Chapter Seventeen
The Best Days of Cyril’s Life
The Hotel Mikos, our home away from home
With the court date behind us and Cyril now liberated from the orphanage, we had nothing better to do than settle into a routine as the days of the waiting period expired.
Since the temperature outside remained well below zero degrees Fahrenheit, we spent a lot of time cooped up in the hotel room. Believe it or not, that wasn’t as boring as it sounds.
That was primarily because, at long last, we had Cyril. All the rushing around and worrying was over. We could relax at last — a much-needed break before the trip to Moscow and our return home to start the real work of raising our new son.
We kept a close eye on Cyril, always wanting to see what he had to show us. Despite the signs of his terminal condition that hindsight has brought to our attention, he did more than just die slowly.
Mentally, he seemed conscious and alert. We noticed that he reacted differently when English and Russian were spoken around him, the latter obviously being more reassuring.
When he felt up to it, he tried to crawl around the room, and when he didn’t, he rolled (of course, as we also realized later, that should have been a yellow flag as he had had no trouble crawling on the original referral video).
But overall, he seemed to be reacting very well to being taken out of the orphanage he’d known his whole short life and put in the care of two strangers in a place like none he’d ever been. He was finally getting undivided one-on-one attention and full meals.
Those days showed us a boy with so much promise. We still remember them fondly, taking a little edge off what was to come (in retrospect, it seems that he was fighting with his last ounces of strength not just to live). The calm before the storm.
When he slept, we also had a TV with dozens of cable channels that was on almost constantly.
It was our window into the new Russia. We would watch advertisements and their simple yet effective copy, a phenomenon totally unknown when we had been studying the language in the twilight years of the Soviet Union.
It was a shame, we thought, that we’d had to master the essentials of the language’s grammar and vocabulary by decoding the dense, convoluted prose of the propagandistic Soviet press instead of the catchy, colloquial language of popular culture.
There was also music video to test our linguistic skills on. Lots of it.
Western songs, Russian pop songs with catchy melodies and dance beats, songs we would often hear on the car radios when we were out with Lena and Sergey. We’ve already mentioned Mumiy Troll and “Nevesta?”
Some of them stand out, though, for their prophetic messages. Alyona Sviridova’s irresistible “Oy! Ya Ne Poydu Domoy!” has a nice bouncy beat and melody that evokes “Lady Madonna” ... but then the title translates to “Hey! I’m Not Going Home!”
Guess who wasn’t? Perhaps, yet again, fate was trying to warn us.
Russian pop at that particular moment, in fact, seemed to have a particular fascination with things spiritual and ethereal. Untangling the title of one song, “Ko Mne S Neba Ty Soshla,” into its English equivalent, “You Came Down to Me From the Sky,” impressed on us the flexibility and artfulness of Russian syntax better than a hundred textbook exercises ever could have.
In another song, “Angel,” the woman the singer was pursuing seemed to die at the end of the video and ascend into the hereafter.
In that vein, one song got a lot of airplay: “Zima v Serdtse,” (“Winter In My Heart”) by a group called Gosti iz Budushcheevo, or Visitors From the Future.
It was the most prophetic. Its somber mood and lyrics of irrevocable loss (we still can’t tell if it’s about the end of a relationship or a death) were visitors from our own very near future.
The news we watched was also not all that positive. Bulletins on the progress of hostilities in Chechnya regularly interrupted programming on the Russian channels. Lena called it “the pain of the country.”
The mood of the country as a whole, in fact, was sober as elections to the Duma, the lower house of the country’s Parliament, approached. Campaign ads were everywhere ... on the street in billboards and flyers, and on television and the radio. Just like America.
The second Chechen war, though quite popular, was not the only issue weighing on voters’ minds at the time that we could feel in the streets. It was over a year since they had endured the devaluation of the ruble in response to the country’s debt default, and this had left a good deal of things hanging economically.
Boris Yeltsin’s administration also let much corruption go unhindered, indeed seemed to many to profit personally from it in concert with the dozen or so “oligarchs” who had managed to acquire much of the nation’s resources as they were sold off in the wake of communism, greatly enriching themselves at the expense of the average citizen, and this angered the average Russian as much as it would the citizens of any other country.
On top of that, most of them were in what economists call “wage arrears.” Meaning, in plain English, that their employers were weeks or sometimes months late in paying them. If that ever happened in the U.S. on such a large scale, we’re sure people would be starting to demand under-the-table cash payments for routine services within a few weeks.
So the country was in something of a funk, its immediate post-Soviet hopes faded and uncertain what the new century would bring.
Lena herself told us that Perm’s government and people were crossing their fingers that the city would be able, with the help of foreign investors, to keep its many factories open ... the industries that, during the Soviet era, had cranked out military hardware (thus keeping the city closed to foreigners) but now needed a new direction.
In short, the streets of Perm bustled with shoppers and people, more so than they would have fifteen years before, but there was nervousness beneath the outward veneer of normality.
Both of us got plenty of chances to be on these streets. At midday, one of us would go out with Lena and Sergey for an afternoon of a long Russian lunch, a visit to some sort of spot of interest, and shopping for things we needed or might need for Cyril at one of the local markets. This gave both of us much-needed breaks from the otherwise limited confines of our hotel room.
On Monday, for instance, Daniel went with Lena to the state university’s foreign-language library, where she was working on the translation of Cyril’s medicals for the embassy. He recalls a bunch of people turning to look at him when she explained to the library’s security people that he was visiting her from America.
It was interesting, from an adoptive-parent standpoint, to see just how the medical documents we all received were translated. No wonder mistakes could often be made. Lena had to work from two medical dictionaries, and only that.
They were not always complete, either. As she worked on Cyril’s files, she had to ask Dan what the word was for one who practices psychiatry. The Russian lexicographers had not thought to include “psychiatrist” in either tome, nor to explain that the proper preposition to go with “registered” in English is “with.”
That at least cleared up the absurdity, in Cyril’s medicals, that his mother was herself a psychiatrist at the age of 23.
When we returned home, there was often some supplementary shopping by one of us at the rynok, or open-air market, next to the hotel, then dinner.
I was really beginning to make my peace with Russia, a country I’d sworn never to return to after my last visit.