Because of our slow pace and frequent stops, getting to Ternopil took an extra hour over the usual two. On the outskirts of town we stopped at a big brick building. A sign in both Ukrainian and English said Tuberculosis Hospital. Oleg had only told us about blood tests, so we were surprised by this stop. We didn’t know what treatment Peter had been given for his positive skin test for TB.
Inside the hospital the lights were turned off, presumably to save money. In the artificial twilight of the hallways we saw cadaverous men and women in light cotton gowns, making deep chest coughs. Peter greeted a passing nurse by name, and stopped to ask Oleg about a cart that carried food trays. He talked to a patient. He had been here before.
Oksana led us to a corner office decorated with patterned concrete. Peter was briefly taken away for a chest X-ray by a young woman with embroidered jeans under a white lab coat and a tall chef’s hat. She was Tatiana, the junior doctor. Maria was the doctor in charge, an older woman, short and round, in an even taller chef’s hat. When Peter came back with Tatiana, he gave Maria a hug. It turned out Peter had been an outpatient here for three months, getting the drug isoniazid as a preventive treatment for TB. He’d never had any symptoms of active disease. Oleg told Dr. Maria about the adoption. She held Peter and cried. Tatiana had to adjust her makeup because she was crying too.
Oleg wanted to get going, but Betsy and I insisted on exchanging addresses with the doctors. They both stood with Peter for a picture, and we promised to send it to them. All of us wept except Peter and Oleg. We left when the X-ray of Peter’s lungs came back. It was very small, the size X-rays were in the 1940s, when my father was checked for TB after the war. Lil had told me about them.
Oleg said we must leave immediately for Peter’s blood tests. We went to a clinic a few blocks into Ternopil. Oksana, who was rather proprietary about holding Peter, let Betsy hold him for the blood withdrawal. His face scrunched up gradually, like a digital picture breaking up, and he cried quietly. But he smiled as soon as it was over. We gave him a Hot Wheels car that we’d bought in Ternopil and he was thrilled.
Next Andrey drove us across town to drop off a form at Bohdan’s orphanage. Peter asked Oleg, very quietly, if he could see Bohdan, but Oksana wouldn’t allow that. She also explained that Betsy and I could not see Bohdan because it was nap time and the orphanage workers didn’t like the routines interrupted. Andrey dropped Betsy and me off at our flat, and drove back to Koropets with Peter, Oksana, and Oleg.
The next day we visited Bohdan again. He held a spoonful of yogurt out to me and when I reached for it with my mouth he withdrew the spoon suddenly and grinned. He rarely laughed out loud.
Oleg had to take a picture of Bohdan for Canadian immigration.
“Odin, dva, tri,” he said, counting. Then the digital camera made a little whistling sound, and Bohdan frowned, unfamiliar with the expectations. Betsy began laughing.
“Odin, dva, tri,” went Oleg, again, after instructing Bohdan on how to smile. No go. On his fifth try, Oleg got Bohdan to protrude his lower teeth. By then I was laughing too, and so was the orphanage worker. This would be his official immigration photo.
Most days Betsy cooked frozen mushroom and fruit perogies on a gas burner, cut up tough rye bread and spooned out the delicious local yogurt, moving quickly around in the tiny kitchen, her work fluid and efficient, her body slender and strong. She had also established an exercise routine early in the mornings that involved running outside and calisthenics inside. With her athletic background, she had an insatiable passion for working out that I never understood. She was three years younger than I and maybe that difference accounted for her energy level.
Often in the evening I felt so exhausted I just watched Ukrainian and Russian music videos on TV. One showed a chorus of young women singing in black dresses with deep V-slits exposing their breasts. They played air cellos while they sang. The lead singer sat naked on a white couch with a large egg in her lap, while a man danced around the woman, plucking air strings with his bare feet. The music sounded like Boney M. Betsy came into the room and shook her head, torn between disapproval and amusement.
On Valentine’s Day Betsy and I exchanged cards that we’d bought in Winnipeg. In the afternoon we had what she called a tryst; at home I referred to sex as “fooling around,” but tryst was much better. Our relationship felt romantic again, like a shared adventure.
On February 15 the day started well — we saw Bohdan and about a dozen other kids in the Ternopil orphanage perform a spring concert. There was a gap-toothed girl who wore white ribbons bigger than her head and a white dress with a matching cape. Beside her was a boy dressed in yellow with a cardboard crown cut like a huge sun. He protruded his stomach from his hips like a skinny Pickwick and made long recitations. His queen had braids in her blonde hair and no lines to say. The kids sang songs, shouting them out with a piano. The room where the performance took place was a chapel, and an orthodox priest attended in full regalia behind an altar. Bohdan glanced at us, looking quite detached from the proceedings. The kids fixated on a basket brought in by the queen — it was full of candies for them. One of the workers said Bohdan wanted to go to Canada right away.
The moment the spring concert ended we called Oleg and drove to Koropets, where we picked up Peter, the orphanage director, and the orphanage lawyer. We were due in a nearby town for the guardianship committee hearing. Normally these committees rubber-stamped foreign adoptions if the paperwork looked good and the correct disbursements had gone out.
There was no chance for lunch. We arrived after two o’clock and then sat in a small office crowded with furniture, icons, and pictures of a social worker’s family. We watched as various staff came and went and made calls on a rotary phone for about an hour. They were investigating Peter and Bohdan’s half-brother, Viktor, who was twenty-one. They had managed to locate him in a remote village about an hour away, unemployed and living with an aunt. Peter sat beside me playing with pens and paper. While I watched people scurry in and out and exchanged helpless shrugs with Betsy, Peter grabbed a battery-operated clock from the social worker’s desk. He removed a set-screw from the back and was about to take apart the whole clock when I noticed him and took it away. He held the set-screw and gestured at the clock. I put it back in his lap to see what he’d do. Peter re-threaded the screw back into the tiny hole with surprising speed.
The hearing began sometime in the late afternoon. It was held in a large room. We sat in hard chairs near the door with Oleg to translate, and to our right sat twelve women, the guardianship committee, along the wall. Directly facing the door, on a diagonal, were two desks pushed together in an L. At the bigger one was the chair of the meeting. The women began asking questions, directing them at me, the only man in the room other than Oleg. They asked about our household income, about my payments to my ex-wife, about our mortgage, all information they already should have had. It appeared they didn’t believe we could support the boys financially. They also wanted to know what my son Jeremy thought of having siblings. I said he liked the idea. One of the women, who spoke a little English, wanted to know why we did not have children “of our own.” Betsy started to answer, and the chairperson cut her short. They didn’t need to know this, she said.
They asked why we were adopting in Ukraine and I gave them a speech about family roots, and coming from Winnipeg, the capital of the Ukrainian diaspora, where we could preserve the boys’ heritage, all of it perfectly sincere. Then the second official, the one Oleg called “the mean lady,” asked how we would care for the boys while we worked. I said we’d take turns — one of us would always be with the kids — a lie that no one challenged. I felt like asking for a show of hands on how many of these women did all their own childcare.
Instead I said, “We consider the boys a sacred trust and we appreciate that you take the adoption as seriously as we do.” A woman in a grey smock asked what kind of books I wrote. I tried to describe them: poetry that um, explored language and the past,
also a non-fiction book about TB. None of them rolled their eyes. Then Betsy, Oleg, and I were dismissed to the small office while the committee deliberated.
When we returned they told us that they approved of us as parents. However, they could not approve the adoption until the boys’ brother Viktor gave his consent. Then Oleg launched into a big argument with them about Ukrainian adoption law. A number of the women had copies of a legal book, about the size of a Gideons New Testament, that they waved aggressively in front of Oleg’s face. He was wearing his suit and had severe five o’clock shadow. His red tie made his face look angry. I realized he was losing the argument. He went out and made a phone call.
We pushed ourselves into Andrey’s taxi then and set off to find Viktor. Mila, a local official who had been very helpful, went with us. Peter cried when we dropped him off at the orphanage. Betsy and I felt awful watching him, even though Oleg assured us he knew that we would come back. How did Peter know that? His own mother abandoned him, his dad was God knows where, and we were strangers who did not speak his language from a country he could not even imagine.
We had no time for dinner. There was snow and haze on the narrow, darkening roads, and I could feel my stomach shrinking into knots of anxiety and hunger. What if Viktor didn’t give his consent? I checked my wallet, worried that Viktor would want money.
We stopped three different times to ask for directions at the roadside. At 7:30, in complete darkness, we entered Viktor’s village. Oleg told Betsy and me not to speak, and to stay in the cab, hunched down. He was afraid someone might try to extort money from us for Viktor’s signature. With the motor off, the cab felt like an arctic tomb.
I imagined going back to Kyiv and starting over, seeing tiny pictures of other children about whom we would know almost nothing. How empty that would feel compared to what I knew from holding Peter and Bohdan on my lap.
At the ninety-minute mark Betsy called Oleg on his cell. He sent a text message saying he was almost done. Back in the car, the “signature” Oleg had gotten was actually five handwritten copies of a statement saying that Viktor had never met his brothers and had no objection to the adoption. Oleg also had gotten the head of the village council to sign each copy. Apparently we needed this elaborate documentation because Viktor had no birth certificate or passport.
We drove back and ate at our regular restaurant outside Ternopil. It was well after eleven. The mushroom perogies and dark beer had never tasted so good.
The next day I felt hungover and groggy. It had been almost two weeks since we’d arrived in Ternopil and we had expected to be going home by now. We saw Bohdan at most one hour each day and Peter only once or twice a week because of the long drive out to the country. Our flat cost $60 US a night with an additional charge for the laundry. I was losing weight. Betsy had the cold that I’d already recovered from.
IV
In the last week of February we said goodbye to the boys. We had to go home for the mandated thirty-day waiting period after our court cases because we’d already exceeded our budget, and Betsy was needed at work. Her parental leave could only begin when we took legal custody of the boys. These complicated arrangements were hard enough to explain to our friends and relatives, never mind to Peter and Bohdan.
Oleg had not phoned ahead to Peter’s orphanage as he should have, so when we arrived, Peter was napping and had to be wakened. We gave him a second Hot Wheels car, this one with a wolverine character painted on the roof. He played with a key chain of mine and, under her close supervision, with Betsy’s Swiss Army knife. He drank from a juice box after a lot of fiddling with the straw. We left him a letter and pictures of himself with us, and us with his brother Bohdan. Until we had legal custody of them both, he would not be allowed to see his brother in person.
Oleg was obviously bored with his job at this point. His early enthusiasm and enjoyment of the children were gone. We pled with him to help us talk to Peter. Oleg explained to him that we’d be back when the snow melted, which Peter seemed to understand, although I wondered if he really believed us.
Peter showed us his bed, in a row where the other kids were still waking up, groggy in the late afternoon from their long nap. Peter ran around noisily showing off the pictures and his new toy car. When the kids got up they immediately headed to us. A little girl who howled instead of speaking sat on Betsy’s lap; in a moment she pulled Betsy’s hair as hard as she could. I lost count of all the children who sat on my lap. Some were quiet, happy for the physical contact and attention from an adult. Others flailed their limbs around and pinched my arms.
Oleg helped us talk to one of Peter’s teachers, a middle-aged woman named Zaryana in a wool sweater and skirt.
“You must love him like your soul but shake him like a pear tree,” she said. Oleg told us this was a folk saying that referred to children who are good but need some firmness to keep them in line. Zaryana said Peter had learned only half the alphabet because he fooled around so much in class. Betsy and I thought he just needed more individual attention, as did the doctors who’d seen him. There were too many kids in his orphanage group for the number of workers, and some of them had severe disabilities.
We exchanged addresses with Zaryana and promised to keep in touch. She referred to us as “normal” parents, and when we asked why, she said it was because we wanted to adopt both brothers. We didn’t mention that it was legally impossible to adopt only one of them. Normal was great.
Normal was what I had worked so hard for with Jeremy in his early teens, driving him to music lessons, punctuating the long rides with lectures on the joy of hard work, arguing with him about why he didn’t visit more often after his mother refused to negotiate custody arrangements. I pictured Jeremy sitting now at his computer, pale, listening to MP3 tracks on his headset, oblivious to the world outside.
There were two workers named Anya at Bohdan’s orphanage, and the morning shift was covered by Anya with the gold teeth. She brought Bohdan out to us in the hallway so we could say goodbye to him. As in many public buildings they avoided turning any lights on during the day. I picked Bohdan up so he could reach the light switch. He flipped it to on, and a bare light bulb glared down at us.
“On,” I said.
“Uhn,” he said.
“Off,” I said, flipping it off.
“Uhff,” he said, and chortled. Anya was staring at us disapprovingly. She spoke rapidly to Bohdan in Ukrainian, then pointed downward at the switch. I nodded agreeably. We would not play with the light switches.
Anya brought us some toys from a closet in the hall. There was a stuffed dog, a book, a truck, and a few other stuffed animals. Bohdan picked those up, and also collected Betsy’s watch. He carried them to the far corner of the room, where the kids had their lockers. Using words and hand gestures he told me and Betsy to stay away.
Bohdan sat down with the book and managed to tear half a page out of it. Betsy’s face registered amusement at my horror. The book was a children’s reader from 1980, Soviet times, with a picture of Lenin hugging a child.
We left Bohdan with a letter and photographs. Anya told Oleg that they would read the letter to Bohdan and go over the pictures with him in the month we’d be gone. We hugged and kissed him. Before we left he picked up Oleg’s briefcase, which contained something like 300 pages of legal documents, a book about our sons. He was a strong boy. But he was only three and he didn’t understand until the snow melts.
On one of the days leading up to our court hearings I went, for the first time, on a morning run with Betsy. Her route went down the river walk and over the icy bridge. I didn’t have sweatpants or headgear for running, so I tied a tea towel with a bright yellow pattern around my bald head and wore Betsy’s pajama pants. Her legs are longer than mine, even though I’m over six feet tall, and I had to hitch the pants up on my waist. No one stared at me; instead, they seemed to look through me, and through Betsy too; there were no other runners. Afterward we went to the Internet café and the grocery store.
Then came bad news from Nikolai in Kyiv: the woman who directed the National Adoption Centre had withheld her signature from all documents on the exact day we needed them for the court hearings. She was angry because her husband had just been fired by the new Yushchenko government. Apparently he was high up in what Ukrainians still called the KGB — the internal security service, a recognized nexus of corrupt officials and organized crime. Nikolai thought this would blow over within three days, but it meant we had to re-book our return flight to Canada for later in the week. There was no guarantee that the director would do anything on a predictable schedule, but Nikolai said, “Her pride will make her do it — she has a policy of signing all documents within four working days.”
That night I was filling in documents, with some help from Betsy, on Oleg’s laptop, because Oleg didn’t feel like doing them. Actually, since we put his name on them, we were forging Canadian immigration documents, and making up cheerful answers to questions we weren’t sure of. I worked at the kitchen table and Betsy sat opposite me reading some unreadable novel. She’d already had her shower and was in her wind-down mode.
“What do I put for Peter’s birthplace?” I’d fallen into the habit of letting Betsy keep track of such details while I dreamed of writing a book about my adopted sons.
“You’re going to have to look it up,” she said.
“Why did you ask me to do this if you aren’t willing to help?”
“You volunteered because you said I was doing too much. So now you have to do some work.”
A couple of minutes passed while I shuffled papers to get her attention.
Detachment Page 4