Any Day Now (2 page)

Some people wonder why I am still friends with Luba. Some say she has, at the least, a little something to do with my situation. There's the $20,000 for one thing. That I still see Luba occasionally for coffee says everything about her impressive ability to entertain. For two hours I am not depressed.

“Got time for another, Lesley?” she asks, and smiles for the first time since we sat down. Luba's gorgeous when she actually looks at you with her hazel eyes. She is tiny and very, very blonde and dresses in couturier black. “It's about Nadia. You know. The friend with the Lada.”

I never met Nadia, but for three weeks in the coldest winter of my life, I wore Nadia's coat, delivered by another of Luba's friends to a corner on Leninski Prospekt. I rode from Moscow to Yaroslavl in that warm old thing. I tramped along the Arbat to McDonald's many afternoons clutching the coat's frayed hood to my face, sat in office after official office in its olive-drabness, sometimes getting a surprise poke from a wayward goose feather. Luba had arranged it, calling Nadia long distance to tell her about her Moscow-bound, cold-blooded Canadian client. But Luba seems to have forgotten this.

“Hang on,” she says and lights up again.

“How's Anya?” I ask. Anya and I are great buddies. She's a sweet girl, funny, too, and she shares my fascination with ancient Egypt. Someday, I've promised her, we will go together to see the pyramids.

“Fine,” says Luba, inhaling. “She's nine. What's not to be fine?”

“Maybe we can arrange a little outing soon…the museum, a movie?” I ask, but Luba's already into the next story.

Nadia, good, long friend that she is, has been looking after Luba's mother's apartment ever since the Monday afternoon six years ago when Luba, with only her purse in one hand, Anya in the other, took a cab for Sheremetyevo Airport, caught a plane for Helsinki, and then another for Montreal. In the end, after all the plotting and finagling, it had been so simple: They were gone. Nadia checked on the apartment every few months or so, to dust, to look around. Luba suspects she sometimes met a man from work there.

“For matinées,” Luba explains to me, and shrugs. Since Thérèse, the must-have-it couplings of a man and woman on their lunch break, no piece of clothing actually removed, has nothing to do with her anymore.

There was no husband to hide from, but Nadia's fifteen-year-old son already had enough problems. He certainly didn't need to hear his mother's mournful releases through the thin walls of their Khruschev-era apartment. It wasn't just her son, Niki, whom Nadia worried about, but the family with whom she and her family had shared living quarters for more than forty years. For some, the old Soviet hunger for community just won't die, says Luba. “And then there's the old Soviet repression. There was no way she could fuck a man at home.”

However Nadia might have misused her dead mother's bed, Luba must now repay the debt of all those visits. As the two women sit at the kitchen table one night, boxing sterling cutlery, Luba asks Nadia what she would like to keep. “Anything,” says Luba. She hopes Nadia will not want the oak hutch they've just emptied. Or the piano. Please not the piano, with its marbled wood panels and unequaled tone. Back in Montreal, Anya is taking lessons on their expensive new piano. But it is not this piano, the one she played, the one her mother had played.

Nadia, who still looks closer to thirty than the forty she is, thanks to not eating much and a set of exquisite cheekbones, looks around the kitchen quickly. Almost greedily, Luba thinks. Nadia says, “The stove.” And Luba, relieved, says, “You always had a rich girl's taste, Nadia Petrovna.”

The stove is a piece of work, an import from Italy. How Luba's mother came to own it has never been clear, not even to Luba. How anyone got their hands on something of quality, something of luxury, in the good old bad days was a matter of intense secrecy and pride. Nearly as massive as the oak hutch, the stove has a high, majestic back, and, a rare thing for Moscow in the 1960s, a stainless-steel grill between the burners. Good for making blini, although Luba's mother, a gynecologist, had had little time for complicated cooking. So the stove it is. It is only a little piece of history, after all. Luba's only condition: Nadia is to be responsible for moving it out. “I cannot handle one more arrangement,” Luba tells her friend.

On the day the movers are to show up, friends come and go. It's as if they are saying goodbye to Luba's mother all over again. “Like we're sitting
shiva
,” says Luba, whose father was Jewish, but — devout Communist — had never celebrated a
shabbas
in his life. Now the apartment, losing its elements one by one, is shrinking, growing shabby. Old is not necessarily elegant, Luba thinks, as she walks through the three dark rooms.

After the movers load the boxes and cart out the furniture for the Montreal-bound container, the flow of friends trickles off. Eka from university drops by as promised and goes off with a box of books. By the time Nadia comes at three, there is only Luba and the stove. Nadia's brought her younger brother, Evgeny; a friend of his, Guram; and a driver who never introduces himself. Evgeny has borrowed a car from his employer, a rich Kazakh importer. It's a Mercedes, see? the men show her from the kitchen window, pointing down six stories to a gleaming black rectangle.

“They're going to carry this massive thing in a
car
,” says Luba. The three men tussle with the stove, which refuses to fit on the dolly. They dance for a few minutes with it. Nadia laughs. They are so earnest, so cute really, sweating in the dim kitchen and swearing. Guram keeps looking at Nadia after he says something in questionable taste.

Nadia looks revived this afternoon, as if she's been liberated from her son, from worry over her job at the lab and what will become of her now that she's older and the men are not so frequent or insistent. Maybe, Luba says, she will send for Nadia to come visit her beautiful Canadian city.

Luba has, in the few days since she and Nadia sat with the silverware, decided she will also leave her friend some cash, something in the area of $500. The stove would be thanks enough, she supposes. But cash is what everyone here craves. And besides, things are hard with Nadia's son. She and the family have just discovered that the unexplainable losses of money in the apartment can now be explained. Niki has been siphoning off cash — from pockets and purses, dressers and desks for a year. He seems embarrassed, but not especially sorry. Nadia weeps, then laughs, when Luba slips her the envelope stuffed with American fifties.

It was a failure of her imagination, Luba thinks as she and Nadia stand outside, whipped by wind, as the men heave and ho the stove, wrapped in blankets, onto the roof of the Mercedes. They'd never planned on carrying the stove
inside
. Still, once the stove is on the roof, making the car look like a small double-decker bus, Luba has serious doubts again.

“We're breaking laws,” she tells the men.

No, Evgeny and his friend reassure her. It will be fine. There isn't far to go and it's as tethered as a missile before takeoff. The men aren't defensive, just very, very sure and only a little condescending. They drive off, Nadia waving from the back window. Alone for the first time in days, Luba stands on the street, debating whether to go back upstairs. She will have to see the space the stove left, see the wall decorated in three decades of grease, see those rooms that give so little back now. She has her purse. She can leave. She gets into the Lada and doesn't look back.

That evening, while she and Anya pack their bags at Tatiana's, the picture of the Mercedes and its burden comes back. Crazy! It will have fallen, of course, right onto the street as the car picked up speed. One can drive only so slowly in Moscow without inciting the aggression of other drivers. But one thing Luba has learned from her years away is that the pessimism so deep in her cells doesn't always play out. Sometimes life works. Sometimes accidents don't happen. Her lover taught her that. There's no word from Nadia that night or the next day, so Luba is left to imagine the best, or at least, not the worst.

The next night is their last. Luba and Tatiana have talked until they're hoarse and Anya has accused her mother, not for the first time, of completely ignoring her. They've poured and drunk the rest of the New Year's vodka, and now, back on the daybed at midnight, still in her clothes, Luba feels Anya's cold feet against her calves, feels every valley in the mattress.

“Luba!”

Someone's calling softly from the door. Luba doesn't hesitate because of all those years of expecting the worst and getting it. In a moment she's in the kitchen at the table with Nadia and Tatiana, also sprung from sleep fully dressed.

“It fell,” says Nadia.

“I knew it,” says Luba.

“I'll put up the kettle,” says Tatiana and goes the two steps to the sink.

“Is it ruined?” asks Luba.

“Worse than that,” says Nadia.

“The stove flew off and killed someone,” says Luba.

“Not as bad as that,” says Nadia and the three women laugh helplessly. The kitchen, Luba says, smells richly of potato…boiled, fried, baked, potato every which way.

It was OK the first half mile or so, says Nadia. And they laugh again, Tatiana doubled over so that her head is nearly in the sink.

But then terrible sounds began to come from the roof, groaning noises as the heavy metal of the stove began to work on the not-as-heavy metal of the Mercedes.

“I'm lucky,” says Nadia, suddenly sober. “It could have fallen through and crushed me.”

Instead, the stove came only partway through the roof — as if a skylight were being hammered out — before deciding to veer right and crash land, leaving the restraints twanging against the car doors like skipping ropes.

The majestic back was decapitated; the grand oven door that had been one of its most winning features was folded in two. Bolts snapped, glass splintered. Cars swerved around them, grinding glass under their wheels. The driver, who now introduced himself also as Evgeny, made some calls from his cellphone. He was not happy, only nodded when Nadia handed him the envelope with the $500. He thought that should cover the work. If not, he'd be calling her.

“Of course, it's enough,” says Tatiana. “He'll probably get a friend to do a bad job for next to nothing.”

“And then,” says Nadia. “I did the worst thing.”

Nadia's brother Evgeny had to get back to work with the other Evgeny. There was the car to deal with and they'd already been gone longer than they'd said. They dropped Nadia and Guram off near a Metro station. They lived off the same line, though hers, Babushkinskaya, was farther out.

“Do you want a drink?” Guram asked, as they passed his stop.

“I took him home. We made love all night,” says Nadia. “He has a wife, two little children.”

“Nadiusha, Nadiusha,” says Tatiana, because Nadia has begun to cry and she's not drinking her tea. Luba puts her hand on Nadia's, but finds no words. What can she say that won't sound harsh? Nadia, you went from nothing to more nothing?

“We did everything. He was very nice. He pleased me. He told me he would love me if he didn't have so many other responsibilities,” weeps Nadia. “We didn't sleep. My lips are still raw. We fucked and fucked. But,” and now she looks at her friends with real desperation. “It didn't help. It didn't help at all.”

Luba stubs out her Players and looks at me. “
Hosti
, what a mess, eh?” She slips an arm into her coat. “But I thought you'd appreciate it.”

“I have a story,” I say, surprising us both. Luba puts her other arm into her coat. I won't have long.

“Once upon a time there lived a coat. He was a nice coat, though on the old side. Olive-green, still tightly packed with goose feathers. The coat was unhappy because his owner had left Moscow to go to the other side of the world. He was cold without her.” Luba almost smiles. She appreciates a quirky start.

“The coat, let's give him a name — Boris — had kept his mistress warm and happy through many a winter. Oh, he's Russian, this coat.”

“We
are
telling Russian stories,” says Luba.

His mistress went off in a great hurry and left him, and just about everything else she owned, in the front closet of her mother's grandly decrepit Moscow apartment. “It looked like she'd just gone out for cigarettes or to a friend's for dinner. But she didn't come back. He waited for months. He waited for years.”

“Don't make me cry,” says Luba. “Last month Moscow. Before that, Thérèse. My heart's already broken. ”

“So he was waiting in the closet, this Boris, singing old Jeanne Bichevskaya songs” — Luba snorts — “to keep himself amused. But then four years into this he had an adventure, a quite amazing adventure and he forgot all about his first owner.”

Luba looks doubtful.

“His first owner was in the baby business.”

“Like me,” says Luba.

“Like you
were
,” I say. Last year Luba gave up her pain-in-the-ass Russian-Canadian adoption agency to go into the import/export biz. “Different kind of imports,” she joked after she'd packed crates of birth certificates, reports from social workers, notes from doctors, provincial certificates — Russian, French, English, a mess of languages and papers — into storage. She wasn't leaving the business completely, she said. For good friends at a good price, she'd be willing to pull some strings.

The business of hooking up Russian babies with Western couples desperate for babies was noble, brutal and comedic. Luba had entertained me with stories when we'd first met: the adoptive mum who arrived in a Siberian outpost demanding McDonald's. The couple who packed six weeks' worth of kosher food into their suitcases before setting off for Moscow. (Aeroflot charged them for the extra weight.) The man who rang up $2,000 of long-distance phone calls from St. Petersburg to Montreal, then sent the bill to Luba. The woman who threw a cellphone at Luba when she found her new daughter had brown hair, not blonde.

People behaved in outrageous ways when they adopted children, Luba said. I would be different, of course.

“
Vite
,” says Luba, and looks back at her car again. She'll be out of here soon.

“So the coat, this faithful old bag of cloth and feathers, is sitting there in his closet, getting nibbled by gluttonous Moscow moths, when one day, the door flies open and warm hands grab him and pull him free. Boris had almost forgotten what it was like to be touched.”

“No sex,” says Luba. “No fair.”

And then Boris is out on the street again. My Moscow, he thinks, as the soft hands cradle him, crush him against the wool of another coat. He is being taken somewhere. He recognizes the stops of the Metro, the names like music: Tyoplystan, Konkovo, Belyayevo. Then he's being rushed up the ten-lane roar of Leninski Prospekt. Gorky Park! Boris is ready to weep with the memories, but at a corner, he is thrust into another set of hands. I have been so cold! the new voice says. Arms push through
his
arms, a back spreads through
his
back.

“Boris is ful
filled
,” I say and Luba rolls her eyes.

Then he and the person are running to a waiting car. Yaroslavl, he hears.

“That's where we sent you,” says Luba. We have agreed not to talk about Yaroslavl. But there it is: out of my mouth, in the air.

“Wait,” I say. “The story.”

Boris has never been to Yaroslavl before and neither has his wearer, apparently. She — Boris thinks it's a she, though her voice is pitched low and he's having trouble understanding her bad French and worse Russian. Mostly she speaks English. This doesn't stop her from asking question after question of Alexei, the man behind the wheel. She wants to know everything: the climate of Yaroslavl, the exact population, the political situation, the social conditions. Alexei has not much to say about any of it. Early on he said, “I am Moscow,” and now mostly nods
da
and shakes
nyet
, because he doesn't seem to much care about this woman. Boris tries to draw himself closer around her.

Perhaps bolstered by this, the Woman, as Boris now thinks of her, pushes on. Has Alexei ever been to Yaroslavl's Baby Orphanage #2 on Chaikovsky Street? “What are the living conditions like there?” she asks, and Boris wonders at the two words put together like this, as adjective and noun. Isn't living itself a condition?

“A very Russian question, but I thought he didn't understand English,” says Luba.

“Boris has a gift for languages,” I say, “a nearly instantaneous gift. Like yours.”

“Go on,” she sighs.

The Woman is relentless. Has Alexei taken many couples to this orphanage? Where were they from? Does Alexei have children of his own? How many and what age? Alexei answers
da, da, da.
Boris worries for her. Doesn't she feel how she is being dismissed? She seems not to notice. In fact, as they leave Moscow farther behind, as they pass village after village on the route of the Golden Ring, he can feel her body growing in energy, can feel a pulse in her muscles. He feels it down to his old feathers.

“I've waited forever,” the Woman tells Alexei, now ignoring her completely. “Her name is Natasha and she has red hair and she's nearly two, two next month. I've had her picture for months and now I am going to see her and take her home. I'm so happy! And nervous, too, of course. Who wouldn't be?” She tells him about the birthday party she's already planned for her new daughter back in Montreal, who has been invited and what kind of cake she will make. Alexei doesn't even nod. In four hours she's exhausted him. But then she cries out, “The Monastery of the Transfiguration of Our Saviour!” because they've come at last into Yaroslavl and there, like a blessed vision, are the golden domes of the sixteenth-century cathedral.

“Epiphany!” says Alexei, pointing to a church covered in coloured tiles.

“I thought he didn't speak English. I thought he wasn't talking to her, period,” says Luba.

“Show me a Russian who isn't proud of their old churches,” I say. “He's revived.”

“I need another coffee,” says Luba. She waves to a kid behind the coffee counter, though the place is strictly self-serve. He takes his time coming over.

Luba lowers her eyes, looks up, smiles just for him. “
Moi, je prenderais une allongé.
” The kid pinkens and scampers away.

“You've made his day,” I say.

“They love flirting when they know there's nothing behind it,” Luba says, and nods at me knowingly because I'm one of the few people she's come out to.

The boy is back in a jiffy — there's even a free
biscuit
tucked next to her demitasse.

“You're going to have to get to the climax, should I say? Of your little story?” says Luba.

I close my eyes to bring it back. “The orphanage is a hell-hole. Boris — after all, he's led a sheltered life, especially in the last few years — is shocked by what he sees. In fact, he sees in a flash the relationship between ‘living' and ‘conditions.'”

Boris has heard stories about Russian orphanages, even watched a TV documentary on them when his owner left him draped on the couch one night. He wept at the sight of those babies in their high, metal cribs, no one to pick them up, no one to pat their little heads, hold their clammy little fingers. Boris doesn't much like babies — they soil and dampen him — but watching the solitary white bundles with their hurting, angry faces left him feeling saggy for days.

Baby House #2 hasn't been painted in decades, or cleaned much either, not with soap and water, anyway. As she follows a woman down a long, draughty hall, the Woman seems to shrink a little. Boris holds close, presses deeper. She really needs him now. He hears shouts a long way off, a clatter of dishes. They pass old women, bent nearly in half over dust mops. And the smell! It makes Boris think of peaches falling off their pits; of cabbage, a hundred years of a hundred pots over high, sulfurous flames, cabbage that doesn't even taste like cabbage anymore, but like the walls themselves.

Then they are in a small room filled floor to ceiling with boxes of files and a woman sitting at a desk with more files on it. She is smiling, but Boris can see that she has smiled this smile thousands of times and that it means nothing.

The woman, tall when she stands up, gestures to a single chair. Boris sinks into it with his Woman. The woman they followed stays to interpret. They go at his Woman with questions — all of which she has answered a hundred times already, on paper, in person, on the phone. Yes, she wants a girl, preferably under two, yes, she is unmarried, no, there is no boyfriend at home, yes, she understands that some of the children have problems — mild problems! the tall one reassures her, very mild! — and yes, she understands that if after meeting with the child, she doesn't want to keep her, she is under no obligation to do so.

Boris listens to it all with growing excitement. A baby! They are here for a baby! Why hasn't he figured this out before?

“He's been living in the closet for too long,” I say.

“Lesley,” says Luba. Her voice is surprisingly soft.

“This is a
story
,” I say. “We don't know how it will turn out.”

The two women lead Boris and the Woman to what must be a music room. On a set of rickety shelves sit harmonicas and tiny horns. One large tambourine, a few of its metal cymbals missing, hangs on the streaked, beige wall. Sit, the women gesture to a round, unvacuumed rug.

“I'll sit here,” the Woman informs them and lowers herself onto a nursery-size stool. The orphanage women look at each other. And then two other women in white aprons and white babushkas come in from a side door, a miniature, red-haired girl walking pigeon-toed between them. She must have been crying seconds before because tears stand on her pale cheeks. But now she is smiling and she comes right up to Boris and the Woman, and lifts her arms to be picked up and the Woman and Boris lift her up, their arms joining together in this first embrace. Everyone in the room sighs a collective sigh, even the woman with the one-time-only smile. Even Boris, who is, after all, only a coat.

“Not so Russian a story after all,” says Luba.

Luba knows another story. Three years ago a woman went to Moscow and then to Yaroslavl in a borrowed coat. The woman sat in that same room and the same little girl came out: red-haired, pigeon-toed, tears on pale cheeks. But the little girl, Natasha, did not stop crying when the woman picked her up. She did not stop crying when the woman and Alexei struggled to get her into the car. In the hotel, the girl threw her plate and cup, the stuffed bear and all the dolls the woman had brought in her suitcase. They bounced off the linoleum, off the wallpaper. When the woman tried to hold the child, to rock her, the girl made hissing sounds. She screamed so loud into the evening that the manager of the hotel came to the door, ready to accuse the woman of terrible things. When he saw the child by herself in the centre of the room and yelling at no one, he shook his head and left. In the night something deeper than sadness took hold. The girl slammed her head against the wall, fought with the bed so hard a sheet tore. The woman lay perfectly still on the other bed, counting seconds that would, please God!, accumulate into minutes.

In the morning, she and Alexei and Natasha went back to the orphanage. Natasha looked drugged, moaned when anyone touched her.

“You kept her up all night playing,” the tall woman said when she saw them. “New parents always do. Don't you know that children must sleep?”

Now the woman wept. She called Luba in Montreal, waking her.

“This happens,” Luba said. “Some children can't handle the first separation from the orphanage. Imagine how you would feel! It's normal.”

“This is not normal,” said the woman.

“Yes, yes,” said Luba. “It is. You will see.”

Luba asked to speak to the orphanage woman, who'd begun to look at the woman from Canada as if she was a nightmare come true. Her voice went up, up on the phone. When she hung up she said, “Natasha had bad flu this winter. That is all. And now you break her heart.”

“I want another child,” said the woman. “I have paid $20,000 for a child and I deserve one who is healthy.” This was true, all true and justified, but something went cold in the woman as she said this, even in that warm, old coat.

The orphanage woman made her sit on her stool for nearly two hours, then brought in another girl. But this girl, though she was cute and smiling, was nearly six. “A girl under the age of two,” the woman had written on half a dozen different applications. In the afternoon, two more girls filed in: one seemed spacey; the other had a rash running from her ear into her cheek. Scabies, they said. Easy to treat, they said. Then why aren't you treating it? the woman asked. Why are you making this someone else's problem?

I saw twenty little girls over the next two weeks, even a few boys at the end, when the director himself was called in. I sat on my stool and looked at each child and tried to imagine her in my world. And I couldn't. I want a strong child, I told the director.

In the end, the orphanage asked me to leave. The director called Luba and told her to give me my money back, at least the part that was meant to be a donation to Baby House #2. And he told her to never, ever send another Canadian to his orphanage. I didn't really want a child, he said. I was shopping for perfection. I wanted guarantees. There are no guarantees for anything ever, he said. Not even in your rich, lucky Canada.