Chapter
Thirteen:
“How
does one get to this clandestine Archipelago?
Hour
by hour planes fly there…and trains thunder off to it –
but
all with nary a mark on them to tell of their destination.”
- Alexander I. Solzhenitsyn
Dom
Rebyonka No. 2, that morning
At precisely seven a.m. Thursday, Gennady and Lena knocked on our door to collect us for our drive to Dom Rebyonka (Home for Babies) No. 2 where Cyril was housed.
We were both nervous, and wondered how this little baby boy would be
when we saw him. Daniel had never
been to an orphanage before, but my trip to Burgas had prepared me for the shock
of going to a place where unwanted babies were now sequestered.
The driver, Sergey, drove like a madman on the snowy streets of Perm. Lena told us he had been a firefighter and taxi driver before retiring.
Our first stop was the local headquarters of the Ministry of Education, for some necessary documentation, located in a big building with a hammer and sickle on the front on a wide mall near downtown. We were told this was probably going to be a mere formality, although there was a chance that we might have to go upstairs and sign something
In the light, we got our first chance to see Perm. For both of us, it was a first glimpse of the real Russia.
On our previous visits, in the Soviet era, Daniel had been to Moscow and what was then Leningrad (now returned to its original name of St. Petersburg) and I had only been outside of the capital once, to Lithuania, now an independent nation.
Perm, although the country’s fourth-largest city, is not an obvious tourist destination. But out here on the eastern edge of European Russia, over one million people lived lives more typical of the overwhelming majority of the country, at least those in the cities.
On the face of it, it was the sort of city one familiar with recent Russian history would have expected. Impressive Tsarist-era pastel-colored buildings in the older downtown areas were complemented by older, echt-Russian wooden houses.
Further out, Soviet expansion of the city manifested itself in the large, brut-prefab-concrete Corbu-style Khrushchev- and Brezhnev-era apartment blocks that we had fully expected to see, the characteristic of every city that had been under communist rule for some time.
But beneath the surface, we would pleasantly discover, it was not a trip down the rabbit hole into a quasi-Soviet present that we had feared. The air did frequently smell of burning motor oil or other hydrocarbons from worn-out internal combustion engines, but there was the same color on the streets there had been in Moscow, all the advertising space available was well-used, and the people on the street in their fur hats seemed to have a sense of direction and purpose as opposed to the Soviet Union’s drunken anomie.
In the car, we conversed about the weather, what we knew about Russian culture, Michael Jackson, Russian songs on the radio (some of which were easily translatable) and other points of interest to us all.
All the while Sergey continued to drive at breakneck speed on the snow-covered streets of
Perm. I wondered if he had a license for Grand Prix racing.
We drove past a prison, and more old wooden peasant dwellings along the roadside. We passed a “circus” building, and the local ice rink.
We passed one of the war memorials so ubiquitous in a country which lost 20 million during the German invasion — Gennady pointed out with pride the artillery pieces, as he had served in an artillery company in the Red Army in Hungary during the Cold War.
We came down close to the wide Kama River the city sat on, almost as wide at Perm as the Hudson we live near.
As the orphanage drew nearer, Daniel and Gennady discussed hockey and Alexander Mogilny, an ex-Buffalo Sabre and one of the first Russians to play regularly in the National Hockey League, as a result of our passing the ice rink.
In the back seat, I was silent. I was nervous, praying that Cyril would be okay. I was becoming anxious as we made our way towards the orphanage.
We
made our way towards a residential section on the outskirts of town where there
were blocks and blocks of the aforementioned Soviet apartment buildings,
apparently dating to the
1950s and 1960s. I could see some
signs of life on the street, and as we turned on to the street where the
orphanage was, I took note that there was a dance club or bar called “The Club
Mikado” advertised by a bright red and yellow sign. It seemed incongruous in the drab neighborhood.
Then Sergey stopped the car across from a low, green two-story building covered in snow. This was Dom Rebyonka No. 2, home of Kirill Konstantinovich Petrov.
Little did we know then what maladies those other children had. We were instructed to stay in the car as Lena and Gennady got out. We waited and then
Sergey moved the car so that we were now directly in
front of the orphanage.
Daniel
and I began to organize our video recorder and still camera.
We wanted a shot of this! Cyril’s
first home!
At long last, Lena went out of the building and came to the car. It was time for us to meet Cyril.
Excitedly, we got out, shaking in anticipation of finally meeting our baby boy.
As we approached the building, Daniel stopped and took a photo of it; once waiting on the snowy front steps, we took note of the plaque which was right near the door.
Ominously, it read, in Russian: “For Children with Diseases of the Central Nervous System” (see photo). We made a comment on it, but I noticed that this sign was not translated for our benefit.
Once again, our knowledge of Russian was paying off. We should not have disregarded that sign with such alacrity, for it may not have been a misnomer.
We couldn’t find her.
The room we were led to was sparsely decorated and furnished. There was a cabinet filled with few toys, a bench and a table and a few chairs.
We were
instructed to sit on the bench, which, in fact, was the very same bench they had filmed Cyril’s video on! We sat down and waited for him to be brought out to us.
As we were waiting, we learned that a representative from the regional Ministry of Education, a woman named Tanya, would be in shortly to observe us with the baby, a requirement for the court hearing tomorrow.
Great! The more the merrier sharing our joy.
But, not everyone in the building was.
We could hear
babies crying at some points — tiny cries, not full-throated cries that you
might hear from healthy children. And
sometimes we could hear the babies coughing.
The rooms where the infants were housed were at either ends of the
building; we had no idea where Cyril’s crib was in all that mob.
And suddenly, the door opened, and on the threshold was a white-clad medsestyor (nurse), holding a small, scrawny infant ... Cyril.
I jumped up and gasped. “Oh!” we both said. “It’s Cyril!”
And when she put that tiny, weightless body in my arms, I began to cry. Such a tiny, tiny small thin thing he was. Too tiny and small. And pale. So pale that baby boy was.
Daniel and I both said, “He’s so small!
Look how tiny he is! We
didn’t think he’d be so tiny!”
He was going on eight months old; he looked more like a three-month old and hadn’t
gained much weight since his birth. His
arms and legs were rail-thin. They
had him dressed in a stiff, one-piece pajama outfit. He was light, there was not much fat on his body to hold on
to as I cradled him in my arms.
But
we didn’t see that then. We could
only see his big blue eyes, his bewildered face, his shock at being moved around
so much for one day. Cyril in the
flesh, the Cyril we had traveled thousands of miles to make our son.
The orphanage director, by that point, had also come in, along with Tanya from the Department of Education. They stood on the side of the room, talking with Lena and Gennady.
The orphanage director asked us if we wanted if we wanted to strip the baby down to check him out. I said yes, that would be a good idea. Cyril was laid down, and I awkwardly untied his single pajama outfit, and took it off. My God, he was so thin and white. I swear that I could make out his ribs.
But what should have been most noticeable was that he was wearing a
diaper. He was wearing a diaper. This didn’t faze me then; I thought all babies everywhere wore diapers.
The orphanage director asked me if everything was okay; I said it sure was, the baby was great, etc. After I got Cyril dressed, I handed him to his daddy to hold.
Daniel was so thrilled to be holding Cyril! Cyril moved his legs and flexed his tiny feet, and soon
attempted to reach for the video camera. He
was already a real comic.
Then it came time to drill us on Cyril’s medical conditions by the orphanage director and Lena. We were told that he had anemia, a doubled collecting complex of the right kidney, pilonephritis and a moderate dilation of the left side brain ventricle — all conditions listed on his medicals.
We were to parrot this information to the judge to let her know that we knew the baby was not 100 percent. We did this drill with diligence, lest we mess up the court proceedings.
We didn’t think anything of this, for we had been told that we would
have to go through this drilling in front of the judge, so the judge knew that
we were aware that Cyril was really bad off and needed to be adopted by an
American couple to give him a chance at life.
All too soon, however, our time with our new son came to an end. The door opened and the medsestyor was there on the threshold. It was noon, time for the babies to take their afternoon meal.
From both sides of the building we heard the hungry, pitiful
cries of the babies. Reluctantly we handed our small, frail son back to his
caregiver and waved bye-bye to him as he was carried away.
We left the orphanage, escorted by Lena, Gennady and Tanya, the social worker. We ended up dropping Tanya off somewhere in town at another appointment she had, then we were driven to another area of the city where Gennady and a fellow by the name of Sergei Talkoch had a small, convenient and cozy office.
Sergei and Gennady seemed to be partners in TAKAR; they were the Russian facilitation
contacts, the people who ran the show, took the videos and handed out the
referrals to the agencies in America.
It was here that we were escorted into and told to sit down on a couch. As we were sitting, we were again grilled on what to say in court the next day. We were also told to tell the judge when asked, that we had seen Cyril, once in the morning and once in the afternoon, during his mealtime.
This
was a lie, but of course, we were good little adoptive parents following orders.
We wanted our son, and our hearts were beating nervously. What if we were sent home without him because something wasn’t in
order?
Lena sat at a computer, running Windows in Russian, hurriedly typing away. We hadn’t known of Sergei Talkoch’s existence until that point.
Like Gennady, he too was well put together, wearing nice clothes and a
neat mustache. He too wasn’t a
person I would have crossed on a bad day. Both
of these men could have soon kissed you as killed you.
Lena then turned to us and told us that there was a snag in our paperwork – again. The judge, while we were flying over the Atlantic, had requested yet another document from us — the deed to our home.
Uh-oh. We hadn’t brought one over.
But before we knew it, a faxed copy to the deed of our home was presented to us; this must have come from BBAS’s office.
We
had obtained a copy for Anguel’s Bulgarian dossier only days before we had
left, and Wendy at BBAS must have copied and faxed the deed over to Russia.
We noticed that Gennady and Sergei kept running back and forth to a copy machine, located in another room. They were copying the documents that we had handed them from our last round of paperwork.
It was there that they copied the certification from New York County and apostille seal that was on some of the documents Daniel had gotten in lower Manhattan the day before we left, and we were then asked to forge the notary’s signature as we were more competent in Roman script than any of them.
Obviously, this was illegal (and would probably have been a felony back in New York), but we had no reservations about it. Russians are, unfortunately, used to having to fudge and cut corners to deal with unreasonable requests from government officials; we’d already had our own taste of this at the airport.
Nothing was going to stop us! We’d
all come too far for this moment.
Finally, we were told it was in order and that the judge would find this document had been forged up to Russian standards. Once again we went back and forth about the baby’s medical conditions, and finally were able to leave Gennady and Sergei’s office.
We
were then driven back to the Hotel Mikos and led back to our room. Gennady asked for
our cash — $5,600 plus $800 for expenses — that we willingly handed over.
Once Lena and Sergey left, we pulled out our videocamera and reran the tape to watch our new son. We both cooed and awed at him, as his tiny hands attempted to grab the camera, at his small, pale body, at Daniel cradling the baby in his arms.
We had tears in our eyes thinking of how badly we wanted to have him there with us.
Little did we know, that very same baby, so slightly vivacious in that
video, would be dead in exactly a week.