Rescuing Julia Twice

by Tina Traster

  Our flight is called. We’re led outside onto the tarmac. Snow swirls. Frigid air bites at the exposed parts of my face. This can’t be my life. I don’t need another adventure to share with my friends and family. There are stories about older parents who are preparing to adopt a child and boom, they’re pregnant. The woman always gets pregnant while she’s scouting the adoption classifieds to find a young mother who needs to give up her baby. It’s a nice fairy tale.

  The plane is more of a relic than the airport. The windows are rusted and mismatched. There is duct tape on some. I don’t want to know why. The seats are cramped. I slide into the window seat and gasp. Snow hits the window with crystal pings. The ground crew keeps deicing the wings. I can’t breathe. I don’t like to fly generally, but no one should fly on a night like this—not even someone who has a daughter waiting in Siberia. I want to run off this decrepit plane, but the bulkhead door has already been sealed shut.

  “Do we really want a baby this badly?” I ask my husband.

  He thinks I’m joking. I don’t think I am. I don’t know what I think except that there’s a good chance we will die on this plane tonight somewhere over the Russian tundra. My mind races to CNN breaking reports about planes going down “somewhere in Russia.” Pilot error. Navigators impaired by alcohol. Bum radar in the control tower.

  Surprisingly, the plane lifts off the ground with the grace of a heron. My eyes are closed, and I’m clutching my husband’s hand. I’m moving through the longest night of my life, moving toward something I’ve told myself I want, yet I feel numb. It could be my cautious nature, but I know it’s not. I am making a lifetime commitment to raise a child given up by another woman. A final, irreversible decision. I worry about our financial stability, though the real fear is more primal. Something I can’t articulate is keeping me up at night and giving me stomachaches. I can feel it in my bones.

  I rifle through my travel bag and pull out Colin Thubron’s travelogue In Siberia. The man has traversed the vast territory, traveling alone by train, boat, car, and on foot. I picked up the book during my last trip to Barnes & Noble. I remember thinking I should probably get one or two parenting books, but I couldn’t bring myself to do so. Either I didn’t believe there was a manual for raising children, or I wasn’t ready to accept that I was going to become a parent. Okay, not just a parent, a mother. Easier, I thought, to read about this vast, mysterious place that I associate with dislocation, with lore, with Doctor Zhivago and Reds.

  Our adoption process had taken place in record time. Three months after completing our dossier in August 2002, we got the call. I thought it must be a mistake, but it wasn’t. There was a six-month-old baby girl in Novosibirsk waiting for a home. We’d been told most adoptions take between a year and eighteen months. Also, we had requested as young a baby as possible but had been told most Russian babies are at least a year old when they leave the orphanages. My head spun when the social worker called. All those times I wanted so desperately to see the little pink plus icon on the pregnancy stick. Would I have felt just as panicked if I had? Her words seemed surreal: We’ve got a baby for you.

  I thought, This can’t be. It’s only been four months. Four months! I’m not ready. We haven’t done anything to prepare for an actual baby—only for the idea of having a baby. We hadn’t even decided where she was going to sleep. And I had writing deadlines. So many deadlines, so much pressure—it was hard to contemplate a disruption as big as a baby. But this was the baby I told myself I wanted so badly. We had used our life savings to make this happen. Nothing else should have mattered. But I didn’t feel ecstatic.

  Why?

  What was wrong with me?

  This queasy ambivalence was entirely in character for me. I often want something, go after it with a vengeance, and then go through a period of regret and remorse. It may be that deep down I fear commitment. I’m afraid to fail, afraid that after I get what I want, the other shoe will drop. In that moment when the social worker said, “We have a baby for you,” I knew I was in troubling territory.

  The quick timing threw me off-kilter. At this point adopting a baby still seemed theoretical, conceptual—something that would happen down the road. Soon after the call, we received a grainy video of a baby being coaxed to smile and crawl for the camera. She wore a diaper. She had the palest skin I’d ever seen and eyes as dark as a tree hollow. She was a piece of merchandise for sale, an object held before the camera to be marketed. I cried hard—for her abandonment, my disappointments, the way circumstance unites a mother and child.

  “She looks like a fine baby to me,” Ricky had said, sitting on the couch, relaxed and curious. I didn’t disagree, but I didn’t feel an impulse to run to the child, lift her from that dreadful place, and bring her to my breast. I simply felt sad. I let my husband’s practical certainty carry me through to the next phase. We agreed to meet the child. Everything else took a backseat to preparing for our two trips to Siberia, the first one just after New Year’s Eve 2003. It was necessary to use what little money we had to pay for fees and travel. My husband and I swallowed our pride and asked for financial help from family and one particular friend, Leah, who proved to be a guardian angel. We kept moving forward, one antiseptic step at a time. I went to a Russian agency for visas. I bought thermal socks and heavy boots. I organized my work so I would not miss a deadline. I walked through steps, checked off checklists. Nothing about this felt like preparation for motherhood. My belly didn’t grow. There was no baby inside me.

  Six hours later, the plane lands at Tolmachevo Airport in Ob. We’ve flown through eleven time zones. It is 5:00 AM, still dark. An endless night. A steward leads us down a flight of metal steps toward the tarmac. Like everyone else, he seems to know why we are here, but how can that be? Breathing in the bracing air scorches my lungs. This is what ten degrees below zero feels like. We walk toward a hangar-style building shrouded in darkness. A loud thunk—bright lights illuminate the cavernous space. Most of it is filled up with a conveyor belt. Above it is a billowy soft banner that says “City of Industrial Science” in English. Below, another sign says “New York Pizza.” A tall man in an army jacket holds a sign with our surname. Unlike Olga, Vladimir meets us with an expressionless nod. When I ask him to direct me to the toilet, he points blankly at a padlocked door. He lets my husband carry our suitcase. He walks in front of us to his Volga.

  We slide into the backseat and sit closely together. Vladimir turns on the scratchy radio, and the guttural sounds of Russian fill the car. It is 7:00 AM, coal black outside, a continuous January night. He drives fast, swerving hard once to miss a wolfish dog that darts into the road. I notice a woman standing stoically in an eerily-lit bus shelter, her breath billowing from her hooded face.

  Twenty minutes later, Vladimir pulls up in front of a squat brick building, the Centralnaya Hotel.

  “Olga, meet 9:30 AM, lobby.” The only words he utters, carefully memorized.

  Two

  The woman behind the glass partition at the Centralnaya Hotel rubs sleep from her eyes and reveals an irritated expression. “Where can we get some breakfast?” I ask. She doesn’t answer. I am starving, feverish, and weak. She hands us a heavy, weighted room key. It is a jail cell, oppressively hot with windows high on the walls. They are thickly caked with ice, so encrusted that when the sun finally comes up three hours later, it looks as though the windows are opaque squares rather than transparent portals to the outside world. There’s a sparse sitting room with a tiny couch and writing desk. Two threadbare cots on opposite sides of the claustrophobic room are on the other side of a thin wall. The misshapen toilet forces your skin to make contact with the bowl when you sit down. There’s no shower curtain and only cold water. My husband suggests we try and find some breakfast before Olga (it seems all translators are named Olga) arrives.

  Ricky and I stop at the front desk and ask where we can find a café or bakery. The same sleepy hotel clerk shrugs. As we walk outside the hotel, right across the street is th
e most beautiful bakery I’ve ever seen. It has a large glass window, steamed over from the frigid morning air, with oceans of cakes and confections. We’d been told dollars would be accepted in Russia. The woman in the tall paper baker’s hat keeps waving at our currency and shaking her head. We need to exchange money but cannot find an open bank.

  “I have three thousand dollars strapped to my chest, but I can’t get a cup of tea,” my husband says.

  We return to the hotel lobby. I alternate between sulking and fuming. Why do we have to be treated so coldly? What is wrong with these people? Why is this journey so fraught with pain? The little voice taunts: Is it because you don’t want this badly enough? Isn’t a woman willing to endure anything to have her baby?

  Olga is a willowy beauty with alabaster skin and slightly slanted purplish eyes. She has a good command of English. She tells us she’s lived and worked in Saudi Arabia and Switzerland. Alla is the one who makes the decisions. She is square and squat, and her cropped black hair looks as if it is pasted to her face. On the way to Vladimir’s Volga, Alla fingers my mink. “Very nice,” she says.

  It is near ten, and the sun is finally rising. Before we enter the Ministry of Education, an imposing government building in the heart of Novosibirsk, Olga leans toward us and says, “Someone is going to ask you if you have seen your child. All you say is, ‘We have not seen our child.’” Olga continues. “The ministry will tell you that they have a child for you. Act surprised.” It is a charade.

  No one shows up for our appointment. Olga, who takes pity on me because I’m suffering with high fever and obvious signs of flu, escorts us to a tiny tea cart on the second floor. We buy tepid tea and stale biscuits as moist as paint chips. “Let’s go to the orphanage,” Olga says. “We’ll come back here later.”

  The landscape changes dramatically as we drive away from the bustle of the city center to clusters of Soviet-era concrete buildings, linear, gray, and featureless. En route, we pass a large hospital. Olga says, “This is where your child was born.” I try to imagine baby Yulia coming into a world where she is not wanted. If the information we’ve been given can be trusted, we know her mother is a twenty-year-old who already has two children. We know her name is Maria and that she is very short, four feet nine. She is married. We don’t know the father’s name. The medical records say baby Yulia spent the first three months of her life in the hospital being treated for a respiratory infection and dysentery. We don’t know if this is true. Everyone tells us the medical records are a sham. They’re exaggerated so the Russian government can tell the Russian people there’s a good justification for “selling” babies to foreigners. It’s a crazy game, but Americans adopting babies want babies so badly they play along. In Siberia, an American floats through a surreal dream-nightmare staged for her and well rehearsed by players in the baby industry.

  As we get closer to the orphanage, I notice scarlet-faced men lying faceup on the side of the road. “What are they doing out there?” I ask Olga.

  “They are drunk. On vodka. It is a sickness. Russia’s national disease.” Olga’s frankness startles. Until now the conversation has been curt. She softens when she speaks about how difficult the end of communism has been for so many of those who’ve never known anything but a subsidized existence. She tells us Siberia has been behind the Iron Curtain for six decades, and essentially it still is. People here are wary of Westerners and of capitalism.

  When Olga says this, I tell her that when we’ve been out on the streets alone, people have looked at us with a combination of disgust and disdain.

  “That’s because people in Novosibirsk know Americans are here for adoptions. To them, you’re stealing their babies,” she says matter-of-factly. The looks on the faces of the airplane steward, the hotel clerk, and the bakery cashier suddenly made sense to me. I was the object of their disdain. And I guess taking babies from their orphanages reminded them either of their society’s failings or their fear of an open society where failure is a harsh reality.

  Orphanage Number Two has no sign on it. It is another one of Siberia’s secrets. We slip into the dimly lit building. It is stiflingly hot. Women furiously dust and polish staircase banisters, but they don’t meet our eyes when we ascend the stairs. I can’t believe that babies live here—one hundred babies, ten to a room. There is life and promise, I suppose, at least for the children who are “good” enough to adopt out. We’ve been told many children are afflicted with fetal alcohol syndrome, a disease that causes mental problems. Those children will never leave these austere places. We’re led into a large room. A group of babies are in a giant crib, like a choreographed diaper advertisement. Older toddlers zip around in mobile chairs. A caretaker changes a diaper. A couple is handed a wriggling baby. I’m still sick with flu and fever. Olga and Alla are conferencing about something that has to do with me. Olga’s voice rises, and Alla eventually seems to give in to something. Then I’m led to a chair outside the baby room and handed a surgical mask. “Alla thought you were too sick to hold the baby,” she says. “Wear this.”

  I’m sitting in the chair. Ricky is standing beside me, his hand resting on my shoulder. My eyes dart left and right, searching for the caretaker who will bring us our baby. We have decided that we will change her name from Yulia to Julia, which is our best effort at allowing her to keep the only thing she’s been given: a name. But at the same time, we’re Americanizing it to Julia so she will not have to explain why she has an odd name. Names shape us. When I was born in 1962, my mother had seen a French model named “Bettina” in a fashion magazine. That was what they called me when I was born, but by the time I got to second grade, kids made fun. They rhymed the name into cruel configurations. Bettina betina, vagina. After that, I was called Tina.

  I’m scanning the room, trying to match babies’ faces with the one I had seen on the tape. “Is that her?” I ask Olga.

  “No, she’s over there.”

  I’m stunned when I see the baby on the changing table. She turns her head toward me and flashes a dimpled smile. Does she instinctively know she will be mine and I will be hers? She is smaller than I imagined.

  The caretaker, who has her swaddled in a blanket, says to me, “Pick up baby.” I hesitate. Fear whips me with hurricane force. I can’t move. Instead, the caretaker places her in my arms, where she fits exactly right. I look into her eyes. They are khaki. I touch her fuzzy bald head. Her nose is runny and red. The caretaker hands me a brown tea concoction in a bottle and says, “Feed baby.” I do and then hand her to my husband. He pulls her close to his chest and says, looking down, “What’s new?” I want to laugh and to cry. I want to run and to cling. I wish I could dance and spin in a sun-filled meadow with clean, bright light. In the orphanage chair, I sit still.

  Time is suspended.

  Everything falls away.

  We have thirty minutes with the baby before she’s returned to her tiny crib in the baby room. She is one of ten babies who share the room. There’s a little boy in the baby room who has a large head, and his eyes are far apart. That is what fetal alcohol syndrome looks like. That little boy has no chance of being adopted. The caretaker lowers Julia into the cramped bed and tightly swaddles her, almost as though she’s imprisoned. She leaves her with a half-empty bottle of the tea concoction. This tiny soul is straightjacketed into a crib where her needs will be met only when a caretaker can get around to responding. But what can they do? They have a hundred babies to care for.

  Julia has a little smile on her face. I think she knows her fate will change. There is something about her dark, deep eyes that suggest she’s lived on this planet more than six months. They have a knowing quality.

  We next meet with the orphanage director. I ask questions about the health of the baby’s mother. They are not answered. Then Vladimir drives us back to town and drops us off at the Irish grill, where we order blinis and salmon roe and shrimp kabob. We are grateful and relieved to be left alone for a couple of hours to talk about our daughter. We agre
e she is startlingly beautiful. We see her in the Russian faces around us—broad cheeks, slightly slanted eyes, skin like goat’s milk.

  That evening we venture out on our own for dinner. Whatever sunlight we saw that day had come and gone quickly. The night air is as sharp as a cat’s claws. It tears the skin.

  People walking down Krasnyi Prospekt, the wide and vast main boulevard, look like floating apparitions, small and shimmery with plumes of steam trailing them. The majestically domed Opera and Ballet Theater anchors the street at one end. Siberia is otherworldly. I could not compare it to anywhere I’d been or anything I’d ever experienced. At Patio Pizza we find comfort. American-style pizzas and a waiter who is happy to practice his English. He spends a lot of time hanging around our table. He easily guesses we are adoptive parents, and I wonder if he thinks we’re baby stealers. He tells us he likes to practice his English: Do we mind if we chat? We are delighted to do so. He’s a student. He wants to study international relations. We tell him we are here to adopt a baby, and he says he already knew that. Then he pulls a pen from behind his ear and grabs an empty napkin. “What is your name?” he asks. I say “Tina.” He scribbles a few letters on the napkin and then shows it to me. “Tuha. That’s your name in Russian,” he says, smiling.

  I run my index finger over the name to make sure the ink is dry and place it into a safe compartment in my bag. I smile at this young man.

  I cannot sleep. I watch my husband sleep peacefully on the rickety cot in the stifling hot room that feels like a lockup. The room is inky dark, but I write in my journal. I wait for 7 AM before nudging Ricky from slumber. “C’mon,” I say. “Let’s go to the bakery across the street.” Groggily he says, “It’s the middle of the night. It’s pitch dark.” I tell him it is morning. “Remember, the sun doesn’t rise until after 9.” The bakery is sultry, like a Laundromat. The tea and pastries are delicious. We pay with rubles, converted from our dollars.