mermaid frolicking on the legs, until we found a counter with shoes that looked as if they might fit Alex. These shoes were like the shoes at the orphanage, made of cloth with Velcro straps. I didn't want to buy orphanage shoes, but all Alex had to cover his feet were socks with little rubber grids on the bottom.

  The shoes were lined up on shelves behind a woman whose face had caved in around her toothless gums. I looked for something to measure Alex's foot with, but there was nothing on the counter except the woman's palms.

  "Show her Alex's feet," I said to Ken. "She can probably tell his size by looking at them."

  "TuflyaP" Ken asked, holding up the foot in the striped sock.

  "Tuflya, da." The woman nodded, pointing to the rows of shoes behind her.

  I measured Alex's foot with my hand and held my fingers apart, comparing the distance between them with the shoes on the shelves. "Those," I told the woman, pointing to a pair covered with orange splotches.

  The woman shuffled over to retrieve the shoes.

  There were no chairs in the shoe department at Detsky Mir. We kept Alex in the carrier while I slipped on the shoes, pressing my thumb around the front looking for his big toe.

  'They're way too big."

  Ken leaned his body over the counter, bumping Alex's nose against the back of his head. "Let's try those." He pointed to a pair with pink rectangles.

  The woman returned the first pair of shoes to the shelves before bringing us the pink rectangles.

  These did not fit Alex either.

  "Too big," Ken explained to the woman, holding
his hands apart the way the clerk with the flashing sneakers had done. "What about those?" He pointed to a pair with purple and blue circles, identical to the ones Alex had worn at the orphanage.

  The woman ran a finger around her empty gums, mulling over his request. Then she brought us the pair with the circles.

  "How do they fit?" Ken asked me.

  Alex's toe did not come close to the end of the shoe, but the woman with no teeth had already taken the box and placed it on the counter.

  "They're fine," I said, thinking he'd grow into them.

  We paid for the shoes and walked back through Detsky Mir, passing the gray-coated women who kept watch over the Barbies and the water pistols made to look like grenade launchers.

  Near a little tower of Curious Georges, we saw the woman beating her child. She was holding him up by the wrist so she could reach him better, and hitting him with her other hand.

  212 THE RUSSIAN WORD FOR SNOW

  The motion of her arm made the shopping bag on her elbow swing back and forth.

  The little boy was not crying. He just let his body dangle above the floor, limp, like one of the stuffed monkeys behind him.

  Watching a child being beaten in the midst of the smiling monkeys and brightly colored push toys seemed especially wrong. And I believe that if we'd been home, been in a place where we spoke the language, we would have tried to stop the woman. But here, in the aisles of Detsky Mir, we just stood and watched her hitting her child until her arm grew tired.

  Alex started making the "ehh ..." sound and yanking on the straps of the carrier. I gave him my mother's lipstick case to chew on, and we pushed past the woman who had stopped beating her child and was now examining a collection of small figures from Beauty and the Beast, while her son stood beside her, staring at his own hands.

  As we walked out of Moscow's biggest children's store, I felt oddly grateful to the woman who had been beating her son. What she had done was terrible and cruel, and yet I'd found it reassuring. In spite of all the things I didn't know about mothering Alex, I knew I could never hit him like that. And that one fact made up for nearly everything else: the bath in Anna's tub, the bananas in the bowl, and the too-big orphanage shoes in the bag under my arm.

  Alex went to the U.S. Embassy with the paper strip from a panty liner in his hand. I'd considered taking it away from him, but he seemed too content, pressing the paper covered with little pink flowers against his cheek.

  Yuri was with us, looking slightly shrunken, the way he did whenever he had to be in a place with Americans. We sat in a room with thirty other couples, all waiting to get visas for the Russian children they were adopting.

  These children were blond or black-haired, babies less than a year, and boys and girls who were five or six. Some had blue eyes, others brown, and some had the slightly slanted eyes of a Cossack. Not all of them were whole; one was missing a hand, another the entire arm, and there were other imperfections—an upper lip that looked as if it had been split, eyes that turned in on themselves like Olya's.

  Still, there was a sameness about these children; in the bruised brown circles beneath their eyes, their lips which were so pale as to be indistinguishable from their skin, the patchy hair that made me think of cancer patients.

  They were exactly like Alex.

  It was oddly quiet in the room. No one ran out into the hallway to see how far he'd be allowed to go. Nobody pushed the metal folding chairs around, turning them into cars and trucks and trains. The children merely stood or sat with their new parents—the strangers who had removed them from the places they'd always lived.

  Beside me, a woman was trying to interest her son in a rattle shaped like a black-and-white whale. She'd shake the rattle and put it close to the boy's nose, then pull it away again. But the little boy only blinked, startled, when the whale came near, relaxed when it went away.

  In the corner, a man and a woman sat with a small skinny boy. The man had a short gray goatee that the little boy was tugging on. The woman also had gray in her hair, thin streaks I wondered if she thought about coloring. Dipping her head, the woman whispered something to the man. He nodded and then handed the little boy over to her. Once the boy was in her lap, she touched the skin of his bare arms, covered his hands with hers. Then she took out a small sweater with llamas parading across the chest and buttoned him into it. A short while later, the man whispered something to the woman, and she handed the child back. The man felt the boy's forehead, pressed

  214 THE RUSSIAN WORD FOR SNOW

  his hand against his thin cheeks, and took off the llama sweatet.

  I watched a couple near the door having a hushed argument over a bottle of child's sunscreen; saw a large man holding his small daughter so awkwardly, she could barely lift her face above his chubby elbows.

  None of us have any idea what we're doing, I thought, smiling over Alex's sleeping head.

  At precisely the same time, a person appeared behind each of the room's four Plexiglas windows and began calling names. We were called by a woman in cat's-eye glasses.

  "Did you know that this child was the mother's third pregnancy?" The woman did not look up from the stack of documents in front of her.

  "Yes," Ken told her.

  "Did you know that he was born in Moscow on March nineteenth?"

  "Yes."

  "And did you know that the mother disappeared from the hospital three days after the birth?"

  We hadn't known this. But I didn't want the woman in the cat's-eye glasses to think there was anything in Alex's history we were unfamiliar with.

  "Yes." I directed the word into the tiny holes in her window.

  "The mother gave the hospital false information." The woman made it sound as if this behavior was something we would have to watch for in Alex. "What I'm wondering is whether there was a release signed."

  "I'm sure there was," Ken told her, although neither one of us had ever seen it.

  Behind me, Yuri shifted his weight from one foot to the other.

  The woman searched through the papers.

  "The mother left the hospital without signing anything," she was saying. "She left a fake name, and an address that no one could find."

  She stared at us through her glasses, waiting for an explanation.

  "She not want baby!" Yuri shouted over my head. He sounded exasperated by the woman's inability to grasp the situation.

  "Yes," she agreed.

  We waited in front of the Plexiglas window while the woman read through all the papers in front of her. Now and then, she'd stop and tap her pencil in the margin next to a paragraph or sentence, leaving behind a scattering of black dots.

  Just give us the visa, I begged the woman silently. Just give us the visa so we can go home.

  At last, the woman pushed all the papers together and tapped them into place.

  "You can pick up the visa after five-thirty," she told us.

  Yuri nodded and hurried out of the building.

  We followed him, passing the woman with the whale-shaped rattle. The rattle was now in the little boy's hand, and he was banging its black-and-white body against his mother's shoulder, holding it up to his ear and listening for the sound it made.

  As I went by, I smiled at the woman, letting her know that I'd seen her shaking the rattle; that I understood how good it felt to have her son banging the little whale on her shoulder. The woman smiled back and kissed the top of her son's sparse hair.

  Ken and I lied to Yuri about when we were supposed to leave Moscow. We'd told him it was a day earlier so he'd be sure to get Alex's Russian passport in time. When he came to deliver it, he asked us for more money.

  "You must pay to me seven hundred dollars," he said. "For what?" Ken asked him.

  "Is for driver and translator. I only charge you for two weeks." "But you told us the driver and translator weren't additional." "Is not additional, is set price. Fifty dollars each day."

  216 THE RUSSIAN WORD FOR SNOW

  Yuri was stan
ding in the doorway of Anna's kitchen. Ken and I were backed up against the refrigerator with the Lion King stickers.

  "We didn't use a translator every day," I told him.

  "You could have."

  "We didn't know that."

  He shrugged. He still had Alex's Russian passport in his hand.

  "We don't have any more money," I said, though Ken had gone to American Express that morning.

  Yuri snorted, and for a moment I wondered if he'd had Vol-odya follow Ken.

  "We've been here so long," I told him, "and it's been so expensive. Our account's empty."

  Yuri tapped the corner of Alex's passport on the kitchen table.

  "The minute we get home, we'll sell some stock," Ken said. "We'll wire the money to your account in New York."

  Yuri looked down the hall to where Alex was sleeping.

  "All right," he said, "I trust you." He threw the passport on the table.

  On June 23, nearly a month after we'd arrived in Moscow, Yuri and Volodya drove us to Sheremetevo Airport. We had one-way tickets on Finnair that we'd bought with cash from a man whose phone number we found in the back of the Moscow Times, and a stapled packet of documents from the embassy. But we had no idea if we would be allowed to leave.

  "Our visas have expired," Ken had told Yuri the week before. "Is that going to be a problem?"

  "No, no problem," Yuri insisted. "Visa expire, so you go."

  But when we went to the embassy to pick up Alex's paperwork, the man behind the counter told us that expired visas were a big problem. "They might not let you leave," he said.

  "But we're traveling with a small child," Ken told him.

  "Last week they detained a Finnish couple with a six-month-old baby."

  The man from the embassy gave us a diplomatic letter requesting that the immigration officer at Sheremetevo overlook our expired visas.

  "Will this work?" Ken asked him.

  "Hard to say. But I'd bring plenty of dollars." The man looked at Alex, who had fallen asleep and was hanging sideways out of the carrier. "And get the people at the Finnair office to help you."