The flat felt luxurious, with hardwood floors and textured concrete walls in swirling wave patterns. The bathroom was tiled in purple and yellow, the kitchen was well-equipped to prepare meals, there was cable TV, and we had two bedrooms so Oleg didn’t have to sleep on the couch. Best of all, the flat had a working furnace, unlike our place in Kyiv. We slept for two hours before Oleg knocked on our door at 7:30 am.
From the kitchen window I could see the first winter sun glinting on the frozen lake below, which was decorated with iron-filigreed railings, Greek pillars, and a bridge. Part of the lake was a crater carved out by German bombing in World War II, the war that had driven my father and his family, possibly through this very place, to Poland. My new family would begin in this scarred and wintry city.
We expected to meet our sons immediately that morning. Instead Oleg took us on a paper chase for almost our entire first day in Ternopil. In our rush to get out of Kyiv, Nikolai had forgotten to prepare the power of attorney that Oleg needed to act on our behalf in the adoption. Therefore we now had to notarize a back-dated version of the power of attorney. This was illegal but not the real problem. Oleg spotted a notary’s office, and we walked in to see a lineup of old women, businessmen, boys with tight tapered jeans and cell phones, all of them waiting.
After twenty minutes it was our turn. The notary sat like a high priest in silence behind a giant mahogany desk and a computer. She gestured to us to sit, and Oleg stood in front of her, almost as if he were auditioning, and spoke for a long time. The notary responded in a couple of clipped sentences, with great emphasis on the last one. Oleg explained the problem to us: he did not have the document he needed in this region showing that he was a government-approved interpreter. Also, the notary didn’t like the idea of Oleg acting on our behalf for the adoption, even though Oleg assured us later that this was normal.
We walked back into the slushy, narrow streets. Around the town square we saw a theatre that staged Ukrainian plays, a cathedral, and brightly-painted apartments that had iron railings on the balconies. I smelt beer, cigarettes, fried foods, diesel exhaust, laundry drying in the crisp air, and my stomach rumbled for lunch. Oleg walked at speed on his short legs from one office to another, all over Ternopil’s complicated streets. Possibly he enjoyed making us chase him. Betsy was more resilient than I, and with her long legs she could walk faster than Oleg, but she exchanged nervous glances with me.
In the end we saw the inner sanctums of another four notaries, who all turned us down with the same degree of haughtiness. We also spent half an hour at city hall while Oleg talked to officials and we said dyakuyu, thank you, to anyone who looked important.
“I love this town,” Oleg said. “I love the fahny way they talk out here. It’s fahn just to watch the people. But I don’t like the notaries. Oh, the notaries.” He shook his head like Job contemplating God’s perversity.
By late afternoon Oleg had abandoned the quest for a notary. Sometime during our whirlwind office tour he’d acquired the local referral we needed to see Bohdan. We were finally driving in a taxi to the Ternopil Specialized Children’s Home at the edge of town. The winter sun set as we entered the orphanage director’s office. He was a big, heavyset man with a dour manner and a black fur cap glued to his head. He pointed to a poster on the wall of newly elected President Yushchenko at Independence Square, waving to an ecstatic crowd. Oleg chatted rapidly with him, and we assumed it was about politics.
The director shook our hands with a terrifying grip, smiled for the first time, and began telling us about Bohdan through Oleg’s translation. At birth Bohdan had measured eight points on the APGAR scale, a flourishing baby. But the parents abused alcohol and lived in “a bad psychological atmosphere.” Bohdan’s mother abandoned him and Peter two years ago, and lost her parental rights after twice failing to appear in court. Their father had disappeared long before. Bohdan entered the orphanage at one year and three months old. He had various “disorders of development,” meaning that he had talked and walked late. He’d had bronchitis and an ear infection in the last year. “He likes to be tenderly treated,” said the director, reading from a doctor’s report, and he smiled more warmly than before.
After the meeting we walked down a series of long under-heated hallways, all very clean and adorned with the occasional plant or a portrait of Ukraine’s national poet, Taras Shevchenko. The director led us up a flight of stairs and into a bare white entranceway. Through the doorway we watched as a group of children gathered around him. A worker in a white smock and kerchief with prominent gold teeth came leading one boy from the group. It was Bohdan. “This is your mama and papa,” she said in Ukrainian.
Bohdan’s brown eyes glowed like deep pools of chocolate. His mouth turned down at the edges as if he was thinking hard or about to cry. He wore a royal blue Indianapolis Colts sweat-suit. Betsy and I looked at each other, delighted. We were both born in Indiana when our fathers were in graduate school, only thirty miles apart, though we didn’t meet for another thirty-three years. What a bizarre coincidence, to meet our son wearing this emblem of our accidentally shared home state, a world away from the midwestern US. It had to be a good omen.
Anya, the worker who’d led Bohdan out to see us, said “Mama,” and whispered something to him. When we sat down she plopped him on Betsy’s lap. Betsy handed him a lollipop that he stuck quickly in his mouth. Bohdan grinned at her and then at me. Betsy and I started to tear up. Could this beautiful child be our son? The other kids clamoured, all eager to be held and touched. We gave them lollipops too.
Anya removed Bohdan’s candy and he began reciting what Oleg said was a prayer. Every minute or so he got stuck and Anya prompted him to continue the lengthy recitation. She gestured to us as he continued, as if to say see, he is a bright boy. Some of his mates did not look so capable. A number of them had the facial markers of fetal alcohol syndrome, which we’d memorized back home. Oleg took pictures with his digital camera and chatted with the workers and children.
Bohdan relaxed in my lap for a long time. I stroked his head and tickled him. His whole being lit up with pleasure. He crinkled his eyes and chuckled. Oleg told me that the name Bohdan means “God’s gift” in the Slavic languages.
On Saturday morning we met Bohdan for the second time. He picked out our voices in the entryway, and we heard him shouting. Anya ran out, smiling, and spoke rapidly to Oleg, who translated: “I asked him why he was running, and he said ‘My daddy has come for me.’ “ I wondered whether he said this because, like all children, he wanted a father, or if it was because he loved me already. Then one of the mentally challenged kids jumped through the doorway, sporting the same Indianapolis Colts outfit Bohdan had worn the previous day. The kids wore whatever clothes came to hand.
Except for a couple of hour-long visits with Bohdan, Betsy and I were alone in our flat for most of the weekend. Betsy did the meal planning and cooking, while I did the dishes. Oleg spent the whole weekend driving the 140 kilometres back and forth to a town near Peter’s orphanage, making arrangements with district officials for documents we needed before we could meet Peter. Bohdan seemed like a perfect son for us, and in excellent health, but if Peter wasn’t healthy enough for Canadian immigration, we would not be able to adopt either of them. Then Oleg told us that Peter was in the orphanage infirmary because of an accident.
On Monday morning we left to meet Peter in the small white cab of our regular taxi driver, Andrey. Betsy and I wedged into the back seat, in spite of us both being a foot taller than Oleg. Outside Ternopil, in the early morning chill, the landscape was flat and curtains of fog obscured the horizon. The countryside reminded me of the prairies in North America, with snow-covered fields, windbreaks, desolate highways. But every few kilometres there was a village filled with what to us were exotic sights: cathedrals crowned by shining cupolas, crumbling brick buildings, textured concrete fences painted two-tone, in Easter egg colours. The roads wound in narrow cobblestone, rattling our bones and teeth. Stray d
ogs and ragged people jaywalked, carrying Hugo Boss shopping bags. As we drove out of each settlement a sign appeared with the place name stroked out, as if God reached down and expunged everything except the fields and the miniature roadside cathedrals where you could pray for protection.
After two hours’ driving we stopped in the last major town before Peter’s orphanage and ate cold pizza for breakfast. Then we waited in the car while Oleg tried to find an official. We needed a local referral to see Peter, even though we already had one from Kyiv. Before leaving the apartment I’d given Oleg $300 Ukrainian, for “expediting expenses.” We didn’t know how much of our money was going into expediting, only that we had cashed out our savings and extended our line of credit for the adoptions. Now we waited in the frigid cab while Oleg expedited and talked politics. After a while he called us in to meet the official who would issue the referral.
The public buildings were all the same: rambling hallways with high ceilings, peeling paint, crucifixes and political posters on the walls above eye level, no detectable heat from the radiators, and dirty bathrooms without toilet seats or paper. Workers kept their fur hats on all day. When I left a building last I usually violated Ukrainian etiquette by failing to close the door behind me. Oleg looked at me darkly, implying that I was a lazy Canadian, someone who expected doors to close themselves.
We took a back road out of town, and soon the pavement became gravel. As the road descended into the Dniester river valley, the fog cleared away and the Carpathian mountains appeared across the river. Soon we saw the village where Peter lived. It was called Koropets, carp. A sculpture of the rotund, scaly fish protruded obscenely from beside the road. We stopped and took pictures of each other beside the fish. Oleg said, “God is good,” because of the sunshine washing the foothills of western Ukraine, and I felt a surge of gratitude and hope. Soon we drove past a creek onto the orphanage grounds. On our left was an old, ornate building that Andrey said had been a Polish count’s palace long ago.
As we stepped out of the taxi, Oleg motioned at us officiously while chatting on his cell phone to someone. We entered a low building on our right and Oleg introduced us to the orphanage director, a short, middle-aged woman wearing a skirt and fashionable boots. She smiled warmly and led us to the infirmary, a small room with three beds.
Peter lay on the bed nearest the door, in a light blue turtleneck and sweatpants. He had a block-shaped head, long eyelashes, and luminescent silver-green eyes under short brown hair. His face was pudgy and handsome; right between his eyebrows was a big X-shaped bandage. He had just awakened.
Another child pushed Peter into the bedpost last night, the director explained, just at the time Oleg phoned to say we were coming. It was an accident. But Peter had needed three stitches to close the wound.
The orphanage director seated herself on Peter’s bed and stroked his hair. She said mom and dad a few times, the only words that I understood. Peter looked at us with his eyes pulsing. Then Oleg spoke to him, and Peter responded with a high-pitched, rapid-fire barrage of words that Oleg translated.
“I dreamed about an elephant, a bear, and a fox, in a big forest,” Peter said. “I was running and scared. And then I slept in my bed. Down the road through the forest came my mother and father, to take me away.” He smiled and I noticed that his ears stuck out. Betsy looked at me with tears tracking down her cheeks. I decided to kill anyone who might laugh at Peter’s bandage even if his broad forehead did remind me of Frankenstein.
Through Oleg, Betsy asked Peter if he had any brothers or sisters.
“Yes, I have a baby brother, Bohdan! Where is he? Can I see him?”
Oleg said that he’d have to wait, and showed Peter a picture of Bohdan on his digital camera. Peter’s face lit up with joy.
“Pampushka!” he said, laughing and pointing at Bohdan’s fleshy cheeks in the picture. Pampushka, Oleg explained, were little garlic buns. Bohdan had put on baby fat in the orphanage.
As I stood there staring at Peter, I thought of my father’s escape from eastern Germany in 1945: a little boy, running to a soundtrack of Russian rifle fire through a beet field, running toward safety and the death of his mother.
Peter held a plastic bag that contained all his property — a scribbler filled with doodles, a single wooden block, and the candy we’d given him. He sat in Betsy’s lap, chattering as if she understood him. Then he plunked himself on my lap. He clutched my hand to his chest like he was afraid of drowning in the open air, pulled my arms tight around him, talking and talking without a pause for breath. Oleg was no longer translating but I didn’t care. The words no longer signified in their meaning. It seemed to me then that Peter experienced the world as I did, as words that tumbled out of mouths or fingers, not always under control, giant numbers of them like space probes sent to meet the other sentient beings that must be out there somewhere. We’d made contact.
III
Having met our sons, we now expected to finish the legal process within a week, after Oleg collected the required documents and the regional court approved our adoptions.
But our expectations for a speedy conclusion were shattered. For the next three weeks, Betsy and I waited and waited while Oleg piled up documents for the adoption dossiers and had them notarized. Another wrinkle: Peter’s orphanage doctor had told us about Peter getting a positive skin test for tuberculosis. While the doctor said this was no cause for concern, we knew that Peter must pass a medical exam for Canadian immigration.
Early in the month Oleg took us in Andrey’s cab to bow and scrape in front of local officials. We visited the boys whenever we could, which was especially hard with Peter, his orphanage hours away on a bad winter road. The time crawled. Even once the court approved our adoptions, we’d still have a thirty-day waiting period before we could take custody of our sons, according to Ukrainian law.
We spent part of each day killing time in an Internet café near the flat, sending emails to our family and friends at home, and eagerly looking for answers. Everyone except Jeremy responded immediately with congratulations on our new family. My dad sent us this message:
Hi Maurice & Betsy!
Thanks for keeping us so well informed about your Ukraine journey. We now have a clear, sharp picture and understand what it is you’ve been doing and what still remains to be done. And we are becoming anxious with you for the ultimate conclusion to happen a.s.a.p. We are all very excited about meeting Peter & Bohdan with their new parents.
…
Every day we await further updating.
Our love to you ALL, mom & dad.
Coming from my father, this was expansive and emotional. I felt grateful. Then, after some cajoling and a phone call by my sister, Jeremy responded to my second message:
News sounds great! First of all, I don’t think you should anglicize Petro, it’s a far cooler name than Peter. Second of all, who wouldn’t want a big brother like me? Third, Bohdan’s a damn good name too.
…
The kids sound spunky.
Love, Jeremy
I felt relief and sweat run down my body as I read his message. Back home Jeremy had said he wanted to have brothers, but his non-response to my messages had filled me with anxiety. His impulse to argue about everything, even Peter’s name, was exactly like mine. We hadn’t always been like that.
I remembered sitting with Jeremy when he was four in our living room, facing a small park across the street. I held him up and we picked our topics from whatever came in sight.
“Look, it’s a car! The car drives. The car drives.”
“Caw. Caw. Caw dwive.”
“The car drivezz.”
“The caw dwivezz.”
“Good! Very good! How about this. The bird flies.”
“The buhd fliezz.” I hugged him to my chest and put my hands on his cheeks, feeling like Rex Harrison in My Fair Lady. I could feel the perfectly smooth skin of his arms and breathe in the fresh bread smell of his body. His straw-coloured stringy blonde hai
r came from his mother. We both laughed like idiots. I loved my son.
On the morning of February 11, our cell phone’s alarm went off at 6:00 am. The plan was to leave for Peter’s orphanage at 6:30, and to take him for more blood tests — we weren’t sure exactly what for. I’d promised Betsy to get up and dance if she set the phone to play “Latin Loop.” My genetic heritage molded me for sitting in a pew, not for fluid hip movements to a Latin beat. Betsy cracked up. It had been weeks since we’d had an argument about anything.
When we picked Peter up at the orphanage we saw his dormitory for the first time. The stitches were out of his wound, so he had been released from the infirmary. Now he wore a smaller bandage on his forehead. He got very angry at me when I didn’t let him play with our cell phone.
An orphanage worker named Oksana came along with us, displacing Oleg from the front of the cab and holding Peter on her lap. She asked us for a plastic bag as soon as we got in the taxi, and draped a towel over her shoulder. This was standard procedure: orphanage children had little experience with driving, and they tended to vomit. For the first few minutes Peter chattered continuously. Oleg translated some of it — Peter was excited about seeing how cars and trucks used their turn signals and brake lights. Within a few more minutes, Peter was quiet and pale. Oksana took off his jacket to cool him. Soon she asked Andrey to drive slowly on the hills. Then the taxi stopped. Oksana took Peter out and he threw up at the edge of the road. She wiped his face with the towel and they got back in. We continued to drive slowly. At the next town I bought some kind of pill at a pharmacy where they sold medication one tablet at a time. It wasn’t the Gravol we asked for, since Peter had to stop and puke several more times.
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