A Watershed Year (23 page)

“We Russians, you must understand, we like to suffer. It gives us something to complain about,” Lesta said. “But children… left here… It makes me glad to think they go to better place.”

Lesta carried her duffel bag to the front door. He rang the bell, and a woman in cleaning clothes opened the door, waving them into a dark entryway. The foyer, devoid of furniture and painted a
bland off-white, smelled like vegetable soup. The floor was covered in green-and-white linoleum squares that Lucy could have sworn were identical to the ones in her elementary school back in the seventies.

When the director finally emerged, she greeted Lucy with a stiff nod. Her graying hair was cut close to her head, and she wore the kind of narrow black skirt that said she didn’t sit on the floor with the children. With her excellent posture, she was a good head taller than Lucy, who could tell she liked being in charge. She said something in Russian to Lesta, who translated.

“This is director Zoya Nikolayevna Minsky. She say Azamat is sleeping now,” he said, looking upset. “Best for us to come back in morning.”

twelve

L
ucy couldn’t wait another day. She was here, doors away from Mat, wearing her white blouse and her trustworthy skirt. She had come all this way. Telling her to come back in the morning was like telling her to stop breathing. But Lesta shook his head, not even translating, as if to say, “Don’t bother.”

“Couldn’t I just take a peek at him while he’s sleeping? I promise not to wake him. Or we could wait until he’s finished his nap.”

Lesta translated this to Mrs. Minsky, who blew through her lips like a horse, which needed no translation. But as Lucy was gathering her things to go, the woman seemed to relent, pulling Lesta aside and speaking to him in a low voice.

Lesta touched Lucy’s arm. “You peek. She say okay.”

Mrs. Minsky led them down a long corridor, past a playroom for the children with a few toys and books on open shelves, and then opened the door to a spare dormitory with eight cots. The shades were drawn. All the children slept silently. She pointed to a boy with a blue wool blanket pulled up to his chin. Lucy took a wide step to an area rug on the linoleum to muffle her footsteps. She walked over to the cot and knelt down beside it, her heartbeat quickening as though she had just run a mile.

He was small; she noticed that right away. Certainly smaller than most American four-year-olds. The light-brown hair she had seen in the photograph had been shaved down to a short stubble on his round
little head. His full lips were open, and he breathed softly through his mouth, slowly, deeply. As her eyes adjusted to the light, she could see the tiny veins that ran across his eyelids, the eyes moving slightly underneath as though he were watching her from inside a dream. He had a scrape, about a half-inch long, on the left side of his nose. His ear, the one she could see, was perfect and so lovely that she almost couldn’t stop herself from touching it. This was the child in which she had invested so much, the one whose picture had allowed her to forget her grief for small, healing moments.

The hazelnut. All that is made.

She wanted him to stir, to open his eyes and see her there, devoted to him. She willed him to wake up, but he slept on, immobile. After several minutes, Lesta touched her on the shoulder and nodded toward the door. Only then did she become fully and guiltily aware of the seven other little boys breathing softly under their blankets. Would others come to kneel by their cots? Who decided, she wondered, which child went and which child stayed? Was there a complicated rubric, or did someone simply choose at random to send one child off to parts unknown while his little friends ate vegetable soup until they were seventeen?

Back in the spartan foyer, Lucy made another plea to wait until Mat woke up.

“But that would not be possible,” Lesta translated, “because they have a lesson, then dinner, then bath time, then bed. There is no time for visiting.”

“Then why did she make this appointment in the first place?” Lucy asked, but Lesta only shrugged. Lucy stood with her arms folded, trying to convey her frustration through facial expressions, which were completely inadequate. Then she saw, very suddenly, that this was a test, that the director was putting her in an awkward position to see how she would react. The director was
directing
, and it was her play. Lucy was an out-of-work actor brought on the scene to make a plot point. She could be replaced, or the scene could be cut altogether.

She picked up her duffel bag and smiled at Mrs. Minsky, who nodded in response.

“I’m looking forward to seeing Mat tomorrow,” she said.

Lesta translated, and they left.

LUCY SAT AT THE HOTEL BAR with a glass of red wine that night and told her troubles to Calvin, who proved to be a surprisingly good listener.

“So she makes this appointment and then won’t let me see him when we get there,” she said. “I finally talked her into letting me peek at him while he was asleep. So I do know he exists. That’s one worry to check off.”

“Sounds like they’re giving you the business.”

“Let’s just say his adoption may be a little unconventional.”

“Hey, that don’t surprise me. Nothing’s conventional here. It’s all about the back door and the cash. Russians love to stick it to Americans. Payback for the Cold War, one sucker at a time.”

“Well, if she doesn’t let me see him tomorrow…”

She couldn’t finish the sentence because she realized she had no recourse. The only person who might take pity on her was Lesta, but she wasn’t sure how far he could push her case. She got the impression that he just followed orders.

“Hey, have some of these,” Calvin said, pushing over a plate of pierogi. “Heavy food interferes with my dancing.”

Lucy took a bite of the pierogi, which held some kind of bland potato-like filling. She hadn’t been impressed with Russian cuisine, what little she had seen of it. They all seemed to subsist on tea and cigarettes anyway, looking down their narrow noses at anything as prosaic as nutrition.

“So what are you gonna do?” Calvin asked, downing the last of his beer.

“I don’t know,” Lucy said. “I think I’ll just say a few prayers and hope for the best.”

“You religious and all? Well, put me down for a prayer or two. I could use the help.”

Lucy laughed and ordered another glass of wine. She seemed to be living some parallel version of her life in which she sat in bars and drank with strangers. She found the company completely benign, just other lonely people looking for a laugh or a sympathetic ear. Why had no one told her that bars didn’t have to be about getting picked up? And for what perverse reason had she discovered this on the eve of becoming a mother? Somehow she felt less sad about Harlan here, as if he, too, were off in some foreign country and would return with amusing stories about the price of bottled water.

Calvin, meanwhile, had called over a friend, another expatriate who had chucked an American nightmare for a Russian one. He was a ship’s cook who had docked in Murmansk a few summers ago and decided to stay, picking up jobs in hotels and restaurants between ships. He reminded Lucy of a pug—a broad face with an underbite, all rolls and ripples underneath a straining sweatshirt, yet somehow sweet and unthreatening.

“Here’s how I see it,” the cook said, settling himself on a bar stool next to Lucy and taking a sip of his Budweiser. “Your
haves
in America got nothin’ to complain about. Great health care, decent schools, five hundred channels, and pay-per-view to boot. But your
have-nots
? Not only do they miss out on the health care and the schools and the five hundred channels, but they have to look at it every day.

“Walk down the street and see the Hummers you can’t have and the big house you can’t have and the doggy bakery selling pastries you can’t afford. I mean, when dogs are eating birthday cakes, there’s something wrong with the values. The
values
, man. In Murmansk, we’re all in the same boat together, am I right, Calvin?”

“Absolutely,” Calvin said, clicking his second beer against the cook’s bottle. “But you know what I miss?”

“What?” Lucy said, having no idea what a tap-dance instructor would miss most about the country of his birth.

“Toast,” Calvin said. “Ain’t no regular toasters here; everything’s grilled or fried. Just give me a nice piece of toast. Whole wheat with a little butter on top.”

Lucy left Calvin and the ship’s cook to their discussion of toasters versus toaster ovens and went upstairs. They were right, of course. America seemed even more confused in the new millennium than it had when she was growing up. And yet, for the most part, its people had good intentions. They liked to see themselves as the benevolent hosts of the planet, mediating disputes and only bringing down the hammer when they had no choice.

She climbed into bed and tried to remember the features of Mat’s little face, which had already blurred in the course of a few hours. The resistance she had seen in his photo hadn’t been there as he lay sleeping. She hoped he would welcome her, couldn’t wait to find out if her own good intentions—or foolishness or blind faith or wishful thinking—would be rewarded.

AFTER A QUICK BREAKFAST at the hotel café, Lucy asked the hotel desk clerk to call Louis as she waited for Lesta in the lobby. It would have been one in the morning in Baltimore, she calculated, but she had remembered at breakfast that she had never dropped her article off to the dean. She had forgotten about it in the rush to arrange her trip, and she wasn’t sure exactly when she would be back. Louis answered the phone after three rings.

“Hello?”

“Louis? It’s me. I’m sorry to call so late. I’m waiting for a ride over to the orphanage to meet Mat. We went yesterday, but he was sleeping. I did get to peek at him though, and he’s exactly how I imagined him from the picture. Only smaller. I can’t wait to see what he’s like when he’s awake.”

“It’s so nice to hear your voice.” He yawned. “Sorry, I’m a little sleepy. I guess I passed out while I was reading. So when do you bring him home?”

“A few days, or maybe a week. I’m not sure. I’m worried, though. The director of the children’s home wasn’t exactly friendly when I met her yesterday. But he’ll like me, right? Is there any reason he wouldn’t like me?”

She hadn’t intended to seek out comfort so blatantly, but now that her questions were out there, hovering across the Atlantic, Louis did what was required.

“Of course, he’ll like you, Lucy; he’ll love you. It’s all gonna work out fine. Trust me.”

The desk clerk glanced at her and looked at his watch. This phone call would probably cost another hundred dollars.

“So call my mom, okay, because I couldn’t talk to her the other day, and I had to leave a message.”

“I will.”

“Oh, and I forgot to drop off my article to the dean. It’s rough, but I’m hoping I can smooth it out and send it off to a journal when I get back. Would you go to my house—the key’s under the plastic frog on the front porch—and bring it over to his office? It should be on my desk, right next to the computer.”

“I’ll take care of it. I promise,” Louis said.

“Thank you. I can’t believe I forgot about the paper. Yulia had me in a panic before I left.”

“Lucy?”

“What?”

“I miss you. I wish I could—”

“I have to go,” she whispered, because the clerk was looking her way again, as if she had tied up the phone too long. “I miss you, too. Bye.”

And she did miss him, missed the comfort of lying next to him, his skin keeping hers warm, missed being part of a pair. But then Lesta showed up, grinning broadly, and she was back in the parallel
universe. She found herself smiling, too, as she marveled at the circumstances that brought them together.

If Lesta had been American, he would have been one of those people who blended into the crush of humanity for her—a middle-aged married man with neither the looks nor the education to stand out in any crowd. She couldn’t think of many situations in which they might become friends, have a beer together, go see a movie, discuss politics. But here, Lesta was more than just her candle in the darkness; he was the light itself. He could make her happy just by smiling.