Charles D'Ambrosio - Loitering - New and Collected Essays

At the edge of the orphanage property are what the kids call the red ruins and the black ruins, and I was taken on a tour of both, each interior with the same dust, the same broken slant of light, the same weeds and rubble and cracked glass, but the black ruin is a former bomb shelter dug deep into the ground, and the red ruin, a brick building above ground, seems once to have housed a repair shop of some sort — there were steel doors of outsized proportions meant to allow the passage of trucks. In the red ruin padlocks remained on doors without hinges, and wire bars gated windows without glass. The ruins mainly suggest a kind of contrapuntal relation to the orphanage itself, which dates from the same era yet still stands. In America, looking back, we don’t really arrive at history so much as we enter romance, some place of eternal beginnings, but here, even in the bucolic Russian countryside, the devastations of war are marked by dead prisoners, shelters, stone defilades and, deep in the woods, what I took to be bomb craters — suspiciously odd declivities in an otherwise smoothly rolling or flat landscape. Here, there are ruins, and then there are things saved from ruin, things that escape, and the difference is emphatically alive and real, even if you can’t calculate why by using the ungovernable terms of historical destiny.

Maybe more than the building itself, the land around the orphanage and the elaborate network of footpaths create for the kids a sense of place. There are trails through the birch and pine, across fields where, every spring, the kids burn leaves and work the ash into the soil and plant potatoes, trails that lead to the river, to the school, to the village, to ponds and creeks and springs flowing up from beneath the ground with cool, drinkable water, trails that are a story in themselves, worn by wandering feet over fifty years, worn by joy and hope and habit and need, trails like a sentence spoken, each a whisper about the surrounding world, a dialogue with doubt or desire that’s ultimately answered by a destination. Many of the children have either no history or a severely foreshortened sense of the past, but these trails, worked into the grass or through the forests by others before them, send the kids off to play in a shared world — shared not just in physical space, but down through time. It must in some humble way ease the isolation, like Crusoe finding a footprint in the sand.

Time and a lot of touching have turned the interior of the orphanage funky, with a lived-in feel that now will likely never go away — it’s there in the worn wood, the marble steps chipped or cracked so long ago that the original sharp, jagged wounds have since been smoothed and cicatrized like a weal by countless passing feet. The paint on the railings is layers thick, the broken windows are patched but not replaced, the tiles that peel up remain missing. Things inside were so worn and rubbed and handled by living beings that the interior had lost a lot of its rectangularity, and was replaced, instead, by a roundedness, a kind of inner burrowed shape arrived at by working the materials from within, like the nest of a wren. I found this fascinating, and loved discovering touches of it, combing the place for evidence of the tide of children, the softening action of them against the hard surfaces and correct angles favored by the original architects. Door-sills were scooped like shells by scuffling kids, and the jambs, at various heights, had lost their edge as lingering children held them, dirtied them, and picked at them until they had to be repainted, over the years, with many quick coats of high-gloss enamel. The stone floors held smooth undulations where the kids habitually walked, wearing troughs that you could feel by skimming your feet across them, and that you could see, in certain lights, as a rippling reflection. Heavily trafficked areas of the orphanage received the most paint, so the lower walls had a receptive, accepting density, an imperfect but pliant look, and the railings on the stairwells, though made of metal, looked like they’d been recently dipped in hot caramel.

The kids live in spacious, decent rooms with high ceilings and big windows. The boys pasted stuff to the walls — ads for cars torn from magazines or pictures of German rock stars ripped from the newspaper — and scrawled a little graffiti with black felt pens — in other words, pretty much a rendition of a boy’s room in America, but without the wherewithal. In one of the rooms, a hole had been punched in the wall, through the plaster and lath, which the boys used to communicate with the kids in the adjoining room. That it was unsightly didn’t bother them one bit. They called it their telephone. These same boys later showed me their pet rats, and at the base of a plywood divider meant to keep males and females separate, the rats, too, had begun to gnaw a hole into the next room. I can’t wring a dark poignancy out of the comparison between rats and orphan boys, however, because Svirstroy just wasn’t that way. What the boys did wasn’t vandalism, it wasn’t destructive or ornery. If anything, the hole in the wall was a rough, clumsy modification the kids made because they’re extremely close to one another. They’d restructured the building to suit their needs; that hole in the wall was about their hope for love. It may have looked destructive, but it was really an act of restoration. In general, boys and girls alike sought each other out, they sought and found proximity, and no one seemed at all defensive about their space. This seeking was one of the more noticeable aspects of my stay there. Relaxing on the lawn or sitting by the river, the kids would naturally clump up, pillowing their heads against each others’ bellies, a whole chain of children in a circle, all quite free and unguarded about touching.

In an American institution the general disrepair might be seen as signs of decrepitude and disintegration, of a shoddy slide, but the direction at the orphanage seemed quite the opposite, upward, integral, a sense of pieces coming together. The clinical rectitude that serves us so well in America might also prevent us from doing the human thing in some cases, and I can’t quite imagine an old building, owned by the government, turned over to the care and maintenance of kids; the impulse would probably be quashed by the obstacles. We’d have to knock Svirstroy down and haul it away in pieces before we could begin. In an obliquely related theme, my whole time at the orphanage I could never find any wastebaskets; my pockets filled with trash. In America of course every public hallway has a rich battery of waste-disposal options, with separate receptacles for newsprint, pop cans, apple cores, or whatever. For obvious reasons, poor orphan kids don’t generate much garbage. Generally, their present doesn’t obsolesce and convert into the past quite as rapidly as it does for kids in America; there isn’t the abundance, and in the absence of a steady stream of the new, stuff doesn’t get used up and sloughed so easily. (The boys, for instance, hoarded batteries for their Walkmans, and deftly rewound cassettes by manually whirling the sprockets with hexagonal Bic pens to conserve power.) The building itself was testimony to this kind of make-do endurance. We’d see in a place like Svirstroy an affront to newness, which in America is the path to the future, and our sensibility might prove problematic, on the level of some aesthetic or metaphoric blockage, in kicking off a project like an orphanage. We’d wonder how you could hope to offer children a future in a building so evidently scarred by the past.

The very best night I spent at the orphanage was with a young woman named Yana. She was sixteen and lived with four other girls, dorm-style, in a room she’d occupied for the past nine years. You could feel the resonance her long tenure brought to the space. She’d obviously lavished love on it, which in turn probably set the tone for the other girls. The economy of love in the orphanage seemed to work that way — it was passed quite efficiently from one kid to the next. Love spread horizontally, across the broad, extended present of the orphanage; it wasn’t invested in a future or sequestered in a solitary, longed-for past. The beds were neatly, uniformly made, with pleasant colorful quilts and matching pillowcases, and Yana had strung a philodendron on monofilament so that, trained, its healthy green cordate leaves circled the room airily overhead, like a string of unripe hearts. On the walls were glitzy pictures of Britney Spears, Christina Aguilera, etc. At one point Yana got up, peeled back the corner of a poster, and showed the cracked plaster beneath; she’d put the pictures there to cover what she called “the bad places.” She was a little shy about it, shy as if the damaged plaster reflected on her personally, but she also seemed proud of the improvements she’d made. She had rodents, like the boys, but these were cute, cuddly mice, a boy and a girl, and she kept them in a large jar of soft, fine wood shavings and, with no divider, planned to share the eventual offspring with other kids in the orphanage.