I had trouble sleeping. I read for a while and turned out the lights at eleven, fell asleep, and then woke every two hours after that, worrying. Under Ukrainian law, if any relative of the boys visited them at their orphanages during March, the adoption would be off. Our agency said they did not know of a single case of this ever happening and everything had gone according to plan. But I knew that you could get so close to something you longed for only to see it snatched away.
My grandmother Helen got so close to what she wanted for her family — safety, stability — and gambled all she had to get it. About a month after she was raped, a Red Army officer walked into her husband’s house and demanded that she and the children come outside at once.
“You are Russian,” the officer said to Helen, “we know because we found this.” The soldiers had ransacked the Simon house, destroying or confiscating every scrap of food, stealing all the watches. The officer held a brown suitcase that came from the Soviet Union. Helen pretended not to understand, and asked in German for a translator. She knew the Red Army was combing every village in the eastern part of Germany for Russian citizens, always ready to send them to the Siberian Gulag.
“You see the hole here under this tree,” the officer said. “If you don’t confess the truth right now I will shoot all of you into it.” And he took his revolver out of its holster. Helen’s face was chalk-white but her hazel eyes dry and hard.
She looked at him without flinching and said in German, “You shoot us then.” He lined up Helmut, my father, and Lil in the order of their heights and pointed the gun at one-year-old Helmut. But his knuckles were white on the trigger and his hand shook.
“You shoot us,” Helen repeated in German, “I have nothing to confess.” The officer re-holstered the gun.
“Get the hell out of here,” he said, “I don’t want to see you anymore.”
As she told me this story, Lil was more shaken than when she’d told me about her mother’s rape.
When I asked her why, she said, “I don’t know, maybe because that was such a close call. He might have killed us.” But Helen was a better gambler than her first husband had been, and they survived.
When my insomnia was at its worst I would get up, go to my office, and read. One night I picked up the diaries my father had lent me back in 2004 when I first tried writing about my childhood. They were a matching his and hers set in black and pink, and covered the years we’d lived in Africa. I hadn’t touched the diaries since he’d lent them to me, but Betsy had, and told me how my father loved Africa, and how my mother cried and prayed and longed for home. Now I picked them up, driven to find a pattern, an explanation, a reason to anticipate a happy ending for my own second experiment with fatherhood. But I didn’t learn much more than Betsy had.
“Are we still going to take an extra week to visit my father’s village?” I asked Betsy when I was booking the return dates for the second trip to Ukraine. I’d already checked on the rail connections from Kyiv to the village, on having a translator, on what it would cost, and we had talked about this excursion into family roots even before our first trip.
“Yes, I think we should. But you know the boys won’t remember this, and really it’s more for you than for them,” said Betsy, always more realistic than I. Tactfully, she didn’t mention money. “Why don’t we go to Ukraine a week early and visit the village on our own?”
“I want them to come with us. Of course they won’t remember this trip. But we’ll be able to remind them about it later, and show them pictures. It gives them another connection to my family.”
“There’s my family too,” said Betsy, whose paternal grandparents spoke Polish and came from what is now western Ukraine, near where the boys were born.
“That’s true. But your family doesn’t know where exactly they came from. At least I have a place to start,” I said.
Perhaps my obsession with family history was a form of narcissism. I was about to take children with whom I didn’t even share a language on a tour of my family’s violently disrupted past in Ukraine, when what they expected was to fly in an airplane to a house that contained cats, and toys, and parents, a house they’d seen in a single picture. What I hoped was that someday Peter and Bohdan would understand how tightly entwined their story was with mine, and with my father’s own troubled history.
VIII
At the end of March 2005, we went back to Ukraine to collect our sons. In the cab to Koropets to get Peter, I squeezed against Betsy in excitement and her eyes brimmed with happy tears.
We wanted to collect Peter first so that he could be part of picking up his younger brother. But first we had to pick up the boys’ birth certificates in the village where they were born, and that delayed us by two hours. Betsy asked Oleg if we needed to buy candy for the orphanage kids. He did not respond. She asked again. Oleg said no, don’t buy anything.
We arrived at Peter’s orphanage just after noon during lunch hour — our timing was terrible. In the dark, cold hallway of Peter’s dormitory, we were told to wait for lunch to finish. Shortly after one o’clock we were mobbed by a group of kids. Where was Peter?
There were two workers with the children. One of them stood in the middle of the hallway, facing us, and we heard sobbing from behind her. Peter was clutching her legs, crying on the floor. He didn’t want to leave. But when Betsy picked him up he hugged her like a wrestler. Within a minute he was talking.
No one was ready for our arrival. I suspected that Oleg had not called ahead to let them know we were coming. Zaryana, Peter’s favourite teacher, had to be summoned from her day off. The orphanage’s lawyer didn’t have the paperwork done and we spent more than an hour waiting for Oleg to come back from the lawyer’s office.
Betsy insisted that we drive to the village of Koropets to buy candies for the children. Oleg now claimed that he had told us to buy them earlier. Shaking her head, Betsy drew her mouth tight and did not say anything. The fact was we couldn’t have Peter’s farewell party without candy and a translator. When we got back, Oleg was having an argument with one of the workers in Peter’s classroom, who insisted that we should purchase a VCR for the kindergarten class. Later Oleg explained how he resolved this dispute. “I said you’re a woman, I’m a man, I can’t take your back-talk, your director has their donation and she will decide what to do with it.”
In the classroom we handed out the candies. Peter helped us distribute them to his classmates, acting as if he’d bought them himself. A little boy kicked me between the legs and I sat hunched over on a bench for a few minutes. The party wrapped up with the kids singing to us, half-howling, Peter in the middle of them.
We went to the orphanage director’s office with Peter. She told him to be good, and gave him a stuffed bear, chocolate, and a Ukrainian alphabet book. She said we must write letters, mail pictures, and send money through Western Union, just like the parents of Alla. Alla was the last child adopted from this orphanage. The director showed us a photo of the little girl in her new home in Florida. She was blonde and fragile-looking.
One more trip to Peter’s dormitory. Zaryana was there to see him. She hugged him and cried, her makeup running. Then the other workers put Peter in four layers of clothing for the trip, purple tights, long underwear, jeans, snowpants. Oleg had been urging us to speed up ever since he’d finally gotten the paperwork from the lawyer. Betsy had to ask him twice to translate for her and he finally did so sullenly, persuading the workers to let Betsy take some of the clothes off Peter so he wouldn’t roast in the taxi.
We took pictures of Peter’s class outside on the driveway. He stood beside Zaryana and held her hand. In his other hand he clutched the black backpack we’d given him for his things.
Before we got in the cab, Peter pulled out Alla’s picture from the backpack, claiming that he loved her, although he’d probably never met the girl. There was no time to think about how he’d gotten the picture because Oleg was trying to hustle us away as fast as possible. The haste was puzzl
ing because we all knew we couldn’t pick up Bohdan later than four o’clock, and it was already 3:30. It would take two hours just to drive to Ternopil. Betsy said to him that we didn’t want to rush things that were important. He nodded absently.
The next day, when we arrived at Bohdan’s orphanage, Peter called out loud hellos to the staff in the hallways and gave the director a bear hug. But when we reached Bohdan’s group he looked stricken, like something was terribly wrong. He said a cursory hello to Bohdan, not the dramatic reunion we’d expected. Then he watched with me and Betsy as Bohdan’s entire group sat in a circle on little plastic pails and urinated. Betsy wanted to ask some questions about toilet habits, but Oleg looked embarrassed. We’d asked him repeatedly if he could translate copies of the daily routines from both orphanages.
“You’re the parents now,” he said. He wouldn’t translate. Then he said he had to leave to get the boys’ Ukrainian passports. We were left with Andrey and the workers at the orphanage, none of whom spoke English. Peter barely talked but without Oleg we couldn’t ask him what was wrong.
When Oleg returned he explained the mystery: Peter had been scared we would leave him behind at Bohdan’s orphanage and take only Bohdan with us. Peter was now chattering away.
Oleg had bought candy and champagne, and we had a party. The children played with us for a while, but then they sat in their miniature desks, and Bohdan and Peter helped distribute candies. With Oleg translating, I tried to give a speech about how grateful we were to the orphanage staff for all their work. A few seconds in and I completely lost control of myself. My voice choked and snot streamed out of my nose. I couldn’t cry in a dignified European way like Peter’s teacher Zaryana. Betsy gave me a Ukrainian tissue with a mint scent. All the tissues had scents.
Everyone drank a glass of champagne, even Andrey. The children danced in a circle while they sang for us. Betsy and I joined the circle and we all danced. We took pictures. We shook hands with the caregivers. The one in charge had heavy white hair, a white smock like the other workers, and a martinet’s manner. She talked to Oleg for a few minutes and then gave Bohdan a hug. Bohdan beamed with joy. One reason was that he was leaving his old shoes behind — they were too small and he loved his new runners and red backpack. Betsy had to strip a couple of clothing layers off Bohdan too.
Outside, Andrey opened the doors to the cab. Oleg was on his cell phone, talking to his new girlfriend. Peter got into the back seat. Betsy gave Bohdan a little nudge to move him in beside his brother. Instead, he sat down on the road. She picked him up. He pushed her away and began crying. She put him down. I talked to him in words he couldn’t understand. What was wrong? Oleg was on the phone and wouldn’t stop talking, so we could only guess that Bohdan was scared of the cab. He had likely never been in a car before; the kids were transported by ambulance when they came to an orphanage, and there were no field trips.
Bohdan broke into a full screaming fit. Oleg finished his phone call and informed us grandiosely that Bohdan did not want to ride in the taxi. But Peter demonstrated getting in and out a few times, and Bohdan finally allowed Betsy to place him inside. He was petrified but at least we were on the road again.
In the evening Oleg asked me for all four of our passports so he could buy us train tickets to Kyiv. He said he’d be back in half an hour. After two hours I began calling his cell. Busy. We were still jet-lagged and desperately wanted to sleep. Meanwhile the boys both refused to sleep. Peter got out of his bed, and when we made him lie down, he wailed. Bohdan screamed until he wore himself out, and then began rocking himself violently from one side of his bed to the other, a self-comforting behaviour I’d never seen before. Our fragments of Ukrainian did not console them.
Oleg’s phone stayed busy almost until midnight, when he walked in the door. I was furious. But I decided screaming would do no good.
Early in the morning Andrey drove us to the Ternopil train station for our return to Kyiv. Oleg talked on his cell phone, ignoring us. We wanted him to ask for Andrey’s address, and also to help us board the train. On our previous trip Oleg had looked after all such details. Now he shoved our tickets into my hands and I had no idea how to read them. Betsy and I were each pulling a large suitcase, carrying backpacks, and hanging on to our sons.
Conductors ran around, shouting, waving us in. Andrey shook our hands seriously, and seemed to ask Oleg if we were getting on the right car. Oleg kept talking on his cell. The part of the train we boarded did not have any sleeping compartments. I tried to tell Oleg, who finally turned in the narrow aisle and looked at the tickets. This way, he said, doing his imperious military wave, follow me. By the time we reached the end of the car the train was moving and we stepped through open air to get to the next car. I held Bohdan’s hand tightly, and he started to cry. We rushed through two more cars. By now I was worried that I’d wrenched Bohdan’s arm from its socket. Our luggage was too wide for the aisles, but I’d stopped caring what or who we hit.
When we reached our compartment Oleg was about to scoot off. I’d been working up to this moment for days.
“Why didn’t you look at our tickets before we boarded?” I said.
“I needed to speak with Nikolai.” He looked irritated, face flushed, wanting to get away from me.
“You talked to him for more than ten minutes! We needed your help boarding the train. What the hell were you doing?” My voice was loud. I wished people around us could understand English, but Oleg did look embarrassed. He walked away, back stiff, clearly offended by my outburst.
In the first hour on the train, Peter crawled underneath the table in our compartment, exploring. Before I could grab him he laid his hand on the pipe that fed our steam radiator and began crying. He’d burnt the top of his right hand. After this he avoided the floor of the train.
At lunchtime I made multiple trips to the dining car to buy food for Betsy and the boys. Oleg helped me order. He was sulky, and I pretended that nothing had happened. Betsy was holding up well. After lunch, I asked if she was OK with the boys while I went back to the dining car and had a beer. I drank the beer quickly and started a second. Oleg sat with me. I bought him a beer, feeling like I should be conciliatory. But I didn’t apologize or even mention chewing him out. What I really wanted, as I sipped my second half-litre of beer, was to hit him as hard as possible.
We spent the next week in Kyiv as we’d expected, waiting for the Canadian embassy to process the boys’ immigration paperwork and finalizing arrangements to visit my father’s village. The downtown flat we rented combined frightening, filthy hallways with a comfortable interior. The landlord spoke broken English and told us two things: the boys must be totally quiet, and we must not break the washing machine. Peter and Bohdan spent a good part of each day screaming and throwing tantrums, but also gleefully laughing and calling to each other at high volume. They frequently made random adjustments to the washing machine, which kept working anyway. We took the precaution of unhooking and removing the TV and stereo from the living room where the boys slept on a sofa bed.
Betsy and I had to supervise Peter and Bohdan constantly. Their new experience of freedom made them fiercely willful. When it was mealtime, they refused to stop playing and hid inside a large chest of drawers; when we put them to bed at night, they cried; when we tried to brush Bohdan’s teeth, he bawled. Bohdan also screamed when we bathed him; his previous life had included only bird-baths, not total immersion. Peter loved the bath and convinced Bohdan to at least tolerate it. In the morning they both sat on stools and watched with rapt attention as I shaved my head and face with a disposable razor and foam.
Mealtimes were free-fire zones, with food flying and landing in unlikely places as we tried to teach table manners. And either Betsy or I always stood because there were only three chairs at the kitchen table. The landlord refused our request for an additional chair.
Betsy and I used our few dozen words of Ukrainian to put the boys on time-outs, five minutes for Peter and three for Bohdan, t
o match their ages. During these time-outs they both had tantrums that involved kicking, arm-thrashing, foaming at the mouth, and energetic, bloodthirsty screaming.
Most mornings when I went to the café across the street for a western-style cappuccino, I felt like I was getting out of jail. Sometimes I took the boys with me for hot chocolate and to give Betsy a small break.
Almost every day we walked downhill to the Megamart for groceries. It was still fun to decipher the Cyrillic labels and explore the exotic mayonnaise flavours, the multifarious cookies, and the huge liquor section. The boys were somewhat quieted by the scale of the store. But only for five minutes. There were lockers for putting away personal items when you came in and the keys had large wooden fobs. Peter liked to work the keys in the locks and usually opened and closed numerous lockers while I struggled with getting bags of groceries into my backpack. He had a habit of pocketing things that he liked — stones, small toys, candies — as if he had to squirrel stuff away in case all his property was collectivized again, as it had been in the orphanage. Even though I took back two or three keys from him each time we left the Megamart, when we returned to our flat Peter inevitably had at least one key stuck in his coat pocket for a locker that wasn’t ours. The next day I’d take that key back to the store. Peter secreted one key in his backpack that I didn’t find until our return to Canada.
On sunny days we went to Shevchenko Park, about a twenty-minute walk. Peter and Bohdan played on the slides and swings. Neither of them had learned to swing in the orphanage, and we tried to teach them with limited success. They were both scared of the ponies that other kids their age were riding. Peter was thrilled by the battery-powered cars that you could rent, but we explained it was too soon for him. We had no idea how much he understood us yet. When the boys rushed around on the play structure I worried that they’d run off and get lost, and we wouldn’t even be able to talk to anyone in the crowd.
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