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T A B L E++T A L K Is your kid wonderful? Take a moment to brag shamelessly in the Mothers area of Table Talk - - - - - - - - - - R E C E N T L Y Back to the future Litter mate Slaves to the system Breathing lessons Shunning and shaming BROWSE THE MOTHERS WHO THINK FEATURE ARCHIVES - - - - - - - - - - Mamafesto
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- - - - - - - - - - "Why don't we have lunch?" Ken says, and I agree, thinking of the warmth of a cold vodka. We decide on the Slavyansky Bazaar because, as the guidebook assures us, "they serve up exquisite blinis in a romantic atmosphere that hasn't changed since Stanislavsky sat in a corner booth dreaming about the Moscow Arts Theatre." "What street is it on?" Ken asks, trying to unfold a Moscow city map in the wind. "Nikolskaya," I tell him. "What does an 'N' look like?" "Like an 'H,'" I say. I stamp my frozen feet on the cobbles of Red Square while Ken looks at the map. "It's not here," he says, and tries to show me, but the wind whips away a corner of the map and flattens it against his coat. "Until 1991," I read from the guidebook, "Nikolskaya Street was called 25th of October Street." "What does that look like in Russian letters?" he asks. "It doesn't say." A man with several bottles of vodka clinking against each other in a plastic shopping bag pushes past us. "Nikolskaya?" Ken shouts after him. "Nikolskaya?" the man says, shaking his head back and forth. "Slavyansky Bazaar?" Ken tries, and the man takes Ken's arm and drags him down the block. I run after them and when we stop, the man is pointing to a small alley across the street. Before we can say "spahseebah," the Russian word for "thank you," he runs away, his vodka bottles sounding like sleigh bells. Six lanes of traffic roar between us and Nikolskaya Street. There is no crosswalk. "I don't know how we're going to get over there," Ken says. "They all did." I point to the people rushing around on the other side. "Maybe they were born there," he mutters. We walk until we come to concrete steps that lead underground, and we take them, hoping they might miraculously transport us to the other side. Under the street, it is damp and smells of urine. We step around a man in sandals and thick socks who squats next to a little stack of cassette tapes he's set out on a blanket printed with characters from the "Lion King." A little farther along, we see a gypsy woman dressed in what looks like overlapping pieces of material without any sleeves or legs sewn in. She is nursing a baby, holding out a dirty hand to the people who pass by. Her child looks to be the same age as my little boy, and I want to put something in her brown palm, but I do not know the value of the rubles in my pocket, and all the zeros make me think it would be too much. At the end of the tunnel, we climb another set of concrete steps and come up near the unmarked alley the man with the clinking bottles had pointed out. The sky has clouded over and it's colder. We walk the narrow street searching for a sign with a letter 'C,' followed by something that looks like a little end table. I wrap my scarf over my mouth and the moisture from my breath freezes there and makes the wool cold and scratchy against my face. At the end of the street, we turn and walk back, checking every building in case we've missed it. We are searching for the Slavyansky Bazaar the way you search for a favorite shirt when you are certain if you don't find it, you've lost not only your shirt, but every good memory you ever had wearing it. Halfway up the street, Ken stops in front of a padlocked door with large Moorish windows. The sign above is so faded I can barely make out the words. "This is it," he says. I peer in and see up-ended tables, chrome sinks and cast-iron burners scattered across the bare wood floor. A crumpled stove has been pushed up against the door as if at one time it had been needed as a barricade. I stand there letting my breath cloud the window until I can no longer see inside. What will I tell my Russian son, I wonder, when he is 10, or 12, or 15, and wants to know what the city he was born in was like? As it is, I can tell him nothing about his mother -- the woman who gave birth to him in a Moscow hospital and three days later disappeared back to Ukraine. I have no stories about the day he was born, how he learned to crawl, the first thing that made him laugh. I was counting on Moscow to give me something to replace these stories; the fairy-tale domes of St. Basil's, the blinis stuffed with sour cream and caviar, the Russian spirit that could survive the harshness of both communism and democracy -- things that would become a history for Alex. Now, it looked as if I would be able to tell him nothing about his city, nothing except the cold, the people who did not smile and the feeling of not belonging. "Let's go back to Red Square," Ken says, taking my hand. "We should be able to find something to eat there." We trudge along past shops selling tinned herring and canister vacuum cleaners to the back entrance of GUM, the largest department store in Russia. The GUM building is a mile and a half long, with three levels of tiny shops connected by black wrought-iron footbridges. The front of every shop is blocked by the broad backs of women in fur coats, and I can only see what is being sold inside when one of the women turns around with a piece of linen, a child's dress, a pair of fur-topped boots to examine it in the natural light that falls from the arched glass ceiling. I stand on the end of a long line of women heading toward a sign my phrasebook translates as "Ladies Toilet." At the front of the line, a woman with thick legs and gray ankle socks sits on a folding chair and collects a coin from each of the waiting women before allowing her back to the stalls. I search my pockets for a coin the same size and shape as the one the woman is grabbing out of each hand, fingers pointed like the beak of a ravenous bird. When it is my turn, I wait until I feel the dry rasp of the woman's fingertips in my palm before moving toward an open stall. I have the thin metal door in my hand when a woman who's been standing behind me, bumping her shopping bags into the backs of my legs, shouts out in Russian. I turn to see her fluttering her fingers as if plucking something out of the air. She points her other hand at a shelf covered with small squares of brown paper. I pick up a couple of the squares and wave them at the woman, showing her I've understood. She nods her head and smiles at me, and her smile makes me feel like a young child whose ignorance of the basic practicalities of living she has found especially endearing. "Spaseebah," I say, thanking her for this small moment of grace. Spaseebah for this kind gesture I will one day tell my son about.
Janis Cooke Newman is currently working on a memoir of her son's adoption from a Moscow orphanage. She lives in Corte Madera, Calif.
Someone to watch over me For one little boy whose babyhood was almost lost in a crowded Russian orphanage, it's not the educational toys and developmental stimuli that matter most.
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