Chapter
Twenty-Two:
“FOR SALE: Baby clothes, never used.”
–Ernest Hemingway telling the shortest story in the English language
Friday dawned.
With the first rays of morning light, It was now impossible to argue to oneself anymore that the horrible events of last night had been just a dream (just like it would be for Automne would five years later). Especially with the empty space in our room where Cyril’s crib had lately been.
I didn’t get up because I hadn’t really gone to bed. I did get dressed, and lay on the couch.
I didn’t eat anything. My stomach felt better, my headache was gone, but I didn’t want to eat.
I don’t even know if I slept. Daniel
went out for some food, but I couldn’t eat that, even by the afternoon.
Calls from our families in the U.S. continued. After tearfully conferring with them, we decided to leave everything we had brought from America for Cyril in Perm.
The pile was still on the chair and every time I looked over at it, I would weep.
What had this been all about? What was that pile of stuff? For who had it been brought for? Did we really think that any of it would get to the babies at the orphanage?
Maybe it wouldn’t even make it there. After our departure, it was wide open for the hotel staff to take and sell if they had wanted to. We don’t know what ultimately became of it.
It would be Cyril’s nasledstvo, or legacy. We only hope some of it has
comforted a child, somewhere.
For most of the day we watched TV and didn’t talk much. When we did, we remembered what there was for us to remember of Cyril.
We still hadn’t come to terms with the drastic reversal in our lives. A day before, he had been all future.
Now, he was all past, a scant 234 days after his birth.
Never would we know if he could have been a hockey player. What it would have been like walking him to the first day of school. Or taking pictures of him all dressed up in a tux with some pretty girl for the prom.
There was a slight nervous tinge to all this. What if the autopsy report found something that would lead the police to try to pin Cyril’s death on us? Or someone higher up in the bureaucracy heard about the case and decided to use us to make an example of their dislike of foreign adoption or to settle a personal score?
This was Russia ... it is not out of the question.
For all we knew, we could be in the opening scenes of something likely to be dramatized as a TV movie several years down the line. It was not the way we wanted to become famous.
In the early afternoon, Lena called. It was what we had been waiting for.
Preliminary findings, she told Daniel, pointed to an “acute infection of the gastrointestinal tract.”
She said it was unlikely that the police would see us as in any way responsible, and we were finally relieved on that front.
We went back to grieving to the accompaniment of the aforementioned “Zima v Serdtse” and other assorted videos and Chechen war bulletins. Winter in our hearts, indeed.
At five, Lena, Sergei and Gennady came into our hotel room. All three had long faces, and I don’t envy the day that they had.
They had really had to work for their money, and later on, Linda was to tell
me that they didn’t get one red cent from her. No wonder they looked so glum!
Lena did ask if we wanted another baby before we got down to the business at hand, but Daniel and I merely shook our heads.
How could another baby replace the one we had just lost? Would another baby make us feel any better? Would you ask someone whose child had died at birth the same question?
They had us write out and sign a declaration stating that we would not hold the orphanage responsible for Cyril’s death. We did that, knowing that it would be difficult to pursue a lawsuit in Russian courts.
We just wanted to get out of Russia, get home and begin healing.
This was one country that I was never, ever going to return to. Ever.
We didn’t kill that baby – that’s all we knew.
Lena repeated what she had told us on the telephone about the autopsy report having been done by the orphanage director; in her hand, written on a scrap of paper which she showed me, she had translated a phrase “intestinal parasites,” as the cause of death.
We asked how long it would take for the autopsy and police report to get done. Gennady and Sergei informed us about a week and it was strongly implied that we didn’t want to stick around for an extra week to sort through things on the Russian end.
They may well have had their own reasons for hustling us out of town so quickly ... perhaps they didn’t want to risk the police casually asking us how much we had paid them, and passing our answer on to the federal tax police — Russia’s most-feared law-enforcement agency — as a result.
But it’s really no concern to us. The truth is that we wanted to get out and
get home just as badly.
We also discussed how to dispose of Cyril’s remains and asked what name we wanted on his death certificate.
When I asked, we were told that he couldn’t be cremated, since religious custom in Russia strongly discourages that practice. But I just wanted to burn whatever killed him right out of his body.
They did, however, ask us what name we wanted on his tombstone. Daniel and I agreed that he was born a Russian, died a Russian and Mother Russia had claimed one of her own again.
We let him keep the name he was given at birth: Kirill Konstantinovich
Petrov. The poor soul had never made it
out of his homeland.
(Denise, in the version of events she gave to the Ohio Department of Human Services in response to our complaint, said we never did this and left Perm totally on our own initiative. We deal with this and many of her other misrepresentations she made in a separate chapter.)
We were informed that we could leave Perm on the 7 a.m. flight out the next
day. Linda Wright would be
accompanying us. We gave our
passports, visas and $200 to Gennady so he could get our airplane tickets.
Lastly, Lena asked us what we wanted to do with the only hint that an infant had been living in this room up until the previous day — the nasledstvo pile of clothing and other baby items. We told them to take it to the orphanage after we left.
Later in the evening Denise Hubbard called us again. She said she had Medina Travel Agency make our arrangements for our flight to JFK on Sunday.
She also told us that a “48-hour bug” had killed Cyril and how she came upon this information she did not relay.
Once again, Denise “padded” information, something she was very good at, but under these circumstances, she should have kept her mouth shut.
By saying “48-hour bug” was she somehow holding us responsible for
bringing an alien virus to kill Cyril?
We were also told that we would get a full refund and that it was being worked on at the time. Regarding the refund, Denise did rattle off what we would not be getting back, as stipulated in the contract, so “full refund” may be a misnomer.
However, at that time, having not slept in two days nor eaten and not having the support of our families to be with us, Denise could have promised me a Mercedes-Benz and I would not have paid much attention to what she was saying. I was not in a mental state to handle the “nuts and bolts” of the refund scenario.