June 3, 2005.  3:25 p.m.  Detroit Metro Airport

When I got home from school, Melva, my mother-in-law, was waiting to drive us to the airport.  Loaded up the car and drove in.  Aran kept asking, “Are we in Ukraine?”  It was very cute.  I didn’t like leaving him, to tell the truth.  I hope he doesn’t get too upset once it sinks in that Mama and Daddy aren’t coming back for a long time.  Many hugs good-bye.  Melva took a lot of pictures.  We set off to the airport, feeling like we were setting off on an adventure.

I should have known better.  I subscribe to the idea that an adventure is someone else having a perfectly horrible time while you’re sitting at home in a comfy chair.  Is your chair comfy?  Then keep reading.

At checkin, the clerk gave us heart attacks.  She looked at our Ukraine visas and said, “Your visas have expired.”

Not a good thing to hear.  Kala said that was impossible--they were good for six months and we’d gotten them back in February.

“Well,” the clerk said, “it says here ‘Valid until 01-08-5.  It expired in January.”

I looked at it and blinked.  “N-o-o-o,” I said slowly.  “It’s European dating.  They expire in August.”  Dummy, I added mentally.  You’d think a  clerk working the international terminal would know better.

Made our way through the security check without incident or extra searching, then headed for the Fountain.  The Fountain is the centerpiece of the MacNamara terminal.  Streams of water arc from the rim of a black marble base to the center.  The arcs sometimes spurt and leap in patterns or at random.  They look a bit like leaping dolphins in an Esther Whatsername water musical.  There we met Sarah, who was flying out to England half an hour before our plane was leaving for Amsterdam.  We had supper at a suprisingly reasonable Coney Island, “dropped” Sarah off at her terminal, proceeded to our own gate and killed time by browsing in the shops.

Eventually we boarded our flight--and got pretty ticked off.  Stupid ticket agent had separated Kala and me.  I spent much time standing in the aisle, hoping for a vacant seat that would allow us to switch things around.  By sheer luck, there was one vacant seat on the entire flight that allowed Kala’s seatmate to switch into it and let me sit with her.

Okay, good.  Ready to go.

And then the delays began.  The captain announced a de-icer part had to be replaced.  We’d be delayed about half an hour.  Then something else needed doing; I don’t remember what.  This delayed us so much that the flight route had to be reworked.  It was lengthened, which meant we had to add more fuel, causing yet another delay.  We sat on the plane for two and a half hours and were going to miss our connection in Amsterdam.  We’d left our cell phones at home and had no way to contact our agency so they could contact the people who were going to meet us at the airport in Kyiv.  Had a bad moment when we thought we didn’t have emergency contact information for the adoption agency, but it turned up.

Before we go any further, let me pause here to say how much I loathe, despise, and revile Northwest Air.  I’ve never in my life had a flight with them that wasn’t delayed, canceled, or otherwise screwed up.

We’re still waiting for takeoff.

 

June 5, 2005, 9:15 a.m., Kyiv

The adventure continued.

We finally took off.  The flight itself, while long, went uneventfully.  We were told via loudspeaker to find a transfer desk and the clerks would reroute those of us who’d missed our connecting flights.

When we landed and deplaned, luggage in hand, a representative of KLM (Northwest’s European counterpart) dressed in a powder-blue uniform stood at the gate calling out, “If you are going to Budapest . . . ” and she continued naming several other destinations, “ . . . then come with me.  I have your boarding passes for your next flight.”

She didn’t mention Kyiv, so we continued on our way.  I was tired and cranky, of course--it’s hard to get good sleep in a tiny airplane seat--and I badly wanted to brush my teeth.  But we had to deal with transferring our flight.

The transfer desk was mobbed.  They had six clerks there to serve something like two hundred people.  There was no queue maze so the next person in line got a clerk--it was just crowd up there and elbow your way forward.  Since Kala and I had gotten off the plane fairly late, the crowd was already huge.  And the clerks were fucking slow.  We timed it.  Most of the people took twenty minutes or more to reroute themselves.  Some people took forty-five minutes or more, and if you were behind such a person, you were just screwed.  I left Kala guarding our place in line and explored the airport, looking to see if any other transfer desks were less busy.  They weren’t.

The airport in Amsterdam is, from an American perspective, a bit strange.  The first thing I noticed when we de-planed was the smell of cigarette smoke.  A casino made up the centerpiece of the terminal we were in.  Languages swirled around, mingling and meshing.  I can follow a bit of Dutch, but I don’t speak it at all, and I couldn’t understand clerks when they talked among themselves.  Fortunately, they all spoke English.  (I didn’t ask if they spoke German; as far as I know, German still isn’t a popular language in Holland.)

We stood in line and stood and stood and stood.  A couple from India was just ahead of us, trying to get to Bombay.  A bunch of other Indians were behind us, and we assumed they were trying to get to the same place.  When the first couple got to a clerk, they called all the other people from India up to the counter as well.  We didn’t say anything because we figured that they were all going to the same place and it would be easy enough to reroute them all at once.

We discovered twenty minutes later that no, only a few of them were going to India.  The rest were going to various other parts of the globe.  We were furious.

While we were waiting, growing more tired and more hungry and more unhappy, Kala spotted Mark and Wendy in the crowd ahead of us one line over.  Mark and Wendy are the other couple adopting in Ukraine through Family Resource Center.  They had originally boarded in New York and were supposed to be on the same final leg of the trip from Amsterdam to Kyiv as we were.  We had intended to hook up at the Amsterdam airport.  Kala and I had already figured we’d missed them, but there they were.

It turns out their experience with Northwest Air mirrored our own.  They’d boarded their plane in New York--and it had been smacked by another plane.  The resulting repair work had delayed them for an hour and a half, during which there was no power on the plane and the passengers had slowly roasted.  The airplane staff finally relented and opened the airplane doors to let fresh air inside after over an hour of stuffy, humid air.  Mark and Wendy had missed the connecting flight as well, and the people from their flight were adding to the congestion at the transfer desks.

Mark and Wendy got through the line a bit before we did and told us there were no more connecting flights from Amsterdam to Kyiv that day, but we could fly to Frankfurt, change planes again, and get to Kyiv by 11:30 local time.  It was either that or spend the night in Amsterdam and head for Kyiv the next afternoon.

We decided to head for Kyiv that day with Mark and Wendy.  There were still a handful of people in front of us, however, and the flight to Frankfurt left at four o’clock--an hour and a half from then.

We finally got to a clerk at three o’clock after spending almost three hours in line.  Since we knew what we wanted to do already, it only took the clerk a few minutes to reroute us.  He filled out a slip of paper by hand, gave it to us, and told us we could get our boarding passes from Lufthansa at our new flight’s gate.  Our luggage, we were assured, would follow us.

Suuuuure it would.

By now it was 3:15, and the Lufthansa terminal was some distance away.  We dashed through the airport as best we could, laden down with various pieces of luggage, and arrived at Lufthansa, sweaty and panting, at 3:25.  The ticket clerk looked at our paperwork and asked us where the second form was.

Oh no.

“He only gave us one,” I said.  “Just one.  That was it.”

This set off a flurry of phone calls by two different clerks.  The clerk back at KLM had screwed up and not given us everything we needed.  We were ready to scream.  But the powder-blue clerks straightened it out in the end.

At about this time, we learned that the woman who had been standing at the gate saying, “If you’re going to any of the following cities . . . come with me” had made a major mistake.  It turns out all the people she’d been calling to WERE BEING ROUTED THROUGH Kyiv.  All the people who were going to Kyiv were suppoed to go with her, but SHE DIDN’T MENTION Kyiv.  We would have been in Kyiv only a couple hours delayed if she had just said “Kyiv,” but for some reason she didn’t.  The fact that her little slip had cost Northwest/KLM many thousands of dollars didn’t make me feel any better.

So.  We had our new route.  We would fly to Frankfurt via Lufthansa, then fly to Kyiv via Ukraine Air.  By now we were starving, as in “my hands are shaking from low blood sugar” starving.  We grabbed some sandwiches from a kiosk, wolfed them down, and boarded our Lufthansa flight.

This plane was efficiently staffed, not at all crowded, and quite comfortable.  Here I discovered an unexpected bonus--the flight attendants were all German.  Communication barriers fell.  I was able to negotiate better seats and get clear information very easily.  A small bright spot there.

The plane arrived in Frankfurt right on schedule.  That was when we realized that we had accidentally left all the DVDs on the plane in Amsterdam.  Several dozen DVDs--movies, TV shows--gone.  This was also upsetting; we’d been counting on them and the portable DVD player to be a major source of entertainment if we got stuck someplace.  Not to mention the cost of replacing them.  If we go back to America through Amsterdam (which seems likely), we’ll hit Northwest/KLM’s lost and found to see if they’re there.

In Frankfurt, the four us (me, Kala, Mark, and Wendy) had a couple hours’ layover.  We also had to actually track down the Ukrainian airline and get our boarding passes.  I took point here and got us through this fairly quickly.  My German expedited this quite a lot, and it was nice to be in a situation where I felt I had some control, some ability to make things better.

While we were standing around waiting for a security line to open, a security clerk asked me if I spoke Russian.

“Nur Englisch und Deutsch,” I said.  Only English and German.

Apparently my German has somehow picked up a Russian accent; she thought I was Russian.  Interesting.

Us four Americans spent the layover in a café/bar.  It was nice to have another couple there.  Not only we were able to talk, we were able to hand off various responsibilities.  Person A can run over and ask about this while B runs somewhere else to ask about something else while Person C ducks into the restroom and Person D guards the luggage.

We boarded our plane to Kyiv.  It was a two-and-half-hour flight.  I spent it in a half-stupor.  By the time we landed, we’d been traveling for 22 hours.  It was 11:30 locally, though I couldn’t figure out what time my body thought it was.  I was tired and sweaty and I didn’t want to haul my luggage around anymore.

We deplaned onto tarmack in Kyiv and a lizard bus waited to bring us to the terminal.  The air was cool and fresh and it smelled different than a Michigan summer--a bit like hay, but with a dryer, sweeter smell.  It was decidedly foreign, but oh, it was nice to be OUTSIDE, however briefly.

When I tried to board the bus, a blocky, gray-haired guy who looked like his name =had= to be Boris stood blocking the aisle on the bus, which was crowded.  Behind him was plenty of space, but he was standing stubbornly near the door, blocking access.  I asked him to step aside in German and in English, but he didn’t move.  I was growing used to everything being a challenge by now, so I tiredly shoved my way past him, clearing the way for Kala, Wendy, and Mark to get access to the space.  Boris grudgingly gave way, I think only because I had about four inches on him.  He looked seriously pissed off, but I didn’t care by then.  If I were writing it up as a novel, Boris would have come back to haunt us later, but I’m not and he didn’t.

We trudged off the bus and into the airport, which was done all in blue and was very sparse and spare.  At last, the luggage converyor belt started up.  Oh my yes, you guessed it--our luggage wasn’t there.  This precipitated another hour and a half of waiting in a small blue office, filling out forms and tracking down our missing stuff.  It was still in Amsterdam.  The very nice lost and found luggage lady told us it would come in on the next flight from Holland the next afternoon.  We could pick it up after three o’clock or wait for it to be delivered that evening.  Part of this process involved getting hold of Sergei, a Rights Protection Fund person who was supposed to meet us at the airport, on the phone.  He gave them an address for the luggage’s delivery, since we didn’t know one.

Fortunately in all this, Kala and I had packed a couple of changes of clothes in our carryons and had all our toiletries.  Mark and Wendy had nothing but a single toothbrush between them.   We were none of us happy.

At one point when I was looking for a customs form I could read (most were in Russian, but there were rumors of a set in English somewhere), a tall, gray-haired man approached me and said helpfully, “Is everything all right, my friend?”  Didn’t take a whole lot of brain cells to see the words “con artist” stamped on his forehead.  I had no idea what he wanted or what game he was playing, and I had no urge to find out.

“Everything’s fine,” I said firmly.  “Thank you.”

By now it was one in the morning, local time, six in the evening back in Michigan.  Twenty-three hours traveling.

Customs turned out to be unexpectedly easy.  We put our stuff through yet another x-ray machine, filled out a form, and we were done.  The lost and found baggage lady had made off with my forms to expedite our baggage recovery, though, and I didn’t have them to show to the sturdy-looking customs lady.  I sighed--another challenge--and asked if I should fill out another one.  The lady waved me on, so I left.  If you want to breeze through Ukrainian customs, hit them up after midnight, apparently.

I’m not sure what to call the guy who picked us up.  Our coordinator?  Driver?  Expediter?  Expediter, then.  Two expediters met us after customs--one for Kala and me, and one for Mark and Wendy.  They were holding signs with our names on them.  Yuri looked to be in his late forties, with a silvering goatee.  Anatoly looked a little younger, with a square face and hands.  No sign of Sergei, but I guess he wasn’t supposed to be there yet.  Anatoly led us out to a car, loaded our luggage, and drove off with us in the back seat.  He didn’t speak much, and I got the distinct impression he wasn’t comfortable with English.

The drive out of the Kyiv airport was eerie.  It was dark out, and we were the only car on an eight-lane highway.  Thick forest lined the road, and I couldn’t read any of the signs, not even a word here and there.  Anatoly didn’t speak, and I realized I had no way of knowing where we were going or what was going to happen next.  I didn’t know if we were staying at a flat or a hotel, where it was, how much it would cost, nothing.  Various stories about kidnappings wandered through my head, and my frazzled mind started building scenarios.  The highway would get smaller and then turn into a dirt road.  We would be hauled out of the car by men shouting at us in a mixture of Ukrainian and Russian.  Boris, the stubborn guy from the bus, would arrive and order us into an abandoned farmhouse.  Our money and passports would be stripped from us, and . . .

Can’t shut off a writer’s brain, can you?

The highway did get smaller, but Anatoly turned into an apartment complex, parked, and got us and our luggage out of the car.  He led us into one of the tall buildings, all shaped like square Cs around concrete parking lots.  The interior was . . . nasty.  The floor was cracked, gritty brown tile that hadn’t been mopped--or even swept--in a long, long time.  The elevator was a seriously scary thing, long and narrow, the size of two phone booths (though, I had to admit, it was better than a stairway).  Anatoly punched the fifteenth floor button--it looked a little like a circuit-breaker--and the elevator shuddered upward.  There was no floor indicator or window that might give you a hint of how far you had gone, and I heard the rattling of . . . chains?

We arrived on the fifteenth floor, and the button popped out with a loud clack that made me jump.  I thought something had gone wrong, but the elevator opened just fine.

Anatoly wordlessly led us down a dimly-lit corridor of the same dirty tile.  A barred gate blocked off the end of the hall.  Anatoly reached through the bars and pressed a doorbell.  After a while, rustling noises came from one of two doors beyond the gate.  A door opened, and out popped a round woman in a red shirt, blue shorts, and sandals.  She had short dark hair and rather reminded me of Ara from my Silent Empire books.  Anatoly spoke at length with her in Ukrainian and she responded.  I think he was explaining why we were so late.  She led us inside the flat.  Anatoly deposited our luggage in the bedroom, bid us good-bye, and fled.

The woman switched to accented but perfectly-understandable English.  Her name was Irine (“ee-REE-nah”) and she’d been dozing on the couch, waiting for us.  She showed us around the flat.

I’d heard that many apartments in Ukraine are much nicer on the inside than out, and that was clearly the case here.  The floors of the main rooms were hardwood parquet set in a zig-zag pattern.  A short entryway/hallway held a telephone bench and set of coathooks.  Irine admonished us to remove our shoes, which we did.  Another hallway branched off the entry to the left.  A bathroom and separate water closet were on the left side of this little hallway, which ended in a small kitchen.  All the appliances were small, by American standards.  At first I thought we had a dishwasher--a surprise--but it turned out to be a front-loading washing machine, which would be much more useful.

The entryway ended with opposing doors that led into a living room (left) and bedroom (right).  The living room was done up very nicely, with matching brown furniture and dark wood bookshelves and cabinets on one wall.  A set of doors opened onto a narrow balcony that ran the length of the apartment.  (The kitchen windows also opened onto the balcony.)

The bedroom was large and airy, with a queen size bed (!) and a crib in the corner next a wardrobe.  There were no screens on the windows, so you could lean out and look straight down fifteen floors to the parking lot below.  Yikes!

Irine showed us around.  If we wanted to shower, she said, hot water might be iffy.  On the fifteenth floor, water pressure was often low at night.  She assured us that the tap water was safe to drink, though I haven’t dared it yet.  The kitchen was stocked with juice and bottled water, and we drank both gratefully.  Only later did I think of Jeffry’s warning that plain bottled water (as opposed to fizzy water) was sometimes just tap water.  Oh well--too late.  (I suffered no problems, however.)

Irine left.  We washed up a little and fell into bed.  I slept fitfully.  I was both over-tired and wound up.  I finally dropped off at, I’m guessing, around three in the morning.

 

5:30 pm.

We got up at eight--Irine had said she’d come by around nine and we wanted to be up and showered before she arrived.  The bathroom was a bit of a trick.  The showerhead was mounted on a steel hose, not on the wall, and I think you’re meant to use it sitting down.  It felt wonderful to be clean, though.  The towel rack was actually the hot water pipe bent around in a backwards C shape.  This was on purpose, you see--you had heated towels when you finished bathing.  Neat!

We also discovered what a magnificient view we have of Kyiv from up there.  At night there ain’t much going, but during the day we could see the green hills of Kyiv broken up by scattered chunks of city.  A colossus-sized statue of a woman holding up a sword and a shield was just visible around the corner of our building.  Irine told us later that she’s the symbol of Kyiv and she’s supposed to protect the city from harm.

Irine didn’t actually arrive until after ten.  She had overslept.  Heh.  She made us breakfast of oatmeal, tea, yoghurt, and cheese.  The oatmeal was much heavier than the wimpy American version--whole-grain with a nutty taste to it.  The yoghurt came in plastic containers just like in America, but it tasted different.  The cheese, Irine said, was cheddar, but the Ukrainian version of cheddar is the color of Swiss and tastes more like a mild goat cheese.  It was really good on toast.  Our first Ukrainian meal!

After that, we did a bad, bad thing.  Irine actually took us out of the apartment and around town.  Gasp!  Yes, it’s true.  Apparently the Rights Protection Fund (a group that facilitates foreign adoptions and which works with the Family Resource Center) gets nervous when Americans leave their rented flats without official reasons.  Screw that!  I’m not going to stay in Kyiv and hide in a bedroom all day long.  I can do that at home.  And Irine offered, though she admonished us not to blab this to the other people at RPF.

“Just tell them I took you out to buy phone cards, use the Internet, and change money,” she said.

Irine calls herself a grandmother, but she looks barely old enough to qualify for the position.  She’s quite friendly and loves to chat.  We learned quite a bit about Ukrainian history and politics from her over breakfast.

Anyway, she took us up the street to what in America would be a bodega.  It was either a large convenience store or a small grocery store, depending on your point of view.  It sold various groceries, lunchmeats, deli salads, whole smoked fish, cheeses, hot foods (pizza baguettes and such), soda, and more.  A separate room in the back offered cakes, chocolates, and other sweets.  It also had a little booth at the front of the store where you could change money.  We changed $400 and also paid Irine.  For $80 per day, we get the use of the flat, Irine’s cooking and cleaning services, and Irine herself as a native guide.  Very nice rate, that.

After the store, Irine took us on a little tour of Kyiv.  Irine has lived in the city all her life and knows quite a lot about the place.  First a short bus ride took us down to the botannical gardens, which was really more like a large park.  Whenever I’m visiting a new place, my usual tendency is to try and hide the fact that I’m a tourist.  I rarely take pictures or ask tourist-type questions.  Not sure why this is, but I do.  This time, though, I didn’t want to miss anything--I’d need to be able to explain various Ukrainian things to my new children one day, for one thing.  So I took a lot of pictures and didn’t hesitate to ask Irine questions in English.

The gardens were very nice, with lots of winding paths and fountains, though many of the latter weren’t operating.  The place smelled of jasmine.  Irine often played there as a child and she pointed out many spots of interest.  A fair number of people were out enjoying the sunshine, though Irine said the crowd was light because many Kyiv natives spent summer weekends in dachas elsewhere.  A military brass band was playing in a square, so we listened to that for a while.  The weather was absolutely gorgeous--low seventies with a light breeze, a few fluffy clouds in a blue sky.

One section of the park was given over to a whole lot of tents in a sort-of campground that had been set off from the rest of the gardens by blue police tape.  Irine told us these people were all Yanakovich supporters who hadn’t given up hope that he’d take back the presidency from Yushenko.  She said in a slightly scornful voice that they hold meetings and occasional small rallies.

“This is one thing I don’t like about democracy,” she said.  “People like this are allowed.”

Irine is a firm supporter of democracy in Ukraine and of dumping the old Communist method of thinking.  One thing the new president has done is wipe out (or try to wipe out) the old system of government bribery.  Irine used to own a small clothing store, and she said whenever she went abroad on a buying trip, the customs inspector expected a bribe.  If you paid it, he would declare your imported goods very cheap, not worthy of much tax--or even of examination.  If you didn’t pay, your goods were thoroughly searched and the tax was set very high.

“The old way was faster,” Irine said, “but the tax money wasn’t going to the government, the programs that needed it.  Now you don’t pay a bribe, but the inspections are much slower because the inspectors have to actually inspect your goods.  Many people are upset by this, but it is all just a new way of thinking, and we have to learn how to think again in a new way.”

A hand-lettered sign out front of the camping area said “Grand Hotel Yanakovich,” which I thought was hilarious and I took a picture.  There was also an outdoor shrine (I’m assuming Orthodox Christian), but an old woman was kneeling at it, and I didn’t feel it would be polite to take a photograph.  Another woman was sweeping up trash with a home-made straw broom.  We saw several examples of these brooms throughout the day, and they seem to be popular for keeping your doorstep clean.

A few craftspeople were selling wares on park benches.  One woman had made landscapes and still life displays out of dried herbs and flowers.  We bought two of those--one as a gift and one to keep.

Irine also showed us around the government sector, which includes lots and lots of old and interesting buildings.  We saw the Ukraine counterparts of the White House, the Supreme Court building, and other such sights.  The architecture was very interesting and fun to look at.  One place was built by an architect as his home, and the top was lined with all sorts of fantastic creatures and horrifying monsters carved in stone.  Its local nickname is the Chimera House.  It’s not a home anymore, but I forget what Irine said it’s now used for.

We next hit the shopping district.  I browsed a men’s store and came across a windbreaker I really liked.  It was only 200G ($40), so I bought it.  I have more jackets than Imelda Markos has shoes, but I liked it very much anyway.  A street vendor had various household objects made of scented wood, and Kala bought a cedar comb from her.  Kala browsed a shoe store, but didn’t buy anything.  I saw a stand of umbrellas and picked out a black and white one--rain was in the forecast--but Irine stepped in.

“This is a woman’s umbrella,” she said.

I blinked at her and looked at the umbrella again.  It was white with a scalloping of black around the rim.  Looked gender-neutral to me.  Irine noticed my surprise.

“You can buy it if you like, of course,” she said.  “It’s your choosing.  But it’s a woman’s umbrella.”

I decided to put it back.  Back home, I wouldn’t care what other people think, but in Ukraine, where I’m adopting children, I needed to be more careful of other people’s opinions.  I learned later that Irine thought I was angry with her for telling me about the umbrella and short-circuiting my purchase, but Kala explained to her that I wasn’t at all upset and that I was actually glad to have been informed.

“He wouldn’t want to show up at the appointment tomorrow with a woman’s umbrella over his shoulder,” she told Irine.  “It might raise a few eyebrows, and we don’t want that.”

There’s a fair amount of graffiti on city walls about Yushenko.  The most common is a stenciled portrait of the man with the caption “Dak!” which is Ukrainian for “Yes!”

We ate lunch at Irine’s favorite restaurant.  It’s a buffet sort of place, but it’s set up more like an open-air market (though the open-air part isn’t, unless you count the skylight that lets in sunshine).  You didn’t serve yourself at this buffet, though--servers behind the counter gave you your food and sold it by weight.

I had a salad made of what I think was eggplant.  It was purple, anyway.  It was spicy, vinagary, and delicious.  I picked up a piragi stuffed with cinnamony apples instead of meat, and decided I’d have to try to replicate it at home.  I chose a main dish of a thin-sliced pork cutlet with some sort of pancake on top of it with a side of buttery garlic potatoes.  Dessert was a scoop each of blueberry and cherry ice cream made by the restaurant.  You ate it with a teeny-tiny spoon.  Oh, was it good!

The restaurant itself was divided by theme.  You could sit in an Indian section, a Chinese section, a Ukrainian section, a Greek, Egyptian, or Roman section.  Each one was decorated accordingly.  Kinda neat.

Sufficiently stuffed, the three of us rolled out of there and to a department store.  It was five floors of shopping.  The foyer opened onto an enormous display of crystal chandaliers that managed to look breathtakingly glittery instead of overdone and tacky.  Kala wanted to look for a dress or two.  I browsed in various other departments.  The place was what department stores should be--lots of glass display cases, odd sections jumbled up next to each other, and lots of unobtrusive sales staff.  Unfortunately, Kala felt abruptly tired and really wanted to start heading for home before much shopping was accomplished, so we left.

On the way back, I spotted a street vendor who sold nesting dolls.  I said we had to buy a set because if you try to re-enter the United States from Ukraine or Russia without nesting dolls, the customs officials will stop you.  “Where are your nesting dolls?  We know you bought some.  Everyone buys them.  So where are you hiding them?  Cough ’em up!”  But Kala didn’t want to stop, and Irine said there was a special store just for nesting dolls we could visit later.

We also stopped at a post office with Internet access around the corner from the flat.  Kala managed to access her e-mail, but Comcast tried to implant a cookie that the computer refused to accept and I couldn’t get into mine.  Irine said we could try another place later.

And then back to the flat.  Irine asked if we can handle supper on our own and we assured her we were quite capable of making sandwiches on our own.  We sorted through our purchases and I got on the laptop to update this journal.

Today was a very fine day and it almost makes up for yesterday.  Now all we need is for our luggage to be delivered and we’ll be all set for our appointment tomorrow!

 

June 6, 2005, 7:30

Our luggage turned up last night, though we don’t have it yet.  A woman named Kate (pronounced “katya”) is a translator and, I think, general errand-runner for RPF.  She told us on the phone that Mark and Wendy had called the airport about their luggage and had been told it had been delivered to the Rights Protection Fund address.  However, the RPF office was now closed.  After some confusion and more phone-calling (I was imagining our luggage being left on the RPF doorstep for anyone to stroll away with), we learned that it was locked in the RPF office.  A bit later, Kate called to say it was in her possession.  She could bring it by that night or in the morning when she picked us up for our appointment.  Since it was getting late, we said we could wait, especially since Mark and Wendy needed their luggage right away and Kate would have to drive over to their flat immediately.

I also made an unsuccessful foray into using the international telephone system.  We’d bought a phone calling card from the post office yesterday with Irine, and I wanted to call home.  However, the instructions on the back of the card (written in Russian and in English) said to use a phone that supported touch-tone dialing.  The phone in the flat has buttons but uses pulse dialing to call out.  Irine wasn’t around at the time, so I decided to head down to a phone booth and see if I could get it to work.

Outside it was cloudy, very windy, and a little cool.  The flat Irine rents out is in a complex of apartment buildings with odd driveways and sidewalks going in various unexpected directions.  I couldn’t remember which direction we had taken when we walked out that morning with Irine, so I sighted on a main street and made for it.  Once I got out there, I realized I had probably taken the long way around, but that was okay--I’d just keep the apartment building on my right on the way to the shopping area and keep it on the left on my way back.  The people on the street didn’t give me a second glance.

I walked down to the little store we’d stopped in earlier.  A couple public phones, the kind with a little half-shelter around the upper half, sat outside.  Ukrainian public phones are square blue things with metal buttons and a small readout screen.  I got out my phone card and my instructions for calling America and tried to call the number on the card.  (You have to call the number on the calling card, then dial the card’s code, then dial the number you want to reach.)

I couldn’t get past one digit.  I would dial a single digit and then a message would come up on the litttle screen.  I couldn’t read it, of course, so I didn’t know what I was doing wrong.  I tried various things and nothing worked.  Okay, Ukraine phone company 1, Steven 0.

I continued onward.  A little ways up the street was the little post office with phone and Internet.  Inside, a bank of phone booths lined one wall.  Each one had a phone on a shelf in it.  I tried one.  No dial tone.  I punched some random numbers and got nothing.  I wondered if the phone had to be turned on at the desk like the computers did.  So I went to the clerk, a blond, stern-looking woman who’d been there that morning and who struck me as none too friendly.  I’ve heard that many Ukrainians strike Americans as unfriendly when actually they’re just being normal and business-like.  But many of the clerks we’d met elsewhere were quite friendly by American standards.  This woman had a tendency to snap.  I didn’t think she spoke English, but I figured it couldn’t hurt to try to communicate with her.

I got her attention (this was actually difficult--she was absorbed in the contents of a loose-leaf notebook and seemed disinclined to look up from them) and pointed to the booths.  I said “telephone” in Ukrainian and held up my phone card with a questioning look on my face.

She spoke in rapid Ukrainian and pointed at the door.  There were public phone booths outside, and I gathered that my card would work on the blue phones out there but not in the booths in here.  Not helpful, since I couldn’t figure out the phones out there.  I held up my card and pointed outside with another questioning look on my face.  She said something else but didn’t nod or shake her head.  I pointed at the indoor phones and shrugged.  She reached into a drawer and held up another series of phone cards, different from mine.  I gathered I needed one of those to use the post office phones.  Except I didn’t have any money with me and I wasn’t inclined to buy another phone card in any case when I had what was supposed to be a perfectly good one.  So I shook my head, thanked her, and left.

Time to go home.  Irine was going to come by later, so I guessed I’d have to ask her about the phones then.

I walked back, crossed a little street toward the apartment complex, and had a moment of doubt.  Had I come this way or that way?  Uh oh.  I kept on walking.  See, I’d forgotten that landmarks look different when you come at them from another direction, and all the apartment buildings in this area looked the same.

The street is a divided six-lane affair and very busy.  I was sure I hadn’t crossed it, but things looked wrong.  I kept walking, despite a growing sense of unease.  If I got lost out here, I’d be in deep trouble.  I didn’t know the address of the flat, I didn’t know the flat’s telephone number (even if I could work out how to use a phone), and I didn’t speak the language well enough to ask for directions.  If I couldn’t find the place on my own, my only recourse would be to go back to the corner store and wait there.  Eventually, Kala would get worried, track down Irine, and come looking for me.  But that might take an hour or more.

Then I saw a sign I remembered and felt better.  I came across a concrete pathway that ran between the buildings and saw a pile of sandbags lying nearby.  I’d passed them on the way out.  Good.  And there was the dumpster that homeless guy had been digging through on my way out, and there was the same homeless guy digging through a different dumpster.  There was the stray cat that always hung around the same apartment entrance.  Good, good, good.  In the end, I found the right building, but there were three doors, all of which looked alike.  Door number one led into an unfamiliar lobby.  Door number two, ditto.  Door number three--ah ha!

With a profound sense of relief, I punched the elevator call button, rode the weird, clanky thing up to the fifteenth floor, and once again jumped when the button clacked on arrival.  Used Irine’s keys to open the gate, relock the gate, open the apartment door, and relock the apartment door.  Whew!  I’d made it!  No phone call to America, but I hadn’t gotten completely lost, either.

I told Kala about my lack of success and she wondered if the apartment phone would somehow work anyway.  It had a setting for tone and for pulse, but although the tone setting made tone sounds, it didn’t actually dial.  It occurred to me, however, that the phone card number was answered by a computer, and the computer would “listen” for the tones once it was connected.  I set the phone to pulse and dialed the number.  When the recorded voice answered, I switched the phone to tone dialing and pressed *2 for English instructions.  The voice switched to English.  It worked!  Wish I would have figured this out a couple miles of walking ago.

We talked to my mother-in-law and to Aran, who was having a fun time with Granny.  I also called my mother to update her.  It wasn’t all that expensive, either.  A 100G ($20) phone card got us 45 minutes of overseas calling.

Irine, meanwhile, showed up again and ran our clothes through the washing machine.  We would have been happy to do it ourselves, but Irine didn’t want us running the machine, so we shrugged and let her do it.  She then hung the clothes outside on the balcony, which had a clothesline, and told us she’d come by at eight or so to make breakfast.

“Do you want oatmeal again,” she asked, “or maybe eggs?”

“Eggs would be great,” I said.

“And how do you two feel about fresh vegetable salad?”

“We like them.”

“Then for lunch tomorrow I will make you fresh cabbage and cucumber salad and chicken for lunch.”

Kinda weird having someone ask what you want them to make you for a meal when you’re not at a restaurant, but hey--we were paying for a housekeeper, so that’s what we got.

I spent the evening reading and writing in my journal.  Kala, who hadn’t brought any books because she’d been planning to watch the DVDs we’d brought and lost, discovered that Irine had a few books left behind by other adopting parents and was thumbing through P.J. O’Rourke.  Eventually we went to bed.

I slept pretty good, considering that today’s a major day.  Last night on the phone, Kate said that the last set of parents she’d accompanied to the National Adoption Center had been shown dossiers on several sets of sibling pairs within our age group, so it seemed quite possible there would be some available.  Nothing’s garanteed, of course, but it was nice to hear that the possibility is there.

Early this morning it started to rain.  I heard it beating against the windows, so I got up, pulled the clothes down off the line, and went back to bed.  Rose again at seven, did a sit-down shower (this feels terribly awkward and I still have no idea how it’s really supposed to work) and got out this journal.  Irine just showed up to make breakfast (“How many eggs for you?”) and is now bustling about the little kitchen.  Kate’s supposed to show up at 9:30 to pick us up for our 10:30 appointment.  Sergei will meet us at the NAC.  Apparently he’s quite the alpha male when it comes to international adoption and he knows how to bully, bribe, threaten, wheedle, and push his way through the tangle of Ukrainian bureaucracy.  We’ll just sit back and take our cues from him.

Waiting now.

 

1:40 p.m.

Okay.  Back from our appointment now.  And yes, I’m going to keep you in suspense about what happened.

Irine is a great housekeeper.  She ironed a razor-sharp crease into my seriously wrinkled kakhis while we were eating breakfast, which consisted of scrambled eggs (Ukrainian style, meaning they were more like omelettes), toast, yoghurt, and tea.

Kate picked us up at 9:30.  I ran our missing luggage upstairs--clack, jump, sigh--and zipped back down to Kate’s car.  Kate is Sergei’s niece, looks to be in her mid- to late twenties, and is quite beautiful--wide brown eyes, sharp features, lots of long, curly brown hair.  She reminded me of the actress who plays opposite Gary Sinise in CSI: New York.  She speaks excellent English.

We drove through town and I took pictures along the way: “This is what we saw on the way to our appointment to learn about you, kids.”  At last we arrived at the National Adoption Center.

It was raining hard by now, and I was glad to have the new windbreaker.  Kate parallel parked on the street (a busy one), and Sergei came up to the car.  Good looks apparently run in the family.  Sergei has straight black hair, gray eyes, and a square, handsome face.  He looks like the stereotype of the Handsome, Brooding European Man With Cigarette.  We greeted him and followed him up the sidewalk past a bar and an iron gate to an arched opening.  An uneven cement courtyard lay on the other side.  Sergei took us to a big wooden door and we went in.

From the other descriptions I’d gotten, I had been expecting a grim, dingy interior, but it didn’t look like that at all.  We went up a large stone staircase that wound around the inside of the building.  The walls started off a textured gray but shifted into yellow on the third floor.  The fourth floor was our destination.  We went down a corridor faced with several doors that led into various offices.  Pictures of children were scattered up and down the hallway.

Sergei took our letter of confirmation, the one with the appointment in it, and went into one of the offices.  Interestingly, the confirmation letter was not on the list of necessary documents the agency gave us, but I figured it would be best of have it and took it along.  This turned out to be a good decision, since the letter is necessary to prove that you, and not someone with a smiliar name, have the appointment.

We expected to wait for quite a while, since we were forty minutes early for our appointment, but Sergei gestured us into the office.

The office was bright and comfortably furnished, with two desks separated by a mesh barrier wound with silk ivy and flowers.  Another couple was sitting at the desk furthest from the door, talking with a woman seated there.  Sergei had us sit down across from the near desk, and a dark-haired, slender  woman dressed in a black blouse and a red jacket came in to sit down.  He introduced her as a psychologist who worked with adoptive parents.  Through Sergei, we told her that we were looking for a sibling pair between three and six years old, though we were open to adopting a single child.  This step struck me as odd--we had to send Ukraine a whole bunch of information (notarized and apostilled) about what sort of child we wanted to adopt, and no one here seemed to have read it.

From a cabinet the psychologist took several enormous red binders, all crammed with pages encased in plastic.  Most of the pages had color or black-and-white photos attached to them.  She pulled out a handful of sheets and passed them to Sergei, who went over them with us.

One was a young child with cerebral palsy.  We had to say no.  Sergei said small children often outgrow the problem and this one’s symptoms were mild.  Again we said no.  Another was a girl, almost eight years old, with a round face and dark hair and eyes.  We set her aside as a possibility.  Another pair of pages showed a girl and a boy, nine years old, twins.  But Kala murmured to me that the girl’s features showed fetal alcohol syndrome, so we said no, but on the basis that we didn’t want two children who were both older than Aran.

Sergei showed us the pages for two boys, brothers.  One was three, the other was twelve.  Yikes.  Twelve?  Sergei pointed out that both boys were healthy (the three-year-old showed delayed development, but that’s usual in orphanage children) and that they’d come to the orphanage in April, 2004--just a year ago.  They hadn’t received any referrals yet.  We set them aside as a small possibility and looked at more pages from more big red binders.

No other sibling pairs were available within the age range we were looking for.  Several were much older.  We saw several sets of three, four, five, and even six siblings.  I was not going to look into breaking anyone up, thank you.

In the end, we drifted back to the two boys.  The older one’s name was Aleksandr, the young one’s name was Maksim.  There was a very small picture of Aleksandr, taken when he was about ten.  All I could really see was that he has dark blond hair.  We learned a little more about their background in disjointed bits and pieces.  I’m straightening it out here.

Aleksandr and Maksim are actually half-brothers.  Aleksandr has two full sisters, both around twenty.  Their mother was born in 1964.  The page didn’t say what happened to Aleksandr’s father, nor did it say if he was married to Aleksandr’s mother, though the father is out of the picture.  Maksim’s father, who came along later, was apparently supporting the family at the time Maksim was born.  When he died, it left the mother with no means of support.  Because the mother couldn’t care for them, a social worker placed both boys in the orphanage system a year and a half ago.  Maksim is in a children’s home and Aleksandr is in an Internat, or boarding school for orphans.  The boys have only recently become available for adoption, and no prospective parents have asked to visit them yet.  They’re housed in Zhytomyr, a city about 150 kilometers west of Kyiv.  And that’s all we know for now.

Kala and I talked about it and told Sergei we’d pay the boys a visit.  He and the psychologist started the paperwork, and it’ll be ready by tomorrow evening.

Oookay.  Little nervous here.  Aleksandr is much older than the oldest possible age I’d envisioned, which was nine or ten.  His family life sounds like it was full of upheaval.  And there’s so much we don’t know yet.  Why is Aleksandr’s father out of the picture?  Death?  Jail?  Divorce?  He just picked up and left?  Was the mother married to Maksim’s father or were they just living together?  How did Maksim’s father die?  What was the home life like?  Poor-but-happy?  Lots of fights?  Drinking?  Hard work?  Loving parents and step-parents?  Maksim would have been eighteen months old when his mother was forced to give him up, and he wouldn’t remember his parents, but Aleksandr would remember his mother and his step-father.  He may or may not remember his birth father.  How does he feel about his step-father’s death and being removed from his mother’s home?  Did he feel close to his baby half-brother?  Sergei said that the Internat and the children’s home are several kilometers apart, so it’s doubtful they’ve been able to visit each other.  How does Aleksandr feel about that?

The answer to all these questions, of course, depends on what Aleksandr and Maksim’s home life was like.  If the parents were abusive, Aleksandr might have been glad to get out.  If they were loving, he might have been upset.  The fact that the mother is still alive and that the boys have two older sisters makes things complicated.  Mom can’t step back into the picture, since she has permanently lost custody, but Aleskandr surely knows she’s still around somewhere, along with his sisters.

So we’ll visit and learn more.

After we left the NAC, Sergei took us down to the bar we’d passed earlier, where it turned out Kate and another guy wedidn’t know were waiting.  They sat at one table, smoking and drinking coffee while Kala and I sat at another table with a pot of tea talking about the boys.  When we were all done, Kate bundled us into her car and drove us back to the flat.  About halfway there, she got a frantic call on her cell from another adoptive parent who had apparently lost his wallet and passport.  Ee-yikes!  Kate told him to contact the U.S. embassy right away, as well as his credit card bank.  While she was talking to him, we arrived at the flat.  In an aside, Kate said she’d call us later about arrangements.

At the moment we don’t know when we’ll be leaving for Zhytomyr.  The papers won’t be ready until tomorrow evening, but that doesn’t mean we can’t travel there earlier to wait for them.  We’ll call Kate later to ask if she doesn’t call us.

Meanwhile, Irine made us lunch.  It consisted of a sort of fried meatloaf made of pork, a little bit of chicken, and milk-strained bread.  The mixture is molded into oblong cakes the size of half a palm and fried in sunflower oil.  It was very good, and horrifyingly fattening.

Despite the heavy diet here, I’ve noticed a definite difference between Ukrainian and American body types.  The people over here are largely well-toned and well-proportioned.

And now we’re waiting to hear from Kate.

Mea nwhile, on a whim, I checked the portable DVD player.  There was a single Simpsons DVD in it.  I told Kala I had a small surprise for her, and she was very, very happy.  Hey, there are six episodes on the DVD, each with commentary.  That’s five hours of television.  Ha!

 

4:50 p.m.

Kala talked to Kate.  One of us needs to go down to the NAC to pick up the paperwork tomorrow afternoon after two o’clock.  The day after that--Wednesday--we’ll travel to Zhytomyr to see the boys.  Kate said most people who adopt from Zhytomyr stay in Kyiv because Zhytomyr is a small town with nothing to do in it.  The drive is about an hour and a half.

Kate also offered to move us to a flat closer to downtown.  We politely declined--the flat we have is very nice, and a downtown flat would be more expensive.

There’s a lot of politicking that goes on among the Rights Protection Fund people.  Sergei, we learned from Irine, has two flats downtown and he often puts people up in them.  He charges $120 a day.  Irine charges us $80 a day.  We pay her in American cash, and I suspect there’s a whole lot of under-the-tableness going on with taxes and such.  Irine has asked us to keep to ourselves while we’re here because “I don’t like to advertise my Americans,” she says.  I think this is her main source of income, and she has to be careful about it.  Sergei’s flats were in use over the weekend, Irine said, but now they’re going to be empty, which was probably why Kate, Sergei’s niece, offered to move us.  I think there’s a whole lot of maneuvering that we just don’t see.

 

5:30 p.m.

Kala and I decided to brave the perils of language and go to the store.  Our international calling card has very little time left on it, so it needed to be replaced, and Kala was out of soda.  Irine wasn’t here, but we figured we could handle buying a couple things.  We puzzled out how to say “I want” from a Ukrainian phrase book.  Armed with that and the words for “please,” “thank you,” and “excuse me,” we figured we could probably deal with basic shopping.

We headed downstairs and strolled to the post office/Internet place.  A different clerk was working at the counter.  I held up the dying phone card and said, “I want?” in my no-doubt heavily accented Ukrainian.  The clerk dug through various drawers, riffled through several envelopes, and came up empty-handed.  She said something in Ukraine, probably “We have none.”  I thanked her and we left.  Strikeout!  Though the transaction itself went fine.

Next we stopped at the little grocery store.  It was quite busy with, I assume, people getting off work.  We got a bunch of soda from the cooler and stood in line to pay for it.  The cash registers here are apparently not required to be placed so the customer can see the total.  The clerk told us the total, but I don’t know Ukrainian numbers.  I had a mental total, though, and realized I didn’t have enough small bills to pay for it.  In Ukraine, you don’t hand money to a cashier but instead set it in a little dish near the register.  I placed a 100G note in the dish and hoped there wouldn’t be a problem.  The clerk took it without blinking and made change.  Whew!

We got back to the flat with our booty without further incident.  Go us!

 

June 7, 2005

Today the weather wandered from gentle, misty rain to insistent, steady rain.  Irina made us oatmeal for breakfast again, then drew us a map of the surrounding area so we could find better Internet access than the place just up the block.  Kala had bought an umbrella, but I still didn’t have one, so I was stuck with just the hood on my jacket and a baseball cap.

We headed down the main street, a six-lane, noisy affair.  We passed lots of different stores, most fairly upscale.  One store had a huge display of toilets in the window--not something you’d see in America!  We walked and walked, stopping now and then at likely stores to see if they had umbrellas.  This was accomplished by snagging a sales clerk and pointing at Kala’s umbrella with a questioning look.  The clerks understood, but always shook their heads.  No umbrellas.

Eventually we found the corner where the Internet café was supposed to be (the corner right after--oh lord--McDonald’s), but we didn’t see it.  A building on the corner was under construction.  Maybe the place had been there but was now being torn out?  We kept going, hoping to find another place.  When you walk around Kyiv, it seems like you see “Internet” signs in Cyrillic all over the place.  We’d have to find one eventually.

We walked what felt like ten miles and still saw not a one.  We finally reached the end of our patience and decided to turn back.  Then I saw across the street was a department store.  They might have umbrellas!  We crossed the street (carefully) and went in.

It was another huge place, a bit like a mall, really, though the stores were much smaller.  The first floor was, I think, one big store with many departments.  Above on a narrow balcony was a set of smaller independent stores.  We wandered through, looking at various displays.  In one store, we found various Kyiv stuff.  We bought a traditional white shirt embroidered with red designs for Aran and a wooden scepter/mace for ourselves.

Other areas in the store sold china (ready to be packed in wooden crates for shipping), icons, toiletries, toys, and clothing.  Kala tried on a couple of dresses, but both were two expensive, so we put them back.  She still needs a dress for court.

We found umbrellas, but they were too expensive--200G or so.  Sigh.  We also found a booth at the back of the store that changed money, so we did that before heading back to the flat.

On the way, I noticed another store that sold umbrellas.  I was soaked by now and went in to check.  Also expensive--180G.  I paid it anyway.  I was tired of being wet, and it was “only” about $40.  It’s a really good umbrella, though!  I’m taking it home.

We passed the corner where the Internet café was supposed to be, but this time we were on the other side of the street.  Then I saw, in small letters, the Cyrillic letters for Internet.  I stopped Kala to point them out.  Sighing, we crossed the street and went into the café.

The first floor, clearly a restaurant/bar, was full of smoke and people.  A sign pointed to the back: Internet.  We followed it, turned a corner, and another sign pointed us down a hallway.  Then another sign pointed us down some stairs.  Then another sign pointed us around a corner.  We were laughing by now.  Eventually we found a small basement room with about a dozen computers.  It was staffed by a young, dark-haired man who, it turned out, spoke a fair amount of English.  He assigned Kala and me a computer each (he seemed surprised that we wanted two of them) and we got caught up on e-mail.  I tried to upload my journal file for e-mailing, but the computer wouldn’t read my disk.  The clerk, however, was able to e-mail the file to me from ­his computer, so it worked out all right.

We arrived home by two o’clock as planned.  Sometime after two, you see, Kate was supposed to call and let us know when we needed to go back to the NAC to pick up the vistitation papers for Maksim and Aleksandr.

Then we got a call--from Mark and Wendy.  It was good to hear from them.  They were also in a flat with a housekeeper, though she spoke very poor English.  We weren’t able to figure out where they were, unfortunately.  It turns out that they weren’t on the appointment list at the NAC, though they had their letter.  Sergei took them over there at eight a.m. to see about shoe-horning them in, but he couldn’t pull it off.  He did get them an appointment for Wednesday, however.  They’re disappointed but still hopeful.  After all, one couple last year showed up for their appointment on a Monday and were told no children were available, come back a week from Thursday.

No call from Kate came.  We finally called her at four, and she said the papers weren’t ready yet, but she’d come by at five to pick one of us up to go get them, hoping they’d be finished while we were in transit.  I stayed home, Kala went with Kate.

I played games on my laptop and wrote.  Two hours passed and I was getting worried.  Irina made vegetable soup with sour cream and blintzes for supper--the blintzes were really good--and still no sign of Kala.  Finally Kate called and said the director of the NAC was still out, and she and Kala were still waiting.

Kala finally got home at eight o’clock smelling like cigarette smoke.  She said she’d spent most of the time talking with Kate and a friend of hers at the same bar where we’d drunk tea earlier.  She also said that the papers she’d signed said, in several languages, that the Ukrainian government doesn’t charge for adoption, that all the money we paid was going to the Rights Protection Fund.  I hadn’t realized this.  I had been hesitant to pester the RPF people for too much non-adoption-related help, but for the many thousands of dollars  we were paying for the adoption (which translates into enormous amounts of Ukrainian money), I’ll probably be rather more demanding.

We were supposed to get another call soon to let us know when we’d be picked up to drive to Zhytomyr tomorrow.  By ten, no one had called, so we called around.  Kate and Sergei didn’t answer their cell phones.  I called Chicago, and Richard said he’d try e-mail and phone as well.

There’s currently no hot water in the flat, hasn’t been since early yesterday.  Kala and I occupied ourselves with heating washwater.  We tried to use my clipper with the little electric adapter, but when I switched them on, they jumped in my hand and growled like an angry dog.  We shut them off.

At eleven, Kala and I had gone to bed and the phone finally rang.  Kate said a woman named Svetlana and our previous driver Anatoly would pick us up between 8:15 and 8:30 in the morning.

I had trouble falling asleep.  I keep wondering about adopting a twelve-year-old.  A three-year-old I’m not worried about, but a twelve-year-old has a long past, a history I know nothing about and will only know what he tells me.  I haven’t been part of his life.  Aleksandr was born when I was 26 and finishing up my English degree in Mt. Pleasant.  If we adopt Maksim and Aleksandr, all three of our children will be very far apart in age.

On the other hand, a twelve-year-old needs a family, too.

 

June 8, 2005, 8:40 a.m.

Sveta and Anatoly are late.  We’re not surprised, really.  We figured “8:15-8:30” would mean something like “8:45-9:00.”

Corn flakes and toast for breakfast.  I remembered to take my lactase pills only after I’d finished the bowl.  I hope I don’t have any problems today.  Ukrainian corn flakes are half-sized and pretty good.

Irina packed us enormous ham sandwiches for lunch, along with bottles of water.  I put in my caffeine supply as well--Coke!  I really miss diet cherry Coke, I tell you.  I want the caffeine, but not the sugar.  Diet Coke is widely available, but it’s disgusting in America, let alone in Ukraine.

Sveta and Anatoly are here.  Updates later.

 

10:20 p.m.

What a day!  It’s hard to keep from blurting everything onto the screen and keep things in chronological order . . .

Anatoly got our stuff into the car.  This included jackets, umbrellas, the camcorder, the groaning bag containing our lunch, Kala’s purse, and my big yellow backpack.  Sveta (short for “Svetlana”) rode up front with Anatoly.  She’s a thin-but-curvy redhead who speaks heavily-accented English and was dressed in a gray pinstriped jacket and slacks.  Are all the women who work for RPF so pretty?

The weather started off looking threatening and nasty, with lots of black, low-hanging clouds.  We didn’t get more than a spatter of rain, however, and within the hour, a light wind blew the clouds away and ushered in clear blue skies and balmy temperatures.  For this we were very grateful, though I pointed out to Kala that it must have happened because I’d just spent forty bucks on an umbrella.

It took quite a while to work our way out of Kyiv, since it was morning rush hour.  Once we cleared the city, however, things picked up.  The highway to Zhytomyr reminds of Highway 14 back home--some sections very nice, some a bit rough, some seriously scary.  We passed all kinds of landscapes--hills, valleys, flatlands, forest.  Lots and lots of birch trees, though they’re darker than the American variety.

One of the more interesting sights along the way were the roadside vendors.  You could buy all kinds of stuff from people who’d set up rough stands right by the highway.  Lots of them were small farmers who had a few baskets of produce or a dozen-odd jars of canned fruit.  Many had built racks by setting a forked branch upright in the dirt and setting another branch in the fork, leaving the other end to rest on the ground.  They hung the resulting slanted bar with various plants--I’m guessing stuff like lettuce and spinach.  Some other people had set up shelves open to the air and were selling brightly-colored stuffed animals the size of ten-year-olds.  These must be marketed primarily to tourists, since I can’t imagine the locals buying enough of them to support even a tiny business.

I snapped a lot of pictures with the digital camera and tried hard to catch one of the vendors, but it was impossible in a moving car.

At one point, Anatoly pulled over at a shed made of cinderblock.  It was marked WC (water closet), but it was a hole-in-the-floor toilet.  Yuck.  Anatoly sucked down a quick cigarette, climbed back in, and off we went.  I was glad he didn’t smoke in the car, and I suspect that he had been forbidden to do so, since RPF’s primary customer base is American, and we’re apparently notorious for our intolerance of cigarette smoke.

We finally arrived in Zhytomyr.  Kate had told us earlier that it was a small, nothing sort of town, but it looked pretty big to us--bigger than Ann Arbor, certainly.  I suppose if you’re used to Kyiv, everything looks small.  I took a lot of photos.  The city is an odd mix of upscale and down-at-heel.

The first thing we had to do was track down a certain Inspector who’s the head of orphanages in Zhytomyr.  This actually set off a long string of events that I didn’t entirely follow.  We had to talk to a total of three people: the Inspector, the Director of Maksim’s orphanage, and the Director of Aleksandr’s orphanage.  We found the Inspector after only a brief wait at a dimly-lit, scruffy office building.  Kala and I both used the bathroom, and it was great fun, let me tell you.  One stall had a toilet with no seat, the other was a toilet bowl set into the floor, also with no seat.  No toilet paper.  Fortunately, I had brought some in my capacious backpack.

Anyway, after getting permission from the Inspector to talk to the Directors, we headed off to find Director #1, who was in charge of Maksim’s orphanage.  We wanted to see Maksim first because we figured if we knew right away we didn’t want to adopt Maksim (who’s too young to understand what’s happening), Aleksandr wouldn’t even know we’d been looking and so wouldn’t be disappointed.

Finding Director #1 proved to be difficult.  She wasn’t in her office that day, but was supposed to have been--two Americans traveling 4,000 miles to see her usually takes high priority.  We drove to two different orhpanages looking for her, to no avail, and each stop lasted half an hour or so.  Finally Sveta contacted someone on her cell.  The someone said she’d track down Director #1 and we needed to pick her up at a certain place.

Anatoly drove around town, through a roundabout, and stopped at a street corner in a rundown neighborhood.  After about ten minutes, a woman walked past the car.  She was carrrying flowers and a briefcase.  Sveta jumped out and greeted her.  Her name was Ilena, and she was the someone.  Introductions were made, and Ilena rode with us all around Zhytomyr.  She spent most of her time on her cell phone yelling at someone in Russian, apparantly on our behalf.  We went back to one of the orphanages we’d checked already.  Sveta explained that no one could find Director #1, but they were trying to track down someone who could grant us the visit anyway.

Sveta and Ilena vanished inside the orphanage.  It was an enormous, four-story building that looked like a stucco apartment building you might find in the American Southwest.  A trio of boys who looked to be about seven were walking up the driveway to the road.  Two white goats grazed in the ditch.  I told Kala that Thor must be visiting.

We waited for almost an hour.  I read a book.  Kala zoned and fumed.  I fumed.  We waited some more.  Finally the two women re-emerged.  They’d found a substitute for Director #1, but we had to go to her office, which was across town.  We dropped Ilena off at the street corner where we’d found her, then whipped over to another office building.  Sveta jumped out, and Anatoly drove away.  We were a bit confused at this point.  Anatoly brought us to the very first courthouse we’d visited and parked the car on the sidewalk.

This, incidentally, is a common practice over here.  People park wherever there’s a clear spot of concrete, even if it’s in a section of street with white lines painted across it to indicate you can’t park there.  Sidewalks are three times as wide as they are in America, so there’s room for parking, and people just muscle up over the curb.  It’s illegal, but no one cares, including the police.

Inside the building, we found Sveta waiting outside a dark office.  The substitute director would be back any minute now.  It was by now almost two o’clock.  Kala and I had eaten our sandwiches during one of the other waiting periods but we hadn’t seen Sveta or Anatoly eat anything.  There was a bakery next to the office building, and we all but dragged Anatoly over there.  He thought we were hungry.  We got some rolls filled with cheese and ham, but Anatoly refused to eat.  He mimed that eating would make him sleepy.  Sveta also refused food.  Must be how Ukrainians stay so thin.

At last the substitute for Director #1 arrived and signed the permission form for our visit to Maksim.  Sheesh!

Anatoly drove out to the orphanage, though he had to stop several times so Sveta could ask pedestrians for directions.  The orphanage was at the end of a long dirt road out in the country.  A horse was picketed in the long grass across from the entrance gate and her colt rolled on the ground near her.  A waist-high concrete wall painted powder blue surrounded the place.  We parked, walked through the gate, and down a winding concrete path toward the orphanage building.  We passed several little playgrounds, all of them brightly painted and looking pretty new.  At last we reached the orphanage itself.  It looked like a multi-story elementary school.  The Director of the orphanage met us at the doorway and led us inside.

It was dark inside, even after our eyes adjusted from the summer sun.  Wooden floors, newly-painted walls, pictures of a recent renovation on a bulletin board explaining all the new paint.  The place used to look pretty crappy, but now it looked quite nice.  The hallways sported murals of cheery animals.  We were escorted into a narrow room with various pieces of medical equipment lining one wall.  After a while, we heard voices and footsteps in an office down a little side corridor.  Sveta came back and took us in for our first look at Maksim.

He sat on a padded bench, a child with enormous hazel eyes, straight brown hair, and a bewildered expression.  He looked more like a two-year-old than a three-year-old, but that was to be expected.  He didn’t react much at all when we came in, and the Director explained that naptime was two to four every day, and we had arrived just after he’d fallen asleep.  He was very, very quiet, but readily made eye contact.  He liked the digital camera quite a lot, though.

We took him outside, feeling dreadful about keeping him awake when he clearly wanted nothing more than to fall asleep.  After a while, he did wake up, though he was very quiet.  He smiled for the camera--it was a very cute smile--and laughed quietly when I tossed him in the air.  He also loved it when I spun around with him in my arms.  He didn’t speak but nodded his head in answer to yes-no questions.  Maksim was very sweet the whole time.  He showed a great deal of interest in the cam-corder.  He also wouldn’t let Kala hold him for very long, but he reached happily for me and insisted I hold him most of the time we were outside.

Children always do this to me.  They know I don’t like children very much unless they’re a) mine, b) those of a good friend, or c) potentially mine.  This means that strange children run straight to me, and will pick me out of a crowded roomful of people as the person they instantly love best.  I must put out serious daddy pheromones or something.

We finally took him back to his dorm room for the rest of his nap and gave him to a little old lady who he clearly knew well.  Behind her I could see several rows of children sleeping in little beds in a room drenched in sunshine.  Maksim waved good-bye when we left.  It was meltingly adorable.

After this, we headed back to downtown Zhytomyr to get permission from Director #2 to visit Aleksandr.  This was actually accomplished quickly, and before long we were off to the Internat.

Older children are housed at boarding schools called Internats, even if it means separation from siblings.  This Internat looked like a medium-sized junior high school.  Four floors, brick buildings that surround a play area that included playground equipment and a small enclosed soccer field.  Children were everywhere, running, shouting, screaming, scrambling over the playground equipment, playing soccer.  A girl who looked to be thirteen or so with white-blond hair watched us unabashedly as we got out of the car and Sveta talked to various adult women.  They led us inside a building with hardwood floors and a dark interior.  During the day, government buildings seem to keep their lights off to save money.  The interior was clean but battered.  The stairs were concrete and worn in the middle.  I counted five coats of paint worn through.

We went into an office area that felt like a school office.  Just inside the door sat a couple of chairs, and beyony them a secretary’s desk.  Four or five women were in the office, along with a teenager.  Sitting in a chair just inside the door was a brown-haired boy with large hazel eyes.  He was short, maybe four and a half feet tall, and on the thin side.  He was trying not to fidget and he kept looking into the hallway expectantly, with hope riding his face.  This had to be Aleksandr.

I was a little startled--I had thought we’d talk to the Director for a while first, then Aleksandr would be brought down.  But he was already waiting for us.

Despite the fact that my writing job requires me to take risks, I’m very cautious when it comes to certain parts of my life.  I had wanted to talk to the Director first and see what she knew about Aleksandr, see if there were any health or emotional problems that would send us back to the NAC for another referral before Aleksandr even knew we had been asking about him.  No hopes would be raised and dashed for him if we elected to leave.  But here he was, in the office, knowing two prospective parents had come to meet him.

Sveta introduced us to him and we learned that Aleksandr goes by Sasha.  So he quickly became Sasha in our minds.  He shook hands, looking hopeful as a puppy.  Sveta told him to wait a little longer in the front office while Kala and I went into the Director’s office to confer with her.  The office was, like the rest of the school, clean but battered.  A red floor rug covered wooden floors and several elderly wooden cabinets held paper records.  I saw no computer.  The Director was a smiling woman with dark hair who wore a red and black suit.  Along with the Director was a lawyer whose name I didn’t catch.  She was dressed in jeans, a mutli-colored blouse, and big glasses.

The Director and the lawyer assured us that Sasha was a smart boy, very social with a lot of friends, no health problems at all (“very healthy” was repeated several times).  Through Sveta, we questioned them more about Sasha’s background.  They said his father had died, and we quickly asked if they meant his father or his step-father.  Blank looks.

“He had a step-father,” I said.  “Maksim’s father.  What happened to him?”

On this they had no records, since Maksim’s father wasn’t Sasha’s father and they had no records on anyone but Sasha.  I made a mental note to ask the Director at Maksim’s orphanage the same question.

We also learned a few things we already knew, that Sasha’s mother was born in 1964 (so she’s our age), that she’s still alive somewhere, that Sasha has two sisters around twenty years old.  He came to the orphanage after his step-father died.  Sasha’s mother has no parental rights at all.  In addition, we learned that Sasha’s family has not visited, not even asked to.  Why, of course, is not known. It may be the mother had no desire, or she may have decided that it would be too difficult to continue emotional ties with a child she would not be able to raise.  We’ll try to find out more.

At the time he was brought to the orphanage, Sasha was living with his mother and Maksim in a house with no heat and no food.  (Remember that they came to the orphanage in April, so they’d weathered the winter.)  The neighbors knew what was going on, and they convinced Sasha’s mother that it would be best for the children if she gave them up.  At last, she agreed and a social worker took them to the orphanage.

After learning all this, we asked them to bring Sasha in.  He entered the office uncertainly and took up a chair between Kala and me.  Sveta spoke to him at some length, and I heard the words “Mama” and “Papa.”  We talked to him through Sveta and learned more about him.

His favorite subject in school is Ukrainian.  He likes to read, especially Greek mythology.  He knows a tiny bit of English.  His favorite food is bananas--and sweets.  He has several friends at the orphanage.  He remembers his brother Maksim, of course, but he hasn’t seen him since they were split up.  He has a small cut at the corner of his right eye from a fall he took.  He likes playing soccer.  He had recently helped paint part of the Internat.  His voice has that curiously hoarse quality some children have.

We showed him the digital camera and took some pictures.  He looked at them and gave a little laugh that was very similar to the sound Maksim made when he laughed.  We let him take some pictures with the camera, and he liked that, too.  We showed him the pictures we took of Maksim.  He stared at those for a long time, then said he remembered Maksim as much smaller.  I found this very sad.

Sasha didn’t know American geography, of course, and we tried to explain where Michigan is.  I asked if the Director had a world map anywhere, but she didn’t.  Sasha said the geography class had one.  Then I remembered there was a U.S. map in the back of my notebook.  I pulled it out and showed it to him.  Through Sveta, Sasha asked if we lived by the ocean, and we explained about the Great Lakes.

It’s hard to talk to someone like this.  I wanted to know everything about Sasha, but my mind blanked out after a while.  Information overload, I think.  At last it was time to go.  Sasha asked if we were coming back, and we said we were.

“When?” he asked, and we had to tell him we didn’t know, exactly.  Did he want us to come back?  The answer was an emphatic yes.

I expected Sasha to leave as filed out of the office, but he stuck close by Kala and me and followed us right out to the car.  I think if we had told him to get in, he’d’ve done it without hesitation.  I reached into our lunch bag and gave him a banana.

Kala, it turned out, had to go to the bathroom before we left, so she went back inside.  I decided to take Sasha for a walk around the Internat.  The moment we were away from the other adults, Sasha sprang to life.  He chattered at me non-stop in Russian, pointing at various buildings and sections of the grounds.  I assume he was telling me what each one was.  The blond girl I’d seen earlier sidled up to us.  She turned out to be a friend of Sasha’s, and she joined us in the tour.  Sasha took me up a set of steps to a concrete porch shaded by an overhang.  A half dozen teenage boys were hanging out there.  Sasha and the girl (who’s name I can’t recall) took me inside, and the boys followed, creating an impromptu parade.

Inside was a large entryway with hallways branching left and right and a wide tiled staircase ahead of us.  The tiles in the center of the stairs were worn through to the concrete beneath.  Sasha pointed down both hallways and said something in Russian, then led me upstairs.  The teenagers followed to the foot of the steps, then stopped and drifted back outside.

Sasha and the girl, meanwhile, took me up to the third floor.  I smelled sharp camphor.  Sasha opened a door on what turned out to be a small medical dispensary.  A smiling, middle-aged woman in a white coat was talking to two children about Sasha’s age.  She came over to see what was going on.  She tried to talk to me, but I could only smile and shrug.

Next Sasha took me up the stairs to the fourth floor.  The hallways all reminded me of an aging junior high or high school.  The walls were painted in blues on the dark side of pastel, and wooden doors lined the corridors.  The flooring was plain wood, painted dark brown.  One room was being painted by a woman in her twenties or so.  Across from this room was a closed door.  Sasha indicated it and chattered at me again.  I pointed at him and pillowed my head on my hands.  Do you sleep here?

He nodded, pleased that I understood.  He made no move to go inside, and I don’t know if the bedrooms were off limits during the day or if he didn’t want to go in.  In any case, Kala was certainly wondering where I was by now, so I pointed at my watch and at the stairs.  Time to go.

Sasha and the girl trundled down the steps.  Sasha wore sandals that skidded across the worn tiles when he hit the first turn in the stairs, and I gasped out a warning.  He laughed and did it again at the next turning, so I realized it was all on purpose.

Back outside, I found Kala and Sveta looking for us, and I explained where we’d gone.  Kala said the same group of teenage boys had clustered around her asking questions in halting English.  “Where you from?” and such.  They knew we were Americans, of course.

Sasha again asked us when we were coming back, and the best answer we could give was “Tomorrow.”

“I’ll wait for you,” he said through Sveta.

I didn’t like leaving.  I didn’t like leaving Sasha there.

We drove back to Kyiv.  Sveta asked us what we thought of the children, and we gave the non-committal “They’re very nice” answers you have to give.  It’s a bad idea to say, “We’re interested in adopting them” because that can lead to pressure--or an implied acceptance.  Rights Protection Fund gets a flat fee for facilitating adoptions, no matter how long each one takes, so it’s in their best interest to get them done quickly.  It also means that prospective parents who turn down children and go through multiple referrals are less profitable to RPF, and they sometimes pressure parents.  Welearned later, for example, that Mark and Wendy had been pressured to accept a referral for two children--an infant and a five-year-old--when they’d come over expecting to adopt a single infant.

At any rate, we talked about the boys in low voices in the back seat.  Sveta’s English is good, but not good enough to piece together our rapid, low conversation over the noise of the car,  so we didn’t worry about eavesdropping.  We both liked both boys very much, but we wanted to send pictures of them to the doctor before committing further.

I had to give Anatoly $100 for gas.

We got home at about 8:30, tired and hungry, but we weren’t done for the day.  Irine had left a chicken and rice casserole on the stove for us, but I had to get own to an Internet café right away.  I grabbed the camera and took off.

The closest café that I knew could handle a USB port was about fifteen minutes away by foot.  I trotted down through the darkening streets.  It was windy and getting chilly and I wished I’d brought my jacket.  I finally got there, winding my way through the little maze of hallways to the basement.  Unfortunately, the computer I was on didn’t have the driver for our camera, and the computer wouldn’t load one.  I asked the person at the counter if he could do it, but his computer wouldn’t let him load a driver, either.  Security reasons.  Dammit!  My laptop won’t talk to the camera at all, so they’re all locked in the memory stick.  We had no way of sending the pictures to the agency or to the doctor.

I finally went back to the flat.  It was dark now, and the sidewalks were nearly empty.  I got back, tired, frustrated, and very hungry.  Kala, meanwhile, had talked to the agency back in Chicago to tell them about the visit and was on the phone with Mark and Wendy as I walked in the door.  Kala finished with them and hung up.

Okay.  No way to send pictures.  Kala, however, said that the agency told her the only thing the doctor would be checking for in the pictures was fetal alcohol syndrome, but Kala knows those features well--she’s worked with FAS kids several times and knows the signs.  Neither Maksim nor Sasha has it, that we know.  The medical records themselves would be meaningless to an American doctor, so there’s no point in faxing them anywhere.

We talked about it.  Both boys were completely charming, and the thought of telling Sasha “Sorry, no,” was unthinkable to us. 

Kala called the agency back and told them we wanted to adopt Maksim and Sasha.

This touched off more phone calls, of course.  We had to call Kate to let her know, and she rattled through the rest of the process.  It’s going to be a bewildering whirlwind of meetings and paperwork that will last a couple weeks or more, depending.

I tried to call my mother, but she wasn’t home.  I left a message with my grandmother.  And then we set the alarm for 6:30 and fell into bed.  It was hard falling asleep, though, and I wondered what Sasha was thinking about as he lay in his dorm room bed.

I’m going to be a father to a twelve-year-old I can’t talk to.  Man, this is going to be a challenge.

Oddly, my tensions have reversed.  I was most nervous about meeting Sasha because he was older, with a long history of his own.  But now I’m more nervous about Maksim, since he was so quiet and subdued.  I know he was tired and sleepy, but I still wonder if something was perhaps wrong.  I doubt it very much, but can’t help worrying.

 

June 9, 2005

I wrote most of the above entry in the car this mornning on the way to Zhytomyr.  We’re currently in that city, winding our way through hills and trees to Maksim’s orphanage.

The babushka brigade was out in full force this morning in Kyiv.   The midieval custom of sweeping your doorstep and sidwalk every morning has continued into modern times in Ukraine.  Shopkeepers in head cloths sweep their front steps and sidewalks with home-made, short-handled brooms of straw and twigs.  They look like fairy-tale witches in bright colors.  And you don’t see litter on the streets in Kyiv or Zhytomyr.

Breakfast was again cereal, toast, and yoghurt.  Still no hot water in the flat.  Kala’s getting ticked off about it.  It doesn’t bother me quite so much.

We drove to Zhytomyr, past all the roadside vendors, and into town.  We stopped at one of yesterday’s office buildings to get the first of the forms we need to fill out and dropped it off at another building where a typist would fill it out.  I popped over to the bakery we visited yesterday and got two bottles of Coke--caffeine!--and some Spirte for Kala.

Most of the shops I’ve been to here have no cash register.  The total is calculated on a calculator and the money is kept in a cardboard box.  The cashier held up the calculator with the so I knew how much to pay--seven gribna for three bottles of pop.  That’s $1.35 or so back home.

We’re now on our way to see Maksim.

We’re visiting Maksim first because the orphanage allows visits from 10-12 and after four.  We elected a morning visit so Sasha wouldn’t have to wait for us all day long.  At the moment we’re driving down a bumpy, winding road that follows a river whose name translates as “Stone River.”  It’s flat and sedate, with a lot of reeds along the bank.  The weather is cloudy, gray, and cool, but there’s no sign of rain, thank goodness.

 

5:20 p.m.

On our way home now from the daily visits.

There was another long wait at two different offices, and then we drove out to Maksim’s orphanage, where there was another long wait.  It’s starting to get frustrating.  It doesn’t seem like anything gets done in this country without a long wait.  This person isn’t in, that person won’t see you right now, another can’t see you until after lunch.  No one makes appointments, apparently.

At last an orphanage worker brought out Maksim, and Sveta told us to take him outside while she did paperwork stuff.  This we did.  Maksim was still very, very quiet, and not much more active than yesterday.  He still didn’t speak.  I was starting to get worried.  The orphanage workers assured us that Maksim talked quite a lot, but we still hadn’t seen it.

We took him around outside and through the various little play areas.  Ukrainian orphanages segregate the children by age.  I wanted to see Maksim interact with other children.  It seemed quite likely that he was just nervous and shy around us, but I wanted to be sure.  I’ve gone through autism once already and don’t want a repeat, however sweet Maksim is.

Wherever we go in the orphanage, we get the attention of the children.  They’re curious, wanting to see who these strangers are and what they want.  The lady leading one group of children shooed us away because the kids were clustering around us instead of playing.

After some hunting, we found what appeared to be Maksim’s group.  There were about sixteen or eighteen children in it, and they were walking down one of the paths leading between the areas with a supervisor.  The children were all dressed oddly to my eye.  All of them, boys and girls, wore heavy stockings under knee-length shorts, with sweaters over that.  The girls had head cloths or big, poofy bows sprouting from the tops of their heads like mutant flowers.  The boys wore tiny baseball caps that were so small they just perched on the tops of their heads.  I couldn’t tell if this was custom or necessity.  Maksim’s little cap was red.

Maksim liked being carried by me, and he liked being lifted high in the air or whirled around, but he did little more than smile.  I set him down at the edge of his play group, and he edged in among them.  He came more to life, then.  A big green truck roared past the orphanage gate, and Maksim was one of several children who dashed over to look.  He also talked to a couple other children and joined hands with them to lead the group further down the path.  I felt a lot better about him then.  He’s really closer to two than three, development-wise, but that’s unfortunately the norm for a child in his position.

Meanwhile, several other children clustered around us, talking to us and asking for attention.  We gave bits of it as best we could.  It was heart-wrenching to watch them.  They all want parents, they all want families, but this is all they have.  It was a small comfort to me to know that the NAC has more families applying to adopt than it can handle right now.

The children played some more and we watched Maksim play.  Then we joined in.  Kala played tag with him, gently chasing him around the playground, and he liked that a lot.  I managed to get a little hide and seek out of him, along with some daddy rough-housing--turning him upside-down to pick up his fallen cap, hoisting him over my shoulders, and holding him in funny positions.  He laughed at that.

Another child caught my eye.  He stood at the edge of the play area, not playing with anyone.  He had epicanthic folds on his eyes, and when he stood there looking at the other children, he rocked from side to side and moaned low in his throat.  My autism alarms went off.  I knelt down in front of him and took his hand.  He stopped moaning and looked at me briefly, then broke off eye contact, though he didn’t start moaning again.  I talked to him and he didn’t respond.  Stimming, lack of eye contact, low social interaction.  Autistic.  But he did look at me, which means he’s not too far gone.  Easily helpable--if someone were able to send him through play therapy.  But there’s no money for that.  I eventually had to leave this little boy, knowing he would grow up autistic in a hard, uncaring part of the world with no one to help him.  It brought tears to my eyes.  I can’t help him.  I want to.

We took Maksim out to the car and Kala held out a cookie to him.  He snatched it out of her hand and chowed it down as if he were afraid someone would take it away from him.  We gave him another one, and he ate it more slowly.  Then it was back to the play area, and he really got active with us.  He didn’t talk much, but he was a much more normal child.

At last we had to bring him inside and leave him with his caregivers.  When Sveta explained to him it was time for us to leave, he hung his head and stared at his shoes.  He didn’t cry, but he was very, very sad.  We tried to tell him that we would come back later, but I don’t think he understood.  He was just sad.  It was awful leaving him.

Next we had a formal meeting with the Director.  She looked like Inspector 12 from those underwear commercials--graying blond hair rammed into a bun, thick build, sausage fingers, stern expression.  The orphanage doctor, a slender, blond woman, was there as well.  We made a formal declaration to her that we wanted to adopt Maksim.  The Director’s expression was almost fierce at first, but it softened as the meeting went on, and by the end she was smiling.  The doctor told us Maksim was quite healthy, and did we have any questions?

I wanted to know about Maksim’s biological father, since Sasha’s Internat didn’t have records on him.  Maksim’s mother, it turns out, was not married to Maksim’s father, nor had she been married to Sasha’s father, though she had lived with both.  In Ukraine, an unmarried woman who gives birth has the option of listing no father at all on the birth certificate, and that’s what Mom did.  We don’t know his name.  Apparently the earlier story we heard about his death was misinformation.  Maksim’s father simply left not long after he was born, leaving the mother, Sasha, and Maksim destitute in a house with no heat and no food.  The neighbors noticed that Sasha was hungry all the time and somehow learned the house had no heat, so they called the Ukrainian version of social services, and the children were removed from the home.  Again we were told that neither the mother nor the sisters had visited either child.

Despite the sadness of the story, we left on a positive note--Maksim was going to be our child.

From there, we drove back to town and yet another office, where a typist had prepared our formal written declaration to adopt.  Sveta asked for our passports.  I had mine, but Kala had left hers back at the flat.  Sveta said it might not matter and vanished inside the building while we waited in the car behind the place.

The area behind these government buildings is weird.  The front looks like a perfectly ordinary, if scruffy, stone-and-concrete office building.  The back looks like a cross between a back alley and a jungle.  Trees and long grass grow around tilting sheds and leaning fences, and a rutted cement alley runs up the middle.  It’s oddly endearing, actually.  Such a place in America would be all cracked concrete and smelly dumpsters instead of trees and grass.

Sveta came out and told us to come inside.  We signed the declaration in front of a notary, a plump woman wearing a multicolored blouse.  She stamped it, put it in a plastic protector, and gave it to Sveta.  Sveta handed her a bunch of money, which neither of them counted, and I suspect it was a bribe.  For reasons I don’t understand, the notary kept my passport.  Sveta assured me I’d get it back tomorrow, when Kala showed hers.

Then we trundled out the other side of town to Sasha’s Internat.  By now it was almost two o’clock.  We’d been hoping to visit Sasha earlier than this because we knew he’d been waiting for us, but it didn’t work out that way.  Before the car even came to a halt, Sasha popped out of the Intnernat’s office building, grinning and waving.  He ran up to hug us the moment we got out of the car.

You fall in love with children, you know.  I will never forget the first moment I saw Sasha in the office or the first time I saw Maksim smile.  Sasha was so glad to see us, and I seriously think he sat in that doorway all day long, waiting for our car to come up the driveway.  I wish he could be with us now, and I miss him when he’s gone.  You wonder how this can happen to someone you haven’t talked to for more than three hours, but it happens just the same.

We showed Sasha the videos we’d taken of Maksim that day, and he loved them.  He also wanted to use the video camera, so I showed him how.  He spent considerable time videotaping the office and some of his friends who dropped by to see what was going on.  Two girls in their mid-teens showed up wearing shorts, halter tops, and a whole lot of white paint.  They looked at the tape for a moment, then ran back upstairs.

Next we went into the Director’s office, where we met a man with iron-gray hair and steel-gray eyes.  I was puzzled--hadn’t we met the Internat’s Director yesterday?  Apparently not.

He asked us a couple perfunctory questions about my job (we had to insert that Kala works as well), our house, and our family.  Then we made a formal declaration that we wanted to adopt Sasha, who was standing in the doorway with the video camera, taping every moment.  I haven’t checked yet, but I hope it came out--it’ll be a neat moment to keep.

And then we were released to visit with Sasha.  We actually ended up visiting with half a dozen of Sasha’s friends, too, since they clustered around us.  Many pictures were taken, many minutes of videotape were recorded.  At one point, we sat on some front steps and showed Sasha a little photo album we’d made.  It had pictures of us, various extended family members, our pets, and our house.  Sasha was captivated, as were his friends.  They all crowded around for a look.

The teens and pre-teens came off as a bit odd to me.  Although most seemed perfectly normal, if starved for adult attention, a few had a definite hard edge to them.  It’s difficult to explain without using unflattering similes or metaphors, especially since most of them got their edge because their lives have been dreadful--not their faults.  There was a definite . . . hunger to all of them, though.  It felt like many of them hung around us because they saw what Sasha was getting and they desperately hoped a few crumbs would come their way as well.  I talked to as many teens as I could, though it twisted my heart knowing that after we left with Sasha, their lives would continue as they always have--broken, with little hope for a family of their own.

After a while, we took Sasha and broke away from the crowd of kids so we could have some time alone with him.  Sveta came along to translate, as needed.  Just beyond the office area of the Internat was a big, echoing hallway done in dark blue.  I suspect that kids hang out here when the weather outside is bad.  It was dimly lit--all the lights were off, as usual.  Sasha pointed a schedule posted high on the wall, and I could see it was a class schedule, though I couldn’t puzzle out the subjects.

We took Sasha into a little alcove with a window and Kala measured him for clothes.  Through Sveta, we asked what his favorite colors were in clothes (black and white) and whether he could ride a bike (yes--loved to).  He also added that he wanted to ride bikes with Aran when he got to America.

We also went over names with him.  Sasha hadn’t been told our last names, so we rectified this.  He had a bit of trouble pronouncing it at first.  We also learned that Ukrainians (and Russians) don’t do middle names.  You have a first name, a family name, and a patronymic (your father’s first name + vich for boys and +anova for girls).  Sasha had a last name (and I’m ashamed to admit that I’ve forgotten it) and no patronymic.  We explained the concept of middle names and told him we’d give him an American middle name.  “Garth” doesn’t work with “Sasha” in our mind, so we tossed that and used instead a name that had come in a close second.  Sasha’s name will be:

 

Aleksandr (Sasha) Mitchell Piziks

 

Maksim’s name will be:

 

Maksim (Max) Everett Piziks

 

I also gave Sasha his first English lesson--body parts.  Arm, leg, hand, foot.  He tried hard and did very well.

Back outside, we learned that Sasha’s usual lunchtime is two o’clock, and our arrival had pre-empted it.  Our son hadn’t had his lunch?  We were horrified!  Fortunately, Irine had packed her usual overly-generous assortment of sandwiches.  Sasha took us out to the play area, where an odd shelter sat beneath some trees.  It was a three-sided, roofed shelter with a bench along one wall.  Not sure what it was used for, officially, though unofficially someone had been playing with matches there and eating sunflower seeds, if the litter on the floor was any indication.  Anyway, Sasha happily munched a cheese sandwich and a banana, which he washed down with Coke.  (Actually, he saved the banana for later, clutching it along with the photo album.)

Then it was time for us to go.  Sasha followed us to the car, and we gave him a couple cookies.  Two other boys were standing nearby, and we gave some to them, too.  Sasha tried to give us the photo album back, but we shook our heads.  It belonged to him.  Maksim was too young to understand it, so Sasha could keep it.  This clearly made him happy.  He gave Kala and big hug and a kiss good-bye, then did the same to me.  And then, as Sveta and Anatoly climbed into the car, there was another round of hugs.

It’s amazing how fast you can come to love someone and it’s terrible how awful it is to leave them, isn’t it?

We drove back to Kyiv and arrived just in time for rush hour traffic.  Oi!  Irine popped in when we finally got home and made supper--fish cakes, curry sauce, and rice with leftover cabbage salad.  Yum!

Kala ran down to the store to change a bit more money and buy another phone card.  Then the two of us decided to hit the Internet café.  Actually, we stopped at the bodega, bought a box of chocolates for Sasha, brought it upstairs to the flat, and then hit the Internet café.  The two of us each spent almost an hour on-line and we only paid about $3.30 for it.  On the way back we talked about the Great Shopping Dilemma.  The drive to Zhytomyr is about 90 minutes each way.  Between that and the paperwork running and the visits, we don’t get back until early evening at best, and we’re too tired to shop for anything--presents, souvenirs, clothes for the boys.  Hmmmm . . .

We arrived home, and found a message from Irine--Sveta and Anatoly would pick us up at 8:30 tomorrow morning.  It would be our last visit until Monday.  (!!)  No boys for two days?  Although this would solve the Great Shopping Dilemma, I hated the idea of going that long without seeing them.  Not so much for me--I can deal--but the disappointment and agonizing waiting would be awful for Sasha, and Maksim gets so sad whenever we leave him.

We also called Mark and Wendy.  Irine was offering to arrange ballet tickets for this weekend, and we wanted to get Mark and Wendy in on it.  Since they didn’t get a referral at their appointment, they’re trying to keep busy until their next appointment on Monday, and Wendy said they’d love to go to the ballet.

Wendy also said she heard that people visit the orphanages on Saturdays all the time, though Sunday is a day off for everyone.  Gonna ask about that tomorrow, then.

Kala’s dozing in the bedroom right now.  It’s 11:30, but she plans to get up at two and call Aran, since he doesn’t get home until six, Michigan time.

I want my boys with me--all three of them.

 

June 10, 2005

We got up at two in the morning so we could call Aran.  The first thing he said when we got on the line was, “Are you on your way home now?” in a plaintive voice, and we had to tell him we wouldn’t be home for a long time.  We told him a little about his new brothers, but I don’t know how much he understood.

Very tired and cranky this morning.  We haven’t had hot water in the apartment for three days now, and we’re getting really tired of heating wash water on the stove and in the electric water pot.  Irina’s getting a small hot water heated installed either today or tomorrow, though, but only because we’ve told her we’re planning to stay for the next two weeks.

We washed up and then headed into “The Three Stooges at Breakfast.”  Or maybe it was “I Love Lucy Goes to Kyiv.”  First Kala tried to turn off the gas burner that had heated the last batch of wash water.  The burner wouldn’t shut off.  No matter which way she turned the dial, the blue flame stubbornly continued burning.  I tried and couldn’t get any result either.  I pushed and turned, pulled and turned, twisted, and cursed.  No result.  The kitchen was getting really warm by now and I had to swing open a window.  Then Kala tried the nob next to the burning one to see if it had some special trick she could duplicate.  The burner instantly shut off.  So one knob turns the gas on, another turns it off.  I’m beginning to see why the Russians lost the cold war.

I, meanwhile, had been making toast.  The wonderful Russian-made toaster, however, has wide gaps in the wires that separate the bread from the heating unit, and a piece of bread managed to slip down between the gaps to lodge against the said heating unit.  Smoke began to pour out of the toaster.  I yanked the plug, waved the smoke outside, and tried to fish the bread out using two knives as tongs.  The bread hid like a KKK Grand Dragon at an NAACP meeting.  I made another attempt, and this time the bread dropped down even further.  One more shot finally got the bread out, though I had to turn the toaster upside-down to do it.  This dropped a shower of crumbs all across the cupboard.  I cleaned up the mess with a sigh and left the dirty dishes in the sink for Irine.

Anatoly arrived, and we headed for the elevator.  The apartment building has two elevators, actually--the big one and the little one.  The big one is the long, narrow one.  The little one is barely bigger than a phone booth.  Anatoly had snagged the little one.  We crowded in and began the descent.  About halfway down, the doors opened and a heavyset man dressed all in black got on.  It was a real squeeze.  I was pressed shoulder-to-shoulder with this guy.  He pushed the first floor button.  We waited.  Nothing.  The doors didn’t close.  After a moment, Anatoly said something to the man.  He snorted and got off.  The elevator doors shut and we continued downward.  The man apparently put the elevator over its weight limit and it had some kind of sensor that told it so.  I think I’m glad.

And now we’re in the car driving to Zhytomyr to see the boys again.

 

7:00 p.m.

Another long day in the adoption process.  The sucky part is, this day was supposed to be short.

We arrived in Zhytomyr and stopped at the notary’s office again.  There, we signed two more declarations that we wanted to adopt Sasha and Maksim.  Yesterday’s documents were for the local level; today’s were for the national level.  This time Kala had her passport with her (both Sveta and I checked before we left Kyiv).  The notary examined it, returned it, and also returned my passport.  Sveta paid her a chunk of money, and this time they both counted it.  Then we were off to visit Maksim.

Maksim smiled when he saw us and came readily to be picked up.  He clung to me like a little monkey and resisted being put down.  We were inside, in one of the classrooms.  A piano sat against one wall, and I played nursery rhyme songs for Maksim.  He seemed to like that, but still didn’t speak.  We went outside.  I carried Maksim on my shoulders for a while, and he liked that a lot.  Every so often I flipped his ankles upward and leaned back.  He giggled and clutched the sides of my head, half in fear, half in glee.  Fun isn’t fun, you see, unless there’s danger involved.

We played with Maksim in an unused section of the play area and we also gave him lots of hugs.  At one point, I was lying on my back on the grass and Maksim lay on my chest.  He didn’t want to do anything but lay there for a long time.  He has a lot of hugs to catch up on.  Another little boy came over, chattering at us in Russian, and Maksim played with him for a while.  They started throwing rocks at one point, and we put a quick stop to that.

Eventually we ended up back with Maksim’s play group.  He still hadn’t spoken to us, but just like yesterday, he perked up when he joined his playmates.  We took quite a lot of videotape of him running around the play area with the other children.  The other kids tried to get our attention as well.  Actually, they tried to get my attention; they all but ignored Kala.  Daddy pheromones at work again.  A game of peekaboo somehow mutated into a game of Scary Monster.  This invovled me ducking behind the wall of a sort of gazebo and popping up with a growl while the children shrieked and laughed and ran away.  I ended that game after a while and came out into the playground proper, and I was instantly surrounded by a horde of children.  I gave them what attention I could.  One little blond boy in a blue sweater wanted so badly to be picked up that I did so.  He burrowed into my shoulder and clung there until I had to put him down.  I hope he gets adopted soon.  I hope all of them get adopted soon, actually.  The NAC is currently booking appointments in December of this year, but I think most people are looking for infants.  These toddlers--and older children--so desperately need affection and homes, and I defy anyone to spend five minutes with them without wanting to scoop up half a dozen to take home.

We gave Maksim a cookie, and he loved that.  We also distributed cookies among the other children in the play group.  We measured Maksim for clothing sizes.  And then it was time to go.

This time, Maksim cried when he realized we were leaving.  It was horrible to leave him behind.  I just kept telling myself that soon he’d be coming with us forever.  I wish we could make him understand that.

We next drove (and drove and drove) across town to Sasha’s Internat.  When we arrived and asked for Sasha, he was nowhere to be found.  The kids are on summer break, which means they don’t do anything but hang around the play area all day and look bored.  At last, Sasha appeared.  He had been out for a walk in the woods that surround the Internat.

We spent an hour with him, mostly letting him play with the digital camera.  He took pictures of trees, of walls, of cars, of his friends, of the Director, and everything else in sight.  He staged lots of photographs, and we started calling him Director Sasha.  Naturally, this meant that Sasha attracted a mass of followers who clustered around the camera and us.  One boy, tall and gawky, knew some English and tagged along for most of the time we were there.  His name was Vitaly, and he loved American films, especially Jackie Chan.

Kala and I gave Sasha a box of chocolates to share among his friends, and that was a major hit.  They were dark chocolates with caramel centers, and we’d bought them cheap at the corner bodega.  Sasha gave one to both of us, and they were really, really good.  Way better than anything available in America.  Americans just don’t do good chocolate.  Sasha handed many pieces around to the other kids, and they were gone within seconds.

At one point we came across the Internat’s library.  It was about the size of an American classroom with a mix of books both ancient and new.  A librarian was tapping away at a manual typewriter.  She knew a few words of English, we knew a few words of Russian, and we both did gestures.  Between all that, we got across the idea that Kala and I wanted to spend some time in here with Sasha, and she agreed.  This also let us shoo the other kids away, except for Vitaly, who still hung around.

Sveta, meanwhile, told us that she needed to go talk to an Inspector or something and that Anatoly would drive her.  She promised to be back in about an hour.  This was at one-thirty.

In the library, I pulled my laptop out of my backpack, intending to give Sasha another English lesson.  This didn’t work in the slightest--Sasha showed way more interest in the computer itself than in English.  Come to that, Sasha has shown very little interest in learning any English at all.  Next time we go out there, we’re going to tell him he has to earn camera time with English lessons.

Vitaly was also captivated by the laptop.  Sasha took a picture of it next to an open book--two converging technologies.  The librarian, meanwhile, left for lunch after exacting a promise that we would stay in the library until she got back so it wouldn’t have to be locked.  An hour passed, and it occurred to me that Sveta didn’t know we were in the library and I should pop out to see if she had returned.  The library door had a handle and a locking mechanism.  The door didn’t open when I pulled, so I turned the lock.  Click!  Uh oh.  The door seemed to be extra super locked now.  I couldn’t get it open.  Sasha couldn’t get it open.  Kala and Vitaly couldn’t get it open.  The windows opened onto a courtyard, but they were barred.

After many minutes, we heard footsteps go past.  We shouted through a crack in the door, but the person didn’t stop.  We tried to figure the lock out.  No luck.  Why does this weird stuff always happen when I’m involved?  First the stove, then the toaster, now this.

Finally the librarian came back from lunch and she got the door open.  Sheesh.

From there we went outside.  Still no sign of Sveta, and it had been an hour and a half.  We wandered about, letting Sasha take pictures until he filled the memory card and drained the battery.  It was then that I had a run-in with true horror.

I had to go to the bathroom.  I knew where it was, but Vitaly offered to guide me there.  I let him, and he took me the long way around, deliberately, I think.  Well, he wants adult attention too, so I went along with it.  The bathroom was occupied, though, so Vitaly took me out behind the Internat.  I thought he meant I should go in the bushes or something, and I refused him, but he shook his head and led me further out into the yard.  A bunch of garage-like buildings were back here, and among them stood a square building made of brown cinderblock.  The smell instantly identified it as an outhouse.  It had a men’s side and a women’s side.  Vitaly pointed me toward the men’s side and I went in.  He waited outside.

You know those stories in which a character goes into a bathroom and says it’s filthy or says something like, “I didn’t want to know what was on the floor” or “I stepped in something slippery and refused to look”?  Well, I’m not going to use metaphor here.  If you have a weak stomach, you might want to skip the next paragraph.  I’m quite serious.

Okay, you’ve been warned.  This place was indeed dis-gust-ing.  The worst I’d ever seen.  The smell was so bad I breathed through my mouth, but then I could just about taste human waste on the air, so I switched back to my nose.  It was just a room with four knee-high cinderblock dividers set against the right wall.  A small square hole was cut in the floor between each divider, and feces were scattered all around them.  Little piles, big piles, a single huge one.  The wall behind one hole was smeared with brown liquid that had dripped down to the floor.  Toilet paper?  Ha!  And the entire floor was wet.  I tried to imagine coming in here wearing the sandals most of the kids had on and I almost barfed.  I selected the least disgusting of the holes, did what I came to do, and fled.

Outside, Vitaly greeted me with a grin and made “Man, does that stink or what?” gestures, with which I wholeheartedly agreed.

I found Kala and Sasha again.  Two hours had now gone by, and still no Sveta.  Then two and half hours, no Sveta.

We didn’t have Sveta’s cell phone number, and we were getting tired, worried, and pissed off.  We love spending time with Sasha, but spending time with Sasha also meant spending time with various teenagers, most of whom couldn’t speak English.  In fact, no one in the entire Internat spoke English, and here we were, stranded without our interpreter and no way to contact her.  It was getting draining, especially after a 90-minute drive in and two hours with Maksim.

I finally went into the Internat’s office and, through sign language, asked to use the phone.  Sveta’s number we didn’t have, but we did have numbers for Sergei and Kate.  I finally got hold of Kate and told her what was going on.  She promised to call Sveta and see what was going on.  I went back outside.

After three hours, the car finally pulled up.  Sveta was very apologetic and said she ran into problems with whatever it was she was doing.  She also gave us her cell phone number.  I was chilly toward her, and next time she’ll just have to wait until Kala and I can go along.  I’m not letting her pull this again, thank you.

We said good-bye to Sasha with many, many hugs.  This kid’s going to be my son.  It’s still weird to think about, sometimes.

After that came the long, long drive back to Kyiv.  We learned that Rights Protection Fund doesn’t usually work weekends so there’d normally be no visitation tomorrow or Sunday.  However, a Sunday visit can be arranged for an extra $100 fee.  We’re going to do a Sunday visit--Sasha could “survive” until Monday, but we don’t want to abandon Maksim for that long--but $100 is a hell of a lot of money over here.  Since we’ll be visiting the boys over two weekends, I’m going to do a little bargaining and see if we can get that $100 to cover two Sundays.

When we got back to the flat, we found that Irine had gotten a small on-demand water heater installed in the bathroom.  We both took long showers and, after three days of sponge baths, revelled in feeling fully clean again.  It was especially nice after getting home from the Internat because the outdoor areas were sandy and full of dust.  I can’t wait to get Sasha into a tub of hot water and into clean clothes.  He and Maksim have always been kind of dirty.  Their clothes, too.

Irine had left supper on the stove for us--Chicken Kyiv (isn’t all chicken in this country automatically Chicken Kyiv?) and a vegetable stew of zuchhini, onions, parsley, and baby carrots.  Very tasty.

Now we’re just hanging out, recovering from the long, exhausting day.

 

June 11, 2005

Slept way in this morning.  I decided to risk using my head clippers this morning, braving the snarling, growling little gadget running on hyped-up European electricity.  The clippers, however, refused to cut.  I think the blades were moving so fast that they couldn’t grab anything.  Maybe today Irina can show me a barber shop.

I also called American Express.  Back when I bought my jacket, I tried to put it on AmEx, but the card was declined.  This struck me as odd, but I didn’t have time to call until this morning.  When I got through, the sales rep told me that there was nothing wrong with the card and that she didn’t even have a record of an attempt.  So it must have been the store.  This is good to know.

Both Kala and I miss Maksim and Sasha, especially Maksim.  Sasha is old enough to understand that we’ll be back, but Maksim isn’t.  From his perspective, these wonderful people show up and give him lots of attention, and then, just when things are going great, they leave him alone.  If he were a baby, it wouldn’t be so bad.  If he were older, it wouldn’t be so bad.  But he’s a toddler, able to get that we leave but not able to get that we’ll come back.  It’s heartbreaking.

We’ll try to drown our sorrows with shopping.

 

4:00 p.m.

If you want to get fat, move to Kyiv.

Except the vast majority of Kyivites have whipcord builds.  I don’t know how they do it.  Even walking everywhere, as many of them do, they wouldn’t burn off a fatty, carb-heavy diet like this.

Breakfast today was oatmeal (Irina drenched it in butter before we could stop her), toast, summer sausage, and cheese.  Afterward we hung around the flat for a while until Irina came back, and we went shopping with Irina in tow.

First stop was a children’s store about ten block up the street.  We bought two shirts each and some socks for Maksim and Sasha, a pair of jeans for Sasha, and a pair of shorts for Maksim.  Then we headed for the subway and the downtown area.

The subway is deeeeeep underground.  I mean two or three hundred yards.  The long, long escalator moved so rapidly that you have to make a little jump to stay upright.  And then the perspective makes it hard to keep a straight face.  The tiles on the wall make straight-line designs that run  parallel with the steep escalator.  The people coming up the other way, of course, are standing upright.  The perspective plays a trick that makes everyone appear to be leaning impossibly backward.  It’s very funny.

We got off the subway at a looooong platform done in dazzling tiles with amazing mosaics on the walls and chandaliers hanging from the ceiling.  On the escalator, we went up, up, up, and up.  We finally emerged in an atrium that was designed to look like a chamber in an ancient monastary.

At last we exited the station.  After changing money at a bank (and these are everywhere, incidentally--changing money should be so easy back home), Irina took us to another cafeteria-style restaurant.  I got a cucumber salad and a pork dish cooked with onions and peppers in a sharp, vinegary sauce, some piragis stuffed with sausage, some steamed piragis stuff with sweet cheese smothered in sour cream, and a slice of chocolate cake layered with whipped cream.  I didn’t finish all of it, but made serious inroads.

Next we stopped at the Kyiv National Opera House to buy ballet tickets.  We got floor seating in the second section for only five dollars each.  (!)  The ballet is called Corsair (as in pirate).  I don’t know the story, so it’ll be one long dance recital to me, but it’ll be enjoyable, I think.  And if it’s not, we’re only out fifteen dollars for three tickets (since we paid for Irina’s, too).

Then we were off to an open-air market.  It was a place that sold lots of Ukrainian-Kyiv souvenir stuff.  I bought a Ukrainian white shirt embroidered with red designs at the neck and chest, a Father Christmas statue, some painted eggs, a nesting doll filled with Christmas ornaments intead of more dolls, a flat kitchen broom decorated with good luck symbols (Irina said you’re supposed to sweep bad luck out the door), a cap with the Kyiv symbol on it, and more.  I discovered the best way to bring down the price on something is to shake your head regretfully and start to move away.  Kala bought an orange “Dak Yushenko!” shirt and a few other things I’m blanking on.  We saw a wonderful, gorgeous witch carved out of walnut, but it cost 1800 G ($360) and we had to put it back.  Maybe next week, if we still have money.  We also found some photograph books on Kyiv and on Ukraine, along with a beautifully illustrated book of Russian fairy tales.

Irina would get along well with Susan Schwarz as the Great Enabler.  “Oh, this is so beautiful.  You would love this!”

The market is at the foot of a hill, and it lines ancient cobblestoned streets.  The hill itself is entirely dominated by St. Andrew’s cathedral.  The cathedral itself sits atop the hill, an enormous blue-and-white structure with rooftops that gleam gold in the spring sunlight.  A stone staircase that looks straight out of a fairy tale sweeps down, down the hill to the street.  The day we were there, two different weddings had just finished.  One wedding party was at the foot of the cathedral in the street, the other was coming down the grand staircase.  It was perfect wedding weather--sunny, not too hot, fluffy clouds scattered across the sky.  I got pictures of both wedding parties, tourist that I am.  The party at the foot of the hill was climbing into a big pink Cadillac convertible that was blasting out Elvis tunes.  They were laughing and cheering.  The party coming down the steps was more sedate.

Kala was pooping out by now, so we headed back home.  We sprung for a taxi and learned it was only five bucks to get home.  In Kyiv, the taxis aren’t metered.  You flag one down and ask how much it would cost to get wherever it is you want to go.  The taxi driver thinks about it and tells you.  You pay in advance and off you go.  There’s no tipping.

And now we’re back at the flat, trying not to miss Sasha and Maksim and Aran.

 

11:00 p.m.

Irina came by at quarter after six.  We walked down to the subway station, which is less than a block from her apartment complex, rode the long, long escalator downward, and boarded the train which zipped us to the central part of the city.

The National Opera House is just about a hundred years old--brand new, by European standards.  The building is enormous, and different companies put on different shows there, mostly opera and ballet.  Next weekend, for example, an opera troup is singing Faust.  Since Kala and I know the story, we might go.  I’ve never been to an opera.

I’ve never been to a ballet, either.

The interior of the ballet theater was stunning, especially when you consider it was built without electric hand tools and all the little bits were done by hand.  The first floor floors swirl with a design set in teeny-tiny tiles that must have been set with tweezers.  The walls are done in white and gold, with decorations on every pillar and staircase.  Friezes and chandaliers are everywhere.  The place stops just short of baroque.

The theater auditorium looks just like you’d expect a nineteenth-century European ballet to look.  Like the lobby, the walls and ceilings are done in white and gold.  A magnificient chandalier hangs from the exact center of the domed ceiling.  The chairs, curtains, and wall hangings are wine-red velvet.  Four floors of boxes rise straight up along the back wall and the sides.  The main drape--more wine-red velvet edged with gold trim--must weigh a ton.

We found our seats, and we had excellent ones in the eighth row a bit to one side.  We bought programs which, thankfully, explained the story in both Russian and English, though the English was broken and a little hard to follow.  It was better than my Russian, though.

Corsair is about a Handsome Pirate Captain (Conrad) who falls in love with a Beautiful Slave Girl (Medora).  But Medora is bought by a Pasha named Seyd instead.  Conrad and his men steal Medora away.  Medora’s slave dealer tries to retrieve her, and does so with the help of Conrad’s best friend, who doesn’t like Medora.  Conrad and his men disguise themselves as merchants and sneak into the Pasha’s palace to free Medora.  They fight their way out and flee back to their secret cave.  Conrad’s traitorous best friend makes a final attempt to kill Conrad and steal Medora away again, but Ali, Conrad’s faithful slave, steps in at the last minute and saves his master.  Conrad reluctantly orders his best friend executed, and the lovers are reunited.

The story is, of course, outrageously romantic and nothing but a thin excuse for the dancers to show off their skill.  It was great fun, actually.  Pretty people prancing around a stage in tight clothes--what’s not to like?  Isaac, the slave dealer, stole the first act.  He was bright and merry, completely unlike what you’d expect a slave dealer to be.  The Pasha was played up for comedy, with a long pointy beard and fluffy turban.  The most popular dancer in the troup was, strangely, the slave Ali.  I’m not sure why.  He does spend the entire ballet shirtless, but so does Isaac the slave dealer.  His dancing was amazing, but no less so than Conrad and Medora.  Still, the audience went crazy over him.

The dancing was amazing and powerful.  Whenever I hear people (usually my students) disparage ballet dancers as fluffy and effeminate, I laugh and challenge them to duplicate a single move.  They invariably can’t, or they refuse to try.  The athleticism is incredible, the leaps, the lifts, the turns and spins.  Many bits garnered extra applause.

During the intermission, I slipped down to the orchestra pit to look at the harp.  I blinked.  It was in terrible shape!  The column was frayed along the top.  The strings needed trimming.  It was battered and scratched.  Poor thing!

The end of the show brought on five curtain calls and lots of flowers brought on stage for the dancers.  No one threw any, rather to my disappointment.

When we emerged from the theater, it was just after nine o’clock, and it was still light outside.  Instead of going home, we wandered down the main street of Kyiv’s downtown.  Kyiv actually has two downtowns--one in the central city, where all the government offices are, and one at the bottom of the main hill, a true downtown.  We were in the latter.  On the weekends, the main street is closed to traffic, and in the evenings, the place is filled with people.  Restaurant seating spills into the street.  Street vendors sell various souvenir-type stuff.  People with exotic or odd animals like small monkeys, owls, or falcons wander about, offering to photograph you with the animal on your shoulder.  Street musicians of all types play many kinds of music.  A troup of salsa dancers gathered quite a crowd.  A fire-eater had staked out another section.  Street artists will draw your picture in charcoal, pencil, or watercolor.  We passed spectacular fountains and statues.  My favorite fountain was the one that runs down a staircase and is shallow enough to stand in.  One of the statues, very famous, portrays the three brothers and one sister who founded Kyiv 1,500 years ago.  The elder brother, named Ky, gave the city its name (“Kyiv” means “City of Ky”).  The sister’s name means “swan” or “swan-like” and the statue shows two swans rising up to the sky behind her.

The whole area felt like a big party, really.  Tourists and natives danced, laughed, and ate.  I really regretted not bringing the camera.

Finally, the three of us were pooping out.  Since we’d gone a long ways from the station, we elected to take the bus back to the flat.  We caught what turned out to be the last bus of the evening.  The bus dropped us off, and we were walking past the subway station near Irina’s apartment complex.  I asked her how much the subway cost--Irina had bought the tokens for us, and I didn’t know.

“Fifty kopeks,” she said, which is a dime.  “Before,” and by this, Ukrainians mean before the USSR left, or sometimes before the Orange Revolution, “it cost four kopeks.”

Inflation has really hit Ukraine hard in recent years.  The prices of chicken, beef, and pork have gone up by ten.  Gas has gone through the roof as well.  Despite the U.S. current poor economy, though, a dollar still goes a long way over here.

We got home, very tired after a fun and interesting evening.

 

June 12, 2005

Slept hard all night.  Got up at 8:00.  Irina made what I’m calling scrambled omlettes, toast, yoghurt, cheese, summer sausage, and ham for breakfast.  Oi!

We’re not going to visit the boys until this afternoon, and Kala still needs a dress for court, so we went to another shopping area Irina had told us about.  It’s all underground.

You get to this little mall through the subway entrance.  The subways that we’ve seen so far all have a healthy dose of street vendors selling fruit, cigarettes, flowers, and other such things.  But this subway station was a little different.  A hallway extended away from the train escalator, and it was lined with shops.  It was a complete shopping mall, really.  Store-lined side corridors ran off in all directions, and they all joined up in a central food court ringed with a second-floor balcony that sported still more shops.  It was an entire world down there!

Shopping involved lots of sign language.  Kala explored a long, narrow store with several staircases that all went down half a floor to another section of the store.  In one section she found two blouse-and-skirt combinations she liked.  The curtained-off area that served as a dressing room was right next to a staircase, and anyone at the top of the stairs could look straight down in the dressing area.  But the store was empty of customers, so it didn’t really matter.

While Kala tried on clothes, I drifted outside to look at a bookstore.  The bookstore was actually a long series of glass display cases lining one wall of the subway station.  A clerk sat at either end of the display, and presumably would unlock a case to get a book you wanted.  Most of the books I couldn’t puzzle out, though I did recognize Harry Potter and J.R.R. Tolkein.  They didn’t carry the Russian translations of Dreamer or Nightmare.  Sniff.

A tap on my shoulder brought me around.  It was one of the clerks from the clothing store.  She said something in Russian and pointed at the store.  I guessed, correctly, that Kala needed me, so I went in to give my opinion on a black outfit that had white designs on it.  She bought that and a red outfit for a total of just over 200 G, or forty-some dollars.

Next we wandered through the mall in search of a store that sold hair grooming items.  The shaver I used on my head just doesn’t work here, and I haven’t had the courage to walk into a barber shop to ask for something as complicated as getting my hair buzzed.  Do you tip?  What if the barber started doing something I didn’t want?  Ack!  We finally found a little shop that sold shavers and got one for the same amount of money we’d spent on Kala’s clothes.  Sigh.  We’re going to see if one of the orphanages would want it when we leave.

Lastly we bought some bananas from a fruit seller for the little kids.  We were going to hit the Internet café after that, but when we emerged from the subway station, we discovered it was raining, and we didn’t have our umbrellas along.  (Which is why it was raining, of course.)  So we went back home.

 

8:00 p.m.

Anatoly arrived without Sveta at 12:30 and we drove to Zhytomyr to visit the boys.  On the way there, we were zipping down a highway when a police officer who was standing by the road stepped forward almost into traffic.  He waved at Anatoly, and Anatoly pulled over.  The police officer came up to the car, and Anatoly got out.  Kala and I were in the back, wondering what was going on.  A little nervous, I shoved the novel I was reading into my backpack so the cop wouldn’t readily see that I read English.

Anatoly and the cop went back to the cop car and spent considerable time there.  At last, Anatoly returned, alone, got in, and started the car again.

“What happened?” I asked.

“Ten gribna,” Anatoly said with a sheepish grin.  Ah.  Speeding ticket.  What an odd way to go about it, though!  No flashing lights, no chase.  Apparently when a cop flags you down, people just pull over.  The fine seemed really low to me, though.

We first visited Sasha.  He wanted to know if we had more pictures of Maksim, but we hadn’t been out there yet, so we didn’t.  We took Sasha into what looked like a little sitting room and shooed out the kids who had followed us.  There, I gave Sasha another English lesson, using the camera as a lure--half an hour of English lessons in exchange for half an hour with the camera.  In order to get this point across, I drew a picture of a clock with hands set to two o’clock and wrote “English” next to it.  Then I drew another clock set to two-thirty and drew a picture of  a camera next to it.  Sasha understood.  I taught him introductions (hello, what’s your name, my name is) and numbers up through ten.  I also reviewed body parts with him.  Funny how my German teaching skills are coming in useful.

Then it was outside with the camera.  Many, many pictures later, we told him it was time for more English, after which he could use the video camera.  We practiced body parts some more, this time with me naming them and Sasha pointing to them.  Another crowd of children and teens had gathered again, and they joined in a little.  More time with the video camera followed.  At last it was time for us to go.  Saying good-bye is a long process, involving many hugs and an intense desire to pop Sasha into the car and drive away very fast.

Anatoly took us across town to Maksim’s orphanage.  We had to hunt a bit to find Maksim, but we finally found his play group.  They were finishing a snack and washing up in the bathroom near their sleeping room.  These toddlers are startlingly self-sufficient.  They ran their own water, put soap in it, and washed their own faces, after which they dried them on little towels.

I popped into the water closet to use the toilet.  Bleah!  Oh, did it smell.

Maksim was happy to see us.  Many hugs followed.  Then Kala took out the bananas we had brought and gestured inquiringly at the two women supervising the play group.  They nodded, and the next several minutes were spent pealing the bananas, breaking them into piees, and handing them around.  The kids reached eagerly for them and scarfed them down in seconds.  Then they went into a coatroom to get ready for outdoor play.  We hung back with Maksim and snuck him a few more pieces of banana.

A bit later, we went outside with Maksim and took him to an unused section of playground, like we did yesterday, and played with him.  He wasn’t as interested in playing today; he just wanted to be held.  So we did.  He didn’t speak a word, though he smiled and laughed several times.

After a while, we took him back to his playgroup.  Maksim played with the other kids.  Kala filmed it.  I was again surrounded by a screaming horde of children all trying to get my attention.  The primary method for doing this seemed to involve hitting me in the head with various objects, all of which I instantly confiscated.  One girl tried to bite me several times and I had to push her away.

See, this is why I don’t like strange children very much.

I finally declared this little session over by standing up and walking away.  Kala got Maksim and we headed off on our own again.  We played some more, then brought Maksim back to his playgroup for our good-byes.  When I set him down with a final hug and a farewell in Russian, Maksim ran away to a corner of the gazebo.  An orphanage worker and Kala followed after him to see if he was crying.  He was.  The worker explained that we would be back, but he continued crying.  I was ready to snatch him up and tell Anatoly to drive like hell.  I hate leaving Maks in that place.

On the way home, Anatoly was flagged down by another cop and had to pay another fine.  Good thing the cops aren’t computerized--getting two speeding tickets in one day back in Michigan would spell doom!

Irina ordered pizza for supper.  In Kyiv, you have to call two hours in advance, though they do deliver.  It was actually very good.  We watched a Simpsons episode on the little DVD player.  Pizza and The Simpsons--a slice of home.

June 13, 2005

Today was almost routine--until the very end of it.  We headed out to Zhytomyr and did some paperwork running in the morning.  We had to visit two officials, or Sveta did so on our behalf.  Part of this involved visiting Sasha’s Internat for about half an hour so that Sasha could write and sign a letter expressing his desire to be adopted by us.  In Ukraine, all adopted children over the age of 12 have to do this.  Kala and I hid in the car while this was going on so Sasha wouldn’t know we were there.  We couldn’t make this our official visit of the day because we can only visit Maksim between ten and noon or after four, and it was already almost ten o’clock.

Once the letter was done, we drove out to visit Maksim.  He was glad to see us again, and he loved playing with us, and he cried when we had to leave.  It doesn’t get any easier leaving him, either.

Then we visited Sasha.  Once again Sveta ran off to do more paper chasing, and we were there for almost three hours.  This time we knew about it in advance and we had Sveta’s phone number, so we weren’t nervous or upset.  We taught Sasha English, went on a walk in the woods with him, watched him play soccer, and of course, let him play with the camera.  As always, we invariably had an entourage around us.  We were the only adults in sight, I might add.  These kids go almost completely unsupervised during the day.  At one point there was a small altercation (not involving Sasha), and it took several minutes to locate an adult.  Boys and girls mingle freely, and I wonder if the Internat has problems with pregnancy.  I mean, deep woods surround this place, and the Internat complex has several empty outbuildings.  The kids are clearly bored most of the day.  Bored teens plus easy privacy minus supervision equals trouble, in my experience.

At last Sveta and Anatoly came back.  We drove to Kyiv, and Anatoly got another speeding ticket.  Apparently there’s a standard joke that a ten-grivna note is your lawyer.  In Kyiv, we stopped at Kate’s apartment and she inspected the paperwork Sveta had gathered in Zhytomyr.  This was when the little surprise came.

Kate told us that everything looked to be in order, and that there was no more paperwork to be processed in Zhytomyr until we actually picked the boys up to be with us permanently.  Since there was no longer any reason for Rights Protection Fund to travel to Zhytomyr, any travel there to see the boys would cost extra--$100 a day.

Kala and I managed to reign in our shock and outrage, but just barely.

“That’s a lot of money,” I told Kate.  “We’ll discuss it later.”

Once we got back to the flat, I got on the phone to Chicago.  I told our agency what had happened and that this was the first we’d heard of any extra fee like this.  Our rent and food are only $80 per day, and now RPF wants to sock us with $100 per day for a fucking driver?  If we had known about this, we would have insisted that RPF find us a flat in Zhytomyr.  We feel--rightly so--as if RPF had waited for us to bond with the boys to sock us with an extra fee.  The boys will be in Zhytomyr for at least two more weeks.  That’s $1,400 if we visit daily.

The problem is that Zhytomyr is 150 kilometers away, and RPF provides transportation for 100 km as part of their fee.  Except no one told us that we wouldn’t be making paperwork trips to Zhytomyr on a regular basis.  Not once.

Our adoption, from FRP’s standpoint, is also damned easy.  Kala and I accepted the first referral we were given, and we decided to adopt the boys after a single visit.  We could have had FRP run us all over hell and gone for days, but we didn’t.  FRP is getting a fee for two children, though after today their adoption runs as a single unit.

Richard and Jane at our agency said they’ll talk to FRP, and we’ll see what happens.  Our agency may pick up part of the travel fee, and we’re going to look into moving to Zhytomyr.  Of course, that still comes with a complication because both orphanages are way outside the city, and I didn’t see any buses or trolleys that went out that far.

We’ll see what happens.

This evening I helped Irine write a letter to a friend in America.  I wrote it on my laptop and she copied it down by hand.

 

June 14, 2005

Today RPF was filing the Zhytomyr paperwork on our behalf with the NAC, so there was no trip to see the boys.  We’re still in negotiation about what to do about the driving piracy.

Kala and I slept in, had Irina’s oatmeal for breakfast, and decided to go downtown by ourselves.  Irina was expecting a delivery to the apartment and couldn’t leave, but that was fine.  Irina is a dear, but we wanted to get out on our own to explore without worrying about Irina or keeping up a conversation with her.  We knew which bus to take (number 548), and we knew how much it cost (1G per person), and we knew how to flag the bus down (stand at the curb and hold your hand out, palm down, at waist level).  So off we went.

First stop was at the post office for some on-line time.  Then we crossed the amazingly-busy six-lane street to get to the bus stop.  Bus 548 came along, we flagged it down without difficulty, and climbed aboard.

Ukrainian busses have two employees on board--the driver and the money collector.  The money collector holds a fistful of cash, and you pay him or her.  When the bus is crowded, the people in back send their money up the aisle like fans passing hot dogs at a ball park.  Change is returned the same way.  I saw no method of counting passengers or making sure the money collector stays honest and I wondered if they have problems with employee theft.

We rode the bus down to a stop right in front of a TGIFriday’s.  Yes, there’s one in downtown Kyiv.  Someone told us that the employees there all speak English, and we decided to eat there.  It was either that, or hunt down one of the cafeteria-style places where you can point at what you want.  Neither of us knows enough Russian to understand a menu or order from one at a sit-down place, and Kala was really hungry.  So we went American.

I don’t think many Kyiv natives eat at this TGIFriday’s, unless they’re wealthy.  The place cost about the same as it would in America, meaning lunch for one person was about $10, or 50 grivna.  Kala, Irina, and I stuffed ourselves at one of the cafeteria places for $12 total, by comparison.  However, we were given menus in English and our server spoke excellent English and they accepted Visa.  So there!  Since Kala’s sister works at a TGIFridays, she asked for and got a kids’ menu in Russian as a souvenir for her.

We next wandered around Independence Square.  I took pictures of all the places that I’d missed the night of the ballet, when I didn’t have my camera.  We also went down into another underground mall and found a hallway of nothing but bookstores.  One of them sold books in English.  I bought several, since I’d been counting on the lost DVDs for most of my entertainment and had only brought a couple books with me.  That was really the extent of the buying for the day.

Wendy had told us of a very good Internet café near Independence Square, one that had new computers and USB ports.  After a bit of hunting, Kala spotted the place and we went in.  It had everything Wendy said it did, and we were at last able to download pictures from our camera.  Hooray!  We could e-mail pictures of the boys!  This we did in short order, and we made a mental note of the location for return visits.

Kala heard a violent set of swear words in English.  A brown-haired woman using the computer across from us turned out to be from Canada, though she was also Ukrainian, and she spoke fluent, unaccented English.  We talked with her for a bit, then she finished her business and left.  After we were done, we headed outside and saw several street vendors who had set up tables of various wares.  One was piled with CDs, and I paused to browse through them.

“Is there a specific kind of music you’re looking for?” said a voice.

I looked up.  It was the Canadian woman!  After I expressed my surprise, she said, “A friend of mine runs this table and asked me to look after it while she took a break.”

“I didn’t even notice you,” I said, laughing.

“There’s something about this face that usually stands out,” she said, gesturing at herself.  “People think, ‘She looks Ukrainian, but there’s something strange.’ ”

“It’s the body language,” I said.  “You look European but act like an American.”

“You mean I’m friendly?” she said wickedly.

Ouch.  Kala and I bid her good-bye and walked away, smiling.  After spending all this time in Ukraine, I can see why Americans have a reputation for friendliness.  I’ve only encountered a few people who were actually rude, but the “service with a smile” idea seems to be the exception instead of the rule.

At last we were getting tired, so we headed back to the TGIFriday’s and the bus stop.  We wanted to buy some bananas from a fruit seller on the street nearby and were examining the merchandise when a gray-haired man in a scruffy dress shirt and slacks approached me.

“Do you speak English?” he asked.  His accent was Russian.

“Yes,” I said cautiously.

He held out his hand.  “My name is [something-or-other].  Are you from America?”

My alarm bells were ringing, and I felt for the wallet and passport in my hip pocket.  I didn’t shake the proferred hand.  “No,” I said.

“Oh.”  This confused him.  “Where are you from?”

“Canada.”

“Ah.  Well, my name is [something-or-other] and I wonder if you could help me to--”

“No,” I said firmly.  “I’m not interested.”

“But if you--”

“No!”  And I turned my attention to the fruit seller.  While we were counting bananas, the man sidled up to me again.  I rounded on him.  “Go away!” I snarled.  He fled.

Okay, children--here’s how to know someone doesn’t really need help when you’re in a foreign country:

1) He offers to shake your hand.  This is an attempt to create false intimacy, not a give real greeting.

2) He introduces himself before he says he needs help.

3) He doesn’t start off with, “Can you tell me where the American Embassy is?”

4) He asks your nationality.

5) He carefully ignores the pair of police officers standing halfway up the block.  If he’s really in the sort of situation that requires the help of a total stranger, he’ll go to them.

Bozo.

It took a bit of work to figure out where the return bus stop was, since the TGIFriday’s was on a one-way street, but we got it eventually and rode back to the flat without further incident.  We have successfully negotiated the Kyiv mass-transit system on our own.  Go us!

For supper, Irine had bought a basketful of mushrooms which she sauteed in some sort of wonderful clear sauce and served over pasta.  We had fresh strawberries for dessert.  Oh man, it was so good!

 

9:30 p.m.

Oh crap!  Oh, this is awful.

We just got off the phone with Sveta.  Maksim has the chicken pox.  This handily explains why he was so quiet yesterday.  It also explains all the blue and green dots on the other children.

See, I didn’t mention earlier that when we first met Maksim, he had these little blue dots dabbed on his face.  The orphanage worker said it was mosquito bites, and the anti-itch medicine they used was blue and green.  There were a fair number of mosquitos around, so we didn’t think anything of it, though one little girl had a veritable forest of green dots all over her face and even in her hair.  Now we’re sure many of the kids were in the early stages of chicken pox.

Poor little Maksim!  I wish we could take care of him here at the flat.  We’ve got lots of kid medicines with us.  But that’s not allowed.  The orphanage won’t let us visit him until he’s well, and Sveta already called Sasha at the Internat to explain what happened and that we won’t be visiting him, either.  I found this mildly presumptious--there’s no reason we can’t visit Sasha, even if we can’t see Maksim--but it does solve the extra travel money dilemma, and Sasha is old enough to deal with our absence.

Thanks all heavens that I got the chicken pox vaccine!  I’ve never had chicken pox, you see.  Neither has my mother or my siblings.  I wondered if my mother had some kind of natural immunity that she passed on to us--both her brothers had it--but my doctor checked my blood and didn’t find any chicken pox antibodies.  So I got the vaccine.  I’d be toast if I hadn’t.  I was holding Maksim and kissing him and letting him sleep on my chest right when he was at his most contagious.  He’ll be all right in a few days, but I’d’ve been laid out for two weeks or more.

Sasha and Kala have already had chicken pox, so we don’t have to worry about them.

Now Kala and I just have to figure out what to do with ourselves in Kyiv until things are better.  Irine to the rescue!  She’s pointed us toward several interesting things to visit, and tomorrow we’ll play tourist.

[Later update: Maksim did not have chicken pox.  Neither did any other child in the orphanage.  When we went to get Maksim later, he had no chicken pox scabs on his face or body anywhere.  They take several days to clear up, and there's just no way they would have nearly disappeared by the time we visited next.  Kala and I suspect that someone, perhaps Rights Protection Fund, concocted this story in order to quiet our outrage at the $100 per day extra fee.]

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June 15, 2005

Okay, so we won’t play tourist.

I woke up feeling a little . . . off.  Not quite sick, just off.  We had planned to go see the World War II memorial and museum today after lunch.  The memorial and museum are in the park surrounding the giant lady with the equally giant sword and shield.  We wanted to wait until after lunch so we wouldn’t get trapped into eating at whatever overpriced café the memorial might have to offer.  Spent the morning playing computer games and doing a little writing.

Then my head started to hurt.

I tried to head it off with a dose of medication, but it didn’t help.  The headache got worse and worse.  I was eating pills like authors eat free hor d’oeuvres, but nothing seemed to work.  It was horrible.  All I could do was lay in the bedroom with the window shut against the traffic noise.  I must have been in there for three or four hours, half-dozing, half wishing someone would chop my head off.

I finally took two pills from a stash that I rarely use because they’re so powerful and combined them with one more pill from my usual meds.  An hour later, the pain was gone, but I felt so doped up and dizzy I could barely stand up.  I finally fell into bed for the night and slept in a drugged stupor.

 

June 16, 2005

The drugs were still making me feel dizzy this morning.  As long as I was sitting down, I was okay, but if I got up, the room swung from side to side.  This lasted all morning.  Kala went out to do some more shopping because she wanted more clothes.

The ubiquitous “they” tell you that whenever you go on a trip, take half the clothes and twice the money.  Boy, do we wish we’d taken all the clothes.  I’m getting very tired of my limited wardrobe of polo shirts, one pair of blue jeans, one pair of lightweight slacks, and two pairs of khaki slacks.  I should have brought along another pair of jeans, more shirts, and another pair or two of light slacks.  People don’t often wear shorts in public in Europe, and more lightweight pants would be very helpful.  Hell, we could’ve taken another suitcase if we’d wanted--it was in our alottment.

Of course, that would have meant our referral would have been somewhere in BF Ukraine and we would have had to schlep all this stuff from Kyiv to BFU and back to Kyiv again.  I can gripe about our limited wardrobe safely because we haven’t had to move at all.

The weather’s been in the eighties for several days running now, and I’m getting tired of my single pair of lightweight slacks.  Kala went out this morning and bought a few new outfits, including a very nice summer-weight gray skirt she likes a lot.

After lunch, I was still feeling vaguely dizzy but decided it would help if I got out and moved around.  We decided to try to find the museum we’d missed yesterday.

On Wednesday, Irine had shown me on the map she’d drawn for us which bus to take to the museum/memorial--trolley bus 38.  The trolley busses run on electricity and get their power from overhead wires.  They’re like elephants--big and slow and clumsy.  They’re also cheap: fifty kopeks (ten cents) for a ride.  When you give your money to the money-taker, she hands you a little paper ticket.  On the vertical handrails scattered up and down the aisle are what look like miniature hole punchers.  You slot your ticket into the puncher and pull the lever.  It chops a pattern of five holes into your ticket, indicating it was used.  At least, I think that’s what’s going on.  If you don’t punch your ticket, you get yelled at, so I assume it’s important.

Kala and I boarded the trolley bus and rode for a while, but then Kala started to get nervous.

“We’re going the wrong way,” she said.  “The memorial is over that way, and we’re going in a different direction.”

“This is the bus Irine told me to take,” I said.  “It’s here on the map.”

“But it’s going the wrong way,” she maintained.  One of the disadvantages of being in Kyiv, of course, is that we couldn’t simply ask the driver or the money-taker.  We had to take everything on faith.

We rode a ways further before Kala couldn’t take it anymore and got off the bus.  I followed her.  She started down a street, and I stopped her.

“Where are you going?” I demanded.

“To get to the return bus.”

I pointed at the electrical lines overhead.  “Those are the lines for the bus we came in on, and those,” I pointed to a set of identical lines across the street that ran parallel to the first set, “are the ones that will take us back.”

You can’t really get lost on the trolley bus system.  All you have to do is follow the wires to figure out where your bus will go.

We got on the bus that backtracked us.  Operating on the principal that we might have accidentally gotten on the bus that went away from the museum instead of toward it, we purposefully overshot our original stop and kept going.  But this bus didn’t seem to take us where we wanted to go, either.  So we got off, crossed the street, and rode yet a third trolley bus back to our starting point.

By now Kala was annoyed and ticked off and not much fun.  I wanted to look for some different shops, but she asked if I wouldn’t mind doing it alone.  I didn’t, so she went home while I went shopping in the underground mall nearby.

I found exactly two shops that sold men’s clothing.  The rest sold women’s clothes.  One of the men’s shops sold sportswear, not what I wanted.  The other store had about six pairs of trousers for sale, none of them of interest.  I scoured the mall looking for more places.  No such luck.  What the heck?  Don’t men buy clothes in Ukraine?

I decided that while I was down here, I’d hit up the post office for some Internet time.  Except there was a hand-lettered sign out front that said [blah blah blah] 14:45-15:00.  Since there were no clerks at the windows, I assumed it meant they were closed until three.  It was 2:45, and people were already lined up outside.  I thought about this.  I could join the queue and cool my heels for fifteen minutes, then wait another half hour in line to get to the computers, or I could go home.

I decided to go home.

On the way, I stopped at the bodega.  The money-changing booth was open, and I asked the worker in my halting Ukrainian if she could break a hundred-grivna note.  She shook her head firmly.

By now I was having a really bad day.  No museum, dizzy on drugs, no new clothes, no Internet.  And now no change.  If I could speak the language, I would have pointed out to her that I must have changed money there six or seven times by now, and if she didn’t want to break one of the hundreds she herself had given me yesterday, I could easily take my money-changing business somewhere else.  But I couldn’t.  The best I could do was thank her in the most sarcastic tone I could manage.  I still won’t be changing money there anymore.

I wanted to go home.  I wanted to shop in a mall where I could talk to the clerks, where people are service-oriented, and where they at least pretend to be happy to help you, instead of giving you a hard, blank stare, annoyed that you dared set foot in their little emporium to spend your filthy money.

For the hell of it, I went to the sweets shop at the back of the bodega (each section of the bodega is an independent business) and pointed to a small, chocolate-covered cake in the display.  The clerk put it into a round container that looked like a hat box to me, and I took him home for suppers.

I finally gave everything else up as a bad job and went back to the flat.  We had supper--Irine made poached fish and mashed potatoes--and the cake for dessert.  It turned out to be a lemon sponge cake covered with a chocolate shell.  I wrote a bit.  Then it was back down to the post office for some serious Internet time.

Later that evening, we got some nicer news.  Monday, you see, is a holiday.  It’s also supposed to be one of the days that the NAC director signs off on paperwork, including our papers from Zhytomyr.  We had asked Kate if the NAC director would still sign paperwork on Monday, or if it would be put off until Tuesday or even (eep) Thurday.  Kate said she didn’t know and would call us back.

This evening Sveta rang up to tell us that the NAC director was planning to sign paperwork on Friday, and there was a 90% chance that our stuff would be signed.  That would give us a court date of Tuesday or Wednesday.  Four days after that, we’d have new birth certficiates, passports, and visas for the boys and we could go home as early as next Tuesday or Wednesday.  (!)  This, of course, is assuming everything goes well and that director does indeed sign our paperwork tomorrow.  We’ll see.

Meanwhile, we need to travel to the village where Sasha and Maksim were born to get their original birth certificates.  They weren’t born in Zhytomyr--that’s just where the orphanage and Internat are--but in a village about 150 kilometers away from Zhytomyr.  We didn’t catch the name of it, though we’re supposed to go there tomorrow.  Sveta will call at about ten in the morning to let us know.

Sveta also said that she and Anatoly would take us sightseeing over the weekend.  I wonder if the agency had anything to do with that, as in, “These people are having a fast, smooth adoption, and you can do a little extra for them, since you’re getting paid the same.  So move it!”

Eventually Kala went to bed, and I decided to go for a walk.  There’s a tree-lined boulevard running up the center of a street not far from the apartment complex, and that was where I went.  Benches are scattered up and down the boulevard.  Couples and small groups occupied them, talking, laughing, drinking, and making out.  It wasn’t loud or anything, just quietly busy.  I walked up and down it, felt better, and went home to bed.

 

June 16, 2005

I understand my grandparents better now than I did when they were alive.  Ukraine (and, for all I know, all of eastern Europe) seems to have the philosophy that if there’s a law against it but I need to do it, I’ll do what I need to do.  This includes speeding, grazing cows, sheep, or goats on public land, parking wherever you can find room, and selling bootleg cigarettes in the subway.  The police either don’t care, or are underfunded to the point where small stuff just doesn’t interest them.

My grandparents, especially my grandfather, shared this viewpoint.  Grandpa waved aside minor considerations such as legality or manners whenever he needed to do something, and he somehow always got away with it.  I think a lot of times he deliberately exploited the language barrier.  Grandpa’s English was heavily accented, but his understanding was near perfect.  I know for certain that on some occasions he pretended not to understand what was going on when he definitely did.  I think a fair number of times he avoided legal trouble because the police didn’t want to try and explain the situation to him.

Also of interest are Ukrainian fashions.  Long, pointy shoes seem be the hip thing for both men and women.  They look horrendously uncomfortable--and ugly!  Turn up the ends a little, and you’d have perfect elf shoes.  Squares are also in.  Designs on men’s shirts and women’s dresses tned to by stylized geometric designs.  Black shirts with gold designs seem to be the most popular.  They look kind of cool.

Anyway, today I called KLM, the European arm of Northwest Air, and the customer service problems continued.  I told the representative that I needed to change our tickets and I needed to change the names on the tickets we were issued for the children.  At first there was some confusion about payment.  The rep wanted to know how I was going to pay for the kids’ tickets, since I was listed as having reserved the seats but not paid for them.

“No-o-o,” I said.  “I’m holding the boys’ tickets in my hand right now.  They were paid for.”

I explained this was an adoption flight and that at the time of purchase, we didn’t know what names the children would have, so we had to guess.  We’d guessed wrong and needed to make this small change.

“All Ukrainian adoptions work this way,” I said.  “I can’t imagine that we’re the first ones who have gone through this.”

The rep informed me that he couldn’t change the names on the tickets.  I replied that I was aware of this, but that the person who originally booked the flight told me that if we had to change the children’s names, we would simply cancel the one set of tickets and get another set in the new name.  This rep said he couldn’t do that.  The best he could do was make a note on the ticket about the kids’ new names.

Nuh uh!  No way.  I am not going to try to get my children through two sets of immigration officials unless the names on the passports match the ones on the plane tickets.

But now Anatoly had arrived to take us on our visit to the boys and I had to get off the phone.  I told the agent to have the tickets delivered to the KLM office in Kyiv.  At the very last minute, I remembered to ask that all the seats be together.

“Oh,” the rep said, as if this were a brand-new idea.  “I think we can do that.”  Keys clicked.  “We can.”

You mean this dummy was going to scatter a new adoptive family up and down the passenger bay?  God, I wish I could switch to LOT or some other decent airline, but I can’t afford to flush a couple thousand down the toilet and walk away.  When we get back from Zhytomyr, I’m going to call the American branch and see what they can do.  I’m hoping I don’t have to call the American embassy, but I might have to.

At any rate, from there we jumped into Anatoly’s car and drove to Zhytomyr to see Sasha.  Maksim, as far as we knew, still had chicken pox and was still not visitable.

The weather was hot, and Irene called it muggy, but Kala and I are used to Michigan humidity, and the heat seemed very dry to us.  We drove to Sasha’s Internat and hooked up with him for a nice visit.  At one point, we were walking through the woods with him and a couple of his friends when the trees abruptly ended in a small parking lot.  Just ahead of us was another of those ubiquitous bodegas that keep every neighborhood running.  We went inside for a look.  Smallish, sold fish and lunchmeat and cheese and packaged ice cream and bread and, oddly, recliners.  Not sure why the latter were there, but they were.

Sasha seemed to know the two middle-aged women who ran the place, and I think he told them we were adopting him.  I bought Sasha and his two friends an ice cream each.  Kala had one, too, but I had to give it a miss--no lactase pills.

We took the long way back to the Internat and somehow ended up at a very odd memorial in a clearing surrounded by pine trees.  A giant, blocky cross with a Cyrillic inscription and “1941-1943” on it stood guard over a stone bench piled with silk flowers.  Surrounding the cross was a series of long, narrow, knee-high mounds, each with a plain white cross on it about three feet tall.  Sasha said something about fascists, and one of the words on the big cross, when I sounded it out, said fascist, though I don’t know what that word means in Ukrainian.  I doubt it means the same thing it does in English, since I can’t imagine anyone would raise a monument for fascism.  At least, not in Ukraine.  It may be a monument commemorating those who fought against it, though.  I couldn’t tell for sure.

Sasha led us back through the woods to the Internat, where we continued our visit.  We hadn’t so far been able to see Sasha’s dorm room--they keep it locked during the day--but this time I had an idea.  The walls of the hallway in the dorm don’t go all the way to the ceiling.  A latticework of white wood makes up the final meter or so.  There are supposed to be panes of glass between the lattices, but they’re all long one.  The place must be noisy at night.

At Sasha’s room, I gave him the camera and lifted him up so he could see through the lattice.  He took several pictures, and I brought him down.  Ta da!  Though there wasn’t much to see--a few simple beds, unmade, and a couple articles of clothing on the wooden floor.  That’s it.  These kids don’t own much.

Not long after this, it was time to go.  We bid Sasha good-bye, and now that I knew he had  a place to spend it, I slipped Sasha five grivna and said, “Sh!”

“You’re such a dad,” Kala said later.

We were driving away when Kala and I noticed we weren’t going toward the highway.  It looked like we were heading for Maksim’s orphanage.  Kala asked Anatoly what was going on.  Anatoly shrugged and smiled and kept on driving.  Oookay.  Maybe Sveta had gotten permission to visit just before Anatoly left to pick us up in Kyiv.  Anatoly’s English is almost non-existant, so he couldn’t explain.

Later, we decided Anatoly had just driven us over there without checking at all.  (This kind of thing seems to hapen all the time in Ukraine--unless you’re filling out government paperwork.)  On the way, Anatoly pulled over at some roadside vendors and bought an enormous pail of strawberries.  I bought some for the orphanage as well.  I got more than two quarts for what amounted to fifty cents.  The babushkas selling them were very nice, too.  If they had spoken English, I think they would have called me “dearie” and “sweetie.”

At the orphanage, Anatoly parked the car and waited with it, as is his custom.  Kala and I walked up the long pathway to the orphanage itself and wandered down the various dark passageways to Maksim’s area.  No one stopped us or even questioned our presence.  It occurred to me that it would be frighteningly easy to walk in here, grab a child, and vanish without anyone taking the slightest notice, yet we have to fill out mountains of paperwork to adopt one.

Maksim’s group was still napping, though it was almost time to get up.  The woman who seemed to be in charge of the kids indicated she would get him up.  I held up the bag of strawberries, and Kala gestured that they were for all the kids.  The worker burst out laughing and led us into a kitchenette nearby.  A big pail of strawberries was sitting on the counter.  We all laughed at that, and added our strawberries to the pile.

The worker went into the dorm room, got Maksim up and dressed, and sent him out to where we waited, in the attached playroom.  Maksim was very glad to see us, and he didn’t seem sick.  Kala examined him and found some chicken pox hives, though she couldn’t tell if they were coming or going.  He didn’t have a fever.  [Again, we later realized Maksim didn't have chicken pox.  The hives Kala found were simple mosquito bites.]

Maksim was still sleepy from his nap, so we took turns holding him while he dozed.  At last, the other children started to wake up.  A horde of preschoolers in their underpants stampeded past us to the bathroom, where they washed up.  Then they stampeded back to the bedroom to get dressed.  Then they stampeded back into the playroom to demand attention from Kala and me.  Another worker shooed them down the hall into a sunroom, which was set up for their snack--shortbread cookies and strawberries.  Maksim ran after them.  He has a determined, purposeful run.  Sasha moves the same way when he plays soccer.

We sat in the play room, waiting.  After a while Maksim came running back in, his mouth smeared with red.  He was clearly glad to see we were still there.  Then he ran back to the sunroom to finish his snack.

Once that was done, the kids put on their shoes and went outside.  Maksim alternated between playing with us and with his year-mates.  Kala and I, meanwhile, dealt with the rotating group of seven or eight kids that clumped around us.  Most of them don’t know how to ask for attention properly.  They hit, throw things, shout, pinch, and bite.  One girl did all of the above and just laughed whenever Kala or I caught her hand and admonished her with a firm “Nyet!”

“Nyet!” she shouted back, laughing.  “Nyet!”

Pushing her away did no good--she came right back for more.  Ignoring her only made her redouble her efforts.  Starved for attention, but going about getting it the wrong way.  Even negative attention was better than nothing, in her view.  I was afraid she would hit me in the eye or the mouth, but couldn’t communicate with her.  I also didn’t have the authority--or ability--to isolate her.  Someone needed to intervene.

At this point, we noticed that there were no other adults around.  Not one.  It was just Kala and me.  What the hell?  It was as if the orphanage workers had decided, “Well, hey--these people are here.  I can have me a little sit-down” or something.  This was wrong on so many levels.  Not only were we unable to communicate with these kids in any meaningful way, we weren’t in a position to discipline them or handle any emergencies that might come up.  If one of these kids fell off the see-saw and stopped breathing, I wouldn’t even know how to shout for help.

I was just about to set out in search of a supervisor (hang the language barrier--“Get your ass outside now, I’m not a babysitter” can be said any number of understandable ways) when two things happened simultaneously.  A woman came outside and it started to rain.

The kids, including Maksim, all dashed to an open-air shelter.  The worker followed.  When Kala and I entered the shelter, every kid gave a loud shriek and they surged toward us.  The worker quieted them with a word and sent them to sit on benches at the back of the shelter.  At this point, we had to leave.  We bid Maksim good-bye, gave him big hugs, and started to walk  away.  I looked back and saw him on the bench, both hands clapped over his eyes, crying.

I’ll be so glad to get him out of there.

 

9:00 p.m.

We have a court date!  Sveta called to tell us that our papers were indeed signed today and that we have to be in court on Tuesday at nine a.m.  Fast!  And since ours will be the first case of the day, there won’t be any cases before us to run long and cause delays.

Assuming the judge waives the thirty-day waiting period (they usually do), we’ll have legal custody of the boys that day.  All we have to do then is get their original birth certificates and apply for visas and passports.  That’ll take four business days.  And then we’ll be flying home with the boys!

 

June 17, 2005

We couldn’t visit the boys today--it’s some kind of holiday.  Actually, it’s a three-day holiday starting today.  Something about the Trinity.  It’s not a big enough holiday to close stores and post offices, though.

Kala and I slept way in.  Irine had church this morning and couldn’t cook breakfast for us, so we were on our own.  I made scrambled eggs with cheese.  An American breakfast!  It smelled . . . normal.  Ukrainian cooking smells are pretty much all we’ve gotten so far, and the scent of something so prosaic as scrambled eggs reminded me how long it’s been since I’ve been home.

We had decided to go downtown today for more shopping.  I still really need a pair or two of lightweight slacks to wear.  But first we were going to hit the Internet.  Off to the post office!

On the way there, we ran into Irine on the street.  She was carrying a bunch of reeds that must have been six feet long.  The ends had a remnant of pink bulb on them.  Irine said these were for the flat, as part of the holiday.  Throughout the day we saw lots of people carrying similar reeds.

We did the Internet thing, then stopped at the bodega for various supplies and popped back up to the flat to drop them off.  We found Irine dropping reeds and flowers on the floor in the bedroom and living room of the flat.  Part of the holiday.

I got back on the phone and managed to straighten out the tickets.  We now have tickets issued for Sasha and Maksim in their real names, and all we have to do to get them is turn in our old ones at the ticket counter when we check in.

Back downstairs, we strolled to the bus stop.  It was a hot day, and I was already getting sweaty under my big yellow backpack.  We needed bus 548 to get downtown.  We waited and waited.  Various trolley busses passed.  A gazillion bus 450s went by.  Two bus 548s went by on the other side of the street.  But no bus 548 came our way.  Here’s where the language barrier was a problem--we couldn’t ask anyone what might be going on.  We just waited and waited.  I said we could try taking a different bus that looked like it was heading in the right direction, but Kala didn’t want to risk getting lost.  So we waited some more.

Finally Kala said she didn’t want to wait anymore.  If I wanted to stay down here, I could, but she was going back to the flat.  Right after she left, another trolley bus came along.  I said, “The hell with this,” and got on.

I love to explore new places.  Whenever I get to a new place, I want to go down every path, every street, every alley until I know it blindfolded.  This is difficult in a city where I don’t know the language, though--getting lost is a much bigger problem when you can’t ask directions --so I’ve been more cautious in Kyiv.  Today, however, I forged ahead.

If you pay attention, you can’t get lost on a bus line.  If it looks like the bus is going in a direction you don’t want, just get off.  It’s easy enough to cross the street and backtrack by taking the same bus going in the opposite direction.  Trolley busses are even easier to keep track of, since the overhead wires will tell you which direction the bus has to go.

I rode the trolley bus, which went down the main street just fine and looked like it was heading downtown.  Eventually, however, it turned in a direction I didn’t want, so I got off at the next stop, trotted back to the main street, and assessed my position.  Okay.  I knew this street--Anatoly took it every time we drove to Zhytomyr, and we always passed near downtown.  So all I have to do is follow Anatoly’s route.

I did this.  The shops all looked familiar.  There was the big toy store.  There was that little street that runs parallel to the main street.  Ah ha!  Just ahead of me was TGIFriday’s.  It’s a very handy landmark, sitting at the edge of the downtown area.  A few blocks later, and I was back on that street that gets closed off on weekends.  Ta da!  I did it!

By now it was well past lunch time, and I figured I’d grab something at one of the sidewalk vendors who had set up little tents all over the area.  I looked over the stuff in one tent and saw a sort of pizza.  It looked fast and easy, so I pointed at it and held out money.  The woman popped it into a microwave and . . .

Bleah.  Here I got the first bad meal I’ve eaten in Ukraine.  There were warning signs, of course.  The woman took the little pizza thing out of the microwave after only about thirty seconds.  Then she drizzled it with . . . ketchup??  And then she sprinkled it with something green.  I accepted it, figuring maybe that’s the way this particular pizza thing was meant to be eaten.

It was awful.  It was like eating lukewarm bread with ketchup poured on it and yard grass sprinkled on top.  Ee-yuck.  I ended up buying a candy bar from another vendor just to get the taste out of my mouth.

The street wasn’t as crowded with pedestrians this afternoon as it had been earlier.  Fewer entertainers were out and about as well.  I thought I’d struck a sort of gold when I came across a group of young, good-looking singers all dressed in embroidered Ukrainian outfits.  They were standing on a long, narrow stage singing Ukrainian folk songs in tight harmony.  The musical accompaniament was pre-recorded, and after I while I realized the singers were too.  Lip synching.  Sigh.

Someone else had set up a basketball hoop and I think they were charging people to play.  I think.  The hoop was laughably close to the ground, but the players made hardly any baskets.  It was funny to watch.  Not that I’m a great basketball player, or anything, but I think Ukrainians would have gotten the same amount of amusement watching Americans play soccer.

I finally made my way into the big department store that Kala and I had been in earlier.  Since I was alone, I could explore it more properly.  Something in my backpack kept setting off the security sensors, though, and it was very annoying.  One clerk, trying to be helpful, started to run my backpack over her demagnetizer.  I snatched it back to yank the digital camera and my computer disks out.  Fortunately, neither had been affected.

Men’s clothes were on the third floor, and I took the stairs, exploring as I went.  This store was not air-conditioned, and the air inside was getting moist and very warm.  A very helpful sales clerk helped me find some slacks that fit.  They’re a light beige with a hint of yellow, made of some very light fabric (poplin?), with a fashionable string-tie at the waist.  I got two pairs for 178G a piece.

By then the store was just too uncomfortable to stay in, so I went back outside.  Had a very bad moment when I thought I’d left the camera in the store, then had a great sense of relief when I found it in a different pocket of my backpack.

I strolled down the street, stopping to look at and listen to whatever interested me.  It was nice to be out and about completely by myself.  Kala and I have different interests when it comes to exploring a city or shopping, so when we’re together, she feelslike she doesn’t get to examine what she wants and I feel like I don’t get to examine what I want.  So when I’m alone I can do what interests me.

At last I decided it was time to go home.  I walked back to the bus stop near TGIFriday’s and wondered if I could catch bus 548 back home.  Nah.  I’d get back faster on foot.  Better to take the trolley.  As I was hoofing it back to the trolley bus stop, I noticed a building I hadn’t seen before.  It was partway up a distant hill, clearly a small cathedral of some sort with the round, gold roofs you see everywhere in Kyiv.  Nuns in full habit (including the wide, winged wimples) were walking up and down the staircases in front of it.  I managed to get a couple pictures.

Then the trolley bus came, and I rode home.

The evening was spent writing and playing computer games.  I’m at the point where I want to go home very badly, to tell the truth.

 

June 19, 2005

Isn’t today Father’s Day?  I’m losing track.

Dads always get hosed on Father’s Day, if you ask me.  You buy presents for moms on Mother’s Day and make breakfast in bed.  Tradition also includes going out to eat.  School is still in session, so elementary school teachers always have the kids make something endearingly cute.  Mom gets treated like a queen.

Father’s Day is in late June, long after school is out, so the kids don’t make anything.  The idea of giving Dad breakfast in bed never caught on, nor has going out to eat.  Traditionally, Dad gets to drink lemonade in a hammock all day, which gets pretty boring.  Dad gets treated like an amiable buffoon.  The whole thing is almost like an afterthought to Mother’s Day.  Hmf.

This year, however, I’m spending Father’s Day visiting my new sons.  How appropriate is that?

We’re driving to Zhytomyr at the moment, bouncing across the highway at breakneck speeds.  Sometimes it gets a little scary.  Ukrainian drivers seem to have trouble picking a lane and sticking with it, for one thing, and everyone drives at whatever speed makes them happy.  Several times so far Anatoly switchd from the left lane, his usual choice, into the right lane just in time to let someone blast by as a well over 100 miles per hour.  I don’t know how the suspension on any car can take that kind of speed, to tell the truth.  The highways do have smooth bits, but most sections are washboarded or pitted with potholes.  The drive to Zhytomyr is very tiring, as a result.

 

3:00 p.m.

We’re driving back now.  We visited Sasha first.  Sveta wasn’t with us, so we had no translator, and I wanted to explain to Sasha about the court date.  I sat down with him and drew a calendar with the number dates on it, since I don’t know the days of the week in Russian.  In the square for Tuesday, I drew a simple courthouse.  Below it, I drew a platform with a stick figure sitting behind it.  In front of the platform I drew stick figures of a family of four, then pointed to each, naming them Mama, Papa, Sasha, and Maksim.  On Wednesday, I wrote the Ukrainian word for Kyiv (KиїB) and drew another family of four.  Understanding flashed across Sasha’s face and he grabbed me in a big hug.  I wanted to draw an airplane on the following Tuesday, but Kala said I shouldn’t in case plans changed, so I forebore.

The visits with Sasha have fallen into a pattern.  We do some English and general attempts at communication, we give Sasha the camera, Sasha and a group of kids dash about the Internat snapping pictures, we shoo the other kids away for some private time with Sasha, we leave.  That’s pretty much what happened today, too.

Sasha has dimples in both cheeks when he smiles.

We also ran into Vitaly.  He was barefoot.  I saw red, raw spots all over his feet and a bandage around his right ankle.  The raw spots were from the fact that his shoes are too small.  All the kids, actually, wear terrible shoes.  Anyone out there want to adopt a teenager?

Today’s visit was on the early side--nine in the morning--and the door to Sasha’s room hadn’t been locked yet.  Sasha took us inside.

The pictures we’d bootlegged last time didn’t make it very clear what sort of conditions these kids live in.  There were six or so beds in the room, all of them warped and falling apart.  The springs and wires stretched between the frames sagged and bunched in the middle.  Three of the beds had been shoved together in a corner with the mattresses going cross-wise, creating a giant bed and, I think, creating a sort-of solution to the sagging springs problem.  The mattresses were thin and dirty.  A locker-like wardrobe made of cheap plywood took up one corner.  The doors hung half-open on broken hinges.  Ragged, dirty clothes made small, sad piles inside.  The only way the place could have been more spartan would be to put the mattresses on the floor.

Sasha took us over to his bed, which looked ready to collapse if you breathed on it.  He had made a private cubby hole by leaning a broken headboard against the wall.  From it he took a plastic shopping bag filled with . . . books?  Two were for learning English, one was a history book, and one was a philosophy book.  Sasha gave the history and philosophy books to us.  I have no idea where these came from.  Discards from the Internat library?  Bought from a used book store with the money I gave him yesterday?  I lean toward the library theory.  Sasha either . . . liberated them or wheedled them out of the librarian, I’ll bet.

At last it was time to go.  A long good-bye followed, and we waved to Sasha until we were out of sight down the tree-lined driveway.

Anatoly drove across town (bump-bump-bump) toward Maksim’s orphanage.  On the way, we always pass a cemetary, and the place fascinates me.  The grave markers are all black stone.  Some are crosses, but very thin and spindly-looking.  Others are elaborate monuments, completely with lengthy inscriptions and portraits of the deceased chiseled into them.  The graves are usually separated from their neighbors by low rails, and a fair number are actually above-ground tombs.  Hugely elaborate grave blankets are common, and the flowers are all in bright, vibrant colors.  It looks like every grave or tomb wears a thick quilt of flowers.

We arrived at Maksim’s orphanage and went straight to his group’s outdoor area.  No sign of the kids.  That struck us as odd--it was a nice, low-60s day, with sun and a brisk breeze.  The other play groups were outside, but not Makim’s group.  Later we wondered if the kids were inside because of the chicken pox epidemic.  We found them in the playroom attached to their bedroom, watching TV.  This was the first time I’d seen a working television at an orphanage.

The kids started to get excited when Kala and I poked our heads into the room, so we retreated into the coatroom and the orphanage worker brought Maksim to us.  We quickly took him outside so we wouldn’t get a repeat of yesterday’s chaos.

Maksim’s visits also follow a pattern.  We spend the first half just holding him.  The second half we encourage him to play.  We bounced him on the teeter-totter, chased him around the yard, let him chase us, climbed the various little jungle gyms, and wrestled with him on the ground.  He didn’t speak, but he did laugh and giggle, and both sounds are horrifyingly adorable.  I noticed for the first time that Maksim has a slight cleft in his chin.

At last we had to go.  We brought him inside, and even before we said good-bye, he knew we were leaving.  He cried again when we returned him to his group.  I kept repeating to myself that in two days he’d be with us forever and we’d never have to leave him again.

And then we drove back to Kyiv.

Yesterday we discovered that the Japanese restaurant across the street from the apartment complex keeps its menu posted outside, and it’s both in Russian and in English.  This means we could eat there without an interpreter!  Hooray!  We hied on over for supper.  Our waiter didn’t speak English, but it didn’t matter because we could read the menu and point at what we wanted.  I had chicken with apples and curry sauce, Kala had soba noodles.  We both had sushi (crab and salmon).  My, but it was good!

On the way home, we stopped at the bodega and bought chocolate ice cream for dessert.

 

June 20, 2005

Today we were supposed to go sightseeing with Sveta at noon, but she called to say she wouldn’t be over until two.  I wrote, Kala read.  Sveta arrived at 2:30.  Man!  Ukraine standard time at work.

We took a taxi to the Cave Monastery, which is wholly within the city of Kyiv.

The word monastery makes me think of brown brick buildings, cobblestoned courtyards, and monks in brown robes chanting softly as they meander from building to building.  This place was the exact opposite of all that.  Outside the monastery were several busses, taxis, and street vendors selling everything from food to nesting dolls.  A street musician played an enormous balalaika, and I put five grivna into his basket.  (As a sometime street musician myself, I feel obligated to support them.)  A small ticket booth stood guard next to an enormous arched gateway.  We bought tickets (only eight grivna each) and headed inside.

The monastery is a whole complex, a series of buildings set into the side of the Dnipro River valley and surrounded by a high wall.  The place is enormous, and it’s anything but quiet.  It’s still a working monastery, but it positively crawls with tourists, and I think the visitors are the monastery’s primary source of revenue.

The monastery was founded more than a thousand years ago, though the Mongols razed it along with the rest of Kiev in 1200, and the Nazis did an almost equally good job in 1940.  It’s been restored, though I don’t know if it was re-done according to the original plan or if it was updated.  I do know that the place is blindingly brilliant.  Every building is covered in white plaster, and most of them are topped with golden minarets.  When the sun is shining, as it was today, the effect is to blast your eyes six feet back into your skull.  Take a hat and sunglasses if you go there.

We first found ourselves in the main entry courtyard, a square with buildings on all sides.  Unfortunately, Sveta’s English is very poor, and she wasn’t much help in deciphering most of the signs and plaques that gave various bits of history.

Here I realized I’d forgotten the camera.  D’oh!

We wandered about the grounds.  A series of tombs set into the cobblestones lined the outer wall of one building.  A scattering of monks and nuns completely dressed in black from head to toe moved about on business of their own.  Lanes and pathways opened into other courtyards and nuzzled up against yet more white buildings.  Every so often, we’d come across a freestanding church or small cathedral, all done with arched windows and minarets, or the buildings would part and we’d find ourselves looking down into the Dnipro River valley, with more of Kiev visible across the water.  The place was a labyrinth, and during the middle ages it would have certainly qualified as a town all by itself.  The abbot of such a place must have been as powerful as a baron.

Sveta told us the monastery was known for its wealth, which was why it was raided so often.

One of the buildings housed a small, one-room museum.  Several display cases showed old books from the 14^th century.  The woodcuts were extraordinary.  Richly-embroidered bishop’s robes were on display as well.  One wall boasted a iconic painting (done directly on the wall) of the entire bible, starting with the Garden of Eden and ending with the apocalypse.  It was a bit condensed, though.  (Heh.)

It was weird, but gift shops abounded in the place.  They sold mostly icons, along with a healthy amount of artwork and other souvenir-type stuff.  The icons were amazing, and I found myself wishing it would be appropriate for me to buy one.  I have friends who I think would love some of them, but I don’t know their tastes well enough to pick one out, so I left them alone.  I did buy a disposable camera, though, and Kala picked out small icons for St. Aleksandr and St. Maksim for the boys.

We went into one of the chapels, and this was truly amazing.  The place was tall and narrow, meaning there wasn’t much floor space, but it was open all the way to the multi-domed roof.  Every inch of wall and ceiling was painted with icons.  Saint Mary, Saint Joseph, Jesus, the Seven Tribes of Israel, martyrs, angels, and more.  Floor to ceiling and across the underside of every dome.  No flat surface was bare except the floor.  My knowledge of Christian mythology is pretty good--better than a lot of Christians--but I could barely identify a tenth of the people depicted.  Floor candelabra (I’m sure there’s a church name for them, but I don’t know what it is) made of brass were scattered about, and people placed thin beeswax tapers in them when they prayed.  I wished I could take pictures, but that would have been wildly inappropriate, so I kept the camera in my pocket.

The part of the monastery which is the most famous, however, is the caverns that lie beneath it, and that’s what I wanted to visit.  Irene had told me that electric light is forbidden--you have to carry candles--and that the most important church officials and saints were buried down there.

Sveta asked a ticket-seller where to go, and we were directed down a long, long cobblestoned street that went down, down, down the hill.  I kept tripping and finally realized there were inch-high ridges deliberately placed every two feet all the way down.  It took me a minute to figure out that these were designed to help people with hand- or horse carts.  If the cart got away from you, it wouldn’t careen all the way down to the bottom of the hill because the ridges would stop it.

At the bottom, Sveta found the building that housed the entrance to the caverns.  More tickets had to be purchased and we had to wait for a tour group to start.  Fortunately, we didn’t have to wait long.  A young woman in a blue dress and head cloth called for us to gather, and we did.  Unfortunately, no tours were offered in English, and Sveta wasn’t proficient enough in English to provide any real translation.  Well, I sat through plenty of Latvian church services when I was younger without understanding a word, and I survived.  I figured I’d survive this.

The woman first laid out a few ground rules, and these Sveta did translate.  No photos in the caves.  Only candles for lighting.  (We were each given a long, thin beeswax taper.)  Women had to wear a head cloth.  (Cloths were provided for women who didn’t have them, including Kala.)

And then, standing next to an enormous cross made of shiny black marble, the tour guide launched into a history lecture.  She talked and talked and talked and talked.  And talked.  Oh man, did she talk.  She must have gone on for twenty minutes.  I thought about wandering away to look at some of the other interesting bits of architecture, but I was afraid I’d miss the start of the actual tour, so I stayed put.

At last the guide stopped yakking and led us into a long, narrow building.  One half of it was taken up with an icon seller, the other half was given over to showing the painting on the wall.  It was a stages-of-the-cross sort of thing that started with a person dying in the lower left corner (death was a naked skeleton carrying a scythe) and from there launched intoa series of twenty pictures.  Each picture had a set of demons and a set of angels going over the dead person’s sins and virtues and the series ended with a choice between heaven and hell.  The tour guide started up another lecture.  It went on and on and on and on and on.  And on and on and on.  My god, the woman yakked.  Kala was getting restless.  I knew she wasn’t all that keen on the caverns and was only there because she knew I really wanted to see them.  I myself was losing my enthusiasm with every passing moment.

Just as I was about to suggest we dump the whole thing, the tour guide moved everyone down past the icon store through a low, round doorway, and into a tiny antechamber all done in white plaster.  Finally!  We lit our tapers and were told to hold them cupped in our hands to prevent wax dripping on the floor.  If we extinguished them, we were told to please pinch out the spark so the smoke wouldn’t stain the ceiling.  Then we headed down a narrow passageway.

Once again, my expectations were shattered.  I was figuring on cave walls, damp floors, and dripping water with monk cells and tombs hollowed out of living rock.  Nope, nope, nope.

The walls and ceilings, all of them rounded, were covered in white plaster.  The floor was laid with square, polished stepping stones.  Passageways were narrow, wide enough to let two people pass only if they both turned sideways.  I felt like I was in a strange house instead of a winding cave.  And the place was crowded.  Long lines of people shuffled down every passage, candles in hand.  It was hot and dry down there from all the burning tapers.  The white plaster bounced the light of all these candles around, giving the illusion that the place was well-lit, but if you found yourself alone, you ended up in a pool of blackness kept at bay only with your candle.

Floor-to-ceiling niches opened up every so often along the passageways.  Each of them contained a stone platform, on top of which was a long, narrow box made of glass set into a wooden frame.  Inside each one was a rounded miter that sat at the top of a long bundle of cloth that extended the length of the box.  The cloth was heavily embroidered and richly dyed.  It wasn’t until I got to the third one of these and saw a pair of shoes poking out the bottom of the bundle that I realized these were coffins.  The bodies were carefully covered, but they were definitely coffins.  One of the reasons it took me so long to figure this out was that the boxes were short, most of them not even five feet long.  (I later learned that the shrouds were all less than thirty years old.  Back in the seventies and before, you could see the half-mummified corpses wrapped in the original, decaying burial cloths.)

Most of the coffins had portraits of the deceased on the wall over the head along with a calligraphy plaque giving the person’s name.  Some were strewn with flowers.  One coffin showed two brown, wizened hands poking through the burial shroud.  They looked like doll’s hands.  A fair number of these people are saints, and visitors venerated them by first kissing the lid of the coffin, then pressing their foreheads to it and making the sign of the cross.

A few places had been widened into tiny rooms.  Some were small chapels covered in icons, others were tombs, complete with glass coffins or, in a few cases, a stone reliquary.  The tomb of the man who’d founded the monastery was covered in beaten gold, or something that looked like it.  Sveta said the tomb had not been allowed to change for 800 years.

In a couple places, the plaster had been removed and a sheet of plastic had been fitted over the spot so you could see the underlying brick.  I don’t know how much of the cavern was natural and how much was man-made, unfortunately.  I also found two holes in the wall, also covered with sheets of plastic.  Both contained a scattering of bones.  More saint reliquaries?  They weren’t labeled, and I couldn’t find Sveta to ask.

Several of the walls were lined with . . . windows?  Each one was about three feet long and a foot high, with rounded corners.  They were nailed shut, and the other side of the glass was covered with opaque cloth.  Sveta later explained that the caverns, in addition to being a cemetary, also served as a hermitage.  Certain monks had themselves walled up into a tiny cell with the window as the only opening.  Bread and water were passed through it and (I assume) waste was removed.  The monk in question sat in the room, in this world but not of it, until he died, whereupon the window was nailed shut and the cell became his tomb.  Some of the men lived in this way for thirty years.

The writer in me wondered how many of them were there involuntarily.

Throughout this trip, the tour guide kept stopping to give long, long, long history lectures in Russian.  She was a rotten speaker, and no one cared what she was talking about.  You could see it.  The other visitors understood what she was saying, but they were clearly as bored as Kala and I were.  Eyes down, shuffling their feet, glancing around for something interesting to look at.  After a while, Kala murmured to me that she thought most of these people were here for religious reasons, not historical ones, and they wished the guide would shut up and let them visit their saints.  I agreed with her.

Me, I felt like an interloper.  People all around me were kissing coffins, crossing themselves, and lighting candles in chapels.  They were pilgrims, I was a tourist, and I felt out of place, like I was intruding on the dead and the faithful.

At last, the tour guide led us back to the exit.  There was another section of the caverns we could visit, but we’d had enough of the endless lectures and Sveta was feeling a little claustrophobic, so we went upstairs.

We stopped in another chapel where a priest was giving a service.  Icons stared down from every bit of wall and ceiling.  Monks chanted in multi-part harmony in response to what he doing.  People milled about, looking at the icons, lighting candles, speaking in low voices, and completely ignoring the service.

By now we were getting tired, so we headed back.  The climb uphill was long and difficult, and we were panting by the time we got to the top.  I watched the hundreds of tourists milling about the entrance and felt oddly sad.  Yes, this place was rich in history, but it was still a working monastery, a holy place to lots of people, and it had been forced to become a tourist trap to survive.  I felt like I had intruded.

We took another taxi back to the flat.  Here’s where the Kyiv system is weird.  The taxi to take us out to the monastery had cost 10 griva.  The ride home cost 20.  I think it’s because getting a fare at the monastery would be easy, but getting one at the apartment complex would be hard.

At the flat, Sveta told us how court would work tomorrow.  I won’t go through it and will instead report what happens tomorrow.

 

June 21, 2005

Got up very early (5:50) in order to arrive for our 9:00 court slot in Zhytomyr.  We drove there without incident along a route that’s become increasingly familiar--and that we’ll only drive once more.  The Zhytomyr courthouse, located in the center of town, is exactly what you’d expect a courthouse to look like--five stories tall, huge pillars out front.  It’s gray, though, instead of white.  And the interior is the usual scruffy, kicked-around look almost all the government buildings here seem to have.  It’s as if the country got all of its buildings second-hand, after other countries didn’t want them anymore.  The hallways are dark and unlit, though the hardwood floors are polished.  The bathrooms are clean, but the toilets have no seats on them.  What is it about this country’s fear of toilet seats, anyway?  It’s not like they’re expensive or hard to make.

We found our courtroom and waited outside for several minutes while Sveta compared paperwork with various other people.  In attendance were the Directors of Sasha’s Internat and Maksim’s orphanage, the local Inspector, the lawyer who was present when we first met Sasha, a worker from Maksim’s orphanage, and us.  We were at last shown into a small courtroom.  There was no bench, but instead a long table done in dark wood and green felt.  It looked kind of like a pool table.  Three throne-like chairs sat behind the table.  The middle one was the tallest, and the trident symbol of Ukraine was inscribed at the peak.  The Ukrainian flag graced the other two.

Four rows of low-backed benches, also in dark wood, made up a spectator area.  A lecturn, presumably for witnesses and lawyers, took up a spot in front of the benches.  A more formal witness box stood against the left wall.  To the right of the judges’ table was the clerk’s table, and it had a modern-looking computer on it.

At about 9:30, a woman with two small children came in.  I think she was waiting for an adoption hearing as well.  A little after that, the judge came in, and we all rose.  He was a gray-haired, thin man with glasses and a pleasant face.

Once we were seated, the hearing began.  Yesterday Sveta told Kala and me that the judge might ask us questions of the “Why do you want to adopt from Ukraine” or “What is your house like?” variety, but he didn’t.  He opened by saying we were here to finalize the adoption of two children to these parents, and so on.  Through Sveta, he asked if we understood our rights in the case (to read all documents, to demand certain changes, etc.), and we said we did.  Then he asked what our intention was with the two boys.  I stated formally that we wanted to adopt them, and Sveta translated.

At that moment, the door opened and Sasha came in, accompanied by an Internat worker.  A smile burst across my face--I was so glad to see him.  He took up a seat behind us, and the hearing continued.

The next part must have been hard on Sasha.  The Director of the Internat and the lawyer confirmed that Sasha’s father was gone, that his mother had no parental rights, that she and Sasha’s sisters had made no attempts to visit him.  The Internat worker confirmed that Kala and I had visited Sasha many times at the Internat and that we seemed to be nice people.

Then the judge asked Sasha if he wanted to be our son and go live in America.  Sasha was so frightened that he couldn’t answer.  He finally, after some prompting, squeaked out a yes.  The judge,smiling, asked Sasha if he knew where America was, and Sasha replied that he didn’t, rather to the judge’s amusement.

Then Maksim’s adoption came up.  The Director of Maksim’s orphanage got up and said the same things about Maksim as the other Director had said about Sasha.  The orphanage worker said we were very nice people and that Maksim liked us.

Then someone--I forget who--told the judge that Sasha has very bad bronchitis.  We’d been warned about this and kept quiet.  Sasha clearly needed to be taken to American with all speed so he could be cured, so would the judge please waive the thirty-day waiting period?  I think the judge knew this wasn’t true--everyone else in the courtroom did--but he agreed this would be a good idea and the waiting period was waived.

And then the judge said everything looked good, we just needed to wait for a couple papers to be written up and we’d be all set.  He gathered up the case file and left.  We waited in the courtroom.  Sasha took pictures of everything and everyone with the digital camera, and made friends with the two other orphans awaiting their hearing.  The boy is a natural socialite.

At last the judge returned.  Kala and I signed many papers, and the judge declared Sasha and Maksim our children.  We hugged Sasha close and accepted handshakes from the various other people in the room.

We had sausage-inna-bun to celebrate.

No, really.  A woman was selling various pastries at a table in the courthouse foyer.  I brought Sasha over and asked if he wanted something.  He nodded and shyly picked out a chocolate-covered eclair.  Kala and I had the Ukrainian version of a pig in a blanket, or sausage-inna-bun.

Then we walked several blocks down the street to an instant photo place to get passport pictures of Sasha.  To my disappointment, Sasha went back to the Internat with the worker once the pictures were developed.  We’ll go get him tomorrow.

Next it was back to the notary’s office, the one with the trees in the alley behind the building.  As we were getting out of the car, we saw a woman enter the halley holding the hand of a toddler.  It was Maksim!  We gave him a long hug.  He looked completely bewildered and thoroughly uncertain.  Like Sasha, he had to go back to the orphanage after getting his passport photo taken.

We went into the notary’s office.  She prepared several documents, none of which I really understood.  We signed them, she notarized them.  Stamp, stamp, stamp, and we were out the door.

Next came the long part--driving to Lugini (hard g), the village where Sasha and Maksim were born.  Lugini is about 130 kilometers away from both Zhytomyr and Kyiv, and it would be a loooong drive, but it was necessary.  Once an adoption is final, you see, the children’s birth certficates are changed, making the adoptive parents the only parents of record, and this can only be done in the place where the original birth certificate was issued.  Hence the drive to Lugini.

The roads to Lugini are seriously bumpy, jolty, shaky, and pot-holey.  Anything but smooth.  Driving there feels like being a kernal of corn in a popper.  The countryside, however, was lush, green, and beautiful.  Sometimes it was woods, sometimes it was meadows and fields, sometimes it was small villages.  Out in the country, Ukrainian houses are small and peaked.  The ground floor walls are usually white or beige, while the loft (the floor under the peak) is usually plain wood.  Trim is painted in bright, bright colors--red, blue,and purple being favorite.  Each one is surrounded by what looks like an unkempt jungle but which on closer inspection turns out to be a garden.  Every square inch of yard space is given over to growing vegetables, fruits, and herbs.  Makes sense--wasting valuable growing space on mere grass is a luxury reserved for the rich.

Anatoly stopped several times for directions, but each time turned out to be going the right way.  At last we hit the village itself.

Lugini is clearly a small, rural town with very little money.  The houses are all surrounded by desperate-looking gardens.  Chickens and occasional cows roam the streets.  Bicycles that look like they were made in the fifties are the transportation of choice.  From the front, the courthouse looks like one building bent around the corner it sits on, but from the back you can see a middle section which was built first and two side sections which were added later.

We parked outside and Sveta ducked inside.  A few minutes later, I had to go to the bathroom, so I went in to look for one.  The interior hallways were dark and gritty, with cracked tiles and split linoleum.  I checked both floors but didn’t see a restroom, and although I can ask where the bathroom is in Ukrainian, I can rarely understand the answer.  So I went back outside and strolled around the courthouse grounds.

That’s how I found the bathroom.  A brick building out back was divided into six stalls, each with its own door and a hole in the wooden floor.  There wasn’t a pit to speak of.  It was more like a shallow trench.  Flies hung thick in the air, and the smell made my eyes water.  It wasn’t as bad as the Internat outhouse, but it came in a close second.  I used the place, then went back to the car for the camera.  Maksim won’t remember Lugini, but Sasha will, and I wanted to take pictures.

Kala and I got out our lunches and were eating on a bench beneath some trees when Sveta came out to report that the typist was typing up the new birth certificates.  She had to go to the bank, so we continued eating while she was gone.  Kala wondered out loud if there was a bathroom inside the courthouse, and I said I doubted it.  By now I’d noticed a steady stream of people exiting the courthouse from the back door and heading for the outhouse.

“You wouldn’t use that place if you had a choice,” I said, and Kala agreed.

It looked strange.  All the people heading out the back door were dressed in business attire--skirts, blouses, and pumps for the women, jackets and ties for the men--and they were all heading for a smelly, backwoods outhouse.

Sveta returned and we went inside to get the new certificates.  Although the hallways were battered and cruddy, the notary’s office was quite nice--freshly painted, rugs on the floor, curtains at the windows.  I think in Ukraine you’re expected to do maintenance on and buy accessories for your own office area.  If you rely on the government to supply you with window shades, rugs, or a nice desk, I think you’ll be SOL.

The notary had me sign for the certificates in her receipt book, then smiled, displaying several gold teeth, and handed them over.  As far as Ukraine is concerned, we are Sasha and Maksim’s official parents.

On the way out of town, I asked Anatoly to stop at a big blue church so I could photograph it.  I also got pictures of the big sign outside Lugini with the village name on it.  A little ways further up the road, we ran into a herd of cows, which were ambling beside and on the road.  It took some time to work our way through them.

And then back to Kiev.

 

June 22, 2005

Today was the big day--the boys come home with us.  We got up very early and drove to Zhytomyr, figuring on picking up the boys and getting home before noon.

Right.

I really should know better.  Nothing gets done in Ukraine quickly or on any kind of schedule.  We spent the entire morning and part of the afternoon chasing down paperwork involving the boys’ passports.  Once again, people weren’t in their offices and we had to sit and wait for them.

An acquaintance of mine who knows Ukraine culture says that this is one of Ukraine’s bigger handicaps.  People are just not interested in getting anything done quickly or efficiently, and the public doesn’t expect it.  Everyone figures on waiting for everything, or they figure that it simply won’t get done, and they do without whatever it was they wanted or needed.  This is why, for example, the residents of Irene’s apartment complex don’t protest when the hot water gets inexplicably shut off for weeks at a time, and don’t get upset when the lights in the hallways burn out and aren’t replaced.  On a larger scale, it’s why tap water in Ukraine isn’t safe to drink, even in big cities like Kyiv.  It could be; it’s just that no one cares about making it so.

While we were waiting, we had Sveta and Anatoly take us to a market.  Most buying and selling in Ukraine takes place in open-air bazzars.  They look like flea markets, except the merchandise is all new.  The one in Zhytomyr was enormous, and I found an entire row of shoe sellers.  This is what we were looking for.  Remember Vitaly, the boy whose feet were raw because his shoes were too small?  Kala had put her foot next to his and knew his feet were about a centimeter longer than hers.  We found a pair of sandals for 37G ($7.50) that we were sure would fit him and went back to the courthouse for more waiting.

It wasn’t until after twelve that we were finally able to get Maksim.

We arrived when the kids were taking their afternoon nap.  The orphanage worker on duty got Maksim up and dressed him in the clothes we brought for him--a black t-shirt and some sweats.  Then we had to wait because the Director wasn’t there to sign Maksim out.  Of course.  Kala and I took Maksim outside to play.  Maksim was happy to see us, but only cautiously so because we’d abandoned him during every visit so far.  Finally Sveta popped outside to tell us the Director was back.  We took Maksim back inside and he promptly hid his face in hands and started silently to cry.  He thought we were leaving again.  We told Sveta to tell him he was coming with us this time, but he clearly didn’t believe it.

We went into the Director’s office, signed some papers, and Maksim was ours.  We had him wave at the orphanage and say good-bye instead of having it said to him.  He still didn’t quite believe it, even after we put him in the back seat with us and drove away.

Next we picked up Sasha.  We found the Internat kids gathered in a small auditorium.  Some guys with guitars were up front, ready to begin playing.  Sasha jumped up and ran to us.  When Maksim saw the children, he started to cry again.  He thought we had just brought him to another orphanage and were going to leave him there.  We reassured him and retreated from the scene to give Maksim some distance from the upsetting scene.

Sasha got to see Maksim for the first time in over a year.  They were both a little uncertain at first, then Sasha hugged him with enthusiasm.  He wanted to carry Maksim, but that was a little too much for him.  I think Maksim does remember Sasha a little bit.  He reacts well to Sasha, and it’s not just because they speak the same language.

We brought everyone into the Director’s office, signed some more papers, and Sasha was ours.  We wanted to give the shoes to Vitaly, and that was when we got some shocking news.  Vitaly was in the hospital with what may be hepatitis.  The Director promised to give the shoes to him when he got out.

Jesus.  You want something to make you cry?

The Director wished us well, and we left.  All five of us--me, Kala, Sasha, Maksim, Sveta, and Anatoly--crowded into the car and we at last drove to Kiev.

Sasha entertained Maksim with the camera and by being a silly older brother.  Maksim laughed and smiled, but didn’t speak.  He did nod his head in response to yes or no questions, but that was it.

At last we arrived in Kyiv.  Sasha, who had been talking a blue streak, fell silent and stared.  He’d been fascinated by the idea of going to Kyiv from the beginning, and now he was here.

When we arrived at the flat, both boys moved in as if they’d owned it from the start.  Irine has a stash of toys, and Maksim fell to playing with them--and he started talking.  Talk, talk, talk, talk.  Kala and I alternated playing with him.  It was very different from playing with Aran when he was this age and starting play therapy.  Aran spoke irregularly and had to be coaxed into imaginary play.  Maksim talked as much as Sasha, and readily pretended various things.  The favorite game was tag, though Maksim almost never did the chasing.

Sasha, meanwhile, played with the computer, the camera, the TV, and the DVD player.  He’s well on his way to becoming a child of the media.  The flat was very, very noisy.

Irine had left a pile of blintzes and strawberries for supper.  We reheated the former and had our first meal together as a family, though Aran wasn’t here.  Sasha ate two blintzes, and Maksim ate one and a half.  Both boys ate many strawberries and several crackers.  Maksim was very cute to watch.  He ate by picking up a piece of food, putting it on the fork, and eating it.

The boys are eating machines.  In addition to supper, they ate some granola bars, bananas, more crackers, cookies, and leftover pizza.  They also drank a great deal of juice.  The usual post-adoption reaction to having access to food--stuffing yourself silly.  Eventually their apetites will settle down.

Maksim has had a recurring cough and runny nose, so we dosed him with some cold medicine and he got much better.  Kala thought he felt warm and wanted to take his temperature, so she got out the digital thermometer.  Maksim freaked.  He fled, crying, out onto the balcony and tried to hide.  Kala couldn’t convince him it was okay, even after she put the thermometer under her own arm to show him how it would work.  I finally got him calmed down, but when I took his shirt off, intending to slip the thermometer under his arm from the back, he started crying again, though not as intently.  I got his temperature--he didn’t have a fever--then held him for a long time, calming him down.

A while later came bathtime, and Maksim freaked out again.  Nothing would convince him that the bath wouldn’t hurt.  So I got him through it as quickly as possible.  He screamed throughout.  I finally got him dried and dressed and held him for a long time.  He had withdrawn again, refusing to speak.

You can see what’s coming.  Irine told him it was bed time (“spatke”), and he freaked.  Cried and cried and cried.  Kala took him to bed and lay down with him.  He eventually stopped crying, lay quietly for a while, then conked out.  He didn’t stir when Kala put him in the crib.

Next it was time for Sasha’s shower.  The building’s hot water is finally back on, and Sasha got first crack.  I made sure he got clean.  Sasha said at the orphanage they wash face and hands regularly but shower only once a week.  You can tell, too.

Irine made the couch up into a bed, and Sasha did the male thing by taking the TV remote and channel surfing.  I’m sitting in a chair next to him right now as I finish this journal.  I think he’s fascinated by the idea of being able to watch TV in bed.

Tomorrow we’re going clothes shopping.

 

June 23, 2005

We all slept in this morning and ate a leisurely breakfast.  Then we took a trip dwon to the toy store that’s about half a mile from us and bought a few things for the boys to play with.  Sasha picked out, among other things, a mechanical set that lets you build a car, a motorcycle, or a helicopter.

Later, Sveta came over to take us clothes shopping.  We took a taxi downtown and went into the huge department store where I’d bought my pants.  There we bought a few outfits for the boys, enough to get by until we got them home.  Sasha picked out an outfit that consisted of a camouflage t-shirt that said US Army on it and a pair of olive-green shorts.  He also wanted a baseball cap and sunglasses.

Maksim vanished, and a few nervous seconds passed before he turned inside a clothes rack.  He’d been sitting down on the support bar that ran across the floor.

I also finally bought a nesting doll.  It’s a family of musicians, actually.  The outermost doll is Mama, and she plays the violin.  The next doll is Papa, and he plays a pipe.  Next comes Sister, who plays the tambourine, and Brother, who plays something I forget.  Last is Baby, who sings.  I like them very much.

Laden with these, we went home and spent time playing with the boys some more.  Sasha had a grivna I’d given him, and he said he wanted to buy a magazine.  I took him down the street.  We walked a long, long ways in very hot sun, looking for a newstand.  We didn’t find a magazine seller, but Sasha bought some sunflower seeds from a street vendor and was happy with that, so we went home.

Sasha and I spent a fair amount of time working on the model car together, the classic father-son thing.  Maksim continues to be the cutest thing ever.  Sorry, Sarah, but he’s even cuter than your Alexander.

 

June 24, 2005

Today we had to take the boys to a certain clinic for an examination so they could get visas to America.  I think it was called the American Clinic, but everything there was in Russian.  It was just Anatoly with us, so communication was limited.  He drove us over, winding through many sidestreets, until I was thoroughly lost.  We arrived without incident, though.

The clinic’s interior was exactly like all the other government buildings--drab, unlighted, gritty.  A long hallway was lined with uncomfortable benches and dozens of people clutching enormous x-ray envelopes.  (You need a TB x-ray to get a visa to most countries.)  After some time, the doctor called us into his office.  He turned out to be another archetype--the Handsome Young Doctor.  He looked like he should be on the set of a soap opera.  Kala later said he reminded her of Jimmy Smits.

He gave both Sasha and Maksim quick examinations and asked us a few questions about them.  Neither of them have been tested for HIV or syphilis.  I thought they had been, but the doctor said there was nothing in the records.  He said it’s not a requirement for a U.S. visa, but we could have it done that day, if we wanted.  We declined.  The results wouldn’t change anything--the adoption is finalized, and we wouldn’t terminate anything at this point, anyway.  I’m not too worried, though.

After the exam, we had to pay for it--$65 per kid.  (Insurance doesn’t cover it because Sasha and Maksim won’t be our children in the eyes of the U.S. government until they touch American soil, and in any case, the complexity of trying to handle this through an insurance company would be enough to shudder my blood.)  Except when Anatoly and I went into the cashier’s office, it turned out she wasn’t there.  More growls of frustration.  What kind of office that collects money would open at nine a.m. but not require the cashier to arrive until ten?  We sat and waited.  I saw a closed door with a sign over it in Cyrillic.  An English translation was below: “Room for children.”  I pointed this out, and Kala took Maksim and Sasha inside to play.  She came back out thirty seconds later and handed Maksim back to me.  Maksim thought the place was an orphanage and he was being left there, so I held onto him for reassurance.

At last the cashier arrived and I paid her.  They require American money; I don’t know why.

On the way home, we stopped at the RPF office to make copies of the visa forms.  We need a form for each kid, but we only had one copy of each.  And then home.

Irine made borscht for lunch.  The traditional way to eat it includes mixing sour cream into it, of course, but also having a clove of raw garlic.  You dip the garlic in coarse salt and eat it.  Garlic upsets Kala’s stomach, so she declined.  I tried it.  It was . . . different.  Very powerful taste experience that makes you totally safe from all vampires.  I only made it halfway through my clove.  Sasha chomped his right down, clearly experienced at it.

Kala says I’m not going to kiss her anytime soon.

The evening turned out to be . . . weird.  I took the boys down to the apartment complex’s playground.  Sasha went up to the flat and back down to the playground several times, and I stayed down with Maksim.  After that, we had to go to the store, and we made a family trip out of it.

We had some fun with miscommunication.  It turns out that “shopping” in Russian sounds like “magazine,” so when I thought Sasha wanted to buy reading material, it turns out he just wanted to go shopping.  Heh.  He likes walking around the underground shopping centers.

When we got back, we played the elevator game again.  The complex has two elevators, the large one and the shoebox.  Sasha likes to take to the shoebox while we take the big one.  Maksim, on the other hand, started off terrified of the elevators and cried and cried when we got on one the first time.  After repeated exposure, he became okay with it as long as Kala or I held him.  He refused to board one with just Sasha.

When we got to the fifteenth floor, Sasha was at first nowhere to be seen.  Then I saw a shadow in the pebbled glass window of the stairwell.  I thought he was playing hide and seek, so I went over to find him.

He was standing in a puddle of urine.  It took me a minute to realize it was his.  His clothes were wet as well.  Through Irine, we asked him what happened.  He said he had to go but couldn’t hold it anymore.  Unusual for a twelve-year-old.

We got him inside and started a bath running.  Maksim needed one as well, and we thought, since Maksim freaked at the last bath, he might respond better if Sasha was there.  Sasha was amenable to this, so we put Maksim in the tub as well.  Maksim screamed for a while, but calmed down when he saw Sasha was having fun in the tub.  I figured it would be okay to leave them alone for a while.

Nope.

They filled the tub to the brim and played with the shower.  Water got everywhere, soaking the walls, the towels, the floormat.  We got the boys out of the tub and cleaned up.  Then I sat Sasha down with Irine translating and told him I was unhappy with how he had behaved.  He looked abashed, and his face was set hard.

Also that night, we had Eskimo pies, bought from the store visit.  Kala gave one each to Sasha and Maksim, but they were huge.  No way Maksim could finish his.  When this became clear, Kala took Maksim’s away from him.

He absolutely freaked.  It took over an hour to calm him down.  Never a good idea to take food away from an orphan, even if he can’t eat it.

At last everyone was in bed.  A weird day.  We still don’t quite know what to make of Sasha in the hallway.  If it repeats, we’ll have to consult a doctor about it.

 

June 25, 2005

Ohhhhh man.  A hell of a day, but I think everything finally turned out okay.

Maksim had wet the bed overnight, and the cleanup took some time.  We’d planned to go to the zoo today, and early, but the cleanup delayed us.  We ended up not leaving until almost eleven.  Irine came with us.

We took a taxi to the zoo.  This one was metered.  (!)  It cost 25G.  Tickets to the zoo were 15G each.  Inside, we did the zoo thing for a while.  Nothing spectacular among the animals, I’m afraid.  Sasha was fascinated by the raccoons and didn’t understand why Mama and Papa didn’t express anything but mild interest.  We had Irine explain to him that raccoons are everywhere in Michigan and that we see them all the time in the wild--and in the garage.  He thought that was great.

The zoo in Kiev, it turned out, charged you for everything.  The petting zoo cost extra.  The butterfly house cost extra.  Zoo workers stand around with various exotic animals and offer to take your picture with them.  It costs extra.

Maksim was terrified of the alligator and the fish aquariums in the reptile house.  The snakes also made him nervous.  We went into the butterfly house--the reptile house surrounds it--and we were the only ones inside.  Sasha liked it quite a lot, but Maksim was nervous and unhappy.  One butterfly kept landing on Maksim’s cap, which sports a red bunny.  The zoo worker explained that it was a male butterfly who though the rabbit ears were a female’s wings.

When it came time to leave the butterfly house, Sasha didn’t want to go.  The butterfly house is built around a staircase that winds around the outer wall of the enclosure, and Sasha liked climbing around it.  I spoke sharply to him, and he still ignored me.  Then I called him Aleksandr.  He stiffened and obeyed.

We passed the petting zoo area next, and Sasha asked if we could go in, but we were running a little low on money, so we told him no.  He went into serious pout mode, planted himself at the entrance to the petting zoo, and refused to leave.  I finally had to lead him away by the hand.  His face was hard and stony, and he started making more demands--for food, for souvenirs, for toys.  We told him no, we had already spent enough money, come look at the elephant.

Sasha hung back, still pouting.  Kala and I decided to ignore him--pouting gets boring after a while.  Kala said she’d keep an eye on him so Maksim and I could get closer to the elephant enclosure.  The elephant was giving itself a dust bath, which Maksim found hilarious.  Then Kala came over and said she had lost track of Sasha.  He was nowhere to be seen.

I handed Maksim over to her and went back to the petting zoo, keeping an eye out for him along the way.  I was only mildly worried, more exasperated than anything else.  Sasha wasn’t at the petting zoo.  I went back to Kala and Irine, who didn’t have him either.  We would have to go to security.

The Kiev zoo had very little in the way of security.  To report a lost child, we had to go all the way to the main entrance, and we were at the other end of the zoo.  I was getting more and more worried now.  In America, I knew, a lost child in a zoo gets a lot of priority and they have lots of people to help.  I didn’t get that impression here.  Irine said they’d make announcements on the loudspeaker, but said nothing about people helping us look.  This didn’t reassure me.  I had the camera with me, which had pictures of Sasha in it to help people identify him, but it wouldn’t help if no one was looking.

At one point the path diverged in two directions.  Irine suggested Maksim and I go one way while she and Kala went the other, in order to look for Sasha better.  We did this.  After a few moments, I looked behind me.

Sasha was a few paces back.

I grabbed his hand and snapped at him in English.  He answered in Russian.  We fell silent, and I towed him back to the main entrance.  Kala and Irene were just arriving.

I took Sasha over to a bench and sat him down.  Irine has a bad habit of injecting her own comments into a translation, so I asked her to repeat exactly what I said without adding anything.  Sasha, meanwhile, refused to meet my gaze.

“Sasha,” I said, “you can’t wander away like that.  You scared Mama and me and made us both very worried.  We were going to call the police.  We are very upset and very angry.”  I paused a moment to think.  “I know it looks to you like we are very wealthy, but we are not as rich as you think.  It was very expensive to come here and adopt you.  It cost more than 150,000 grivna.  I would pay it again if I had to, but you need to know that if Mama and I say ‘no,’ we’re not saying it to be mean or arbitrary.  We have to be careful about how much we spend.  We’re going sit here for a while and rest, then we’ll go home and Mama and I will decide what to do about today.”

Sasha still refused to look at me.  I wasn’t expecting him too.  I see this kind of thing in my students all the time.

We took a taxi back home--25 grivna--and rode in silence.  At the flat, we told Sasha that he couldn’t leave the flat for the rest of the day or night.  (A major punishment, since one of Sasha’s main forms of entertainment is riding the elevator and playing on the playground.)

I spent a fair amount of time trying to change our flight plans.  Our tickets are for Wednesday, but we’ll be able to leave on Tuesday.  I called the airline and found out the only flights to Detroit on Tuesday had an overnight stay in Amsterdam Tuesday night.  I didn’t know if the kids, who have Ukrainian passports, would need visas or not.  The airline rep said he didn’t think so, but he wasn’t sure.  I tried calling Amsterdam but couldn’t get through.  Dialing long distance in Ukraine is hit or miss, and if you can’t connect, it’s impossible to tell if it’s because you’ve dialed wrong or if the connection isn’t working right.  It’s very frustrating.  I was also running out of phone card time, soI went down to the post office to buy another card.  They didn’t have $20 or $50 cards, so I had to buy two $10 cards.  The annoyance continued.

In the end I was unable to connect with anyone helpful, so I decided to go back down to the post office and see if I could find any information on line.  When I got there, I ended up in line right behind a woman who was sending ten or eleven telegrams.  Each one had to be checked, the words counted, the rate for the receiving country looked up.  It took for damned ever.  People were piling up behind me in line, and you could feel their annoyance growing.  Then, at last, the job was done, and a woman who had been on-line jumped in ahead of me to say she had sent a print job.  If I had been more conversant with the language, I would have told her to get in line with everyone else.  But the clerk started up the print job.

It was over a hundred pages.  The clerk had to reload the printer twice.

I finally slapped down money on the counter and said, “Internet!”  The clerk paused in gathering the print job to set me up and I finally revved up Google.

The airport website didn’t say a word about overnight visas or lack thereof, but I got several phone numbers.  I wrote them down and headed home, very hungry.

We’d ordered out for pizza, and everyone had eaten by the time I got home.  I was pissed off and hungry.  Sasha dashed into the kitchen, set a plate with pizza on it on the table, and filled a glass with Coke for me.  A way of saying, “I’m sorry,” I think.

 

June 26, 2005

Sasha is a tester.  He pushes until he meets hard resistance, then stops.  But he ultimately seems to be glad to find the boundaries.  A fairly common viewpoint among kids his age.  I just wasn’t expecting to deal with it quite yet.  I wasn’t fiuring on having a twelve-year-old for quite a while yet.

Today we decided to visit the war memorial we weren’t able to visit last time because we had trouble with the bus.  Irine assured us that bus 38, if you ride it all the way to the end, stops near the memorial, so off we went.  Irine wasn’t with us.

The four of us got on the big, lumbering trolley bus and rode it to the end, which turned out to be near the Cave Monastery.  Six or seven tour busses were lined up outside the monastery.   Very busy.  When we got off the bus, we didn’t see any sign of the memorial, but the handful of riders who got off with us strode off purposefully down the sidewalk, and we decided to follow them and see if they were going to the memorial, too.

We rounded a bend in the sidewalk, which was built into the side of a hill that blocked our view.  Once the hill was out of the way, we saw the huge statue of the woman holding a sword and shield.  Yay!

It was actually quite a hike to the memorial park.  First you have to go down a long, gentle set of stairs, at the bottom of which is a series of tanks, mortar shells, and other big war vehicles all lined up near a military museum.  The musuem was closed, unfortunately, but you could pay a grivna to sit in one of the battle helicopters.  We bought Sasha a ticket so he could try it, and he liked that very much.

Next, a long, wide, winding boulevard paved in bricks took us past another monument, this one to Soviet soldiers and Soviet citizens who’d died in various revolutions and wars.  The monument arched over the bouleavard, creating a heavy, blocky cave with a ceiling about thirty feet up.  Huge figures of soldiers, workers, and other people lined the walls.  A loudspeaker played the sort of music you expect to hear in the old Soviet Union--men chanting firmly in a minor key.  The sculptures are powerful and well done, but after a while, they look too somber, too serious.  “We are Soviet Empire.  Many of our people died.  Bow head in awe!”

Next we walked passed a reflecting pool with a fountain in it.  A family of ducks had taken up residence, with the babies swimming around and around the central sculpture.  Very cute.

Past that, we got The Statue.  The Statue is the same one we could see from the flat by leaning out the balcony windows.  It’s a silver woman, almost as tall as the Statue of Liberty, clad in a toga-style robe holding an upright sword in one hand and an upright shield in the other.  It was very impressive close up, looming over us the way it did.

The pedestel is a World War II memorial museum, and we went inside.  The interior was done in brown stone and brick and, of course, barely lit.  But it was much cooler than outdoors, which was getting uncomfortably warm.  We bought tickets and realized no one else was there.  We had the whole place to ourselves.  On a Sunday?  Weird.

The museum consisted of two levels, both built in a circle.  You wander from room to room and eventually end up at the entryway again.  The entryway’s centerpiece exhibit was an iron eagle with a swastika on its chest.  The eagle lay on its back on a pile of stones, its wings chopped off and lying beside it.  We later learned (by examining pictures of pre-WWII Kyiv) that the Nazis had originally mounted this eagle on the roof of the main government building in Kyiv.  The sculpture created from it was symbolically very fitting.

The musuem housed acres of exhibits--war machinery, airplane wreckage, soldier equipment, postcards, official documents, and photographs.  Lots and lots of photographs.  I love old photos, but was hamstrung here because I couldn’t read the captions.  The only thing in the entire musuem that I could read was a sign in German and Ukrainian posted in Kyiv after the Nazis had taken over, warning the reader that looters would be put to death.

Two rooms dealt the Holocaust, since the Nazis constructed death camps in Ukraine.  The most disturbing exhibit to me was the set of sleepers hanging in a display case over a pair of child-sized shackles.  The guillotine--presumably the real thing and not a reconstruction--was right up there, too.

The most striking room was the final one.  Thousands (and I mean thousands) of photographs of men and women in uniform lined the walls from floor to ceiling.  A long, long table curved through the room, set with glasses, canteens, water bottles, and other drinking utensils, as if all the people in the pictures were going to show up any minute to grab a drink and share war stories.  But all the people in the photos were dead.

The last thing we did was go up into the actual pedestel directly beneath The Statue.  It offered a striking 360-degree view of Kyiv.  You could see the Cave Monastery, the Dnipro River, and Irine’s apartment building.  We later learned that an elevator will take you up the statue into its sword arm, but we missed it because we couldn’t read the signs.  Oh well.

And then back to the flat.

After lunch, I took Sasha downtown to the street that gets closed off on the weekends and whose name I can never remember or pronounce.  I gave him some money, and this really excited him.  We wandered up and down the boulevard.  Sasha bought junky souvenir-type stuff, just what you’d expect a twelve-year-old to buy.  We paused at a couple of show thingies, but the ones that interested me didn’t interest Sasha, and vice-versa.  I let him have his head, though.

At last we were getting tired, so we went home.  Just in time, too, since it rained right after we arrived.

The first major crisis began.

I needed to go down to the post office for Internet access, and Sasha wanted to go with me.  Against my better judgement, I let him come with me.  At the post office, Sasha saw the telephones and wanted to make a phone call.  For this, he wanted more money.  At least, I think that’s what he wanted.  It was hard to tell.  I refused, since we have a phone at the flat.  Sasha got upset and repeated his request for more money.  I refused again.  The post office ladies thought this exchange was hilarious.  I was ready to slap them both.  It wasn’t funny to me--I knew I was missing a chunk of the conversation, and Sasha was getting upset about the situation.

I finally dragged him home, almost physically.  On the way there, Sasha was upset and pouting.  Although I’m recording it here for the first time, giving Sasha money the first time set off a wave of requests for more, which I steadily refused.  Each refusal seemed to get him more and more upset.

“Grivna, grivna, grivna,” I finally said in exasperation.  “That’s all I hear from you, Sasha.  Is that all that’s important?”

Sasha obviously didn’t understand every word, but he got the gist.  When we got home, he stomped into the bedroom.  We had established one of the dresser drawers as his, and he kept most of his remaining money in it, tucked into the pages of a Russian-English dictionary.  He handed the money to me, then went and gathered up the various toys and other small objects we’d bought for him.  Maksim was in the room, and Sasha put them on the floor by his brother.  Sasha said something that, I assume, translated as, “These are yours now, Makism.”  Then he stomped out to the balcony, where he stared angrily out the window.

Hoo boy.

Frankly, I didn’t follow exactly what Sasha wanted or exactly why he was upset.  And I couldn’t talk to him, either.  His message was clear: “I don’t want anything from you.”

After a cooling-off period, I brought Sasha into the living room, opened my notebook, and started drawing stick figures.  Using a combination of crude drawings and English with a smattering of Russian, I told him the following:

Sasha is angry and upset.  Papa doesn’t understand why.  Sasha talks to Papa in Ukrainian, but Papa doesn’t understand.  Sasha is angry about money, but Papa doesn’t understand why.  Papa loves Sasha.

At least, that’s what I hope I told him.  I also drew three stick figures, one angry, one scared, and one puzzled.  I asked him which one was Sasha.  Sasha, who remained silent throughout this exchange, just shrugged.  I offered him the pen and paper, but he didn’t take them.  Finally he got up and went to the balcony, staring out across the city.  I wasn’t sure what to make of this.  Had he understood?  I didn’t know.  There wasn’t anything else I could do.

And then Sasha abruptly came back into the living room.  He went into the bedroom and put his money back into his drawer.  Then he gave me a kiss and a hug and turned on the TV.

Whatever I did, it seemed to work.

Sasha is difficult to parent.  A large part of it is that I can’t communicate with him very well.  I tell myself it’ll get better when as he learns English, but it’s more than a little scary.  Sasha is . . . volatile.  Not violent or scary, though.  Maybe “touchy” is a better word.  Understandable, considering his background.  I get the impression that whatever parenting he received was half-assed at best, and he desperately needs--and wants--stability.  He asks me for more money, but I think he really wants me to say no, even though he storms off in a fury when I give him that answer.

I wasn’t ready for this, to tell the truth.  I find myself retreating into teacher mode, since Sasha isn’t that much younger than my students.  I know how to relate to teenagers (and, by extension, pre-teenagers) as a teacher, but not as a father.  That was supposed to come gradually, see, as my kids grew into that phase.  Now, though--wham!  I’m the father of a pre-teen, and I’m being shoved--or maybe towed--into uncharted waters I haven’t even been able to examine from a distance.  It’s scary as hell.

 

June 27, 2005

I’ve been having fun with plane reservations.  We changed our original tickets from Monday, June 21, to Wednesday, June 29.  Northwest/KLM’s adoption flight program allows people to do this without incurring extra fees, because adoption trips are so unpredictable.

When it became clear that the boys’ visas would be ready by Monday and we could fly out on Tuesday, I called the airline to make the change.  Except you can only make changes to adoption flights through the adoption desk, and they aren’t open on weekens.  They open at seven a.m. Central time, which is three p.m. in Ukraine.  To my frustration, I couldn’t find out if the flight was available until Monday afternoon.

Anatoly showed up at eight o’clock to drive all four of us to our 8:30 appointment at the U.S. embassy.  He parked behind a café across the street, and we all headed in.

The embassy is a blue building surrounded by a wrought-iron fence.  A short stairway leads up to a surprisingly small entrance.  (I was expecting big double doors.)

The place looked like a New York club.  I don’t mean it was surrounded by flashing lights and limosines.  I mean it was surrounded by an enormous crowd of people, all jumbled around the entrance, waiting to get in.  A guard held forth at the top of the stairs.  I stared.  It would take hours and hours and hours to wait in this line.  But Anatoly muscled his way through the crowd, gesturing at us to come forward.  The crowd, however, instantly closed behind him.

I took Sasha’s hand, checked to see Kala and Maksim were behind me, and plunged into the people.  It was like forcing my way through a jungle.  Some people readily moved aside for me, others had to be pushed.  At last, I got to the stairs and up to the top.  The guard let me open the door, and all of us went inside.  See?  New York night club, and we were on the VIP list.

Inside, we went through a metal detector and a passport check.  I had to check the digital camera.  A long hallway lined with service windows and signs led us past various services until we got to the area that dealt with adoption visas.  The woman on the other side of the bullet-proof glass checked all our paperwork and we signed the parts that needed to be signed in front of a witness.  Then we were asked to take a seat and wait until an official could interview us.

Sasha had disappeared.

I sighed and headed off to find him.  I was more exasperated than worried--he couldn’t leave the embassy without us, and there were very few places open to the public.  I finally found him outside in what seemed to be an employee break room under construction.  The walls and ceiling were plastic dropcloths on a basic frame.  A few plastic chairs and tables sat scattered around, and people smoked at them.  You can’t smoke indoors at the embassy.  Two vending machines, covered in construction dust, stood nearby.  Sasha was trying to get coffee out of one and quickly discovered the hard way that vending machine coffee is pretty nasty.

I all but dragged him back to the waiting area and kept an eagle eye on him.  He kept trying to wander off.  He was bored, but there was nothing for it.  I had to be rather short with him at one point.

At last, the officer called us up to his window and we completed the visa application process.  We signed a few more papers, and the officer said the visas would be ready at 3:30 that afternoon.  He also handed us two thick manilla envelopes, sealed with several official-looking stamps.  We would need to show them to passport control people when we left Ukraine, the officer said.  Kala put them in my backpack.  We wove our way back out through the enormous crowd outside the embassy, and I wished really hard that Europeans used deodorant.

We spent the morning by taking a trip to the botannical gardens, which are supposed to be stupendous.  It was only a short bus ride away.  And the gardens would have been stupendous, had we not been accompanied by two children who were completely uninterested in taking a nice long walk among pretty flowers, bushes, and trees.

Actually, the problem was Sasha.  Maksim seems to be pretty happy as long as he’s near Papa or Mama.  Where we are is immaterial, and he doesn’t seem to get bored.  Sasha, however, was bored.  Understandable--when I was twelve, I wouldn’t have been very fascinated by the gardens, either.  And the greenhouses and museums inside the gardens were all closed for a minor Ukrainian holiday.  I got Sasha to play catch for a little while, and then we played a little bit of tag and we wrestled on the grass, but Sasha wasn’t really into being there, and Maksim was showing signs of being cranky, so we decided to head home.

On the way, we passed a small playground.  This got the kids’ attention, and they ran off to play.  Sasha got on the swings next to another kid.  Maksim had a little fit for a while, and we couldn’t figure out what was wrong.  When Maksim gets upset, he covers his eyes with the backs of his hands and rocks in place.  He was doing this now.  We wondered if he thought the playground was another orphanage and we were going to leave him.  Either that, or he was unhappy because both swings were taken and he wanted to swing.  He did cheer up when the second kid got off the swing and Maksim could get on.

At three I called the airline and managed to get tickets home for Tuesday--tomorrow!  Oh, we were glad.  I really want to go home.  It’s a two-stage flight though.  We fly to Amsterdam, spend the night there, and fly to Detroit in the morning.

United States citizens who want to enter Amsterdam are granted visas on the spot.  Ukrainians, however, have to apply for visas weeks in advance.  For us, this meant the boys couldn’t actually enter the city.  However, a bit of phone-calling turned up the fact that you can stay in what’s called the Transit Zone for as long as you want.  I figured there must be people who need to spend a day or longer in the airport who don’t have visas and need a place to stay.  And anytime there’s a need, a business will spring up to fill it.

I started calling some of the airport numbers I’d harvested from the Internet yesterday.  My suspicions were correct--as long as you don’t leave the transit zone, you don’t need a visa, and there are hotels in the transit zone.

Yesterday’s Google search gave me contact information for several hotels near the airport, and I used my phone cards to call them.  I ended up talking to the Amsterdam Hilton reservation desk.  Everyone--or nearly everyone--in Amsterdam speaks excellent English, and this was a major help.  I can read a fair amount of Dutch and understand some spoken Dutch, but I can’t speak it at all.

“My wife and I are American,” I said, “but our children are Ukrainian with Ukrainian passports.  We need to spend the night in Amsterdam before travelling to the United States, and our children will not have visas.  Is your hotel in the Transit Zone?”

“Yes,” she said.  “The hotel is perhaps a five minute walk from the airport, but we also offer a shuttle service.”

“So we don’t need visas for the children to stay at the Hilton?”

“That is correct.”

I made a reservation.  Such nice people.

Anatoly showed up to take us to the embassy for the visas.  It turned out only one of us needed to go, so I stayed home with the boys while Kala went to the embassy.  She got home with no trouble.  We had supper, and then Kala took Sasha down to the bookstore so he could pick out something to do on the airplane flight home.  When they got back, Kala said the clerk at the store was really bitchy.  Sasha had picked out a book on animals.

Later, after supper, we sat down with Sasha.  Irine translated for us, though she unfortunately kept up her habit of adding to what we said.  Through her, we asked Sasha if he would be willing to tell us about his birth family.  “If you don’t want to talk about them,” I said, “you definitely don’t have to.  But it would help us if we knew a little more.”

Irine talked to Sasha at length, and his answers were very short.  I finally interrupted and reminded Irine that I really wanted her to translate, not add.  But Sasha was getting more and more upset.  He finally burst into tears.  So we hugged him for a long time and told him it was okay.  He didn’t have to talk if he didn’t want to.

Irine told us Sasha said his time with his birth family was unhappy and that he didn’t want to remember them.

The rest of the evening went smoothly, for a wonder.

That night, Maksim was in bed, Sasha was watching TV, and Kala and I went out to the balcony to look at Kyiv by night for the last time.  We talked about Sasha and his background.  I had either misheard or misunderstood something about the whole family thing, so here’s the final version:

Sasha’s father and mother weren’t married, though they lived together and Sasha’ father supported them.  Sasha’s mother had a boyfriend on the side, however, and he was Maksim’s father.  When Sasha’s mother came up pregnant, Maksim’s father left the picture.  Not long after Maksim’s birth, Sasha’s father died.  We still don’t know how.  The loss of income reduced the family to abject poverty and the boys ended up in the orphanage/Internat system.

Kala and I speculated out loud if Sasha had experienced abuse.  Neglect, definitely, but what else?  Sasha hasn’t shown any signs of cruelty (casual or otherwise), and he’s very protective toward Maksim.  He’s touchy and has a tendency to pout (he isn’t old enough to call it brooding yet, and he doesn’t do it for long anyway).  He’s all but obsessed with money--not hard to see why, considering his background.  I’m watching him, trying to figure out how much of his behavior is perfectly normal and how much is “problem” behavior.

We decided that what Sasha needs--and wants, really--is absolute regularity and consistency.  We’re going to have to be careful not to bend or break family rules for Sasha.  This will especially apply to his allowance.  No advances, no additions or changes.  It seems to us that if he learns he can get more money if he just keeps asking long enough, he’ll keep asking.  Mom and Dad can’t become slot machines that will pay out if he just keeps pulling the handle long enough.  Preoccupation will become obsession.

Can we parent this kid effectively?  We hoped so.  Certainly we can do a better job than the Internat.  Too late to change our minds now, in any case.

While we were talking about this, Sasha came out onto the balcony and leaned on the rail between us.  We hugged him briefly.  At that moment, two sets of fireworks flashed in the distance, one to the north and one to the northeast, probably as part of the holiday today.  We watched them together, as a family.  Sasha went into the kitchen for a banana and indicated that he wanted to throw the peel over the side.  We shook our heads and pointed to the wastebasket.  Sasha accepted this with a grin and obeyed.  When the fireworks ended, Sasha went back inside to watch TV.

Maybe things can work.

 

June 28, 2005

You’d think packing to go home would be easy.  You just put everything you brought with you into the suitcases and off you go.  Wrong!  Everything has to be sorted and arranged.  Souvenirs have to be cushioned among clothes.  Carryons need to be differentiated from checked bags.  Sasha wanted to help, and we let him, though we had to redo almost everything he did when he wasn’t looking.

We also sat down with Sasha and had Irine explain to him a few Necessary Travel Rules: