Tom Callaghan - A Spring Betrayal

“Follow the money?”

“Here’s how it works. First of all, you get approval to run a licensed adoption agency. The certificate doesn’t cost very much, but the bribe to get one is going to set you back fifteen to twenty thousand dollars. Then you set up a website, contact adoption agencies in other countries, let people who are desperate to have a child know you’re in business. More time, more money.”

I nodded, scrawling some figures on a napkin.

“Each time you get a referral, that there’s a child in the system that can be adopted, a couple of thousand dollars gets left in an envelope, as a ‘present.’ Getting the paperwork sorted out is another thousand. So the costs are rising. And then the foreigners enter the picture.”

Saltanat looked around, but all the tables nearby were empty, and I didn’t imagine Graves’s caution would extend to bugging the Metro Bar.

“Imagine you’ve been married for twelve years, trying for a child for the last ten. The tests can’t point to a specific problem, IVF hasn’t worked out for you, her biological clock batteries are almost exhausted. What do you do?

“You go to the adoption agencies in your own country. They say you’re too old, you’ve been married before, there aren’t any children available in your ethnic group. Come back next year, but no promises.

“You’re spending your evenings arguing about this, you don’t have sex anymore, it’s splitting you apart. Then you read an article about the orphans in Kyrgyzstan. Beautiful Asian children living in poor conditions, horrible surroundings you wouldn’t keep a dog in, poorly fed, barely educated, often with physical or mental handicaps, no one to love them, care for them.”

“It wasn’t like that where I grew up—” I started to say, when Saltanat held up her hand to silence me.

“Akyl, ‘poor conditions’ to these people means not having Wi-Fi and a 42-inch flat-screen TV in every room. Their heart goes out to these orphans, of course it does. So they get in touch with an agency, like Hoping For Love, and are told to fly to Bishkek or Osh, to meet some of the children. And once they do that, they’re hooked.”

“Once they’ve found a child, they can’t walk away,” I said. It wasn’t a question.

“Of course not. The smart ones, they find a lawyer to help deal with the agency, to keep the bribes down to a minimum and to make sure the paperwork’s legitimate.”

“How much are we talking about?” I asked.

“Maybe as much as fifty thousand dollars,” Saltanat said, rubbing thumb and forefinger together to emphasize her point.

Fifty thousand dollars. That’s a lifetime’s earnings for a lot of people in Kyrgyzstan, years of rooting up potatoes, growing fruit to sell by the wayside, slaughtering a goat or a sheep and hacking it up to sell in the market you set off for before dawn, with a cold wind coming down off the mountains.

“The thing is,” Saltanat continued, “if you’ve paid that sort of money, you end up with a child to take back to your country. It’s expensive, but you get what you paid for. And compare it to the cost of surgery if it’s needed, school fees, college, it’s not that much if a child is all you’ve ever wanted.”

I nodded. I didn’t like the idea of children being taken from their roots, detached from their culture, never knowing their birth brothers or sisters, but I wasn’t stupid enough, or patriotic enough, not to realize it could be a ticket to a better life.

“So everyone feeds their beak, everyone gets what they want?”

Saltanat stared at me, and shook her head.

“Say you don’t have the fifty thousand? Or before you can lawyer up, someone says, we can cut out the paperwork, get things sorted faster.”

I knew I wasn’t going to like hearing what was to come next.

“We know it’s expensive, that’s the government, but for thirty thousand, paid direct to us, we can get you a child from outside an orphanage, better looked after, healthier, yours to take home, no complications.”

I reached over, took the last cigarette from Saltanat’s pack. Time to reclaim my gun; I wanted to be tooled up when I next met these fuckers.

“Imagine you’re a family over in Karakol, or up in Talas or way down in one of the villages past Osh. Poor, but honest. The only crop you’re good at growing is children. Too many mouths to feed, clothes, shoes, no money coming into the house.

“An agency approaches you. Chance of a new life for your new baby. Wealthy foreigners. They’re looking for a handsome malysh or a beautiful malyshka . Boy or girl, whatever you’ve got. They show you pictures of the big white house outside Vancouver, the farm in upstate New York, places you’ve never even heard of, luxury you can’t imagine. That’s where your baby’s going to grow up. Of course you’ll miss them, but there’ll be photographs, letters, maybe even visits over the years. How can you deny them that?”

Saltanat took the cigarette out of my fingers, inhaled, handed it back, waved her empty glass at the waitress for another beer.

“Of course, they want to compensate you for your loss. A thousand dollars, look, I have the money right here, clean new hundred-dollar notes, never even been folded. Pay off your debts, new clothes for the older children, maybe a new dress for the wife. What are you going to do?”

I could picture the father, hands roughened by years in the fields, the mother, worn out before her time by too many children and the endless battle against mud and hunger. I thought of my mother with her cheap plastic suitcase with the split handle leaving for Siberia, my grandfather unable to meet my eye as we arrived at the orphanage, the dormitory where I covered my head with a blanket and silently wept, night after night.

“The agency takes pictures of the child, sends them on to prospective parents. They always want a baby or a toddler, someone who won’t remember their earlier life, never a sulky teenager. And one couple will say, yes, that’s the baby for us, then the money changes hands and so does the kid. Probably handed over to Albina, pretending to be caring and maternal, to reassure the mother.”

There was a question I knew I had to ask, dreaded hearing the answer.

“And then what happens?”

“A lot of the time, it goes through, the foreigners get a cut-price baby, the parents have some spare cash for the first time in years. A couple of thousand buys the baby a passport and adoption certificate, allowing it to leave the country, and we hope it all ends happily.”

I could follow the logic; if official channels were bypassed, that only meant fewer beaks got dipped.

“But?” I asked, certain there would be more to the story, and it wouldn’t be pleasant.

“It often depends on the foreigners, how gullible they are,” Saltanat said. “Sometimes the same baby gets sold to four or five couples; one of them gets the child, the other ones are told the child has died, or the parents have backed out at the last minute. Of course, it’s impossible to offer a full refund, and, having broken the law, the couples can hardly go to Sverdlovsky station and lodge a complaint. They’ve heard too many horror stories about Kyrgyz jails to consider that.”

“So they fly home to an empty cradle and a bank account light by thirty thousand dollars?”

Saltanat nodded.

“But the worst if no one buys the child?”

Her face grew hard, and I waited for her to speak.

“Better not to risk returning the child. The parents are told all went well, and they keep the thousand dollars.”

“And the child?”

“You dug seven of them up in a field outside Karakol. And I shouldn’t imagine that’s the only dumping ground. If they’re lucky, they get killed quickly. If not, they star in one of Graves’s home movies.”