The Russian Word for Snow

by Janis Cooke Newman

  "I come with you to Finnair office," Yuri said, when we arrived at Sheremetevo.

  "That's OK," Ken told him. "You can watch our bags."

  Yuri rubbed at his stubble and looked unhappy.

  "Meet us under the arrivals-and-departures sign," Ken said. "We'll be back in an hour."

  Yuri scratched at his face. "Yes. Fine. Sure."

  In the Finnair office, we flipped through magazines published by the Finnish Board of Tourism, while a woman with long, slender legs spoke to the immigration officer on the telephone.

  The woman laughed, crossing and recrossing her long legs.

  I thought that perhaps she and the immigration officer were on friendly terms, that perhaps they met and had drinks together after work, and because of this, he would do this favor for her.

  "I will take your letter now," the woman said.

  Ken handed her the diplomatic letter. "Should we come with you?"

  "No, no. You wait here."

  I showed Alex the pictures in the Board of Tourism magazine. He touched a page with the fingers that had been in his mouth, wetting a photograph of people ice-skating.

  The woman returned without our diplomatic letter.

  "The immigration officer will meet you at the gate," she told us.

  "Does that mean we can leave?" I asked.

  "There will be a fine of one hundred dollars per person for the expired visa. You will pay that to the officer at the gate."

  "And he knows which flight we're on?"

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  "He will find you."

  "I can't believe we're really going home." Ken rushed through the airport, skipping over little piles of cigarette butts on the floor.

  I squeezed Alex's bare legs beneath his shorts. He made a little chirping sound and pressed his palms against the lenses of my glasses.

  Yuri and our bags were not undet the sign.

  "It hasn't been an hour yet," I said. "Maybe he and Volodya went to get breakfast."

  At a coffee stand that had run out of coffee, I bought milk to put in a bottle for Alex. I tried letting him hold the bottle himself, but he kept dropping it on the floot, and I remembered that I'd never seen him with a bottle at the orphanage. I poured the milk into a Styrofoam cup and gave it to him. He drank some, and spilled the rest down the front of his shirt.

  Yuri was still not under the sign.

  "I'm going to look for him," Ken said. "You wait here with Alex."

  I sat in a row of plastic chairs joined together at the arms. After a few minutes, a man who was cleaning the floors came by and made everyone in the row get up and move.

  A woman wearing a cardigan with tiny beads sewn across the front lifted her purse, so Alex and I could sit beside her. She tapped her fingers on the plastic armrest between us to get Alex's attention, and when he looked down, she lifted one finger and gave him a small wave. Her hand resembled a tiny four-legged creature nodding its head. Alex hid his face in my shirt. The woman tapped out another little rhythm. He turned his head and watched her fingers with one gray/blue eye.

  "He is boy?" asked the woman.

  "Yes."

  "Handsome," she said. "Strong." She clenched her fists and poked out her elbows like a weight lifter.

  "How old?"

  "Fifteen months."

  The woman stared at Alex. I wondered if she knew how big a fifteen-month-old was supposed to be.

  "Handsome," she repeated.

  The woman reached into her purse and took out a piece of chocolate wrapped in foil. It was the same brand of chocolate Ken and I had been given at Swan Lake, and I imagined that all over Moscow, middle-aged women carried this chocolate in their bags.

  "Is all right?"

  "Yes."

  The woman unwrapped the chocolate and gave it to Alex. He squeezed it between his ringers before he put it in his mouth. Then he took it out again and rubbed it over his hands.

  "Is good." The woman nodded at him, then handed me a piece. "You like Russia?"

  I didn't know how to answer this nice woman who'd turned her hand into a little animal to amuse Alex.

  "It's very interesting," I said, and she gave Alex another piece of chocolate.

  "He hasn't come back yet?" Ken was standing in front of me.

  "No." I wiped at Alex's fingers with a tissue. The front of my T-shirt was spattered with small chocolatey handprints.

  "The flight leaves in less than half an hour." Ken clutched at the fabric of his shirt.

  We went to the Finnair security counter and spoke to a man who was tall and blond and clean-looking.

  "Our adoption coordinator has disappeared with our luggage," we told him.

  The man shook his immaculate head. He checked us in and let Alex and me through.

  "I'm going back to look under the sign," Ken said.

  "I advise you to hurry," the Finnair man told him.

  The immigration officer was waiting to collect the fine for our expired visas. He had bushy eyebrows and hair growing out of

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  his nose. I couldn't imagine the long-legged woman from the Finnair office meeting him for drinks. I handed him $200. He stamped our visas and did not give me a receipt.

  "I still can't find him," Ken shouted over the Finnair security counter.

  "Let's just get on the plane."

  "He's got Alex's carrier."

  "I'm not staying here for a carrier and some clothes."

  "Let me just take one more look around."

  "You flight will leave the gate in seventeen minutes," said the Finnair man.

  I sat on a rubber conveyor belt that was used for checking in luggage and bounced Alex on my knee.

  "Ride a cockhorse to Banbury Cross" I sang, wondering how many of the words to this nursery rhyme I could remember. "To see a fine lady on a white horse." Alex was laughing, his voice making a little hiccup each time he hit my knee. "Rings on her fingers and bells on her toes I She shall have music wherever she goes."

  I stopped bouncing Alex. My pants leg was wet.

  "Is there a place I can change my son's diaper?" I asked the Finnair man.

  "Not until after you pass immigration."

  But Alex was soaked, and I knew there wouldn't be time after we passed immigration. I put him on the conveyor belt and pulled open the snaps on his shorts. The Finnair man turned away, ran his hands over his neat hair.

  I was clutching a wet diaper when Ken and Yuri ran up, dragging the suitcases.

  "I sorry," Yuri kept saying, his eyes darting around as if searching for the proper excuse.

  Ken yanked the suitcases out of Yuri's hand and gave them to the Finnair man.

  Alex tried to crawl off the conveyor belt. I flipped him onto his back and did up all the little snaps on his shorts while he kicked his legs and laughed at me.

  "We've got to go," Ken said.

  I snapped the last snap, scooped up Alex, and handed the wet diaper to the clean-looking Finnair man. Maybe this is how mothering works, I thought. Maybe you just figure it out as you go along.

  Ken and I ran down the hall.

  "Your leg's all wet." It s pee.

  The immigration area was deserted. I strapped Alex into the carrier on Ken's back, and he stepped up to the immigration booth, passing all of Alex's documents to the woman behind the glass.

  "Who is this baby?" the woman asked him. She jabbed at Alex's paperwork with her finger.

  "That baby is this baby." Ken pointed to Alex on his back.

  "But who is this baby?" She stabbed at the paper again, as though trying to poke a hole it in.

  "I don't understand."

  "Who . . . is . . . this . . . baby?" the woman said slowly. She held the paper with Alex's name on it against the glass window of her booth.

  "It's him," Ken said. And he turned so she could see Alex better.

  The woman made a little explosion of exasperation that left small drops of spit on her window. She began t
o rip open the packet Ken had given her.

  "Don't do that!" Ken shouted. The man at the embassy who'd given us the packet had been very clear. "This is not to be opened until you reach San Francisco." And then he'd stapled all the edges shut. "The embassy told us all you needed were those two papers on the top," Ken explained to the woman.

  She examined the documents once more.

  "But who is this baby?" she asked.

  Ken made a sound as if he were being strangled. "Can I talk to somebody else? Please?"

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  The woman in the booth waved over another woman whose uniform had more badges on it. This second woman was quite large, and barely fit into the booth.

  "The embassy told us all you would need were those two papers." Ken stubbed his finger against the glass, trying to point at the papers.

  The woman with the extra badges read through the documents.

  "And this baby is that baby?" she asked, pointing to Alex.

  "Yes," Ken told her. "Yes, yes."

  She stared at Alex who was yanking on Ken's ear. Then she stamped all of his documents several times and pushed them back through the window.

  A flight attendant was standing in the doorway of the plane, waiting for us.

  "We put you in the bulkhead seats," she said. "That's where we seat the families."

  She handed me a small seat belt that looped onto mine. I buckled Alex into it, tethering him to me.

  "What's that on your shirt?" Ken asked.

  "Chocolate," I told him, remembering the curled shavings of chocolate and earth I'd put in my mouth wishing for a baby.

  "What a sweet little boy," said a woman across the aisle. "How old is he?"

  "Fifteen months."

  "He's very lucky."

  I nodded, but in truth, all the spells and incantations had always been to ensure my good fortune, to bring what I had wished for. I buried my face in Alex's neck, letting his skin be the only thing I could see or smell or touch.

  "We're leaving Moscow," Ken whispered. And I felt the rise of the plane in my body.

  The Snow Child

  "Batman or Superman?" I ask Alex.

  "Batman," he says, leaping onto his bed. "No, Superman, because he's the powerfulest."

  I toss him blue pajamas that have Velcro tabs on the shoulders for a cape—the costume of a superhero for a little boy who always sleeps with the light on.

  Alex puts the bottoms of the pajamas on his head and jumps on the bed. The legs float out like blue antlers.

  "I'm counting to three," I tell him.

  "I'm not playing that."

  "One ..."

  He flops down and yanks the pajamas over his legs, Two . . .

  He pulls on the shirt so the red S spreads across his chest.

  "Three."

  "Beat ya."

  "What are we reading tonight?" I ask him.

  "Woolly Mammoths."

  "My brain will explode if I have to read Woolly Mammoths one more time."

  "We'll just do the disgusting part—where the cavemen cut the mammoth up."

  "Pick something else. Please."

  Alex stands in front of the shelves pulling out books so he can see the pictures on the covers. Every now and then, I see the

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  bright face of one of the adoption books I've bought for him: books filled with colorful drawings of smiling parents, books that often end with a little song about adoption you are supposed to sing to your child.

  Sometimes, when Alex lets me pick, I choose one of these books.

  "Where are the bad guys?" he always asks, when we're finished reading. "What about the fighting?" And the next night, he insists on Peter Pan, or "something with swords."

  "How about Horace?" I ask him now, taking out a book about a spotted leopard who has been adopted by striped tigers.

  "I'm picking," he reminds me.

  From the time we brought him home, Alex has heard that he's adopted. "Where'd he get all that blond hair?" someone would ask in the supermarket. "We adopted him," we'd say, "from Moscow." "Do you think he's going to be tall?" someone else might ask. "Oh, yes," we'd nod. "After all, he is Russian."

  Once, when Alex was two, he came into my office and started looking through my Russian guidebook. "See this?"—I pointed to a photograph—"that's Red Square. It's in Moscow, the place you were born."

  Alex looked at the picture, and then placed a wet finger on the people walking along the cobblestones. "Are they all there to get their childs?" he asked, making me aware that we'd turned Russia into a country of orphaned children.

  Although we talked constantly about adoption, I don't think Alex understood what it meant until Dan and Kate's son, Spencer, was born.

  Kate became pregnant six months after we brought Alex home.

  "I have a baby growing in my stomach," she told him. "Feel." And she placed his hand on her belly, holding it there until he felt a foot push against her skin like something trapped beneath blankets.

  After Spencer was born, we brought Alex to see him. Standing

  beside the crib, he lightly touched the baby's transparent skin, while the adults murmured, "Gentle, gentle," above his head.

  "Mommy?" Alex asked in the car on the way home. "Did I grow in your stomach?"

  "No," I told him. "You grew in another lady's stomach."

  "Who?"

  "A Russian lady."

  "But who?"

  "I don't know. I never met her."

  I looked in the rearview mirror, trying to gauge the effect of this insufficient answer. He was holding a plastic hippo up to his window, showing it the view.

  Alex has stopped pulling out books and is now looking at the photographs on his dresser. He picks up one of himself and my father, standing outside a shopping mall in Ireland.

  "This is a detective hat," Alex tells me, pointing to the wool cap he's wearing in the photograph, the cap my father bought him to match his own.

  Ken and I have surrounded Alex with pictures like this—me in a wedding dress, holding my mother's hand; Ken and his sisters, smiling beneath a Styrofoam grotto in a restaurant in Little Italy. We do this, thinking perhaps their photographic presence will turn our family history into his.

  "Choose a book, Alex, or I'm going downstairs."

  "Calm down," he tells me, holding up both his hands.

  After Alex turned three, Ken and I told him more of his story. "We visited you every day in the orphanage," we said. "We were sad because they wouldn't let us bring you home."

  "Why couldn't you? Were they tricking you?"

  "It felt like it."

  "What about that Russian lady?" he asked.

  "What Russian lady?"

  "The one you said took care of me. Do you think she misses me?"

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  I remembered Irina saving the cloth she'd used to wipe his mouth, moving her hand in the air above Alex's head in the shape of a blessing. "I'm sure she does."

  When Alex turned four, we showed him the photographs we'd taken at the orphanage.

  "This is you," I told him. In the picture, Alex was gripping the handle of the yellow lawn mower. His face was pale and serious.

  He studied the photograph.

  "I was a different baby then," he said.

  When Alex was five, we showed him the videotape from our first trip to Moscow.

  "Grisha, Grisha," said Ken's voice from four years ago.

  The baby in the video was wearing a GAP sweatshirt that dipped beneath his collarbones.

  "Do you know who that is?" we asked Alex.

  "Yes. Me."

  In the background, Yuri's voice told jokes in Russian to the women in the white coats. I looked at Alex, trying to see if the foreign words still held meaning for him. But he'd stopped watching the video and was making his Tarzan and Spiderman wrestle on the coffee table.

  Later Alex told us that it wasn't him on the tape. "Actually, tha
t was another baby. I was in France."

  Alex has moved away from the photographs and is now tying plastic cowboys to his bedpost.

  "I'll make a deal with you," I say. "I'll read the disgusting part of Woolly Mammoths, if we can read this first." I pull out a book of Russian folktales I've found in a used book store.

  "Let me see the cover."

  The cover has a picture of a witch wearing a babushka. The witch is riding a broomstick and holding a wooden club in her hand. On her feet, she wears a pair of bedroom slippers. The legs coming out of the slippers are no more than white uncovered bone.

  "OK," Alex says.

  We stretch out on his sheets which are printed with fish. I choose a story called "The Snow Child," because it reminds me of the way Alex was named.

  " 'Once there was a man and a woman who were sad because they had no child,' " I read. " 'All day they'd stand at the window of their hut, watching the children that belonged to other people.

  " 'One day, the man and the woman decided to make a child out of snow. They worked all day, shaping the snow and ice, and by nighttime, they'd finished. Standing before them was a snow child—a little girl with blind white eyes. ' "Speak to us," said the man to the little girl. ' "Run like the others," said the woman.

  " 'And suddenly, magically, the white eyes turned blue, and the snow child began to dance around them. "Stay with us," said the man. "Be our child," said the woman.

  " 'And the snow child stopped dancing long enough to take their hands. "I will stay with you," she told the man and the woman, "and I will be your child, for as long as you always love me more than anything."

  "We will always love you," the man and the woman promised, "more than anything."

  " 'And so the little girl made of snow stayed with the man and the woman, and became their child.' "

  "The end," I say, closing the book.

  "But there were more words," he says.

  "That was another story." But of course he's right; there is more to "The Snow Child." It being Russian, there's a fox and a trick, and the man and the woman lose the child made of snow. But I don't want to read this part to Alex because I don't want him to think we'd ever lose him.