Charles D'Ambrosio - Loitering - New and Collected Essays

Yana had been at Svirstroy for eleven years. She said she had no idea where her mother and father were, but presumably they were somewhere, alive; an uncle, alcoholic, last paid her a visit eight years ago.

She asked if I’d like to see her photo album, and when I said I would, the room suddenly got very quiet. And then her shier roommates, encouraged, brought out their albums. It’s hard to imagine or adequately describe what an album of photographs might mean to an orphaned girl of sixteen. One thing that was immediately apparent was that Yana herself did not own a camera. The pictures in her possession were taken by others, by visiting Americans, by one or two kids who’d been adopted and then sent back snapshots of themselves in Disneyland, by representatives of the various charitable organizations that come through a couple times a year. In other words, they were copies of photographs taken, most centrally, as an event in someone else’s life. Yana herself was a touristic stop in somebody’s trip to Russia. In every single shot she was posed; there were no candid moments, no moments outside the fragilely constructed instant. Naturally, the pictures didn’t serve a nostalgic function. They hardly offered a chronology, capturing, instead, the present tense of life at Svirstroy. The scenery surrounding Yana never changed radically; the orphanage was her constant backdrop. Judging by the album alone, Yana was never a baby, she was never a toddler taking a first step, she was never a communicant in white lace walking up the aisle at church, she’d never had a birthday or ridden a bike — and so on and on and on. In a way, family photographs are a record of the parents’ watchful eyes, a chart of the unfolding future they’ve planned and invested in, but a sense of that forward-looking scrutiny was entirely absent in her album. These photographs were taken by strangers, and some of that exchange, the character of it, remained in every picture, in the posed quality, the drifting gaze, the blank or baffled or forced expression. In a regular family album, the kids grow, their bodies change, and that’s largely what’s being documented; and half the time the true subject is in the background, it’s about a day at the beach, it’s about the snow in the mountains, it’s about the garden in back of grandma’s house — it’s about the children as they exist in the world. But in Yana’s album there was no such verification. She existed, solely, at the orphanage.

When I asked the kids if they were happy, none of them could really answer; the question, I gathered, was puzzling. “Happiness is a big word,” Tonia told me, after a long, stalled silence. Then, through the translator, of course, she said she was happiest when there was understanding, when “things go good for others,” when people love each other. I realized then that I was asking a typically American question about the state or sovereignty of the self. It was a question that assumed a primary and absolute right to an interior self, and she, like so many of the kids, looked instead to the outer world, the world of contact, of presence. Eventually, she did say one of her best memories was when the other kids surprised her with a gift and a cake and lemonade at a birthday party she wasn’t expecting. What seemed to move Tonia was that they’d “prepared ahead,” that she’d been held in mind by others, remembered for a duration, and given a passing sense of what a future, filled with loving concern, might feel like. And that’s the way it was at Svirstroy. None of the kids expressed a sense of being rooked out of an imagined rightful life, and if perhaps, darkly, they’d developed minds and equipped their souls with buffers so pain was not cumulative and the present tense of experience neither stemmed from the past nor was predicated on a future, so be it. They were home.

One day I was led through the woods by ten or so kids until we came to a spring that emerged from the base of a hummock marked by a large Russian Orthodox cross. A small wooden platform had been placed beside the spring, to stand on as you fetched water; next to it was a forked stick, like a coatrack, dangling with drinking cups someone had made by cutting plastic bottles in half. We all drank, and the water was cool and clean, it felt like water should feel, holy, a moment where time stops, and the quenching of thirst, on that day as on any really good day in your life, was as much a matter of communion as breaking bread or sharing wine. In some simple way this was the site of a special meaning, and the kids had led me, like an acolyte, to a place where I could drink and refresh myself in a communal mystery. Svirstroy was a place where love circulated, and somehow what’s good there was registering in me. I was feeling it. I’m sure I was. These children never showed self-pity, and if anything they’d taken the hollow where that emotion normally settles and filled it with each other. In fairy tales every juncture along the trail, no matter how dark or forbidding, is met with a yes, and that’s how they unfold and why, deep down, they soothe our fears. Here, inside the shared present, was the happiness Tonia was talking about.

It’s natural enough to hope tomorrow will cure today, and the core of the problem, of futures that recoup current difficulties, cropped up again when the translator brought to my attention the business of money: his $200, the orphanage’s $150, the driver’s $300, the hotel’s $200, none of which I had. I was dead broke. I’d traveled halfway around the world with a dollar in my left pocket that was more talisman or trinket than anything else. I’d been boldly approached by a lovely Russian hooker in the lobby of the Moscow Hotel, a beautiful blonde with Heidi braids and endearing broken English and a Russian-novel name, Katarina, all very tempting, but that transaction, like everything else, was beyond my means. She refused to believe I was broke. We argued about it! She wanted to know how much money I made “every month in America.” I felt like we were trying to negotiate a swap of cultural clichés. I was too embarrassed to tell her that basically my mother and sister and brother-in-law had been supporting me until my new mood stabilizers kicked in and I could once again think clearly about my life, i.e., get out of bed in the morning. For the kids at Svirstroy, the circulation of money, Russian or otherwise, was never an issue. Most of the boys beyond the age of ten smoke, and cigarettes, for them, act as a kind of coin, a wealth to be acquired and traded and shared. The absence of “real” money, flat money, is essentially the absence of a future. Not that the boys lack one — rather, possible futures never enter into their calculations; a cigarette equals pleasure, not the hoarding of deferred possibilities. In America, the sight of little boys with cigarettes would be shocking, but I have to say these guys were kind of cute, in a Little Rascally way, puffing smokes in their sloppy orphan clothes.

The other currency we traded in was words. None of the kids spoke English, although one boy I really liked a lot, Sasha, would say, “Good morning. I’m glad to see you.” And other kids liked floating the few words they knew my way. They traded these words like chits in a game about relationships: Limp Bizkit, hip-hop, Linkin Park, etc. Language probably always has this adhesive aspect, but it’s more noticeable when you struggle for words, when you constantly skirt the edges of failure. When I was on my own, alone with the kids, they either shouted in Russian, as if I were merely dense, or worked with gestures, as though playing charades. The translator was meant to bridge the gap, and he was excellent, keeping the conversation alive to the point that, after a few days, the kids began to realize that I could, on occasion, be pretty funny, and I, in turn, was just beginning to recognize the soulful texture, the nap of personality, in some of the boys and girls I spent the most time with. On the upside, perhaps, our lack of shared language had a filtering effect — rather like a lack of money — giving the past a shallowness, the future a vagueness, and keeping us in an essential present. Paradoxically, translation and the stripping of verb tenses forced us to live together in a physical, shared world. We enjoyed the fresh air, the river, the smell of pine trees. We played games that didn’t require talk, and we walked the trails and pathways, letting those old sentences in the forests surrounding Svirstroy speak. Still, working through a translator was hard. Everything came close to a gloss or a paraphrase, losing some degree of nuance, so that it was very difficult to know who was quick-witted or sullen or sensitive, which kids were bright and which were slow. There were questions I didn’t ask, particularities and depths I avoided. This failure on the level of fine distinction tends to make you see the kids as a conglomerate, which points the way toward pity, opening you up to a vague and general sadness at exactly the moment when, because you’ll never have to do anything particular, it’s safe.