"Just sign any blank lines you see," Maggie told us, shrugging.

We took Yuri's documents to a notary public near the immigration office.

"I can't notarize this," said the woman behind the counter. She wore orangey lipstick that had been applied with great precision.

"Why not?" Ken asked her.

"It's in Russian."

"But all you're notarizing are our signatures, and they're in English."

"But I can't read this document."

"That's OK." Ken smiled at her. "Neither can we."

"You're signing a document you can't read?" The woman raised her eyebrows.

Ken nodded, and she put her gold-handled notarizing stamp back in its place behind the counter.

We could not adopt Alex unless we had an approved 1-171H form from the Immigration and Naturalization Service, which we couldn't get until we'd completed an 1-600 Orphan Petition, but could be expedited by submitting an I-600A Advance Processing of Orphan Petition, and delivering it by hand.

We rode up the elevator at the INS office with an elderly Chinese woman who leaned on the arm of her granddaughter, and a Mexican family with faces like Aztec carvings. Ken and I towered over all of them. The Mexican children stared up at us until their mother noticed and turned their heads away.

"I brought a FedEx mailer," Ken said to Sarah Choy, the woman who handled foreign adoptions for the INS, "so you can overnight our fingerprints to Washington."

"Oh, the government can't accept Federal Express."

"But I put our credit-card number on it." Ken waved the air bill over Sarah Choy's desk, each page fluttering like a paper wing.

"The government doesn't have the mechanism in place to accept Federal Express," she told him. And I imagined a long mechanical arm lying on the floor of a government building, waiting to be installed.

"Then how do you usually send the fingerprints?" Ken asked.

"United States Postal Service," Sarah Choy said proudly.

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"It takes at least two weeks for fingerprints to show up in our system," the woman at the FBI explained to Ken.

"It's been three," he told her.

"That doesn't mean anything."

When our fingerprints didn't show up in the system by the end of the fourth week, the woman said it still didn't prove they were lost. "They might be downstairs," she said, making it sound as if the things that wound up downstairs would surface only in their own time, like lumbering sea creatures that rarely came up for air.

Ken called the unpublished phone number of the FBI fingerprint-expediting office. He'd gotten the number from the Internet, from a chat group of people who were also in the process of adopting from Russia.

"How did you get this number?" asked the woman at the expediting office.

"From a friend."

The woman gave Ken the government address at which the mechanism to accept Federal Express was in place. Ken sent off a second set of our fingerprints, and then published the address on the Internet.

Every piece of paper that had been notarized also had to be apos tilled.

"What is apostilling, anyway?" I asked Ken.

"It's like notarizing a notary," he explained.

"You're making that up," I told him.

Apostilling could be done only in Sacramento, and could be turned around in less than three days only if the documents were delivered in person.

"I'll go," Ken said.

"No, I'll go." And so we both went, leaving behind an unfinished script about the workstation of the future.

It was the kind of thing we were doing more and more often.

"Your script's going to be a little late," Ken would tell our

clients, "we're still looking over your materials." Then we'd run out to drop off another document at Sarah Choy's office.

"We need to get some work done," I'd say to Ken, when we'd fall too far behind. But it was impossible to stay in the office writing about features and benefits when we could be doing something to get Alex out of the orphanage.

Our paperwork was completed on March 3.

"That gives Yuri a month to get the signatures before Alex comes off the database," I told Maggie. I'd stopped by her dark little house to pick up the applications for our Russian visas.

"Oh, Yuri won't even start getting the signatures until after April fifteenth."

From Maggie's screen porch I heard a sound like an angry baby howling.

"I'm mating my cat," she said. "I don't think she likes it."

"You mean we won't be able to get Alex on the fifteenth?"

"It'll probably be more like the thirtieth."

Something crashed on the porch.

"Possibly even the beginning of May."

"We have to wait two more weeks?" I wished I could lock Maggie on the screen porch with the unhappy cat.

Doing nothing turned out to be more difficult than doing the paperwork. Every couple of days, Ken would scatter all of our duplicate documents—the ones we'd collected in case the first set got lost—across the kitchen table.

"Did we send this bank statement to Moscow?" he'd ask me.

"That was for INS, not the Russians."

"What about the copies of our passports?"

One night he convinced himself we'd forgotten to apostille the results of his lab tests.

"Let's go away somewhere," I said.

"We can't."

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"What about this camping trip?" I showed him a picture of people in bandannas standing on an enormous rock in Arizona.

"I'm sure we forgot to do this." Ken clutched the paper that attested to the state of his health.

A week later, Ken and I stood in the Arizona sun while a retired schoolteacher weighed our backpacks to make sure they didn't exceed the Sierra Club weight limit.

"Why don't we all introduce ourselves," said the retired schoolteacher's wife. She and her husband were from the Midwest, and they spoke with the hard, flat vowels people in that part of the country developed to match the hard, flat plains.

"I have a grandchild who will be six months old at exactly seven thirty-one tonight," declared a woman with an Ace bandage on her knee.

"I've got three daughters," said a man wearing pants covered with pockets. "Fifteen, thirteen, and twelve." He wiped imaginary sweat from his forehead.

"My son was just accepted to Stanford and he's only sixteen," a woman in a pink baseball cap told us. She puffed up the chest of her khaki shirt and pointed her pink brim at me.

"I have a son who'll turn one year old this week," I announced, shifting around on the hard-packed sand. "He's in Moscow."

The pink brim cocked itself at me.

"We're adopting him," I told it.

That first afternoon, a man named Loyal dropped back to walk with Ken and me. In the middle of the desert, he wore a hat covered with the fake bugs and caterpillars that are used for fly fishing.

"Both of my children are adopted," Loyal told us. "A boy and a girl."

He touched a spot near his heart when he spoke of them.

"They're grown now. Great kids."

Then before we could say anything, he walked ahead of us,

leaving me with the sight of a bright green worm bouncing on the back of his hat.

That night, in the pale blue world of the tent, Ken and I zipped our sleeping bags together and talked about Alex.

"We'll take him next time we go camping," Ken said. "He'll fit right here between us."

He moved closer to the wall of the tent, making a space for Alex, and we slept around it all night.

The second day, we stopped for lunch along a steep path covered with barrel cactus topped by red blooms, like short ladies with flowers in their hair. Ken and I walked to the top of the trail, searching for a spot away from the pale young woman who used every mealtime to discuss her allergies, inventorying for us all the foods that caused her to produce mucus.

As we sat on rocks, eating the peanut butter and jelly sandwiches the retired schoolteacher's wife made for us, we watched Robbie trudge up the hill.

Robbie was twenty-six years old and had just been given a new heart. "His old one had some kind of congenital defect," the retired schoolteacher had told us, after Robbie had gone into his tent early one night. "Something hereditary." Now the drugs Robbie took to keep from rejecting the new heart made his muscles cramp. On the trail, he moved slowly and often fell behind. When he got too far back, the schoolteacher would suggest that we stop and admire the view.

Robbie dropped his pack beside us, raising a little cloud of pink dust. He collapsed on the ground and opened the Tupper-ware container with his peanut butter and jelly sandwich.

"I'm adopted," he said, keeping his head down so that it looked as if he was telling the sandwich. "I think that's why it took them so long to figure out what was wrong with my heart."

The three of us sat chewing peanut butter, our tongues sticky and thick.

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"It's a good thing you're doing, adopting that little boy,"

For the rest of that afternoon, Ken and I walked at the back of the group with Robbie.

The third day was Alex's birthday.

That evening we sat around a fire and ate Hungry Man mashed potatoes mixed with Spam.

"I see a lot of adopted Russian kids in my practice, and they all have one problem or another," said a man who'd told us he was a psychiatrist.

The schoolteacher's wife cleared her throat. Robbie pushed pieces of pink meat around in his Sierra cup. Loyal sat with his mouth open, revealing partially chewed mashed potatoes.

"Tell me," Ken said to the pale young woman, "is it all cheese you're allergic to? Or just cow's milk?"

"All cheese," the woman replied, wriggling with delight in her camp chair. "They just go right to my sinuses."

I gave Ken my last Oreo.

Later that night, Ken and I sat beneath the stars and listened to the man who was a pilot playing the flute. The pilot always set up his tent away from the others—the way we did— and every night the sound of his flute would float over us like a continuous ribbon; sometimes twining itself around the high-pitched wail of a coyote, sometimes curling against the short whistle of a night bird. We never mentioned the flute playing to the pilot, in case it would make him stop.

"Do you think they'll do anything for Alex's birthday?" Ken asked. "I mean, at the orphanage?"

I shrugged in the dark, thinking of the woman who had given birth to Alex a year ago. I imagined her walking home in the early darkness of the Russian winter and stopping suddenly on the street when she remembered what day it was. I saw her standing in the cold, milk and bread in a plastic bag, while people pushed past her, hurrying to get out of the wind.

I wondered if she'd held Alex the day he was born, and if

she'd given him any explanation before she'd let him go. And I hoped, as she stood remembeting on the icy streets of Moscow, that she didn't want him back.

Ken unzipped the tent and took out the plastic flask we'd filled with bourbon. We were rationing it, allowing ourselves only two small sips a night.

"Happy birthday, Alex," he said, lifting the flask to the stars.

"Happy birthday," I said to the night sky. The bourbon was warm and tasted a little like plastic. I drank all of it.

Once we got back from Arizona, I began to read everything I could about child development. I'd stand in the aisles of bookstores next to pregnant women, and women with children asleep on their backs, reading about motor skills that were described as fine and gross.

Climbing develops mathematical ability, the books said. Puzzles are a prereading activity. I copied these pronouncements into the Chinese notebook where I'd once listed the names of pediatric neurologists and child psychologists.

Choose toys that are interactive. Make up songs and sing them to your child. I underlined these pieces of instruction, wondering if this advice had been passed on to the white-coated women who worked in the orphanage.

Take your child everywhere — even a trip to the grocery store can be stimulating. Hold your child whenever you can — physical contact aids brain development.

"Sometimes these children don't get out of their cribs," Maggie had once told me. "Sometimes they spend the whole day there."

The first three years are the most important time in a child's development. Nothing you do afterward will have as much impact.

Alex would be nearly fourteen months old when we went back to get him.

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The first week in April, we traveled to New York. Ken was working a trade show, delivering the same presentation to a different audience every twenty minutes.

"Why don't you call my sister?" he suggested.

I was sitting on the hotel bed, reading a book about developing your child's artistic potential.

"She'd love to see you."

Lynne met me at a gallery in Soho, pushing into the white space with a stroller, a diaper bag, half a banana, and my eight-month-old nephew, Wesley.

We'd come to see an exhibit of taxidermy mice—small stuffed rodents that had been dressed in pearls and little vests and placed in front of miniature paintings like tiny art lovers. Wesley lay on the gallery floor next to them, pressing his cheek into the polished wood.

"Mice," Lynne told him.

He touched a mouse wearing a beret tilted over one ear.

Tactile stimulation, I thought.

Wesley was the baby Lynne had been carrying when Ken's father died. Ken and I had only just flown home from the funeral when we got the call that Lynne was in labor. Wesley was born two months early. "Probably the shock," everybody said.

"It's like Daddy's come back," Lynne had told us, when we called to ask about the new baby. "He looks just like him."

She was right. Now and then, the little boy would lift an eyebrow or twist his mouth, and it would be as if the older man's face had been projected onto the smooth screen of his grandson's skin.

We let Wesley crawl around with the taxidermy mice until a gallery woman with straight black bangs frowned at us. Then we stepped out into early spring air that smelled of flowers even in New York. A fish truck rumbled past on the cobblestones, heading toward Chinatown. A boy in an 7 ¥ New York T-shirt used a magnet to determine which of the buildings along Greene Street were really cast iron.

Lynne dropped Wesley into a stroller with a little plastic steering wheel attached to the front. He pounded his fist on the horn, making a loud beeping sound and frightening a pigeon that had been pecking at a sooty bagel.

Cause and effect, I noted.

We walked for a while and then went into another gallery. Here, the exhibit was a raised floor made of a kind of gel that would hold a footprint for a minute or two, before filling it in like waves on a beach. A pile of shoes had been left at the base of the raised floor—Doc Martens and boots with platforms like enormous bars of black soap.

Lynne set Wesley on the raised floor, and he crawled across it to a man wearing glasses with lenses no bigger than quarters. Looking over his shoulder, the little boy marveled at the imprints his star-shaped hands made.

The ability to change his environment.

Wesley reached the wall and tried to turn on the gel surface, but he lost his balance and tumbled off onto a pair of suede clogs.

Lynne rushed to pick him up, touching him all over with her hands.

"It's all right," she murmured, letting some of his hair curl into her mouth. "It's all right."

Watching her, I remembered the boy in the blue overalls on Maggie's tape—the one who'd been learning to walk and had fallen and lay crying with his face in the carpet while the legs of the woman walked back and forth behind him.

I yanked off my shoes and stomped onto the gel platform, leaving a trail of deep footprints. The man in the glasses scooted over to the side and put on a pair of leopard-print loafers.

"Are you OK?" Lynne asked me.

I sat against the wall, making an indentation the exact width of my hips. "I want to go get my son."

She sat beside me, making her own indentation.

"It'll be all right," she murmured. "It'll be all right," repeating the phrase the way she'd done for Wesley.

Lynne had been certain that her father would see his first grandchild. "He'll hang on till my baby is born," she'd kept telling everyone. "It'll be all right."

But of course it hadn't been.

And now, we sat side by side, sinking into a piece of art.

"May Day is a very big deal in Russia," Maggie said. "Everybody goes to their dacha in the country."

"What does that mean?" I asked.

"Nobody's going to be signing papers the first week of May."

"Do we have to change our travel date?"

"Make it the second week."

"The beginning of the second week?"

"Better make it the end."

"A crib, a changing table, a diaper pail with locking lid." Ken was reading from a paper that had drawings of storks around the edges. It was the middle of April, and Alex was off the database. Now Ken wanted to get the small room next to ours ready for him.

"The old Italians wouldn't give me a baby shower until you came home from the hospital," my mother had once told me, eyes squinting from resentment and cigarette smoke. "They thought it was bad luck."

"I don't want to buy anything, not until it's closer to when we're going," I said.

But a week later, in a store that sold painted Madonnas and bright red devils, I saw the wall hanging of the market.

The market had been made in Peru, stitched from bits of colored fabric into brown-faced vendors who sold cotton cabbages and tiny Peruvian hats. Along the bottom of the market, cloth women held babies swaddled in squares of striped burlap, and cloth men walked along with perfectly formed raffia sombreros on their heads.

"It's wonderful, isn't it?" said a saleswoman wearing an embroidered blouse. "All made by hand."

"How much is it?" I wanted to buy the little cloth market for Alex; wanted to hang it in the small room next to ours, so that after he came to live with us, I could lift him up and teach him the words for "corn" and "tamales" and "baby."

The saleswoman folded over a corner stitched with tiny sausages. "Two hundred and fifty dollars."

"That's a lot," I said. And I turned to examine a Madonna with toothpicks stuck round her head in an effort to depict radiant light.

"It is all made by hand," the saleswoman repeated. She picked up a devil by his penis and dusted the shelf beneath him.

"The old Italians were superstitious," my mother had told me. "They wanted me to pierce your ears, pin a little horn on your baby undershirt to keep away the evil eye. But I wouldn't do it. I said that in America there was no evil eye. And when I was pregnant with your brothers, I made your father take me out to buy a second crib."

My mother had laughed when she told me this story, joyous bursts that had come out with little puffs of smoke. And I'd admired her bravery, the way she could laugh smoke into the evil eye.

"I'm going to take this," I told the saleswoman, touching the market near where the women walked with their babies.

I bought the wall hanging and a table with a blue coyote painted on it. At the last minute, I also bought a wooden cross wrapped in yarn that the saleswoman told me was used to protect children from the evil eye, just in case my mother had been wrong.

"I've been meaning to call you," Maggie said, fingering asparagus thin as chopsticks. "I heard from Yuri." It was the beginning of May, and I'd run into her at a Berkeley produce market, where I was filling a plastic bag with cherries, eating every fifth or sixth one.

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"What did he say?"

"He thinks it would be better if you traveled after May twentieth."

"Why?"

"He hasn't got all the signatures yet."

"He hasn't?"

"I told you this was a difficult process." She rejected the asparagus. "I said there'd be delays." She wandered into the next aisle.

I watched her go, spitting out a chewed red pulp that looked like a small battered heart and did not taste quite ripe.

The next week, Ken and I bought Alex a dresser of unfinished wood, and for four nights I put on paper overalls and went out to the garage to work on it. While I sanded and primed and painted, I told Alex the story of the dresser.

I never painted anything before, I said, never anything this big. And I described how I'd run the brush in one long line across the top so there wouldn't be any marks; how I'd painted even the places in the back that nobody would see unless they pulled the dresser away from the wall to retrieve a toy that had gotten trapped there.

After I finished the dresser, Ken went out to cover it with a coat of polyurethane. "It's so perfect, I want to protect it."

But the polyurethane pulled up the paint, made it streak and clump together.

"Who said you could touch my dresser?!" I screamed at him.

"I'll fix it," he told me. "I'll strip it back to the wood and paint it over myself."

"No! Don't touch it! It's mine."

And I used up four more of the nights we had to wait before we could get Alex, repainting the dresser.

"Yuri says don't come until the end of the month," Maggie told me. I'd stopped by her house to pick up a list of Russian ex-

pressions for children, sentences we wouldn't find in our phrase book: I'm your mother. Good boy. I love you.

"So when can we go?" I said, rolling the list of expressions into something I could hit things with.

"Sometime around Memorial Day."

"That weekend?"

"I think so. By the way, I'm leaving for Moscow on Sunday."

"You?"

"Just to touch base with my coordinators, maybe see a few orphanages."

"Would you check on Alex for me? Make sure he's all right."

"I'll do it the first day and call you."

A week went by without hearing from Maggie.

"You're sure she said she would call?" Ken asked me. "You're certain that's what she said?"

"Yes," I told him. And then I touched the blue folders where we kept the extra copies of our paperwork for luck.

Since we got back from Moscow, I'd been practicing a series of small enchantments meant to ensure that nothing take Alex away from us; lining up the blue folders so the edges met, tapping the horseshoe that hung by the front door with both hands, retyping entire sentences even if I'd only made a mistake in just one word.

But as more days went by without hearing from Maggie, I was forced to invent new spells and incantations.

If I can get the milk into the refrigerator before the door closes, I told myself, Alex will be all right. And when Ken came into the kitchen and saw me with half a gallon of spilled milk on the floor, he was surprised by how upsetting I found it.

If I can go fast enough to get the car into fifth gear before the next light, I thought, Alex won't be sick. And I speeded up until Ken pressed his foot into the floor on the passenger side and yelled at me to slow down.

It had been four months since we'd seen Alex. Four months

n8 THE RUSSIAN WORD FOR SNOW

since the doctor at the American Medical Center told us he was small and undernourished. Now, I imagined him lying in a crib, too weak to raise his head, susceptible to all the childhood illnesses—polio and tuberculosis—that were still common in Russia.

It wasn't until the second week that we heard from Maggie.

"That is one unhappy little boy," she told us. We had the kind of long-distance connection that makes it seem as if the other person is thinking long and hard about every word. "All he does is rock back and forth on a yellow bear."

"But he's all right?" Ken asked her. "He's healthy?"

There was a long pause. I heard faint conversations in the background, like whispered secrets.

"He's healthy, just not happy."

I pictured Alex rocking back and forth on the yellow bear, his face serious and closed. And then I pictured the boy in the snowsuit, the child I'd watched from the window in the orphanage twisting the chains of the frozen swing and making himself spin without seeing the joy in it.

"Yuri wants me to tell you not to come until the first week in June," Maggie was saying, her voice tiny and far away. "There's one signature he still has to get."

"No," I told her. "I can't wait anymore."

^ffiafflfflffiSffifflffisww

Someone to Watch over Me

• "*■*

*>*C:

It wis snowing flower petals in Moscow. Outside the orphanage windows, thin white ovals like paper disks blew oft the trees and landed on Volodya's car.

This was a different Volodya. Yuri had gotten a new driver and didn't say what had happened to the tall man who'd nodded and smiled at us instead of speaking. This Volodya wore a shirt that reflected light, and had mean eyes. He made me think of men who stand smoking outside rooms where other people are being threatened.

The new Volodya had a different car as w<ell. It was shiny and European and new. Each time the flower petals blew against the windshield, he turned on the wipers, crushing them at the bottom of the window. In between, he sat in the front seat, smoking and laughing with Yuri.

Inside the orphanage. Ken reached into a playpen with a pink and white railing and rocked a yellow bear, ringing the bell inside. '"Where are all the children?" he asked.

"Perhaps the children sleep," Anna told him. She ran her hand along a row ot empty cribs, lined up end to end like cars in a train.

This was not the same room we'd waited in four months earlier, the room where the women in the white coats took their tea. This room was on the second floor of the orphanage, up a wide staircase with short steps that forced me to climb more slowlv than I'd wanted.

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"Look," Ken said. "They each have their own comb and washcloth."

He showed me a wooden peg board decorated with decals of leaping lambs. Above each hook was a piece of tape printed with a child's name.

"This is Alex's." Ken put his ringer on a name that began with a letter that looked like an unfinished "r." We studied the square of terry cloth and the pocket comb that belonged to our son.

A woman in a white coat and men's ankle socks hurried through the door. She stopped when she saw us touching Alex's possessions.

"She is Irina," Anna said, and the woman in the ankle socks made a little bow. Irina's features were rounded and soft, as though they had been made of rubber.

"Irina say the children are sleeping outside on the umm . . ." Anna slid her palm across the air.

"Balcony?" I asked.

"Umm . . . yes, balcony. She will go to get your child."

As she went out the door, Irina's slippers made a scuffing sound, like walking through leaves.

"Are you excited?" Ken was smiling at the lambs leaping above the washcloths.

"Yes." But I couldn't stop thinking that we were supposed to be taking Alex out of here, not leaving him behind to sleep in the little crib train, head to toe with the other children.

"When do you think you'll get the signature?" Ken had asked Yuri last night in the marble lobby of the Radisson Hotel.

"Maybe Friday, I think."

"Friday?"

"Yes, maybe."

"Is there anything we can do to make sure it's Friday?" Ken pulled Yuri out of earshot of the woman who was checking us in. "With money?"

"This man is too big," Yuri said, shaking his head. "I cannot get to him. Also I think he is in Urals with Yeltsin. For the election."

We were three weeks away from Russia's first democratic election. On the drive in from the airport, we'd passed billboards put up by the Yeltsin campaign. One showed the current president and the mayor of Moscow, a bald man with an enormous round head, shaking hands. The city's skyline had been superimposed behind them, the buildings resting on the two men's arms. Another billboard showed a picture of a black-suited Yeltsin standing in the middle of a forest. His body was tilted at an angle, just touching a tree that appeared as stiff and unbending as he was.

"So there's nothing we can do?" Ken had asked, keeping his back to the woman at the counter.

Yuri shrugged. "I told you not to come."

Irina carried in a child in a blue snowsuit. I thought she might stop, pull back his hood, and show him to us, but she kept walking. We followed her to a metal changing table, where she untied the straps of the brown knit hat that fit him like a bathing cap. When she bent down to throw the brown hat onto a pile of hats exactly like it, I saw the small face I remembered mostly from photographs.

While Irina pulled Alex's arms and legs out of the blue snow-suit, Ken and I hovered over her like party-goers observing the unwrapping of a present. Beneath the snowsuit, he was dressed in lavender overalls that had a blue whale stitched onto the bib. He was less thin than he'd been four months ago, but the dark circles under his eyes were still there. So was the brownish mark on his forehead we'd thought was a bruise, and now saw was a birthmark—a permanent smudge that people who didn't know him would try to wipe off with a wet thumb.

Irina tied a white cloth around Alex's neck and held a china cup filled with purple juice to his lips. She called him Grishka,

126 THE RUSSIAN WORD FOR SNOW

and spoke to him in Russian, making the language sound more melodic than I'd heard before. He dripped purple juice onto his pointed chin, and she wiped it with the cloth from around his neck. When the cup was empty, she leaned over him, pressing the palms of her hands together.

"Dastachnya, Grishka? Dastachnya?" Asking him, I supposed, if he'd had enough. She'd drawn her shoulders together the way people do when they see a tiny baby they want to hug.

She loves him, I thought, both pleased and covetous of her right to wipe the purple from his lips.

Irina untied the cloth and lifted Alex off the changing table. She set him down on an Oriental carpet, placing him in the center of a brown and white flower. Ken and I sat on the floor beside him.

"Grisha," I said, wanting to call him Alex, but not feeling I had the right in front of the woman who'd just wiped his chin with such practiced ease.

Alex pressed his forehead into the carpet and hid his face in the tufts of the brown and white flower.

I thought of all the small enchantments I'd invoked to bring me here, the charms I'd repeated each time I touched the horseshoe above the front door, stepped around the painted lines in a parking lot. Over the past four months, I'd thought of nothing but this little boy—his slight weight in my arms, his skin that had smelled of cabbage and sleep. Now I sat beside him, his body curled into itself like a small animal who senses danger.

"Grisha"—Ken's voice fell naturally into the singsong that is reserved for babies. "Look what I have." He held up a Plexiglas ball with a plastic butterfly trapped inside.

Ken twisted the base of the ball, and it played "Three Blind Mice" in plinking notes. Inside, the trapped butterfly opened and closed its plastic wings in time to the music.

It took until the farmer's wife cut off their tails with a carving

knife before Alex would turn his head just enough to watch the butterfly opening and closing its wings. The entire song played through twice before he would sit up.

When the music wound down, stopping in the middle of a phrase, Ken rewound the ball, and put it in Alex's lap. For almost an hour, until Yuri came to tell us it was time to go, we watched Alex make little grabbing motions over the clear plastic, as though trying to release the butterfly caught inside.

After the orphanage, we drove in Volodya's shiny car to a restaurant near Red Square to have lunch.

It was freezing inside the restaurant, the air conditioning a hard wall after the warm mugginess outside. Disco music with Russian words blared from speakers screwed into the ceiling.

"Paht!" Yuri shouted at the maitre d'. He held up five fingers.

The maitre d' studied a reservation book, and then surveyed the empty dining room. He turned his body all in one piece, his shoulders and torso and legs seeming incapable of independent movement. When he revolved back to us, he was shaking his head, and I thought we would have to leave. Then he picked up a stack of menus and led us to a table in the center of the room.

Ken and I ordered vodka and caviar with blinis. Volodya waited until Yuri had ordered, and then asked for the same thing: a rare steak and a beer. Anna said, "A small salad, please," and pressed her lips and the edges of her menu together.

The five of us sat in the cold dining room surrounded by music intended for dancing. Ken stared off into the middle distance, and didn't notice when I touched his leg under the table. Anna folded her hands so they made a neat ball on the cloth. Volodya gave me a smile that made me think of a crocodile.

"How do people feel about the election?" I shouted across the table. "Do they think Yeltsin will win?"

"I think so, yes." Yuri said.

Volodya nodded his head.

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"Many people will vote for Zyuganov." Anna directed her words at her folded hands.

"Eh!" Yuri brushed nonexistent crumbs off the table. "Nobody wants the Communists back."

"Zyuganov is Communist?" I asked.

"Like the old Communists," Anna said. "He does not like Americans."

"Can he win?" Ken shouted over electronic drums.

"Some of the umm . . . polls say he will win."

"But what will happen to adoptions?"

Anna shrugged without unfolding her hands.

Ken reached for his vodka, spilling some on the white tablecloth.

"How soon after the election does the new president take over?" he asked.

"Nobody knows."

"Nobody knows?"

"This is first election," Yuri said, sounding annoyed that we didn't know this.

Until this moment, my fear that we wouldn't get Alex, that something would go wrong with the adoption, had been un-specific, formless enough to push away. Now it had a shape, a name—Zyuganov, the Communist who did not like Americans. I'd seen his picture in the English-language Moscow Times, left in the Radisson's lobby for tourists. He was big-shouldered and barrel-chested, someone who would not be easy to push away.

The waiter brought Ken the bill before we were finished eating. Maggie had told us that we would be expected to pay for lunch. "The American families always buy," she'd said.

Ken studied the check which was presented in dollars and paid in rubles. "Twenty-one dollars for water?" He showed the bill to Anna, as though her role as translator included interpreting the cost of things.

"That is umm . . . twenty-one," she confirmed, pressing her straight spine against the back of her chair.

"A bottle of water is twenty-one dollars?" Ken asked the waiter.

"Yes." He reached for the credit card in Ken's hand.

"How can it be twenty-one dollars for one bottle?"

"Seven glasses in a bottle," the waiter explained. "Three dollars a glass." He made another grab for the card.

"Can this be right?" Ken asked Yuri.

Yuri shrugged and stood up.

"I'm sure the menu didn't say twenty-one dollars," Ken said to Yuri's Gucci belt buckle.

Yuri pushed his chair under the table. Volodya stood and lined his chair up with Yuri's. Anna smoothed imaginary wrinkles from her skirt.

"I just don't think this is right," Ken told the waiter.

They both had their hands on the credit card.

Yuri disappeared into the men's room. Anna picked up her purse and hooked the strap into the crease of her elbow. Volodya shook his car keys in time with the music from the speakers.

"I don't think anybody is going to help us," I said softly to Ken.

He loosened his grip on the credit card, and the waiter left with it.

On the second day, Irina let us feed Alex. She sat him in a child's chair that hooked onto the edge of a small Formica table and tied a piece of cotton around his neck, making a large knot at the back of his head.

"What is this?" I asked Anna, pointing to the bowl in front of Alex. I'd read that parents should feed their adopted children the same things they ate in the orphanage, and I couldn't identify anything in Alex's lunch.

Anna looked into the bowl which was filled with a brown and yellow liquid the texture of oatmeal. "Meat and vegetables and soup. They umm ..." She moved her hands as if mashing something between them.

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"Puree?"

"Yes, yes. All together so it is easier to feed."

Irina pressed a soup spoon into my hand. I put a tiny bit of the pureed food on the spoon and brought it to Alex's lips. He opened his mouth, letting me push in the spoon without looking at me. He didn't seem to be looking at anything, he just swallowed and then dropped his mouth open.

Passing through the room, Irina gave Alex a hard crust of bread. Ken, who'd been videotaping us, took the camera away from his face.

"Should he have that?" He pointed to the bread. "Isn't that one of the things he can choke on?"

Two weeks before coming to Moscow, Ken and I had taken a class in infant CPR, the only couple in the room who wasn't pregnant. We'd practiced mouth-to-mouth resuscitation on a rubber doll and listened to tales of hot dogs that became stuck in children's windpipes, and toothbrushes that lodged in their throats. I knew that children weren't supposed to have nuts, raisins, or toys with pieces small enough to fit into the plastic tube they'd given us, the tube that was the size of a baby's esophagus. But I couldn't remember anything about bread.

"Can't he choke on that?" Ken asked Anna.

"I will tell you a story about choking," Anna said. "One day this boy, he is maybe four years old, he is eating carrot and it sticks in his throat so he cannot breathe. For a long time he cannot breathe. For so long that he gets umm . . . brain damage. After, he cannot move his arms or legs, cannot pick up his head. So his mother and father put him in orphanage."

"Why do they put him in an orphanage?" I asked, unsure why Anna was telling us this story.

"They do not want him."

Anna turned to look at a child crying behind her, and Ken slipped the crust of bread out of Alex's fingers. Alex examined his empty hand, but did not seem surprised to find that some-

thing that had once been there was now gone. Ken walked to the window. From the back, I could see him chewing.

Irina came back into the room carrying a tray of mismatched bowls. Seeing her, the children in the big playpen rushed over and pressed themselves against the pink and white railings, crying with their arms held in the air. Irina picked up the closest one, a girl with crossed eyes who'd spent the morning reaching through the railings, trying to catch onto the edge of Ken's jacket. Tying a piece of fabric around the girl's neck. Irina lifted a bowl to the level of her chin. As the other children cried to be next. Irina stood behind the cross-eyed girl and spooned the pureed food into her mouth without pausing to let her swallow.

I turned back to Alex, who was waiting with his mouth open for the small bit of food on the spoon in my hand. Behind me, I could hear the cross-eyed girl coughing, and I looked to see if Irina would stop or slow down. But she just kept emptying the bowl, occasionally taking the next spoonful from the food that was running down the girl's chin. There were tears in the girl's crossed eyes and snot coming out of her nose.

I swallowed hard against the gagging in my own throat, and did not turn around again until Irina had set the dazed-looking girl back into the playpen and lifted out another crying child.

In the time it took me to feed Alex, Irina fed nearly all of the ten or so children in the playpen. Then she poured the pureed food from one of the bowls into a bottle, and retrieved a small boy barely old enough to crawl.

The boy's face looked like something not quite formed; there didn't seem to be enough definition between his nose and his upper lip, as though they'd been smudged together by a careless thumb when they were still wet and malleable. Irina held the boy out to me, opening his mouth with the nipple of the bottle so that I could see inside.

"This boy has something missing," Anna translated, opening

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her own mouth and pointing with a pink-polished nail to a spot behind her front teeth.

"He has no palate," Ken said, leaning over and looking into the space behind the boy's smudged lips. "No palate," he repeated to Irina and pointed to the roof of his own mouth.

"Da, da," Irina nodded, opening the boy's mouth wider with the nipple. I looked inside at the empty blackness and wondered if this something missing was the reason the boy was in an orphanage.

I wondered the same thing about the little girl he shared his crib with, a girl with black hair and brown eyes who looked perfect when viewed from the left. Only when she turned to reveal her right side did you see that her mouth kept going— slashing across her cheek like a smear of lipstick, almost reaching up to her misshapen ear.

And how about the boy I'd seen with the shortened leg, the girl with the crossed eyes? All of these children had defects that American doctors could most likely fix. Had that been what their parents were thinking when they'd sent their children to live in an orphanage? Had that been what the parents of the boy with the missing palate were thinking? That an American family would take him and give him a nose, an upper lip, something hard upon which to form his words? Watching Irina hold the bottle in the empty space of the boy's mouth, I hoped so.

Over the next few days, we did whatever we could to make Alex notice us. Irina had given us permission to take him out of the big playpen, so each day we lifted him over the railings and tried to tempt him with toys that never seemed to be moved from their positions on the shelves. We'd line up these toys—a stiff-legged doll in a party dress, plastic rings in graduated sizes, a music box with a twirling ballerina—in front of Alex's knitted socks, like contestants being paraded before a judge. Irina, pass-

ing through the toom with a pot of boiling water, or a folded pile of the cotton rags she used for diapers, would stare at the toys on the floor. Before we left, we'd put everything back where we'd found it.

Alex mostly ignored these offerings, choosing instead a yellow push-toy that looked like a combination telephone and lawn mower, with red wheels and a blue handle and a plastic duck mounted just above the receiver. Alex would push this toy back and forth in front of the playpen while the other children sat behind the pink and white slats and watched him.

Once, when Alex passed near me, I tried to get his attention by running a red dump truck along the floor near his feet and making the sound of the engine with my mouth. He stopped and watched the truck move past his socks as if it were self-propelled and had nothing to do with me. Then he pushed the lawn mower/telephone over to where the cross-eyed girl whose name was Olya, was shaking the railings of the playpen.

Of all the children, Alex was the one who was least interested in us. The others clocked our movements with their eyes, pulling them away only when Irina carried in the bowls filled with whatever had been pureed that day. Natasha, a little girl with a perfectly round face who was called Nashty, liked to follow us around the edge of the playpen, always going to the corner where she'd be closest to us. Nikita, a boy with skin so transparent I could see the bluish veins pulsing beneath it, would spend an hour dropping a plastic ring over the railings, hoping we'd pick it up and hand it back to him. Olya liked to wait for Ken at the side of the playpen. When he came close enough, she'd grab onto his sleeve, or hook her fingers into one of his belt loops, not letting go until he'd crouched down and spoken to her.

Alex barely looked up when we arrived, hardly noticed when we stood outside the playpen calling him. He'd just continue climbing a pile of stair-shaped blocks, or rocking back and

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forth on the yellow bear, holding tight to its ears. If we wanted to take him out, we had to go to him, climbing over the railings and pushing past the other children who came up to touch our legs.

It wasn't until the end of the first week that Alex made the first small move toward me. We were sitting together on the floor, while Irina dressed the other children for their naps. The children took their morning nap in cribs that sat in rows on a cement balcony. Even when it was warm, Irina would fold the children's flannel-covered arms and legs into snowsuits, tuck the straps of their brown knit hats into that undefined area between a baby's chin and throat.

I could never tell what determined the order in which Irina dressed each child for his or her nap; it changed every day. I knew only that when it was Alex's turn, we would have to leave. I wanted Anna to ask if Alex could be last, see if she could win for us an extra bit of time before we had to get back into Vol-odya's car, shutting the door and wondering what we were going to do with the rest of the afternoon. But then I remembered that Irina earned just $20 a month, and that when Alex woke at night, she was the one who went to him. So instead, I'd hold Alex on my lap and wait, silently repeating the names Olya or Nikita or Nashty, as if I could influence who she'd reach for next.

That day, Irina was changing Olya, shaking thick powder on a rash that looked red and hot and I knew that Alex's turn would come soon because there were only three children left in the big playpen. I put my face close enough to feel his breath, and ran my hand over his wispy hair down to where it was too long at the back. He raised his eyes—gray and blue and possibly green—up to mine, and I believed it was the first time he was actually seeing me. I ran my hand over his hair again, and felt him push his head into my palm.

Then slowly, slowly, as if moving through water, he raised

his hand and touched just his fingertips to the ends of my hair. His eyes—gray and blue and now I could see definitely green— were looking into mine, and I was about to say, "Hair. That's hair," giving him a word for what he'd begun to twine around his fingers, but I couldn't make any sound come from my throat. He pulled his eyes away to look at my hair, dark against his hand, and then touched his own, so light as to have almost no color at all. I held my breath as he went back and forth, between light and dark, letting his eyes rest in mine on the journey from one to the other.

Behind us, Irina zipped up Olya's blue snowsuit with a ripping sound and carried her out of the room. I tried to recall the name of the little girl whose mouth cut across her cheek so I could make her be next. But when Irina returned, she reached for Alex.

On Friday, the day our papers were to be signed, we waited for Volodya's car in the lobby of the Radisson Hotel. Outside the glass doors, Mercedes-Benz automobiles pulled up and let out their passengers; long-legged women who looked like fashion models accompanied by short-necked men who dressed like gangsters from American movies. They swept past Ken and me, speaking in Russian and barely noticing us in our orphanage clothes—jeans and T-shirts and sneakers—as they headed to the shops that sold Cuban cigars and children's clothing made by Italian designers.

Boris Yeltsin was dancing on the cover of the Moscow Times. The picture had been taken at a rock concert called Vote or Lose, and the caption beneath the president read "Gettin' Groovy." In the photograph, Yeltsin was standing in the aisle, his elbows bent, so that I could imagine the jerky little movements he must have been making with them. When I'd first looked at the picture, I'd thought he was smiling; but now I saw that he was just pressing his lips together, and that his hands were clenched into fists.

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Next to the photograph of Boris Yeltsin was the headline, "Reds Plan Seizure of Power, Communists Readying Russia for Civil War."

In the story below, one of the president's aides was quoted as saying that if Yeltsin won the election, the Communists would send out what he called their "fighting units." In that case, the man warned, "The Kremlin will have no choice, but to declare a state of emergency."

"The finger is on the trigger," the man insisted further down the page. "At any moment the trigger will be pulled."

I rubbed my bare arms, cold from the Radisson's air conditioning, and imagined soldiers with rifles passing through the hotel lobby instead of the long-legged women, armored tanks grinding their gears outside instead of Mercedes-Benz automobiles.

If there's a civil war, they'll make us leave, I thought. The Russians or the Americans will force us onto a plane and send us home without Alex. And who knows what might happen to him before we were allowed to return?

"Look at this," I said to Ken, meaning to show him the story about the warnings of the presidential aide.

But Ken was staring into the video camera, watching the footage he'd shot the day before. I'd come upon him doing this at night in our hotel room, standing in the small space between the bed and the dresser with the camera pressed against his face. "Excuse me," I'd say, and "I need to get something out of that drawer." And he'd step to one side or the other without taking his eyes away from the small boy in the camera.

"What is it?" Ken asked without looking up.

"Boris Yeltsin dancing," I told him.

Volodya's shiny car pulled up in front of the Radisson.

If I don't step on any of the black squares, I told myself as I walked toward the glass doors, our papers will be signed before the election. I took a small hopping step on a white square of marble.

Yuri was in the front seat, watching the men behind the Kievskaya train station exchanging out-of-date rubles for foreign currency.

"Have you heard anything about our papers?" I asked him.

"No," he said without turning around.

"But it's Friday." I pulled on the back of his seat. "You said our papers would be signed by Friday."

"I thought so, yes."

"So do you think we'll get the signature today?"

Yuri turned to glare at me. "I do not know." He shot a stream of tobacco-scented smoke out of his nostrils.

Ken drew me back into my seat. Volodya pulled away from the Radisson, throwing us against the door as he sped out of the lot.

On Saturday, Irina let me dress Alex for his nap. Handing me one of the blue snowsuits, she pointed to the changing table, and then stood so close behind me, I could feel the shape of her body with my back. I had no trouble sliding Alex's arms into the slippery sleeves, bending his knees into the pants. His limbs seemed to have no will of their own, like those of a pliable doll. He lay on the changing table, not reaching for my fingers, not turning to see why Olya had started to cry, so resigned to whatever I might do to him, it made me sad.

After he was zipped into the snowsuit, I sat him up to put on the knitted brown hat that was so unflattering and institutional, Ken and I had taken to calling it his orphanage hat. I tied the straps under his chin, and then slipped my fingers beneath them to make sure they weren't too tight. I didn't notice until I'd stepped back that the front of the hat had fallen over his eyes.

Alex tilted back his head and peered at me from under the brown hat. I waited for him to lift a hand, push the brown wool higher on his forehead, but he seemed to accept that this was the way the hat would be worn from now on. He was so matter-

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of-fact, sitting with the brim of the orphanage hat resting on his nose, that I started to laugh.

Irina reached around me and shoved the hat off Alex's face. Then she stepped forward and yanked on the elastic cuff I'd let ride up above Alex's ankle. As she tugged the pants leg, making his body jerk back and forth, Alex reached up and pulled the hat back down over his eyes.

Irina stepped back from the stubborn cuff and saw that the hat was once again over Alex's face. I heard her make a tsking sound, before pushing the hat back and looking Alex over carefully, checking zippers and cuffs and mittens, muttering in Russian. When she was satisfied, she clapped her hands together in a small bit of applause.

Alex turned his head to look at me and yanked the hat back over his face.

This time Irina laughed, a sound both light and sudden that she quickly caught in a hand covering her mouth. Beside her, I laughed until tears came from my eyes.

For the first time, the little boy in the orphanage hat felt like mine.

That night, Ken and I went to the ballet—not the Bolshoi, but the Moscow Classical Ballet. Bolshoi tickets were difficult to get. Unless foreigners were willing to pay inflated prices, they had to buy their tickets from scalpers. Ken and I had seen these ticket sellers, grandmotherly women in flowered housedresses who stood on the street and hissed, "Bolshoi, Bolshoi," at us as we went by.

Tickets for the Moscow Classical Ballet could be bought at one of the street kiosks near the big hotels.

Our guidebook had a section titled "Useful Expressions for Buying Tickets." "Useful Expressions" contained only three possible performances one could buy tickets for: Swan Lake, Sleeping Beauty, and The Nutcracker, making me believe that at any time

in Russia, at least one of these must be playing. We were going to Swan Lake.

The Moscow Classical Ballet performed in the Kremlin Palace auditorium where the Communist Party Congress met when Russia had still been the Soviet Union. All of the seats in the Kremlin Palace auditorium had straight backs that forced the people in them to sit upright.

Our seats were miles away from the stage, and when the townspeople came out in Act I, they were so tiny that we could barely tell they were dancing. Acres of empty chairs stretched in front of us, and as soon as the lights dimmed, the Russians began scurrying around, looking for better seats.

"We should move closer," I whispered to Ken.

"But these are our seats," he said, showing me the ticket stubs in the dark.

We watched the tiny townspeople dance around until the first intermission. When the lights came up, we were alone in our section.

"I feel stupid sitting back here," I said.

"We'll move when the lights go down."

Once it was dark, we slipped out of our row, walking hunched over, though there was no one behind us. We found two seats farther down on the aisle. I sent Ken in first, making him sit next to a woman with a large purse on her lap.

During the second intermission, I stood and stretched my back, which was stiff from the Communist chairs. The woman beside us with the large purse sat staring at the stage, as if the dancers were still there.

Just as the lights were beginning to dim, the woman nudged Ken. He looked over at her, and she gestured with her chin at the purse which was now open on her lap. Ken lifted his palms to show the woman that he didn't understand. The woman nudged him again and jiggled her legs a little to make the purse move.

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"I think she wants you to reach into her bag," I whispered to Ken.

"Why?"

"I don't know."

The woman shifted her legs so the purse would be easier for Ken to reach into. I saw his arm move toward the dark opening, and I resisted the urge to yank it back.

A thin tinny sound came from inside the purse, and when Ken removed his hand, he was holding two pieces of foil-wrapped chocolate.

"Shakalat," the woman whispered, the word sounding much the same in Russian as in English. She smiled at us, making me feel we were favorite grandchildren for whom she often hid treats in her large purse.

I unwrapped my chocolate and put it in my mouth, letting the thin square melt on my tongue and fill my mouth with sweetness.

After the ballet, Ken and I walked up Tverskaya Street, looking for a place we might find a drink, or a taxi back to the hotel. A stack of the next day's Moscow Times sat outside a deli called New York Sandwiches, waiting for the carrier to finish his cigarette and bring them inside.

"Let's check the weather," Ken said, pulling a paper off the pile. "Partly sunny, high seventies," he read. And then he stopped walking and grabbed my hand.

"What?" I asked. "What is it?"

"Just a minute."

He read, and I stood staring at an ad for a software company in which a man was punching his competition with a boxing glove.

"There's been a car bombing. Someone from the Moscow mayor's office."

"Who?" I asked, forgetting that Yuri had never mentioned

the name of the man whose signatute we wete waiting fot. "Does it say what he does?"

"He's an assistant to the mayor."

"Isn't that who's supposed to sign our papers?"

"I can't remember."

"Is he all right?"

I pulled the paper out of Ken's hands, tearing the corner that promised a day of fair weather.

The story had been printed alongside a picture of the bombed car, the lines of text bumping up against the blown-open door, the charred driver's seat.

"It doesn't say if he's alive," I said.

"Continued on page six."

I fumbled with the pages of the newly printed paper.

"He's in stable condition, recovering from—"

"From what? From what?" Ken was trying to read over my shoulder.

"From having his hand blown off."

We stood in the middle of Tverskaya Street, not sure whether we should laugh or cry.

The next morning, we called Anna.

"What is man's name again?"

I read her the name from the story.

"I think I do not know this name."

"He's assistant to the mayor."

"I do not know this man."

"So he's not the one who signs our papers?"

"I think, no."

"You're sure?"

"I cannot be sure."

"We should ask Yuri when he comes."

"Oh, Yuri and Volodya will not be coming," Anna said. She tried to explain why, but without the visual cues of her manicured

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fingers flying through the air, imitating the signing of a document or the changing of a diaper, I had trouble understanding what she was telling me. I knew only that Volodya and Yuri would not be taking us to the orphanage that day, and would probably not come to take us for a while.

I wouldn't miss Volodya's small, mean eyes, or the way Yuri lingered at the hotel after they dropped us off, waiting for the lunch we no longer bought. But I didn't want them to stop driving us. Their continued presence proved that they hadn't forgotten why we had come.

"I will not be going to orphanage this day either," Anna told me. "I must go with Yuri."

So all through breakfast, Ken studied the phrase book, memorizing expressions from a chapter called "Making Friends."

Our new driver, Alexander, was a friend of Anna's. He spoke no English and greeted us by asking, "Newman?" while making driving motions with his hands. When we asked him his name, he squinted, as if trying to bring our words into sharper focus.

Ken sat in the front seat of Alexander's car, looking for the seat belt that wasn't there, and paging through the phrase book.

"Moy sin," Ken said. "Moy sin, Alexander." And I supposed he was telling our new driver that he shared a name with our son.

Alexander darted his beat-up Fiat in and out of the Moscow traffic like a quick little fish. While we raced through the streets, he grabbed the phrase book from Ken to look up expressions, taking his hand off the wheel to point to the question he wanted to ask. Where do you live? What do you do? Each time, Ken would take the book back, answering him in phonetic Russian, so he wouldn't have to take his eyes off the road. But Alexander would only grab for the book again, more intent on Making Friends than on the cars swerving around us.

How do you like Moscow? Alexander asked. Are you enjoying your stay?

Ken answered him with a shrug that seemed particularly Russian.

That afternoon, we asked Alexander to drop us off at Izmailovsky Park. Like the people around us—Russian families carrying plastic shopping bags, tourists with locked fanny packs turned to the front for greater security—we were going to the Sunday flea market.

Along the concrete path to the park, people stood with their arms full of lacquer trays and fur hats, blue and white dishes and paintings of saints on pieces of wood. As we passed, they held out these items, offering them to us.

Inside the park, the aisles were jammed with crowded stalls, each one filled with something different: hand-carved chess sets, enameled pins painted with tiny flowers, antique samovars that glinted in the sun. We climbed wide cement stairs, stepping around carpets from the Caucasus that had been spread out to attract customers. One long alley had nothing but painters, the walls of their stands covered with pictures of onion-domed churches and snowy landscapes.

I stopped to look at a little boys shirt from the Ukraine. It had a high collar with buttons and a wide belt embroidered with snowflakes, and seemed much too big for Alex to ever grow into. When I walked away, a man ran after me.

"Madame, look!" he cried. He was waving an oversized book. "Children's stories," he said. "Famous Russian fairy tales." And I wondered if he knew that I was here to adopt a Russian child.

The man opened the book, flipping the pages beneath his dirty fingernails so I could see the Cyrillic characters on one side and the English words on the other. "Very famous stories," he assured me.

Some of the English words were misspelled, and the drawings

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of foxes and bears were rough and cartoonish. But I bought the book anyway.

I caught up with Ken at a booth that sold matryoskka dolls.

"Look at this," he said, pointing to a set of Russia's most recent political leaders. The continent-shaped birth mark on Gorbachev's forehead had been painted a lurid shade of purple. Brezhnev's eyebrows were drawn on with hundreds of tiny brushstrokes. Yeltsin, the current leader, was the biggest doll, his silver hair and bulbous nose making him look a little like W. C. Fields. I hoped that after the election, the artist would not have to make an even bigger doll, for the Communist candidate who didn't like Americans.

At the back of the booth, I found a whole matryoshka family: a father playing an accordion, a grandmother carrying a golden samovar, a little boy holding a flute to his lips. The smallest doll was a tiny baby in a blue and white bunting with a red pacifier painted into its mouth.

"I want this for Alex," I told Ken, picking up the mother matryoshka whose hair was bright yellow.

While the man behind the counter packed up the matryoshka family, nesting each figure into the next largest, I conjured up a picture of Alex playing with these small round dolls and then filled the picture with details; the scraping sound the father with the accordion would make when Alex twisted him open, the way the top half of the grandmother would look if he tried to fit her over the striped legs of the little boy, what he might say to the yellow-haired mother who looked much more like him than I did. Standing beneath the warm sun in Izmailovsky Park, I added as many details as I could, believing each one a credit on the side of taking Alex away from here.

Alexander drove us for the rest of the week. Sometimes Anna would arrive with him, but more often he came alone. On those days, Ken would try to talk to Irina himself, using the phrases he'd learned from Making Friends. Irina preferred to tell us long

stories in Russian. The fact that we didn't understand Russian did not appear to bother her. She seemed to regard us as no different from the children in the big playpen, assuming that if she talked loud and long enough, eventually we'd understand.

Days went by without hearing from Yuri, without knowing if he was any closer to getting our papers signed.

Sometimes, when we left the orphanage, Ken would slam the door of Alexander's Fiat, knocking the sun visor out of its broken catch. All the way back to the Radisson, he'd tell me the things he wanted to tell Yuri—the threats and ultimatums—until I'd have to ask him to stop shouting, remind him I wasn't the one he was angry with.

One morning, I came out of the shower and found Ken pounding his fists into the bed pillows. All around him, bits of dust and what looked like feathers flew up into the air. His eyes were squeezed shut, and each time he punched one of the pillows, he made a sound that was both primal and violent, like someone engaged in sex or childbirth. It was such an intensely private activity, I went back into the bathroom and ran water into the sink until long after the pounding had stopped.

Among the books I'd brought with me to Moscow was one a woman had written about her son's first year. Kate had given it to me, saying it was the book everyone gave to new mothers. On the cover was a picture of the woman's little boy dressed in a tiger costume. I kept the book facedown on the hotel night table, not wanting to read about a woman who already had her son.

Instead, I read a book about Buddhism. To want something creates suffering, the book said. Learn to practice nonattachment. And each morning. I'd sit cross-legged on the floor, pretending I didn't really want Alex, that I hadn't become attached to the small boy with the permanent bruise on his forehead.

One afternoon as we were leaving the orphanage, I burst into tears in the back of Alexander's car.

"We go Sparrow Hill." Alexander pointed out the windshield, see view.

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But I shook my head and told him no. A view would have been wasted on a woman who couldn't stop crying.

Each morning, Ken and I would assess the other's mood. I'd listen to him in the shower, trying to hear if he banged on the hot-water faucet to make it work, if he muttered to himself when he dropped the soap. Over breakfast, he'd ask me what we were going to do after the orphanage, gauging my emotional state by whether I suggested the Pushkin Museum, or merely stared blankly as though incapable of thinking that far ahead. By these small signs, we determined which of us most needed to hear that nothing would go wrong.

One day I showed Irina pictures of our house in California. She wiped her hands on the diaper-sized cloth she wore around her waist before touching the photographs. Over her shoulder, I saw the redwood deck where fuchsia like tiny ladies in petticoats tumbled out of Italian clay pots; the kitchen, filled with morning light and the terra-cotta chickens we'd brought back from Mexico; the small room next to ours with the painted dresser and cloth market made by hand in Peru.

"Chic," Irina told me, pronouncing it "chick."

Taking back the pictures, I felt as if I'd been showing her the home of an American celebrity. I couldn't believe I'd ever lived in all that clean, bright space.

"I don't think I can stay here much longer," I told Ken one night, saying it to make myself feel that I had a choice.

"Go home if you need to."

"What will you do?"

"Stay here. Visit Alex."

He was reading the book with the little boy in the tiger costume on the cover.

"I won't leave," I said because of course, I had no choice.

Then I opened my book on Buddhism and read All things will end over and over until I fell asleep.

One afternoon after the orphanage, Alexander took us to tec 1 small church that had recently been reopened. The church was painted in a frenzy of colored stripes and triangles that pulsed against the gray Moscow sky.

Inside, the little church smelled of incense—sweet sandalwood and bitter sage, and the wax}- smoke of burning candles. There were no pews or seats of any kind. People stood or kneeled before painted icons of saints and apostles, while elderly women, their backs curved as if to accommodate their short-handled brooms, moved among the crowd, sweeping the stone floor around the worshipers" feet. From someplace near the ceiling, chanting, slow and sonorous, and continually revolving back upon itself, drifted over everyone.

Along the walls, bearded men in cassocks, who I imagined must be priests, stood on small risers. In their smooth hands, they held icons—painted images of Christ, the Virgin, a wild-bearded John the Baptist. Men and women carrying plastic bags filled with tomatoes and bread and toilet paper climbed low staircases to reach these icons. At the top, they pressed their lips to Christ's brow, the Virgin's hand, before crossing themselves and backing away. The priest then passed a white cloth over the icon in a circular motion, wiping away the previous supplicant's saliva, preparing the image for the petition of the next person.

A man stretched himself along the floor and kissed the ground beneath the icon of an angel. A woman cleaned burned wax out of a votive with crooked fingers and an expression of joy. I followed these people, standing on the spot where the man had laid his heart, touching the smooth glass of the cleaned and empty votive, as if whatever had made their faith so strong might still be lingering there.

It was not their religion that attracted me, but the sur bility of their belief. These people had kept their faith even after Dmmunists had closed their churches and put their priests

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in jail. I wanted such faith. Faith to keep believing that Alex would come home with me.

In a far corner, I saw one of the priests holding an icon of a Byzantine Virgin. Her eyes were heavy-lidded, much too sultry for a virgin. And she was the first one I'd seen holding a child. The child in her arms was pressing his forehead into her cheek, blending the halo of light around his head with hers.

The line in front of the sultry Virgin was short: a young woman wearing a white babushka, an old woman whose slippers were held on with rubber bands. I thought about taking the place behind them, climbing the low staircase to press my lips against the painted face of the icon and make my request. But I was afraid that the priest would know I wasn't a believer.

From across the little church, I saw Ken watching me. He wore the same hopeful expression I saw on the faces of the faithful as they approached the icons.

I closed my eyes and felt the chanting descend on my head like a benediction. Please, I begged, clasping my hands together, please let me have my child.

When I opened my eyes, the man in the cassock was wiping the cloth across the Virgin's feature. The woman with the rubber-banded shoes backed down the staircase.

I have just asked a painted icon in whom I do not believe for my son, I thought, and separated my hands.

The old woman reached the bottom step and crossed herself before turning away from the icon. Even in the smoky dark, her eyes shone, as though the Virgin with the seductive eyes had already granted her request. I watched the woman shuffle her collapsed slippers across the floor with a sense of gratitude. Perhaps it would be enough that others believed.

At fifteen months, Alex didn't talk. None of the children did. I never heard any of them try out a sound or string together a sentence of purposeful babble. When they played together in the

big playpen, they were silent. Watching them was like watching television with the sound turned off.

Some days, when she had time, Irina stepped out of her slippers and climbed into the playpen with them. Sitting on the floor, she held up an inflatable dog and pointed to its ears, its nose, its eyes, pronouncing the word for each. The children crowded around her, Olya holding onto her sleeve, Maxim crawling over to suck on her calf, the way he tried to suck on the arms and legs of the other children; all more interested in finding a place they could touch her, than in the word for tail or teeth. Once Irina had named all the body parts on the inflatable dog, she clapped her hands and sang what I thought must be a Russian song for children. The children never clapped along. They just clung to her more tightly, perhaps aware that when the song was over, she'd step out of the playpen, put on her slippers, and walk away.

Ken and I knew that Alex could understand Russian. Once, when he was pushing the blue and yellow lawn mower around the room, he'd stopped at the chair where Irina was bottle-feeding the boy with no palate. Reaching up, he'd placed his hand on Irina's hip, and she'd looked down and said something that made him smile. Watching him touch the side of her hip, I'd felt like an outsider, excluded from some private communication.

Ken and I talked to Alex constantly, jabbering on about the mangy cats that prowled the wall outside the orphanage window, the whale that was embroidered on the bib of his overalls. Sometimes I'd tell him long stories about camping near the ocean, or shopping for live crabs in Chinatown, things we would do once he came to live with us; stories I told as much for myself as to accustom his ears to the sound of English.

At the start of the second week, Ken began singing to Alex, carrying him around the room and sending his smooth voice into Alex's ear. Ken didn't know any children's songs, so he sang

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standards: "The Way You Look Tonight" and "My Funny Valentine," "They Can't Take That Away from Me" and "I Get a Kick Out of You." I'd follow him from the row of cribs to the deep sink over which Irina suspended whichever child she was changing, keeping my hand on Alex's back.

One day, stopping near the crib where the little girl whose mouth was too wide was playing with a Mickey Mouse mobile, Ken sang, "Someone to Watch over Me"—our wedding song. I leaned against his back and put my face near Alex's, so I could breathe in both their scents at one time. The little girl in the crib tugged Mickey's leg, smiling with the perfect side of her mouth.

Ken sang the song twice through, and when he stopped, I could hear a soft, high voice continuing on. The words were unrecognizable, but enough of the melody was there.

"Can you hear that?" Ken whispered.

Alex was singing our wedding song.

That night, we left the television on while we got dressed for dinner. The local programming was mostly old American police shows, dubbed into Russian over the original sound track, so the English dialogue could be heard in the background like a spoken version of the characters' thoughts. The Radisson pulled in programs by satellite, and it was possible to watch news in every language of Western Europe, as well as soccer games from South America. Mostly, we left the television tuned to CNN or some other English-language news station, to fill the hotel room with words we recognized.

I stretched out the bottom my T-shirt, trying to decide if I could wear it to dinner, or if it had become too wrinkled from carrying Alex around. On the television, men and women were rushing up from someplace underground, their mouths covered by handkerchiefs or the tails of their shirts. These people ran into each other and collapsed on the pavement, blinking against

the camera lights like moles that have been unearthed unexpectedly.

"A bomb exploded in the Moscow subway . . . ," the newscaster was saying, pronouncing the last syllable of the city "cow" instead of "coe," the way I did. For a moment, I wondered which was right. Then I realized that the frightened blinking people were in the same city I was.

"Did he say Moscow?" Ken flew out of the bathroom.

We stared at a woman whose eyes shone white from a sooty face.

"The incident occurred on the Zamoskvoretskaya line," said the newscaster.

A woman on a stretcher was crying, both hands over her face.

"We've been on that line." Ken dropped onto the bed.

On the television, a man with bloody sideburns was helped to an ambulance. Another man, who was drunk or disoriented, stumbled out of the subway, still clutching a newspaper under his arm.

"Sources believe that the bombing in Moscow is related to the upcoming election."

" 'Cow' or 'coe'?" I repeated, trying to make that the only thing that was uncertain about this city. Moscow was coming apart. There would be more bombs, more explosions, more people crying with both hands over their faces. Soon no one will have time to worry about a small boy in an orphanage who has learned the melody of an American song.

I grabbed onto Ken's fingers, willing this city with the undecided pronunciation to hold together until we could get Alex out of it.

The Hairy Hand on the Metro

The carpets in the room at the Intourist Hotel were worn down to the burlap netting, and the furniture was covered with cracked yellow veneer that made it look like peanut brittle.

"Do you have a crib?" Ken asked the man from the hotel.

The man shook his head to show he hadn't understood.

Ken mimed rocking a baby, laying it down to sleep.

"No," the man replied, "no, crib." Then he showed us how we could push two chairs up against the couch that had been built into the wall. "Crib," he told us.

We were leaving the Radisson, moving to the less-expensive Intourist, where Anna knew someone who would give us a special rate. But when we arrived with all our suitcases, the special rate was $50 higher than she'd quoted, and it was unclear whether the man had ever met Anna.

"You take?" asked the man from the hotel.

"Yes, we take." Ken gave the man enough dollars for a week's worth of nights.

After the man left, I put the chairs back. Seeing them pushed against the couch, protecting no one, depressed me.

"At least there's a view," Ken said.

We were on the twelfth floor, overlooking the Kremlin. Above the brick towers and yellow walls of the government buildings, I could see the five gilded domes of the Assumption Cathedral. But the Intourist windows hadn't been washed in some time, and everything on the other side—the buildings, and even the air—looked dim and oily.

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"You can hear the Turks working on the underground mall," I said.

The room vibrated with a steady pounding, like a subterranean heartbeat.

"They are building umm . . . shopping mall beneath Red Square," Anna had told us. "Government wants it finished by anniversary of Moscow, so they use Turks because they will work twenty-fours hours each day."

"Let's get some lunch," Ken said. And we took the elevator down to look for a restaurant.

On the way to the lobby, we passed a long bench filled with tourists—chubby middle-aged Americans clutching meal vouchers, European travelers in their twenties with rucksacks, Russian couples of all ages holding cardboard suitcases on their laps. They sat submissively, shoulder to shoulder, as though they'd all been infected with the same strain of despair. I assumed they were waiting to begin their tour of Lenin's tomb or Tolstoy's house, but they seemed to hold very little hope of actually going.

In the lobby, Russian men in suits that creased across their forearms stood talking into tiny cell phones, eyeing everyone who walked by. They made me remember reading in the Moscow Times that it was possible to have a person killed in this city for $2,000.

Next door to the Intourist, we found Patio Pizza, a Western-style restaurant with a salad bar protected by a sneeze guard so enormous, I had to strain my neck away when I scooped up the hard little croutons.

Like most of the people in Patio Pizza, the woman sitting next to us was American. I watched her feeding tiny spoonfuls of chicken and stars soup to the little girl who sat in her lap. The girl had the same thin blond hair as Alex, the same thousand-yard stare when she ate. When she lifted her shoulder to brush away a star that had stuck to the corner of her mouth, I saw that her left arm was too short. Bits of skin that looked

like the beginnings of fingers stuck out from the place where the elbow should have been.

"This is Madeline Grace Rose." The woman beamed at us. She had the slurred, smooth consonants of the South. "I'm adopting her."

"She's very pretty," I told the woman, pulling my eyes away from the little starts of fingers.

The woman smiled at the compliment, unsurprised that I'd commented on the loveliness of her daughter.

She fed the little girl all the stars in the bowl, and when she wiped the girl's hands, I noticed that she passed the napkin gently over all her fingers, even the tiny ones where the elbow should have been.

I thought of Alex's hands, and the way he'd taken to resting them on either side of my neck when I held him.

"I think that's Olya out there," Ken said, peering through the orphanage windows.

Near the swing set, a woman was hugging Olya so tightly that her small arms stuck out like a doll's.

"Who's that holding her?"

"I can't tell." Ken put the video camera to his eye and pressed the button to make it zoom. "There's a woman and a man. I think they're here to adopt Olya."

"How do you know?"

"The man just kissed the top of her head."

Ken gave me the camera, and I saw the part in the woman's reddish hair, the glint of the man's wedding ring as he patted the back of Olya's terry-cloth pajamas. The couple stayed in the yard until the three-year-olds came out, running toward the swings in identical brown oxford shoes.

Coming up the stairs, the woman talked to Olya. "You're such a sweet little girl," she said, "such an angel." Her singsong voice echoed and bounced off the walls, so that it sounded as if Olya

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was being addressed by more than one woman. "My baby," the woman exclaimed, "my precious, precious baby." All the way up, she showered Olya with English endearments that must have sounded like passionate gibberish to the child in her arms.

Inside the room with the big playpen, the woman's husband hovered over his wife, waiting for her to relinquish her hold on Olya. He wore thick glasses that made his eyes look large and childlike, and he kept tucking the little girl's light brown hair behind her ear whenever it fell forward.

"You're American?" Ken asked.

"From New Jersey," the man said.

"I feel like I'm going to cry," the woman burst out, hugging Olya's stiff body against her soft chest. "I'm just so happy!"

Ken and I showed them around the room, introduced them to Alex, and explained about the signature we were waiting for.

"You've been here two weeks?" The man's enormous eyes were baffled.

"Twelve days," I corrected him.

It was the couple from New Jersey's first visit to Moscow. They had their American adoption coordinator with them.

"Elizabeth Edwards International Families." The woman made the agency sound like part of her name.

Elizabeth Edwards wore glasses attached to a string of amber beads and could speak fluent Russian. Irina kept her head bowed whenever she spoke to her.

I remembered that Maggie had been trying to learn Russian. Each time I'd gone to her house, I saw the same Russian primer on her kitchen table, a book that appeared to have been written for children with a picture of a cat and a ball on the cover. I didn't think Maggie ever opened the book—there were always toast crumbs scattered over the childish drawings.

"Elizabeth flew here with us," said the woman from New Jersey, wrapping her free arm around the coordinator's shoulder. "She's just made everything so easy, hasn't she?" She appeared

to address the question to Olya, and kissed her cheek loudly. The small girl touched the spot and then examined her own fingers.

I picked up Alex, who'd been running the blue and yellow lawn mower over my feet.

"Where's your coordinator?" Elizabeth asked.

"Back in Berkeley," I told her.

I'd been leaving messages on Maggie's machine every day for over a week. "You can always reach us after 9:00 P.M. That's 8:00 in the morning your time." Every night, Ken and I would rush back from dinner and sit up in our shabby room at the Intourist, waiting for her call until we couldn't stay awake any longer.

"Don't you think she'd want to know that our papers haven't been signed?" I asked Ken. "Doesn't she care that we don't have a translator anymore, that we hardly ever see Yuri?"

"I guess not."

But still I'd pick up the phone and dial the long string of numbers that connected me to Maggie's damp little house. We'd given her $5,000 to help us adopt Alex. I was certain there was something she could do, somebody she could call. Even if it was just Yuri, to keep him from forgetting about us.

Irina brought in a tray of steaming bowls and set them down on the small Formica table. The man leaned over to see what was inside, clouding up his thick glasses.

"Ohh . . . looks like it's lunchtime," the woman told Olya, giving her an excited squeeze.

I slid Alex into one of the chairs that clipped onto the edge of the table and tied a piece of cotton around his neck. Then I waited until Irina let me know which bowl was his. The other children stood at the pink and white railings, crying and lifting up their arms.

While I fed Alex, Elizabeth Edwards reviewed the couple's itinerary: how long they could stay at the orphanage, what time they would return in the afternoon, when they'd have to leave

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for the airport. All the while she was talking, the man kept touching the row of pens in his shirt pocket, as if wishing he could be writing this down.

His wife was watching Irina feed Nashty.

After nearly two weeks, I'd gotten used to the choking sounds the children made when the pureed meat and vegetables were poured down their throats. But this was the first time the woman from New Jersey had seen it. She stood with her hand over her mouth and made a little gagging sound whenever Nashty spit up some food, trying to take a breath.

"Will you feed Olya for me?" the woman said softly next to my ear. "Whenever you can?"

"Of course," I told her, though I wasn't certain Irina would allow it. "When do you come back for her?"

"In six weeks," Elizabeth Edwards announced. "Perhaps less."

"Hope you guys aren't still here," the husband joked, wiping his glasses with a little chamois cloth he kept in his back pocket. Without the thick lenses, his eyes looked small and squinty. He probably couldn't see that we weren't smiling.

"I need to change a return flight," I told the woman in the United Airlines office. Over the phone, I could hear the clicking of a keyboard and the soft murmurings of other voices.

"I'm sorry, but you can't do that."

"I have to," I explained. "There's no way we can leave on June 15th."

"I'm afraid your tickets are not changeable."

"But they're frequent-flyer tickets. Frequent-flyer tickets are always changeable."

"Usually, yes. But we don't have an office in Moscow."

"Can't you just change them on the phone?"

"I'm afraid not."

"But my husband and I are here trying to adopt a little boy and—"

"I'm showing that you had a child with you on the way out."

"That was a mistake."

When I booked the tickets, I'd told the airlines that we would be traveling with a child on the return only, but somehow this information had not gone into their computer. The morning we arrived at the airport, the man at the check-in counter told me. "We've separated you and your husband, so that one of you will be in a seat with a child-sized oxygen mask." Even after I'd explained that we didn't have our child yet, he'd refused to put us back together, saying it would be against FAA safety regulations.

"Look," I said to the man, who had a pair of little wings clipped to his shirt, "do you see a child with me?" I held up the empty backpack carrier we were bringing to Moscow.

"It says 'child' in the computer," he replied, without looking up from the screen.

"Mistake or not," the woman in the United office was saying, "if you want to use those tickets, you'll have to return on June fifteenth."

"But I can't!"

"There's no need to shout."

I heard clicking in the background, and I wondered if she was typing in that I'd yelled at her.

"Please," I said, making my voice soft and sorry, "isn't there anything you can do?"

"I'm afraid your tickets are not changeable."

"But we're here adopting a baby."

"I understand," the woman said.

I could hear something in her voice that was supposed to sound sympathetic, but it was more of an approximation, as if someone had told her, "This is what sympathy sounds like."

"You don't understand!" I was shouting again. "If you did, you would help me."

"I'm doing the best I can, ma'am."

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"My son is in an orphanage." I was angry with the way my voice was wavering. "We want to leave with him on June fifteenth, but we can't because our paperwork isn't signed, and the election is less than a week away, and we don't know what'll happen if the Communists start a civil war, and you're telling me that if we don't get on that plane on June fifteenth, we won't even have a ticket home, and there's nothing you can do about it?"

"I'm very sorry, ma'am."

"No, you're not!" And I hung up, because I didn't want the woman in the United office to know that she'd made me cry.

I threw myself on the couch we were supposed to turn into a crib and started to wail—big heaving sobs that did not sound anything like my own voice.

"We'll just buy another ticket," Ken kept telling me. "We'll put it on the credit card." And he tried to rub my back, but I wouldn't let him.

"It's not fair!" I screamed. "Those bastards!" I shouted, not exactly sure which bastards I meant, but intending it for all of them.

I pounded my fists on the cushions of the sofa and sobbed as loud as I could. Ken stood away from my flailing fists, his hands dangling at his sides.

It was a long time before I felt like stopping. A long time before I put my face down on the cushions, the scratchy fabric making my wet cheeks itch. And when I lifted my head to tell Ken that it was over, that I was all right, I had no voice.

Nobody at the Kafe Shokoladnitsa was paying any attention to us. No maitre d' stood behind the little podium with the big reservation book. No one who worked for the restaurant hovered about the dining room, waiting to be of service. From time to time, a waiter would appear from behind a set of double doors, carrying trays of food to other tables, then disappearing back into the kitchen for long stretches of time.

"Afetsyant!" (Waiter!) Ken shouted, whenever one of the tray-carrying men pushed open the double doors. "Menyu!" he called out to a retreating figure.

Around us, groups of Russians in twos and threes sat eating enormous plates of food without speaking to one other.

"I think there are menus over on that podium," I whispered. I still had no voice. That morning, when Alexander had driven us to the orphanage, he'd advised me to drink warm vodka infused with chamomile, two ingredients which seemed to constitute the Russian cure for everything.

Ken walked to the podium, keeping his head down. He slipped two menus off the pile and hurried back to his seat with quick little steps.

The menu was handwritten entirely in Cyrillic. To translate it, we had to look up each letter in the phrase book and convert it into something we recognized, then string all the letters together before trying to find it in the "What's on the Menu?" section. It took a long time, but it didn't matter. No one appeared interested in taking our order.

"The guidebook recommends their solyanka soup," I whispered.

"Don't whisper, it'll strain your throat."

"Their specialty is blini with chocolate sauce," I croaked.

Ken waved his menu at a waiter who had just placed a deep bubbling bowl in front of a fat couple. "We'd like to order," he shouted in Russian at the disappearing waiter's back. "Maybe I'm supposed to tackle them." He got up and went to wait by the double doors.

Ken was the only person standing in the big dining room, but nobody looked up at him. He still had the menu in his hand, and he kept fanning himself with it, although the restaurant was freezing. When a waiter finally pushed through the doors and saw Ken, he was so startled, he jumped back, splashing bright purple borscht out of the bowl on his tray. Ken

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repeated the Russian for "We'd like to order," and waved the menu around. The waiter used his chin to point at our table, indicating that there would be no ordering until Ken was back in his seat.

When the waiter finally arrived, we asked for the solyanka soup followed by chocolate blinis. But all the food came at the same time. "What's on the Menu?" described solyanka as fish soup with salted cucumbers. What was in my bowl looked thin and watery, and I could see bits of something that resembled gray cardboard floating in it.

"This looks like old dishwater," I told Ken.

"Try the blinis," he suggested, although I could see he hadn't touched his.

The blinis were rubbery. The chocolate tasted greasy and sour.

"This is going to make me sick." Ken threw his napkin on the plate of blinis where it soaked up the chocolate, leaving a greenish yellow stain.

"Let's just go."

Ken held up a finger to get the attention of a waiter who'd just brought a second bubbling bowl to the heavyset couple. He shouted, "Schyot/" (bill!) at another, who kept his face turned away from us.

"How much do you think all this was?" Ken asked.

"I don't think we should pay for it at all," I whispered, making it sound like I was telling him a secret.

A waiter stuck his head out the double doors, and Ken yelled, "Schyot!" at him.

The waiter pulled his head back without making eye contact, and a man talking into a cell phone at the next table put a finger in his free ear.

I stood up.

"Where are you going?"

"I'm leaving."

Ken looked at the door the waiter had disappeared behind, then grabbed his camera bag and followed me.

When we reached the podium, our waiter shot out of the double doors waving a small piece of paper at us. We couldn't read anything written on the bill, and there appeared to be more items than we'd ordered, but we paid it anyway—throwing thousand-ruble notes at the man who did not seem to want to touch our money.

Outside on the street, I squinted my eyes against the too-bright sun. I could see no shade, no trees—only concrete sidewalk, windowless stone buildings and streets wide enough to land an airplane on. The air was hot and smelled of exhaust from the cars that raced past us, sunlight glinting off their metal hoods.

"Where is this place we're going?" Ken asked.

I took out the map folded to the Central House of Artists.

"It's here," I pointed, "near Gorky Park."

On the map, the park appeared as an uneven green rectangle, the only green thing for miles.

We started walking to the corner, a distance that in any other city would have been broken into several blocks. The wide sidewalk was empty. No Russians with their ubiquitous plastic shopping bags hurried past us. Ken and I were the only living things on this street south of the Moskva River, and we were surrounded by concrete and metal and the white-hot sky.

"According to this, there are two museums in that building," Ken said, looking at the map. "Which one are we going to?"

"I don't know."

He stopped walking and looked at me.

"I didn't know there were two museums."

At the Central House of Artists, a woman with a bosom like a shelf sat behind thick glass. In the guidebook, the admission to the museum was listed as $6, but the sign above the woman's head put the foreigners' price closer to $10.

"Maybe we should see if this is right museum before we go in," I said.

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Ken walked up to the glass. "Soviet political posters?" he asked the woman.

"Nyet Soviet," she told him. "Nyet." And she pointed to the admission sign, as if to prove her point.

"Where did you read about this exhibit?" Ken asked me.

"In the Moscow Times."

"Did you bring the paper?"

"I left it at the hotel."

Ken pulled the phrase book out of his pocket with a little more force than was necessary and flipped through it. The woman with the large bosom sat patiently behind her glass. There was nobody else waiting to get into the museum.

"Plakat?" Ken asked, using the Russian word for poster.

The woman shrugged and shook her head, but it was unclear whether she didn't understand what he was saying, didn't have the posters, or just hadn't heard him.

"Plakat?" Ken shouted into the glass, leaving a circle of steam near where his mouth had been.

The woman pointed to the door, and I thought she might be asking us to leave because Ken had shouted at her. But then she bent her wrist, and I realized that she was telling us to go around the building.

"I think the posters are in the other museum," I told Ken.

I went out the door before he could say anything else about the newspaper.

We walked along the long stone building in the hot sun. At every corner, we'd turn, expecting to see an entrance, only to find another blank wall. There was a scratchy place at the back of my throat, and no matter how hard I swallowed, I couldn't make it go away.

Two women sat behind the glass at the museum in the back; a tall, thin one in a suit and a short, fat one in a cotton house-dress. They were seated side by side, staring straight ahead, waiting to sell admission tickets to an empty lobby.

"Soviet plakat?" Ken asked the two women.

They looked at each other as if deciding whether it was advisable to answer him.

"Posters?" he said in English.

"Da, da," said the fatter woman, reaching for our admission money.

It was hot in the museum, and dark—most of the fluorescent fixtures above our heads had either burned out or hadn't been turned on. Ken and I were the only people in the marble hall, but I had the unsettling feeling that we were not alone. All along the walls and up a curving staircase, period clothing— floor-length silk gowns, men's suits with embroidered vests— stood at attention, as if invisible people still inhabited them.

"Are these supposed to be costumes?" Ken asked me. "Clothing of the czars?" But none of the signs were in English, so I couldn't answer him.

We climbed the curved staircase, brushing past silk and velvet worn by phantoms. My throat was dry and sandpapery, and I kept looking around the folds of the skirts for a water fountain.

We could find no Soviet political posters on the second floor, only more of the eerie clothing.

"I don't know why you didn't bring the newspaper," Ken said.

"Shut up about the damn newspaper!"

I walked back to the top of the stairs. "It's too hot in here, and I want to go."

"What about the posters?" he grumbled. He was standing in front of a military uniform, and it seemed as if the bodiless soldier was annoyed with me as well.

"I don't care about the posters," I told them both. "I'm hot and I'm leaving."

Ken walked down the steps in front of me, shaking his head. "We come all this way to see the Soviet posters," he complained to a gown with a deep decolletage.

Outside the museum, we stood under harsh sun in an open courtyard. Around us lay statues of former Soviet leaders who

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had been removed from their pedestals around the city and dumped here after the last coup.

"Where to now?" Ken asked me.

"I thought we might go to Gorky Park."

"What's there?"

"Happy Russians."

He looked skeptical.

"And there's a roller coaster."

Ken refolded the map, and we started walking. The white sky pressed down on me, and the wind was hot and evil-smelling. My eyes burned and I had an oily grit on my skin that scratched my face when I rubbed at it. I thought I could see the main entrance to the park up ahead, large gates that arched over the street. But no matter how long we walked, we never seemed to get any closer.

I stopped on the broad, hot sidewalk. "I want to go back to the hotel."

"You what?" Ken had been walking with the map held out in front of him, angling it to match the streets that surrounded us.

"My throat hurts."

"But I thought we were going to Gorky Park."

"I want to go back to the hotel."

"What about the roller coaster?"

"You go if you want to."

Ken folded the map with a little slap and shoved it in his camera bag. "Where's the nearest Metro stop?"

"How the hell should I know? You have the map."

He yanked the map back out of the camera bag and handed it to me. There was a small rip across Gorky Park, as if indicating this was yet another place in Moscow that was under construction.

"We want Oktyabrskaya," I said. "Which way is that?"

Ken took back the map and flipped it around. "That way." He pointed with the folded edge.

It was rush hour. Crowds of people swarmed the Metro station; men and women, but mostly women, carrying large shopping bags from which branches of dill and pickling cucumbers protruded.

"This was bad timing," Ken mumbled, and I assumed he was blaming me for placing us in the middle of this swirling mass. But he took my hand and held it, making sure I wouldn't get away from him in the crush.

The crowd pushed us along with the force of water, while we tried to read the Cyrillic signs. More than once, we had to double back, looking for a turn we'd missed.

When we found the right platform, Ken and I forced ourselves into a northbound train. Russian people stood too close to me, their bags of groceries and polyester clothing and flesh making contact with my skin. I pressed myself against the metal pole, and my hip touched the belly of man who smelled of vodka and sweat.

I wanted to push these people away, shove them against the seats and sides of the train so they wouldn't be able to touch me. Instead I gripped the pole, using it to hold up the backpack in which I'd hidden my guidebook so I wouldn't look like a tourist.

Across from me, a woman sat with a small boy. The boy must have been six or seven years old, and he had a way of looking into the middle distance that made me think of Alex and the other children at the orphanage. His mother reminded me of the orphanage children as well. She seemed to be staring at something that existed just beyond her son's head, and there was a stillness about her that made me think of someone in a coma.

The train lurched, and the woman lifted a hand to touch her son's cheek. With a start, I saw that the back of the woman's hand was completely covered with dark hair, like the fur on the paw of a monkey or a chimpanzee.

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The boy did not react to the touch of this hairy hand. He merely blinked his eyes slowly and continued to stare into the middle distance.

At the next stop, the man who smelled of vodka and sweat was replaced by a student with a sparse blond mustache who opened a book so close to my face, I could see the Cyrillic letters covering the page: K's and C's and backwards R's that looked as if they would scratch and tear at my throat if I tried to pronounce them.

And all the while, the woman with the hairy hand stroked the boy's smooth cheek, a repetitive motion that neither of them seemed to be aware of—and I could not stop watching.

When we got off at Okhotny Ryad, a large man in a ripped windbreaker threw his arm around Ken's shoulders. "My friend!' he shouted, walking along with us. "My friend!"

I hoped the man was only drunk. There was something reckless about him that might have otherwise been craziness. People getting off the train walked wide around the three of us, at last giving me the space I'd been craving. I ran a little ahead of Ken, pulling on his hand.

"My friend!" the man repeated, slapping Ken's shoulder. "My friend!" I began to suspect it was the only English he knew.

"Yeah, yeah," Ken told him with a thin smile. "Your friend."

At the steps, the man did not want to let go of Ken's shoulder. He pushed into people, forcing them to make room so that he could walk at Ken's side. I lost my grip on Ken's hand.

"Drunk," said a voice behind my head. And I turned to see if it was someone who might help us, but I couldn't tell who in the crowd had spoken.

At the top of the stairs, Ken took the large man's hand off his shoulder. "Good-bye," he said.

"Good-bye, my friend." The man put his hand back on Ken's shoulder.

"Good-bye," Ken repeated, removing the hand once again.

And this time, when the man tried to replace it, Ken shouted, "Nyet!" startling him so that he almost fell down the stairs.

"Come on," I said, pulling Ken away from the man who seemed intent on following us.

We got onto the escalator, pushing past people who were waiting to be taken up into the light, putting their bodies between us and the large man who was shouting, "My friend! My friend!" over their heads.

At the top of the escalator, two elderly women thrust small bouquets into our faces—wilted wildflowers that were mostly weeds.

"I want to drink something," I said. And Ken and I went into Patio Pizza, into cool air that smelled of garlic and cigarette smoke.

"Vodka," I told the man behind the bar. "Very cold, without ice."

"The same," said Ken.

We drank the vodka out of tall shot glasses. Its syrupy chill coated the sharpness in my throat.

"I want another one," I told Ken, using the bottom of my glass to make wet circles on the bar.

"These two just cost us twenty-eight dollars." He held the bill in the air, balancing it on his palm.

"That's impossible."

"Fourteen dollars apiece." He dipped his hand as though demonstrating the weightiness of the amount.

"We can buy a whole bottle at a street kiosk for ten dollars."

"Let's do that." He covered the bill with ruble notes. "Let's buy a whole bottle and drink it tonight."

The kiosk outside the Intourist was out of vodka.

"That's impossible," I told Ken. Vodka was the one thing nobody in Moscow ever ran out of. But the man behind the Plexiglas window shook his head each time Ken asked, "Vodka? Wodka?" alternating between the V and the W sound, as if the proper pronunciation would conjure up a bottle.

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"There's another kiosk up near Pushkinskaya Plaza," Ken said.

"I can't walk that far."

"I'll go. You wait in the room." And he disappeared into the crowd on Tverskaya Street.

At the door to the Intourist, a man with broad shoulders stepped in front of me. All I could see were the purple buttons on his shiny shirt.

"Hotel card!" he barked.

I reached into my backpack for the small paper card that proved I was a guest. A tampon fell out and rolled across the floor. I bent to pick it up, and the man snapped his fingers, impatient for the card that was in my hand. When I gave it to him, he held it close to his nose, sniffing it. Then he turned it over, though I was certain there wasn't anything written on the other side.

The man gave the card back and did not step aside. I had to walk around his large bulk to get into the hotel.

Our room smelled of ammonia and pine. I found a bottle of water in the half refrigerator and drank it standing by the window. The sky over the Kremlin was dirty white, and I could hear the throbbing of the big machines carving out the shopping mall beneath Red Square. I took off my shoes, clogs that had left black dye across the tops of my feet, and lay back on the scratchy cushions of the couch. There wasn't enough room for me to stretch out, and I rested my head on the edge of the corner table.

Ken and I had tried to love Russia for Alex's sake. Each afternoon, we headed out with the pages of our guidebook folded over to mark the sights we thought we should see. Every night, I planned the outing for the next day.

"Let's walk along the Boulevard Ring," I'd suggest. "The guidebook calls it leafy and pleasant. It says that people go there to play musical instruments."

And the next afternoon, we walked the entire curved length

of the Boulevard Ring. "How nice and shady it is here," we told each other. "Isn't the man with the violin wonderful?" Never once did we mention that the Boulevard Ring was nothing more than a narrow strip of weeds and dirt squeezed between two automobile-choked highways, or that the man with the violin was accompanied by six filthy children with unwashed palms.

We'd made it a point to go out every day, telling each other that we needed to see Russia. And we prided ourselves on not being like the other families we'd heard about—families who hid in their translators' apartments, coming out only to eat at Pizza Hut or the McDonald's at Pushkinskaya Plaza.

I heard a door slam somewhere down the hall, and sat up. Ken had been gone a long time, and I imagined that the man from the Metro had found him, the man who'd called him "my friend," and wouldn't let go of his shoulder. I'd been alone in foreign cities before, but I didn't think I could be alone in this one.

I went to the window and pressed my forehead against the glass, looking down on the bobbing heads of the people walking along Manezhnaya Ploshad below. Ken had gone in the opposite direction, but I continued to study this street, thinking I might be able to tell from the way people were moving here whether there was trouble around the corner.

I was still at the window when Ken came back.

"Where were you?"

"I had to go up past McDonald's." He was holding a bottle filled with bright yellow liquid.

"What's that?"

"Limonaya."

"Limonaya isn't yellow."

He put the bottle near my face and pointed to a lopsided lemon that had been drawn on the label. "It's got lemons in it."

"Lemon-flavored vodka is clear," I told him.

"And the last time you had lemon vodka was . . . ?"

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He turned his back to me and opened the small refrigerator, banging the flat of his hand on the side of the metal freezer.

"Stop smacking that thing."

"I'm trying to get the ice out."

"Don't bother, I'm not having any."

He yanked out a plastic ice tray and twisted the ends as if he were strangling it.

"I'm going out to get some real vodka." I put on my shoes and grabbed my backpack, knocking a lampshade askew so the bare bulb shone on me like a spotlight. Yanking open the door, I stood between the room and the hall that smelled of old cigarettes. "I can't believe you're gone for half an hour and you couldn't even—"

"It was fifteen minutes."

"A simple bottle of vodka—how could you screw that up?"

He threw two misshapen ice cubes into a glass. "I thought you would like limonaya."

"That's not limonaya."

"What does it say on the bottle?" He jabbed at the label with his finger.

"Limonaya isn't yellow."

"It . . . has . . . lemons . . . in . . . it."

"It's supposed to be clear."

"How can it be clear if it has lemons in it?"

"That is so stupid."

"Oh, I'm stupid?"

"I didn't say—"

He slammed his glass down, spraying the window with yellow droplets. "I wasn't the one who couldn't remember the damn newspaper."

I threw my backpack at him. The guidebook was still inside, and it hit the wall next to Ken's head with a heavy thud.

Ken pounded on the refrigerator, startling the motor into life. "Don't you ever throw anything at me again!"

I slammed the door. "What are you going to do?" I shouted. "Hit me?"

"Stop screaming—you'll lose your voice."

I forced out a ragged scream that went silent in the upper registers, like someone switching off a radio in the middle of a song.

"You're going to permanently damage your vocal cords."

I screamed at him again, liking the idea of permanent damage. "I hate this place!"

"It was your idea to leave the Radisson, I didn't—"

"No. I hate this country! I hate this country, and I hate these people!"

Ken looked at me as if saying I hated these people was the same as saying I hated Alex.

I knew I should stop, but it was like the burst of breath you can't hold back after staying underwater too long. "All we want to do is take one of their children out of an orphanage that's only going to dump him on the street at sixteen, and instead of helping us, they ignore us in restaurants and charge us too much for things and refuse to sign our papers so we can get the hell out of here!"

My voice had begun to give out, removing the volume from every other word and making the rest sound hoarse and layered.

Ken stood at the window, using his finger to connect the drops of yellow vodka. I could hear the hum of the refrigerator and the pounding of the underground machines.

"I hate it here, too," he said, flattening his palm on the glass and smearing the vodka into a yellowish curve. "I hate the disgusting food and this filthy city and the people who despise us."

He bent down and picked up my backpack, set it on the dresser. "I especially hated that restaurant today."

"The green chocolate."

"The gray soup."

"The waiters who kept pretending we weren't there."

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He sat on the little refrigerator.

"How about the woman on the Metro? With the hairy hand?"

He shut his eyes and waved the image away, as if the woman had suddenly raised the hand in front of him.

"How is that?" I pointed to his glass which was now tinted yellow around the rim.

"A little like Gatorade."

He got another glass from the bathroom, filled it with ice and limonaya, and brought it to me. The drink left a taste in my mouth like something artificially sweetened.

We sat together on the scratchy sofa, drinking yellow vodka until it got dark. When the bottle was empty, Ken made up unflattering songs about the Russians and sang them to me. I laughed soundlessly, and videotaped him dancing in front of the windows, the golden domes of the Assumption Cathedral behind him, the Turks laboring beneath the cobblestones of Red Square below.

The Finnish Kidnapping Plan

"Have you heard anything about our papers?" Ken asked.

Yuri was leaning against the little refrigerator, folding and refolding his arms. "I will tell you when papers are signed," he said.

"Do you have any idea when that'll be?"

"I do not know."

Volodya paced in the corner, turning to glare out the window every minute or so, as though expecting an attack to come from behind. Anna perched primly on the edge of the dresser, studying her fingers. Ken and I sat on the couch, unwilling to share the brown cushions with any of the Russians.

"What's the name of the person who's supposed to sign our papers?" Ken asked.

"He is in office of mayor."

"What's his name?"

Yuri unfolded his arms.

"Is it Olga Tokareva?" Ken asked. "A woman?"

Yuri thrust himself off the refrigerator. "Where did you hear that name?"

"From an American journalist at Business Week."

After the hairy hand on the Metro and the yellow vodka, Ken and I had begun making phone calls. I started with Maggie, telephoning at all hours until I reached her.

"I want to call the U.S. Embassy," I told her. "Do you know anybody there?"

"You can't call them. It might cause an international incident."

"I'm just going to see if they can help us get our papers signed."

"Promise me you won't call them."

"All right." I hung up and called the embassy.

"We can't really make the Russians do anything," said the man from the embassy, surprising me since I'd always believed the American embassy could make anybody do anything. "All we can do is ask when they're likely to sign, but the answer won't really mean anything."

After that we called Kate and asked her to get in touch with anybody who might know someone in Moscow. The number of the journalist from Business Week had come from her.

"Let me see what I can find out," said the journalist. And the next day he called back with the name of Olga Tokareva. "That's who signs the papers, but I'm afraid we don't have any contacts in that office."

"Olga Tokareva carries the papers," Yuri insisted. He mimed her duties, holding his hands flat and transporting imaginary papers between Volodya and Anna. "She does not sign." He slapped his flattened hands together. "Korobchenko signs."

"Korobchenko?" asked Ken.

"Tokareva carries. Korobchenko signs."

"I want you to call over there." Ken held out a piece of paper with the phone number the journalist had given us.

"Anybody cannot call there," Yuri told him.

"The journalist from Business Week did."

Volodya had stopped pacing. He placed his body between Yuri and the phone number.

"I tell you, Korobchenko signs."

"Let's make sure."

Yuri grabbed the paper out of Ken's hand with a snap and punched the numbers on the hotel telephone.

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"Alio" Yuri said, and began to speak very fast in Russian. I thought Anna might translate this for us, but she was occupied with pushing back her cuticles.

"It is as I say." Yuri slammed the receiver. "Korobchenko signs."

He brushed his hands together and marched to the door. Vol-odya followed close behind him.

"There's something else," Ken said.

Yuri turned around before he had a chance to compose his face, to soften the brutal planes that must always lie beneath the surface.

"The driver and the translator, do we pay for them separately?" Ken asked.

"No. Is part of fee."

"The driver and the translator are included in the $10,000?"

"Yes. Included."

"So they don't cost anything extra?"

"No extra."

Yuri turned away, reached a hand toward the door.

"Then we want to go to the orphanage twice a day," Ken told him.

"Twice?" Yuri's outstretched hand slapped down on his thigh.

"Two times." Ken held up two fingers.

Yuri glared at Anna.

"But Grisha must take his nap," she murmured, clutching her small square purse.

"We'll go in the morning before he naps, and come back after he wakes up."

It had occurred to us that the more we used the driver and the translator, the more we would cost Yuri. And the more we cost Yuri, the sooner he would want us to leave.

"I do not think orphanage will allow it."

"We'll ask them tomorrow."

"Perhaps I cannot come every day." Anna rubbed a smudge from the shiny surface of her purse.

"I'm sure you have other translators," Ken said to Yuri.

Air exploded out of Yuri's mouth. Volodya stood in the middle of the room, making fists.

"OK, two times," Yuri told him.

"Starting tomorrow."

Yuri clawed at the brownish stubble that grew in patches on his face. "Fine. Yes. Tomorrow."

He charged out the door, letting it close on Volodya.

Anna hooked her square purse in the crook of her elbow. "Good-bye," she said, nodding politely. Then she let herself out.

Since I'd come to Moscow, Anna had spent most of her time telling me the things I couldn't do for Alex. "The orphanage decides what Grisha will eat," she said, when I told her I didn't want Irina cracking a raw egg into his soup. "Only the orphanage can give him medicine," she informed me, when I wanted to give Alex a children's vitamin shaped like a jungle animal. "Grisha is allowed to wear only the orphanage clothes," she insisted, the day I wanted to take Alex out of the stained pajamas he'd been wearing for a week and dress him in the overalls I'd brought with me. After a while, I began to feel less like Alex's mother, and more like a troublesome bystander, afraid even to take down the stacking blocks and teach him about big, bigger, biggest.

But after the day we made Yuri call the office of Olga To-kareva, I was no longer willing to go on being Alex's observer. And the next morning, when I lifted him over the pink and white railings, I decided that the orphanage didn't get to determine whether I was Alex's mother.

Over the past weeks, I'd watched as Irina measured shoes against Olya's feet, then showed her how to walk across the room, calling her Olysbka and jiggling her arms for encouragement. Olya was the only child Irina did this for, so she was the only child who was even close to walking. The other children, including Alex, stayed in the big playpen, clinging to the railings or each other when they wanted to stand upright.

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Now, I carried Alex over to a communal pile of fabric-covered shoes and chose a pair, measuring them against the bottom of his feet before slipping them on over his footed pajamas.

Then, I held both of Alex's hands and pulled him to his feet. Together, we walked across the room, his arms in the air like someone being robbed.

"Videotape us," I said to Ken. He'd been bringing the camera to the orphanage every day, but had stopped recording anything. "I'm showing Alex how to walk."

Ken lay on the floor and pointed the camera up at Alex, who was walking without bending his knees, putting his full weight into every step. "He looks a little like Frankenstein from down here."

Alex could not keep his eyes off the shoes, which had purple and blue circles on the toes. The plastic radio that was always left on was playing a program of parade music—rousing anthems of heroism and victory to accompany a small boy in terry-cloth pajamas walking across the floor of an orphanage.

When Alex's weight began to feel lighter in my hands, I led him to one of the cribs along the wall and let him wrap his fingers around the bars. Stepping back, I knelt against the pink and white railings of the playpen. Behind me, I could feel the soft touch of Olya grabbing onto one of my belt loops.

"Come," I said to Alex, clapping my hands and holding them out in the space between us. "Walk to me."

Alex looked at my hands, then down at the purple and blue shoes. He let go of the bars and stood swaying, like someone in a shaky boat.

"C'mon," I coaxed, "you can do it."

He leaned his upper body out over the carpet and released the bars, hurling himself in staccato steps that propelled him past my hands to the railings of the playpen. He wound up face to face with Olya, who seemed surprised to see him.

"You did it, Alex! You did it!" shouted Ken. The forgotten video camera around his neck taped his own feet dancing.

"Horoshy malchick, Grishka," Irina said. She'd been watching us from the table where she was changing diapers, an activity she performed according to a schedule instead of when the children needed it. "Horoshy malchick." It was an expression that had been on the list we'd gotten from Maggie. It meant "good boy."

Irina knelt on the carpet across from Alex. Go away, I wanted to tell her. This is mine.

"Preytee, Grishka, preytee," she urged. And she held out her hands to him.

Alex let go of the railings and took three forward-tilting steps into Irina's grasp.

"Good boy," I said. "Good boy, Alex."

Alex turned to look at me, and there was something different about his face. I thought it might be the walking, that perhaps each new skill he learned would change his appearance in some way. But then I realized he was smiling, and that I'd never seen it before.

Ken crouched beside me, and Olya grabbed onto his belt loop with her other hand.

"Come here, Alex," he said. "Walk to Daddy." It was the first time Ken had referred to himself this way, and it was as strange as if he'd suddenly decided to call himself Bob.

Alex looked at Ken and wrinkled his forehead.

"Come on," Ken coaxed. He fluttered his fingers in the air.

Irina gave Alex a small shove, and he took a couple of heavy-footed steps toward Ken. The moment he was within reach, Ken scooped him up and spun him around, the video camera squashed between them.

Irina rose, pulling up on her ankle socks.

"Preytee," she told me, repeating the word she'd used to call Alex to her. "Preytee," she said to Anna, who'd been sitting at the Formica table holding the girl with the misshapen mouth.

We followed Irina to a metal closet. She spoke in rapid Russian.

"Irina say she think you come to orphanage for so many days

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because you cannot decide if you should take Grisha," Anna translated. "She think you do not know if you want him."

The idea that I might not want Alex was so incomprehensible, Anna might have still been speaking Russian.

"No, no." I shook my head. "You have to tell her that's not true."

"I explain you are waiting for papers to be signed."

"Yes, yes." I nodded at Irina. "Papers."

Irina opened the closet door and pointed inside. Neatly folded on the bottom shelf were the clothes we'd brought to Moscow four months earlier—the navy sweatshirt with the word GAP on it, the ski parka that had blue fur around the hood.

"Irina save these for you," Anna explained. "In case you will come back."

I bent down and placed my hand on the knitted hat that had made Alex's head look like a blueberry.

"Spasebah," I said into the closet, not wanting Irina to see me cry over a pile of folded clothes. I felt her hand on my shoulder, a touch as light and unannounced as Olya grabbing my belt loops.

"Oh yes, I know Anna," Elena said, wrinkling her lips. "I do not think her English is so good."

Elena had big thighs that overflowed the child-sized bench we were siting on, and orangey hair that sprang out from her large head. She was Yuri's other translator.

"Anna keeps telling us she doesn't know what's going to happen to adoptions after the election," Ken told her.

Elena shook her head.

"She makes us nervous."

I shifted Alex to my other knee. He was wearing a baseball cap decorated with an inaccurate copy of Donald Duck.

Elena made a clicking noise, echoing the locusts in the trees above her.

Ken and I were taking Alex outside almost every day now.

At first, Anna hadn't wanted to ask Irina for this privilege.

"Is not allowed," she told us. "Irina will say no."

"Just ask her," Ken demanded.

And when she saw that we would not stop insisting, she made the request.

"Irina say you must keep Grisha clean," Anna told us. "You cannot let him get dirt on clothes. And you must wipe bottom of yout shoes when you come in after."

It was the middle of June and the temperature was in the low eighties. Yet Irina always buttoned a sweater over Alex's terry-cloth pajamas and tied one of the orphanage hats under his chin before she would let him outside. At the bottom of the stairs, Ken and I would take off the sweater and the hat and drape them over the handlebars of the tricycles that were never taken out.

Now, Elena followed us around the orphanage grounds, trailing us from a beached boat covered with splinters, to a little swimming pool filled with colored balls. Ken and I sat with Alex on a dusty log. Elena squeezed her hips between us. We watched two girls and a boy playing on a rusted slide.

"There are only three children in this group?" I asked Elena.

"They are the oldest ones," she said, and I guessed the children to be seven or eight years old.

The girls wore cotton dresses that blew up around their skinny legs as they came down the slide. Each time they got to the bottom, the boy would reach out his hand and help them make the little jump to the ground. Then he'd turn, laughing, and race them to the ladder. His face seemed to have the sun shining out of it, and his smile was startling in this shabby yard where even the trees in full leaf seemed sick at the root.

"These children will never be adopted," Elena told us. "They are too old." And she waved a dismissive hand at the boy and the two girls.

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I thought about taking the boy with the luminous smile just to spite her. Considered bringing him home and letting him help teach Alex to jump off a slide. But I wanted to be done with Russia and Yuri. And I knew that Yuri would demand another $10,000 for this boy Elena thought too old to adopt.

Yuri and Volodya came out of the orphanage building carrying kitchen knives. They laughed as they slashed at big cardboard boxes that had been left in the gravel driveway.

We'd been surprised to see Volodya's shiny car pull up in front of the Intourist this morning, surprised to find Yuri smoking in the front seat. Most days now, we were driven by Alexander in his battered Fiat.

"You must take Metro back from orphanage," Yuri had said, when we climbed into the back seat. "Today I go to see about your papers."

Now he stood with Volodya on the orphanage grounds, opening boxes of brand-new lawn furniture; chairs and loungers in bright summer colors, with backs that reclined.

The director of the orphanage stood beside them, leaning her white-coated body toward Yuri and pulling on the pieces of short brown hair that lay against her cheeks. She was surrounded by other white-coated women, the ones I thought of as the orphanage's elite. I'd never seen any of these women pick up a child, or carry a tray of the mashed-together food. The only one who ever seemed to come upstairs was the doctor, a woman with a sharp V creased into her forehead. Whenever she'd pass through the room with the big playpen, Alex would hide behind my legs.

Volodya dragged out a round-bellied barbecue and began dropping black briquettes into it.

"What's going on?" Ken asked Elena.

"Is celebration."

"A Russian holiday?"

"For lawn furniture."

I rested my chin on the top of Alex's head shut my eyes.

Janis Cooke Newman 185

"Do not worry," Elena said to me. "Yuri will get your child."

I smiled into her large features.

"And if not this one"—she raised a hand to point at Alex— "he will get you another one." Her raised hand flicked in the direction of some children playing on the swings.

I didn't think I'd heard her correctly. Didn't think it was possible she could have held out this comfort and then taken it away so quickly.

Elena opened her wide mouth in a smile. "Other family Yuri work with, there is trouble with papers. So Yuri say, 'Forget this child, I get you different little boy.' " She nodded her large head. "Yuri always get children for his families."

I wrapped my arms around Alex's chest, pulling him so close the brim of his duck hat pressed against my throat. "I want you to leave," I said to Elena.

She looked confused, and her gaze turned inward, as if searching for an alternate meaning for the English words. "But I tell you this story to help you. So you understand that Yuri will not let you leave without child."

I stood and walked away from her, taking Alex into a wooden playhouse with a swan carved into the roofline. Through the playhouse window, I could see Elena talking to Ken, her hands pressed together as though begging him for something.

"Don't you understand?" he was shouting at her. "This is the last thing we want to hear from you!"

Ken turned away from her, and Elena walked across the weedy little yard toward Yuri and the white-coated women. She spoke to Yuri, pointing to Ken and me in the playhouse with her man-sized hands. Yuri did not seem to care that we were sending his translator away. He just shrugged at Elena and turned back to the little orphanage director.

Elena trudged slowly up the gravel drive. She turned back once to look into the playhouse before going through the metal gate.

Ken and I stayed in the playhouse until the woman in charge

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of the three-year-olds shouted at them, making them leap from the swings and scramble to be first, so they could hold onto one of her fingers. Then we knew it was time to bring Alex inside for his nap.

When we left the orphanage, Volodya was spraying lighter fluid on the charcoal, making the flames rise up near the overhanging branches of a tree. Above the fire, the heat distortion made his face appear liquid, as if it were about to melt and change shape. The white-coated women still hovered around Yuri, pale planets circling a dark sun. He pretended to stick his hand in the fire, holding it just above the flames and making the orphanage director cover her mouth with alarm. Someone had brought out the radio from the tearoom and turned up the volume. Russian folk music blared across the little yard.

As we walked past, Yuri held up his big gold watch, pointing to the face and nodding, as if to let us know he was keeping track of the time.

Ken and I ate lunch at Patio Pizza next door to the Intourist, because the menu was in English and we'd given up on Russian restaurants. Then we took the Metro back to the orphanage, scrutinizing the shopping bags on the laps of the other passengers if they looked large enough to contain something the size and shape of a bomb.

Near the orphanage, music and the smell of burning meat floated over the high stone wall. When we came through the metal gate, we saw Yuri stretched out on one of the new lounge chairs. He was drinking vodka from a bottle.

"Son of a bitch," Ken said, making Volodya look up.

Volodya was resting on the lounger beside Yuri. He'd kept the reclining back upright, I supposed to prove he was still on duty. The white-coated women sat around them, sipping what looked like vodka from the same porcelain teacups Alex took his juice in.

When Yuri saw us, he sprang out of the chair and shoved the bottle at Volodya.

"I go!" he shouted, giving Volodya a violent wave behind his back. "I go to check on your papers!"

Volodya ran to the car, the vodka bottle still in his hand. Yuri stood in front of us, wiping his brow. There was a dark smear of burned meat at the corner of his mouth.

"What the hell are you doing here?" Ken shouted at him.

"Is plenty of time," Yuri said, once again showing us the face of his gold watch.

Volodya backed his shiny car down the driveway, spraying gravel on the new lawn furniture.

"Good-bye," Yuri yelled as he climbed into Volodya's car. "Good-bye," he shouted as they sped out the gate.

"Son of a bitch," Ken repeated to the white-coated women. They stared back at him with baffled looks.

That night we packed our things. We were leaving the Intourist. In the morning, we'd move into Anna's apartment behind the old KGB headquarters. Anna was leaving for Spain on vacation, and her daughter was studying in France. For half of what we were paying at the Intourist, we could stay in her apartment. "You will like it," she assured us. "It has been in my family from before the revolution."

I threw a pair of jeans on the bed. Stitched inside the fly was the Cyrillic H the Intourist laundry had put there: H for the N in Newman. I packed the jeans on top of the child-sized overalls and T-shirts that had been moved from the Radisson to the Intourist, and were now going to Anna's prerevolutionary apartment. The small clothes looked flattened, as though they'd become a permanent part of the suitcase's lining.

"I think we should tell Yuri that for every day he doesn't get our papers signed, we're taking $100 off the money we owe him," I told Ken.

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"Can we do that?"

"What can he do to us? He wants his money."

"But Yuri can't make anybody sign."

"Not if he's at the orphanage drinking vodka."

"You think it'll work?"

"It's the only thing I can think of."

Ken tugged on the sleeve of the linen shirt he'd been wearing every night to dinner. "OK."

And he called the number we had for Yuri's wife.

"This . . . is . . . Ken . . . Newman," Ken said into the phone, the space between each word making the information sound weighted and portentous.

On the other end, I could hear a shrill voice repeating, "Da, da, da" —little bursts of assurance that the speaker knew who Ken was.

"Yuri pazvanyet," he said, using the Russian for "to telephone." "Tonight," he said in English, because our phrase book didn't have a translation for that word.

"Tell her it doesn't matter what time it is."

"Even if it is late."

Excited Russian poured out of the receiver.

"What's she saying?"

"How should I know?"

Ken spoke into her stream of words. "Tell him to call us tonight. Pazvanyet."

Yuri's wife was talking very fast, barely giving herself time to breathe.

"OK?" Ken asked.

Another string of "Da, da, da," flowed out of the phone.

Spasebah, he said into it, and hung up.

"Do you think he'll call us tonight?" I asked Ken.

"If not tonight, then tomorrow."

But tomorrow was Friday, the last day our papers could be signed before Sunday's election. And just today, the Moscow Times

had said that Gennady Zyuganov, the Communist candidate, could become the next president.

"Children who grow up in orphanages are put on the street at sixteen," Maggie had told me.

"Then what happens to them?"

"The girls become prostitutes."

"And the boys?"

"They wind up in jail or dead."

I touched the small flattened clothes at the bottom of my suitcase.

"How far are we from Finland?" I asked Ken.

"Where?"

"Didn't Yuri say he drove there once to pick up a car?"

I flipped through the pages of the guidebook, looking for a map. "We can take Alex there. Cross the border."

"What're you talking about?"

"Here it is. Just past St. Petersburg." I measured the mileage with my fingers. "Less than 200 kilometers."

Ken stood beside the suitcase with the wrinkled shirts in his hand. "We can't just take Alex out of the orphanage."

"We bring him outside every day and nobody watches us. If we left right away, we'd have two, maybe three hours before anyone would even know we were gone."

"What about the guard at the gate?"

"He's not there half the time."

"But how are we going to get to Finland?"

"We rent a car and park it around the corner from the orphanage."

"But we don't have any papers for Alex. Who are we going to say he is?"

"When we get to the border, we'll put him in the trunk."

"Are you crazy?"

"Just until we get across."

"What if he cries?"

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"Why do I have to think of everything?" I threw a balled-up pile of underwear at him. "You could help, too."

"I am. I'm thinking of what could go wrong."

"Cough syrup," I said, suddenly remembering the bottle of children's cough syrup we'd brought to help Alex sleep on the flight home. "We'll give him cough syrup before we get to the border."

"Then what?"

"Then we go to the U.S. Embassy and get them to help us."

Ken sank into the bed. "When are you thinking of doing this?"

"The election's Sunday."

"Do you really think it would work?"

I sat beside him. Now that Ken had started to believe in the Finnish kidnapping plan, it sounded stupid and risky.

"I think we could get to Finland," I said. "And I think there's a good chance we can get across the border. But I just don't know what the embassy will do once we get there."

I started picking up the underwear.

"Why don't we wait and see what happens on Sunday," he said.

I nodded and tossed him some boxer shorts. But I was thinking, if adoptions were stopped, I knew it wouldn't matter how stupid and risky the Finnish kidnapping plan was.

We'd finished packing and were just leaving the room to go to dinner when the phone rang.

"It might be Yuri." I picked up the receiver.

"This is Anna. There is good news for you."

Who is it? Ken mouthed.

"Yuri's wife has telephoned me. Your papers have been signed."

"Is it Yuri?" Ken tapped his fingers on the base of the phone. "What's he saying?"

I couldn't think what to tell him first.

"It's Anna." I put my hand over the mouthpiece.

"You have heard me?" Anna asked. "The umm . . . signature came today."

"Tell her about the ultimatum," Ken said, "about the $100."

"Our papers have been signed." I felt a shiver like an unexpected breeze blowing across wet skin.

"What?" Ken yanked on the cord, almost pulling the receiver off my ear.

"Yuri's wife, she try to tell Ken, earlier when he call."

"Did you talk to Yuri?" I asked Anna.

"No. Yuri is at party."

"Tell him to call us tonight."

"It will be late. After midnight, I think."

"I don't care."

"All right. So, now you are happy, yes?"

I felt I was poised on the edge of being happy.

"Just have Yuri call us." I hung up.

"So our papers are really signed?" Ken asked.

"That's what Yuri's wife said."

He grabbed both my arms. "That means we could take him tomorrow. Bring him with us to Anna's."

We smiled at each other with clenched teeth, the way you do when something is too good.

"Do you think it's true?" I asked him.

"It could be."

"Anna didn't talk to Yuri, just his wife."

"You think she doesn't really know?"

I shrugged.

"When is he supposed to call?"

"Sometime after midnight."

Ken looked out the dirty Intourist window to where it was still light over the Kremlin.

We walked to a Spanish restaurant that was hot and noisy and full of foreigners. The restaurant had splashes of bright pink

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paint on the walls, like someone had thown Pepto-Bismol there, and served pitchers of sangria that cost thirty dollars.

Gypsies with guitars played music and danced between the crowded tables. The men wore bright shirts with food stains on the bottoms of their full sleeves. The women had multicolored scarves tied around their hair, and smudges of mascara beneath their eyes.

"Should we get the sangria?" Ken asked me. "To celebrate?"

"I don't know."

"Our papers could be signed. They probably are."

"Then let's get it."

And when the waiter came by, Ken ordered the sangria with a sweep of his arm that made it seem he was buying pitchers for the entire restaurant.

The sangria was purple, like the wine we'd drunk in Boston the night my mother died.

"Should we toast?" Ken held up his wine glass. It had slices of orange and lemon floating in it.

I touched the stem of my glass. One of the gypsies pounded his feet behind my chair, and it sounded like bursts of machine-gun fire.

"Do you think Yuri's wife would lie because she knows we're mad at him?" I asked.

"It's possible."

"And maybe tomorrow Yuri'll say it was a mistake, that his wife was wrong?"

The gypsy circled our table. His stamping feet vibrated the slice of orange in my glass

"That probably won't happen," Ken said.

"You think we'll be able to take him tomorrow?"

"I think so."

The gypsy clapped his hands over our sangria. Sweat was dripping off his forehead. "Hey!" he shouted at us.

"Let's toast," I said.

Ken touched his glass to mine.

I drank the purple wine, hoping that tomorrow I wouldn't have to think of myself in this hot. noisy restaurant, clapping along with a gypsy and toasting nothing with expensive sangria.

We sat up in the room, waiting for Yuri to call. "He's not calling tonight," I said at 2:00. Tin taking a sleeping pill." And I fell asleep with the corner of the book on Buddhism pressed up against my cheek.