Chapter Fourteen
The morning of our court date came and Lena, Gennady and the driver Sergey were there to pick us up at our hotel bright and early. We were both dressed nicely – had on suits and carried our nice shoes with us. We were driven to the courthouse and instructed to wait on the second floor for the judge to arrive.
After waiting ten or twenty minutes with Lena and Gennady in the hall outside the courtroom, we were told it was time.
Only Lena could accompany us into the courtroom, as she was our court-certified translator and the hearing was not open to the public.
She explained how things would go and who everyone was ... Tanya was there, as well as a “procurator,” a lawyer representing the state’s interests much as a prosecutor does in the U.S.
She instructed us that we couldn’t speak Russian to the judge. She was aware that we knew the language, but she would be happier if we spoke our own tongue and relied on Lena’s proven (and court-certified) translation expertise. We agreed.
The judge called the hearing to order and asked us if we had any objections to the translator or anyone else present. Since we’d all just barely met each other, except for Lena on whom we were relying to make our points, naturally we didn’t.
First, the judge reviewed the facts of the case for the record. We learned a little bit about Cyril’s background here ... that his mother had had a brother and grandmother who could have taken care of the child, but since the former was married and had a child of his own on the way, he had declined to take on Cyril. The mother had decided to move on with her life; the father was not interested either.
We took mental notes on this information, hoping it would be of use to Cyril one day should he return to Perm to find out about his origins. It never crossed our mind that this would be a moot point in a terrifyingly short stretch of time.
Tanya described our visit(s) to Cyril the day before in favorable terms. The issue of whether the required two visits had, in fact, taken place never came up.
We were asked if we understood the extent of Cyril’s reported health problems, and repeated some of the information from the medicals. The judge probed a little further than we had been led to expect on this issue, asking us in turn about what specifically we could do for him and how we would be able to afford it. Daniel found himself explaining the entire concept of health insurance to the judge.
The procurator had no objections to us. We were an ideal family for this particular Russian orphan, and the judge read the entire homestudy into the record, a common occurrence in such hearings (we were told), causing some laughs when she read the description of Daniel as “laid-back” in the original English.
We were then told to recess and go back out into the hall while the judge rendered her decision, a formality we expected to come down in our favor, but we would only believe it when we heard it.
As we were waiting, a policeman came by and instructed us to clear the
area; he was escorting two accused murderers down the hallway!
Sure enough, as we were leaving, I could see two shackled young men, being led by the gendarmes, again in camouflage and carrying semiautomatic weapons, who were also escorting two large Rottweilers. None of them looked very happy.
Along with everyone else in the courthouse that day, we were made to wait in the stairwell for a few minutes while the prisoners were escorted through the hall we had been sitting in.
When we came back out, Lena gave us some documents to look over and sign. These were the the formal request that we be allowed to take Cyril to our hotel room for the 10-day waiting period. Obviously she expected the judge to rule in our favor, as did we. We signed eagerly.
After that, the clerk came out and told us that the judge had made her decision. We filed in to the courtroom, slightly nervous as the moment of truth approached
When we all were seated, there were no surprises. The adoption was approved, its full legal force not to go into effect for another ten calendar days. Exactly what we’d been told would happen.
We smiled with relief as Lena congratulated us. Even the judge was smiling too. We made some small talk about the scene in the hallway during the recess and then prepared to go on with our lives.
Sergey and Gennady met us in the hallway and shared the good news. They, too, congratulated us.
Our mood was in stark contrast, however, to what was going on in the larger courtroom next door. We could see the two young men in barred cells in the back of the room as an older woman — one of their mothers or grandmothers, we guessed — walked out with tears streaming down her face. Obviously it had not gone well.
Justice Russian style. Later we learned what had happened, from a news bulletin on the car radio as we were going to lunch with Sergey and Lena.
Apparently the two men had broken into a neighbor’s house and been surprised when he returned earlier than they had expected. In the ensuing struggle, the neighbor had been killed (Another bulletin mentioned the deaths of Texas A&M students in the collapse of the annual bonfire before the Texas game).
The youths got ten years each.
It seemed like an unrelated detail at the time, like so many other things had. Who knew that two very different court proceedings in adjacent courtrooms would have a common thread: tragic death?