“How would paying attention to your kids, how would that help you?”
“This is my last chance to be their father. They need that, and so do I.” My voice cracked and I looked down at my watch to avoid eye contact. I needed to get away from her bright room.
ADOPTION
I
Betsy and I arrived in Kyiv on January 31, 2005. Nikolai, the adoption agency’s main operative, met us in the reception area of the Boryspil Airport. Nikolai had sent me a picture of himself by email, after I wired him $5,000 US for what the agency called a general service fee. In person he looked the way we’d expected, a bald man in his thirties, although surprisingly short. His head was perfectly hairless on top, but with brown tufts cut short around the ears and above his neck. He shook my hand very hard.
The parking lot overflowed with vehicles and people. As we seated ourselves in Nikolai’s van, someone dropped a beer bottle from the taxi wedged beside us. The taxi lurched from its space, narrowly missing us, but Nikolai seemed unconcerned. His van was quite new, with a Kenmore stereo system. McDonald’s wrappers from his kids’ lunch littered the floor. I perched sideways in the front to see Nikolai as well as Betsy, and Betsy sat in the middle seat row, quiet, observant.
“What kind of music you like?” Nikolai asked me, grinning.
“Jazz and classical music,” I said, not wanting to complicate things by mentioning Jimi Hendrix or Wilf Carter.
“Perfect,” he said, like a waiter in a franchise restaurant back home. “I’ve got Chick Corea here.” He turned it up loud. “You can buy this on CD for two dollars in the Kyiv market. Pretty good, yeah?”
I agreed and asked what other music he enjoyed. He said he listened to Michael Brecker and John Patituci but did not care for Louis Armstrong and “all those old guys.” Nikolai started to tap out the drum part from the Corea album on his steering wheel.
“I play the drums,” he said. He had a degree in music and was delighted to hear that I played the upright bass.
“You speak English very well,” I said.
“I learn in California,” he responded. He’d played drums in a big church there, but couldn’t make a living as a musician in Ukraine. Now he no longer owned a drum kit. I thought of my dad, whose uncles insisted he do something sensible instead of being a musician. Nikolai was being sensible.
“Why you decide to adopt in Ukraine?” asked Nikolai.
“My father was born here. His family fled during World War II,” I said.
“Did your father’s family speak Ukrainian or Russian?”
“They spoke Russian and German, some spoke Ukrainian. My family was Mennonite. They pretended they were living somewhere else.”
“What do you mean, somewhere else?”
“Well, at first Ukraine was like heaven for them, and then the revolution came and the wars. They thought they were in hell.”
Nikolai laughed, showing all his white California teeth.
“Let me tell you a joke,” he said. “An Englishman, a Frenchman and a Russian are at an art gallery looking at pictures of Adam and Eve in the garden. The Englishman says, ‘Look, they’re English — they’re eating an apple for breakfast.’ The Frenchman says, ‘Look how beautiful they are naked — they must be French.’ The Russian says, ‘No, no — they have no clothes, almost nothing to eat, and they think they’re in paradise — they must be Russians.’ ” Betsy’s quietness was unusual, but throughout Nikolai had been addressing only me.
Then he spoke at a lower pitch, more seriously. “Guys, this is how it will work,” he said. “It is hard to find healthy children to adopt right now. But I talk to my friends at the National Adoption Centre, they make phone calls, I help them, they help me.”
Nikolai drove onto a sidewalk in a square crowded with people, trucks, motorcycles, stores, and bars. Someone waved him into a parking spot and he handed coins out the window. There were a few centimetres to spare on each side.
Nikolai helped take our luggage out of the van and walked us to the “Euro-style” flat that the agency had promised. As he opened the door to the stairwell at street level the briny smell of urine hit me. We picked our way up stairs cluttered with empty wine and vodka bottles. But the flat on the second floor, a collection of small apartments with a space for the manager in a central area, was clean and pleasant. Our unit had high ceilings, a balcony with wrought-iron railings, a bedroom, a kitchen, and a bathroom. It was also freezing cold.
The last thing we did that night was shop for breakfast foods in the mall across the street. The basement grocery store had every imaginable item, much of it from western Europe, and there was an enormous liquor section. We bought breakfast cereal and what we thought was milk; I’d left our Lonely Planet Ukrainian phrase book in the flat. But we’d bought smetana, and the following morning, shivering and tired, we found out smetana is sour cream.
The next day, stuck inside Nikolai’s Toyota van in slow-moving traffic, we gazed down at an old Lada. Nikolai said no one jokes about Ladas in Ukraine because that would be like making fun of a handicapped person. He enjoyed his own jokes.
Again he became solemn. “Guys,” he said, “my friend at the National Adoption Centre has children for you. Two boys. They are great, great boys.” He paused, waiting for us to react.
I turned from the front seat to look at Betsy. Our documents said we wanted to adopt one girl and a second child of either sex. Betsy had talked for years about how she wanted to raise a girl, and I could easily picture her passing on her feminist values to a daughter. At home I’d said either sex was fine so long as the children were healthy and toilet-trained.
“It’s hard to find healthy children,” Nikolai said, into our silence. “These two boys — they are great, and in the west.”
When Betsy asked why the west was more desirable, he said that orphanages were smaller there than in other regions, and people drank less vodka. Most of the children were “social orphans” — abandoned by parents who couldn’t afford to raise them.
What about fetal alcohol syndrome, we asked?
He grinned. “This is not Russia. We are a moral country, and not so many alcoholics.”
That night, Betsy and I lay in bed in the darkness, our hands touching lightly. For a few minutes we didn’t speak. We were here because in 2003, after three years of marriage, we’d decided to adopt children in Ukraine. I already had my nineteen-year-old son, Jeremy, whom we didn’t see much, but Betsy and I really wanted to raise kids together.
In 2001 we’d bought a big old house in central Winnipeg that would hold our new family. I pictured being surrounded by my books, and our cats, and children who would look up to me and stay quiet while I wrote. My kids would have stable and predictable lives. And I would communicate my love to these children better than my father had to me. Or than I had to Jeremy. Betsy wanted to be a parent like her mother had been: enthusiastic, loving, and wise.
By 2002 we’d given up on the idea that she would get pregnant. We’d both had medical checks. Nothing was wrong. We saw a doctor at a fertility clinic. I was forty and Betsy only three years younger, which made bad odds for having a pregnancy through fertility treatments, and the treatments cost a lot.
I had just gutted my income by becoming a full-time writer. Betsy was an economics professor. Adoption made sense, and we knew a couple who had recently adopted children in Ukraine. They’d had much more control of the process than adoptive parents got in other countries, and we both had family roots in Ukraine. We began navigating paperwork and bureaucracy in 2003.
Then in 2004 Betsy got pregnant. The doctor said not to tell people until the end of the first trimester, and we didn’t. We felt happy and scared, and talked to each other only a little about our hopes and fears for the baby, and mostly about the impact on the adoption. We decided to leave the adoption process open. All along we’d wanted more than one child.
The miscarriage came from nowhere: a sudden bleeding that didn’t stop for days, and an undiscussable
pain that gnawed for years afterward.
That year of the miscarriage I spent most days on the third floor of our house, writing, trying to write, avoiding writing. Betsy went to work, earned almost all the money, and left me with domestic chores that we’d agreed would compensate for my lost income. But I ruined her favourite dress pants by forgetting to read the care instructions, and frequently delayed emptying the dishwasher or putting the pots away, only to find her doing these chores when she got home. I felt guilty but also entitled to my new leisure after working for years at jobs that had seemed meaningless.
Betsy launched herself into various hobbies: pottery, stained glass, knitting, playing the piano. Sex, which had unfailingly brought us closer together in the past, began to seem military to me in Betsy’s relentless focus on getting pregnant. She said her body, which she’d trained as a high school and college athlete, had never failed her before. The performance she most wanted now was not athletic though — it was reproduction.
We quarrelled. I accused her of ignoring me. She said it shouldn’t be up to her to replace the attention that used to come from my colleagues at work. She pointed out that if I wasn’t getting any writing done I should pay more attention to Jeremy’s problems with school. We quarrelled about that too.
But there was still our shared project, the adoption. We had to work hard to persuade the Manitoba authorities to let us adopt in Ukraine. They were concerned about corruption, bribery, and worse. We had to explain to our friends that we weren’t trying to save children from poverty. Our motives were more selfish. We wanted to adopt children for ourselves, for building our own family.
“Betsy,” I said, tightening my grip on her hand as Kyiv’s street noise filtered over us, “if we had biological children we’d have no control over their sex.”
“That’s true,” she said. Through the wall a TV blared Ukrainian pop music.
“Could you be happy with boys?”
“Yes,” she said, squeezing back, and I felt closer to her in that moment than I ever had to anyone. We went to sleep, drugged with jet lag.
At the National Adoption Centre on the morning of our interview, everything ran behind schedule. We waited two hours in a bare vestibule. Other prospective parents waited with us, Italians, Spaniards, Americans, all with their hired adoption facilitators. The waiting gave us time to think some more about the boys Nikolai had told us about, to wonder whether his friend had located a girl for us, and to realize yet again that we were not in control.
Finally Nikolai returned, beaming, from an extended series of visits down the long narrow hallway. We followed him into an office with two desks and a window at the end that had been patched with masking tape. Nikolai introduced us to his friend the psychologist, who wore an elegant powder-blue suit and looked like T.S. Eliot in old age. He quivered when he shook my hand.
The psychologist put three plastic-covered sheets on the desk. Two of them were held together with a paper clip that looked like an umbilical cord. These were the brothers Peter and Bohdan. They must be adopted together. We looked at their pictures. Peter, the five-year-old, had a mischievous grin, and he resembled one of my cousins. Three-year-old Bohdan’s mouth turned down at the corners as if he had weights pulling on them.
The desk behind us was occupied now by the Americans. They studied an orange binder. “This child is very sick,” their facilitator said. “She has had seizures probably caused by infection.”
Nikolai translated the sketchy information about the boys on the plastic-lined sheets: their birth dates, when they were abandoned by their parents, the date when they arrived at the orphanage, their delayed development. We asked for their heights — average for an orphanage. The boys lived in Ternopil, near Poland. At first we heard “Chernobyl” for “Ternopil” and stared in blank confusion. Everyone smiled when Nikolai explained that Chernobyl was in a different part of the country.
The psychologist picked up the third plastic-covered sheet, on which we could see the picture of a little girl. As the psychologist read, he laughed, exposing his cigarette-stained teeth and stretching the liver spots on his cheeks. The girl’s name was Halyna and she was six. She had dark hair and hazel eyes like my sister’s. She lived to the south in Crimea. We had to choose between the boys and this little girl. The psychologist said something to Nikolai and then they both chortled. Nikolai explained this new joke. The parents’ social status was recorded on every form by the orphanage director. In Halyna’s case it just said bums, which is the same word in English, Russian, and Ukrainian. Her grandparents’ social status was listed the same way: bums.
We felt stunned. As westerners who’d received an official letter that said we would have an interview, we expected one. Instead: adolescent jokes and fifteen minutes on hard wooden chairs in front of the psychologist’s desk to make the most consequential decision of our lives.
“I want to meet the boys,” said Betsy.
“Are you sure you’ll be happy without a daughter?” I gazed steadily into her green eyes as if no one else was present. We were not approved to adopt three children.
“Orphanages are bigger in Crimea than in Ternopil,” said Nikolai, exchanging a glance with the psychologist, “and they drink more vodka there — more Russians, you know.”
Neither of us said anything.
“Guys, you need to make a decision. Other people …” and Nikolai nodded back to the lobby.
He had made the psychologist or someone more powerful hold these files for us. I guessed at the influence of the money we sent. Nikolai paced by the window in his black suit and the psychologist sat quietly, until after about ten minutes, we decided. Nikolai and the psychologist immediately began writing out documents in longhand. We were not legally committed to adopting the boys yet but they would be our sons unless some terrible problem turned up.
In an adjoining room, while Nikolai and the psychologist furiously scribbled, officials handed us more documents to sign, notarize, and copy. The first form read:
Notice: To foreign prospective adoptive parents:
This is to inform you that National Adoption Centre
of Ministry of Education and Science of Ukraine will
proceed with the process of adoption without payment.
I repressed my impulse to guffaw.
Betsy and I waited for Nikolai in the hallway. “Are you OK?” she said. I nodded and felt relieved that she’d noticed my distress. I did not want to choose. I closed my eyes and pictured a building with an infinite number of floors and a maze of hallways, exit signs, and rooms with children crying in their beds, alone, sweating with fever. The doors kept closing on officials signing documents, the conversations partly in German, the language of my early childhood. Once a door closed it never opened again.
Betsy and I decided to flip a coin because of my uncertainty, even though we’d already filled out the forms. “Call it,” she said, and I called heads in the air for the boys. The Ukrainian coin landed on heads, trident-side up. Now our choice felt right.
Nikolai came back some indeterminate time later. When we asked about the little girl he said she’d already been selected by other people. No choice remained to second guess. I remembered a photograph of two of my cousins at the age the boys were now, in suits and crew-cuts, and how my mother always complained that they peed on the grate in aunt Lil’s bathroom back in Winnipeg. I imagined teaching my younger son Bohdan to pee standing up.
On the steaming hot train the next night, heading for Ternopil to meet our sons, I drank a beer in the dining car with Oleg, while Betsy read a novel in the sleeping compartment. Betsy read constantly, usually books I considered hopelessly middlebrow, but she enjoyed them. Oleg had just been hired by Nikolai as our adoption fixer and translator out in Ternopil. He lived in the eastern industrial city of Dnipropetrovsk, the same city where my dad’s uncle Henry once attended university. A different world: 1941, the year Germany invaded the Soviet Union. Henry had to join the German army. His job was to tra
nslate the language of occupation for the dirty, ignorant Slavs.
Oleg had to translate for us, the ignorant Canadians. He was a fervid supporter of newly installed President Yushchenko and the Orange Revolution, which had just taken place and which proved to be his favourite topic of conversation, followed by how hard he worked and his love for God. Oleg was short and always in need of a shave. He spoke excellent English, quoted Shakespeare, and was a born-again Christian. He loved Whoppers, Pepsi, and George W. Bush. Previous clients, mostly wealthy Americans, had flown him to the new world where he saw professional sporting events and acquired a Dell laptop, a thumb drive, and a digital camera.
“Adopting in Ukraine,” Oleg said to us, “is not like China. There it is Walmart. You pay, go to a hotel room, and they bring your baby girl to you all wrapped up with a bow on her head. Here you have to do a lot of work.” He seemed to relish the idea of us doing a lot of work. Betsy and I grinned at each other when he couldn’t see.
Then he told us that Peter and Bohdan, the brothers we expected to adopt, lived in different orphanages, 140 kilometres apart. According to what the National Adoption Centre had told us, both boys were in Ternopil. But that information was a year out of date.
Oleg went to his compartment to make calls on his cell phone. I went to sleep in our compartment reading Barbarossa, Alan Clark’s book on the German invasion of the Soviet Union. All the atrocity stories were in footnotes.
II
Oleg, Betsy and I arrived at the Ternopil train station just before daybreak. During the trip from Kyiv, Oleg had found a flat for us. Our new landlord met us at the station wearing an Adidas tracksuit stretched tightly around his barrel-shaped body. He drove us in a shiny silver van down unlit streets to the edge of a lake, and stopped at his apartment building. The entrance housed feral cats whose acrid smell lingered after them and dissipated as we climbed the stairs, though the odour stayed imprinted on my mind the way that certain family stories did.
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