AS RUSSIA GRADUALLY DISASSEMBLES ITSELF, ONE ADOPTIVE MOTHER WONDERS WHAT SHE WILL TELL HER SON ABOUT THE CITY OF HIS BIRTH.

BY JANIS COOKE NEWMAN

The guards outside Lenin's tomb have little puffs of steam coming out of their nostrils -- like dragons. In the building behind them, the body of Vladimir Ilyich Lenin, dead since 1924 and preserved with formaldehyde, lies in a glass sarcophagus. I am standing in the frigid air of February in Russia, reading to my husband, Ken, from a guidebook called "Moscow: Soul of the Country."

"For a quarter of a million dollars," I tell him, "you too can get the Eternal Lenin Deluxe package."

"You made that up," he says.

I hold up my guidebook. "It's right here."

The guidebook also contains several "Traveler's Tips" for avoiding the "inevitable long lines to view the dead leader," but besides the two cold-looking guards and us, no one else appears to be interested in the father of the Soviet Union.

"I don't think it's open," Ken says.

"It's supposed to be," I tell him.

We walk back and forth in front of the low black building, but can find no entrance, not even a sign. The guards do not seem approachable, in spite of the wide-brimmed Russian military hats that make them look like children playing dress-up.

I flip through my guidebook, desperate to find the Traveler's Tip that will get us admitted into "one of Moscow's most popular attractions." I need this to be one of those rare travel days: the one where the greengrocer in Tuscany gives you a packet of seeds for the odd little zucchini that tastes like nothing you've ever eaten, or the pub owner in Galway opens up just to serve you a fortifying pint of Guinness because you've hiked all this way and isn't it a lovely walk then. The kind of day that makes you feel adventurous and lucky, and keeps you from thinking about a baby in an orphanage with a knotted-up rag for a diaper.

We've traveled to Moscow to see the little boy we are going to adopt. To see him, and then as the Moscow Center for Adoption requires, leave him behind for three months until he is released from the Russian database and can be adopted by foreigners.

Yesterday, in the room where the women who work at the orphanage take their tea break, I held his thin body for the first time. Russian disco music played from a pink plastic radio, and glasses of bitter black tea sat steaming on the cracked vinyl tablecloth in front of me. A woman in a white lab coat brought him in -- a little boy with dark circles under his eyes and hair that stood up in tufts like a baby bird's. I rested my cheek on his head and it smelled of boiled cabbage and sleep.

"Can we go back?" I asked our Russian coordinator, a man with small decayed teeth and a bristling fur hat, the next morning. "Just for an hour?" I wanted to sit in the room where the women drank their tea and hold my son again, memorizing the whorls of his ear, the dark blond hairs that grew between his arched eyebrows, the small dent like a thumbprint between his nose and mouth.

"No," our coordinator told us, lighting a fresh Marlboro from the one in his mouth. "Is not possible." Then he suggested we go to Red Square instead.

Ken and I walk across the square to St. Basil's Cathedral, its green and yellow striped domes looking like hot air balloons tethered against the cold blue sky. At a scratched plexiglass ticket booth, an ancient woman with two woolen babushkas tied over her head sells us tickets for more rubles than any of the prices printed on her sign.

Inside the cathedral, the walls and ceilings seem to have been painted in a rush with wide-eyed Madonnas and red, turquoise and yellow flowers, but a thick film of smoke and dirt covers everything. Icy wind blows through windows that are covered only with chicken wire, and after 10 minutes, we are too cold to explore the small dark chapels under the fanciful domes. Shivering, we hurry back into the harsh sunlight.

"Let's try the Kremlin," I say, because the map in my guidebook shows it to be made up of numerous buildings, a few of which I think must be heated.

We walk along the high wall that surrounds the center of the Russian government, its turrets and gold-faced clock tower reminding me of a castle in a storybook I once had about a young czar and an enchanted bird. I look up at the narrow openings that have been worked into the red brick and imagine medieval sentries with huge crossbows, watching us. At last, we come to a tall doorway flanked by guards, but when we try to enter, one of them hurries over, wagging his finger back and forth at us and saying, "Nyet, nyet." We back away, feeling embarrassed and unwelcome.

N E X T_ P A G E: The search for memory

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PHOTO © KENNETH NEWMAN