SOMEONE ELSE'S CHILDREN

Bright Star

March 23, 2000

Norm split the fifteen thousand dollars in pristine $100 bills he’d wheedled from our banker into five piles. It had taken more than a month to amass this stash because Fargo banks don’t keep them on hand, segregated from the dirty old money. Each week a teller offered us the best of the big greenbacks, and we selected a thousand bucks worth here, a few hundred there. Russian money changers want bills stiff enough to slice skin, free of scribbles and stains, and though international currency exchanges weren’t supposed to require new money, who were we to make demands? We’d be able to use our credit cards only at the Moscow Marriott, and Norm was determined not to be caught short. Rita, our U.S. adoption contact, told me that when she first visited Magadan, the city where we hoped to adopt Svetlana, a banker had asked to see her Mastercard; he’d heard of them but never seen one. Magadan Region was thinly populated by indigenous tribes until Stalin built the city up from nothing on Russia’s Far Eastern coast in order to process prisoners in and precious metals out of the gulag. Until that time, the gold and silver had been protected by weather and distance.

Though we lived on a lake in rural Minnesota and weren’t unaccustomed to cold weather, we prepared to enter a different world in Siberia. Norm was nervous, but I was game for adventure and read all I could about the place, enthralled by what visitors before me had said. In his book, In Siberia, Colin Thubron wrote that ‘Among the native peoples a myth exists that in the extremest cold words themselves freeze and fall to earth. In spring they stir again and start to speak, and suddenly the air fills with out-of-date gossip, unheard jokes, cries of forgotten pain, words of long disowned love.’ Though the calendar had announced the arrival of spring, we’d face a return to wintry weather in Magadan region. Still, I fantasized that some of those thawing words might touch my ears. And I wondered whether our daughter-to-be would be able leave her tragic past in that frozen air in order to embrace life with us.

In five days, we’d be in a Russian courtroom. With travel expenses, adoption fees, and donations, it would cost more than 25 grand to bring home the fourteen-year-old Russian orphan I’d encountered on the Internet, but it wasn’t possible to calculate the emotional, practical, and additional financial costs to come. Or the benefits. Thousands of miles away, our potential daughter was preparing for our arrival, for a journey to America, to a family, to a life where she didn’t even share our language.

I slipped a wallet necklace over my head, then a turtleneck; Norm patted his own envelope, adjusted his money belt and said, — I hope it’s enough.

Then we both snapped pouches around our ankles, the last step before we left the comforts of home for a world we’d only read about.