Ukraine: A Real Knockout (cont.)

The plastic donuts fascinated her.

I took photo after photo while she placed the donuts, in the wrong order, medium sized donut first, large donut next, sideways, smallest and then, on top, fitting very loosely, the next to smallest donut. Once she had the donuts in place she never gave them another look.

Sherry reached her hands out to get Luba to dance with her. Luba took her hands and then just stood there. Sherry tried to do a polka around the room, lifting Luba high off the ground after every turn. Luba’s legs flew out backward, her dress rose with the wind, revealing her baggie diaper underneath. She never smiled, never fought back. She just rolled her head back and watched the ceiling pass in circles. I have video footage of all of this.

On the way back to the place we were staying we talked with Irina, our translator.

“She is little girl,” Irina told us, “She has lived whole life in orphan home. She has not seen a dog, has not seen a cat. She does not know who you are or why you are at.” Irina paused. “Orphan home. You will see, tomorrow she will be different.”

We were sitting in the back of a beat up van. Instead of a backseat, Sherry and I sat on a large piece of foam that had been placed over a wooden bench nailed in place where the backseat should have been. Every time we took a turn, we braced against the wall to keep from falling backward. Irina faced us, sitting in a kitchen chair that had been screwed to the floor of the van.

Sherry was concerned that Luba’s passivity meant something else. I knew she was concerned because as we left the orphanage she kept repeating, “Idon’tknow. Idon’tknow.” She said the phrase like it was one, three syllable word, squeezing all the words together.

You are worried, I can tell,” Irina continued. “See, I am right. I knows you. I knows how Americans are.”

“We are just worried,” I said, trying to both answer our questions and prod Sherry into articulating her vague fears, in case she had some intuition I wanted to know about.

“I knows that.”

“We are worried she has fetal alcohol syndrome.”

“I know that. All Americans worry about fetal alcohol. I don’t knows why you do, but you do. All Americans think we don’t do nothing but drink vodka in Ukraine. But what can I do?” She shrugged her shoulders in a mock comic gesture.

“It is just that our doctor.”

“Your doctor? Who? Who is your doctor?”

In fact, before we left for Ukraine we had hurriedly contacted two doctors, one in Chicago who specialized in foreign adopted children, and another in New York who called herself ‘The Orphan Doctor’, a name that sounded at once pompous and foolish to me, as if she were the only doctor in the US who ministered to orphans. I took out the paperwork the New York doctor had sent me.

“Oh,” Irina said, pulling the papers from my hands, “The Orphan Doctor.”

“You know her.”

“Oh, yes. I tells you, Jack,” Irina pronounced my name as if it was spelled with an extra four Js at the beginning, “We knows the Orphan Doctor. She makes her money scaring American.” Irina was grinning as she said this. “Luba does not have fetal alcohol. I knows that. But I can show you little children who do, if you like, and you will see.”

“But we aren’t just worried about fetal alcohol,” I paused, not sure whether to continue. We are also worried about–“

“What, Jack, what? What are you afraid of?”

“I don’t know.”

“You don’t know. They don’t know. I don’t know, too. You are nervous. Is normal. Every parent is nervous.”

We agreed we were just being nervous parents and gave Irina permission to begin the paperwork for the adoption.

“Now are you sure. I wants you to be sure.”

I squeezed Sherry’s hand. It was as sweaty as mine. She smiled softly. I nodded. “Yes, we are sure.”

The adoption would take a week, Irina explained, and would involve lots of visits to lots of Ukrainian bureaucrats, each of whom had his or her own stamp to put on the document. The process could be stopped at anytime. Irina did not tell us that, but we knew that was true because the American agency told us that, adding that at each step of the way a bureaucrat had to be convinced it was okay for a foreigner to take away a Ukrainian child. Usually it took a gift to convince, the more important the bureaucrat, the most impressive the gift.

“Well, can we go to the internet café?”

“Yes, yes, after dinner, you take a nap, and then we go to internet café.”

As she told us this we were pulling into the courtyard of the high rise apartment building we were staying in. The building was part of a complex of grey, concrete buildings, with wide, scary cracks in the exterior, patched, if that is the right word, with what looked like little squirts of tar.

A bunch of kids, they could have been any age between 14 and 28, were hanging out near the small dumpster, overflowing with garbage. They wore torn shirts and jeans. The guys looked like they had spent the last three days in them. The women were much more artful about their rips, slashing knees just so, ripping the t-shirts so that they hung loose at the shoulders and didn’t completely cover their midriffs.

Irina pushed the up button and somewhere in the building, an elevator motor groaned to life.
When the elevator arrived the light was out inside. Irina stepped in first, hit the right button and then waved us in.

The elevator suddenly jolted to a stop and just when I was mapping out a plan of what to do for the next twelve hours while we waited for a repair man the door slid open, revealing a tiny, dimly light hallway, reeking of mildew and onions and boiling potatoes.

For dinner, our hostess told Irina to tell us she had something special that “would make us look for home.”

“Look for home?” I repeated, a tincture of satire in my voice.

“You knows. Look for home return soon. This dinner will make you think about your homes.”

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