Laura Kasischke: Mind of Winter

But that had been almost the least of it! On their second trip back to the orphanage, this time by train from Moscow, the conductor, wanting to practice his terrible English, had explained to them that he always wore, under his uniform, a cilice —which, it turned out, in his case, was a barbed cross on a chain. The conductor undid the buttons of his shirt to show the cross to them—primitive and the size of a child’s hand, hanging from a piece of twine—along with the scratches on his sparsely haired chest (could he have been even thirty years old?) that the cross’s barbs left there. He explained that the tracks of the Trans-Siberian Railway were laid over the graves of the prisoners who’d built it, as if that explained the need for the punishing barbed cross he wore against his skin.

Holly was appalled, while Eric had been charmed. Neither of them had expected this sort of thing from the Russians. They’d expected, maybe, searchlights and vodka bottles and barbed wire and an unfriendly, militaristic citizenry—although, in truth, they’d not even gotten that far in their imaginings. Had Eric and Holly even believed that Russia, that Siberia , existed until they were in it? Hadn’t they thought that the adoption agency was just being descriptive, calling it “Siberia”—which to Holly had always been a way to describe a place, not an actual place. She’d perhaps actually thought, even as the adoption agency arranged plane tickets for them, that by “Siberia” they just meant “off the beaten track” or “desolate.” Not that the orphanage was actually in Siberia.

But it was Siberia they found themselves in. Siberia existed. There were vodka bottles and searchlights and barbed wire, as Holly had expected, and there were women wearing babushkas, wagons full of straw, grim men in uniforms, some beautiful young girls with fur hats—none of which surprised her. Although Holly was surprised by everything else. Everything. And, particularly, the superstition. At the Pokrovka Orphanage #2 the babies had coughs and fevers, so the nurses had asked Holly and Eric to wear cloves of garlic around their necks. They’d handed Holly and Eric actual cloves of garlic dangling from pieces of gray twine. To ward off germs? Or…?

In any other place, Holly would have balked, but, inside Pokrovka Orphanage #2, she slipped the garlic over her head happily, gratefully. She would have done anything at that moment—opened a vein, gorged on ashes, pledged her soul to Satan—to hold this baby they’d come all this way to hold.

Whose name would certainly not be Sally. Holly and Eric had known all along that they would call her Tatiana. It meant fairy queen in Russian.

Baby Tatty.

“THIS IS THE baby,” a nurse said, appearing suddenly in a doorway. Holly had expected an hour of paperwork first, or a long walk through a corridor. She’d pictured herself and Eric standing behind a vault door while a guard twisted a lock. Instead, they’d no sooner slipped the necklaces of garlic over their heads and sat down in the waiting room than they heard the words, heavily accented but in a musically feminine voice: This is the baby.

Holly had looked up to the open door to find that an astonishing amount of light was pouring from a window, or from a great wall of windows, somewhere behind that nurse, and the nurse’s hair, pale and cut close to her head, was glowing like a halo. That nurse (whom they never saw again, although they asked to) had a cherubic face, a stunning smile—straight teeth and glistening lips. She could have stepped off a cloud or out of a movie screen, bearing this child. She could have passed for any number of supernatural beings—angel, fairy, goddess—or an actress hired to play the part of one that day. It was hard to look away from her face, to look at what she was holding in her arms.

Eric always claimed that Tatty had been wrapped in a blue blanket, but Holly knew she hadn’t. Their daughter had been wrapped in a dirty-gray blanket, and it had looked to Holly as if the sun were trying to launder it, bleach it white, bless it. The sun was trying to make the baby shine. The sun wanted Holly to love the child, to take pity on her, to take her home. The sun couldn’t have known that no effort on its part was needed for that. Looking from the nurse’s face to the baby wrapped in gray in her arms, it was all Holly could do not to fall to her knees, not to cry aloud. Instead, she grabbed Eric so hard that, later, walking away from their first trip to the orphanage, they would laugh that she’d left him battered and bruised—and, in fact, she had. When Eric took off his shirt that night they saw that he had a purple mark in the shape of a small conch shell just above his elbow.

When the nurse had stepped fully into the room, Holly stood, and the baby was placed in her arms.

Holly took her daughter in her arms, and before she saw or felt or heard her, she loved her—as if there were an organ and a part of the brain that was love’s eye or nose or ear. The first sense. It had never been needed before. Now Holly realized that it was, in fact, the sharpest of her senses.

The second sense: smell. Holly would always associate her daughter and her love for her daughter with that secondary sensory impression—the ripe, rich Allium sativum , muddy hoofprint of that clove in its torn papery wrapper around her neck, at her chest, between herself and her baby. And a dirty diaper. And the scent of sour milk and cereal soaked into the damp neckline of the ratty, tatty gown they’d dressed her in, as if to sell her to them—as if they’d need to be persuaded to snatch her up!—with a few faded daisies on it for good measure.

And Holly remembered how, then, too, she’d wanted to write it down. She’d wanted to say something about it on a piece of paper before she lost the words. But, of course, there was no time then. Even in the bathroom after they’d had to return their daughter to that nurse and walk away, Holly couldn’t write it down. With her naked ass on the cold porcelain, fishing through her purse while her husband paced around outside the thin door, she couldn’t find a pen.

NOW, SHE NEEDED to find a pen to write this down:

Something had followed them home from Siberia.

From the orphanage. Pokrovka Orphanage #2.

Holly needed a pen and a half hour alone before the in-laws and the roast in the oven and the Coxes. God, the Coxes. Who would sit at the table waiting for her to entertain them. And their terrible son, who seemed to have been born without a soul. Holly had not wanted to write in so many weeks, months, years—and if she didn’t do it now, if she could not wake up fully and find a pen, if she did not have a half hour alone, it would pass, and perhaps the desire would never, ever, come back.

She moved her hand over to Eric’s side of the bed, to the place she hoped to find empty, the place she needed to find vacant beside her, the sheets cool, Eric gone, so that she could have a few moments alone—

But he was there, and Holly felt him twitch awake, and then Eric sat up so fast the headboard slammed against the wall behind him, and Holly was fully awake then, too, realizing that there was far too much light in the bedroom, and Eric, realizing it, too, was out of bed fast, standing over her, shouting, “Jesus Christ. We overslept. Fuck. It’s ten thirty. My parents must already be sitting at the fucking airport, and the fucking Coxes will be here in an hour. Where in the hell is Tatiana? Why didn’t she wake us up? Jesus Christ. Holly. I gotta go!”

Then he was gone:

Holly had barely put her feet on the floor when she heard the sound of Eric’s car in the garage, and the garage door opening. Eric was not the kind of man to squeal his tires on the way out of the driveway, but nevertheless he did, and Holly heard it for what it was—the implication of blame. Of course. Of course if his parents were already waiting at the airport, worried or sick or complaining, it would somehow be her fault. When Eric’s siblings arrived later they would say, “Why in the world was Eric late to get Mom and Dad?”—as if the question were the answer because both were directed at Holly.