These parents were dead to the world, whether or not they were dead.
There were also some orphans (a large roomful of them, in fact, which Holly had surreptitiously discovered for herself) who were so ill or disabled that even a functional family might have given them up. Those children were kept behind the door that visitors had been forbidden to open—a door that Holly had opened and stepped behind (how could she not?) when the scant members of the staff were occupied elsewhere.
THERE HAD BEEN a sign on the door to that room, printed up professionally in Russian and then translated in sloppy but emphatic English in red pen below—THIS STAFF ONLY OPENS.
Holly would never have noticed or thought about it if not for that sign.
This was their first trip to Siberia, though, at Christmastime, when it still seemed important to know everything about the orphanage out of which they were adopting their daughter, to be suspicious of it—before Holly had come to the conclusion that blind acceptance at face value of whatever they were given or told would get them out of Siberia, and happily back to the States with their new daughter, more quickly, and with more peace of mind.
It had been December 26, their second day in Siberia, and there was no one at that moment around to stop Holly from opening the door. Eric was standing beside Baby Tatty’s crib, holding her, as she slept in his arms and the two nurses on duty rushed around with armloads of sheets—all so gray or yellowed and rumpled it was impossible to tell if they were clean or dirty sheets—and black plastic trash bags into which they were either placing or removing those sheets. No one noticed Holly standing outside the door.
She put her hand on the doorknob and pushed it open, surprised to find that it wasn’t locked, that no alarm sounded (she’d planned to say, if she were caught, that she’d gotten confused in her search for the bathroom), and Holly stepped over the threshold quickly, then closed the door carefully behind her so that no one would hear it.
Immediately she realized that it was a mistake, that she shouldn’t be there, that she should have obeyed the command on the sign. This she was to have been spared, for her own good. Of course. She’d known this, hadn’t she? If she hadn’t understood it before, now she did, completely.
Not every secret should be revealed. Not every mystery should be solved.
Although the room, observed in a photograph, would have appeared not much different from the room full of cribs in which Tatty was kept—the same institutional light, the same curtains printed with faded blue stripes—to step into it was to understand that it was entirely different. Not just the smell of it (of vomit, of feces, of urine-soaked bedding) or the sound (complete silence), or the stillness, but the sense that some barrier between the living world and the rotting one just underneath it had been crossed at that threshold.
Holly closed her eyes, backed up, put her hand on the doorknob again, trying to unsee what she had seen in her quick glimpse, and certainly to see no more, but she couldn’t open the door without opening her eyes again, and when she did she took in the room despite herself, its ten million terrible details blurring, blessedly—except for one:
A boy whose wrist was tied to a slat of his crib, his head twice the size of his torso, his eyes open and unblinking.
Then she was on the other side of that door, closing it behind her again, and resolving with the quick snap of a rubber band on her wrist not only never to open it again, but never to think about it again:
She heard Annette Sanders, as clearly as if she were standing beside her at the Pokrovka Orphanage #2, saying, “It isn’t repression to acknowledge the horrors of this world and to let them go. It’s freedom.”
“IS THERE ANYTHING else?” Eric had asked Anya that spring day in Siberia, before they headed out the door of the Pokrovka Orphanage #2 to make their way home with their beautiful daughter. “We only need to know in order to know what she might need. In the future. You know. Was there any illness that you know of—in the family history?”
Both Eric and Holly had seen one of the nurses give Anya a sharp look when she replied, in her cryptic and strangely poetic English, “The sister, yes, born to die. Same sick as the mother.”
Anya had put her fist to her heart then and given it a quick, light punch, as if to restart it, or to demonstrate for Eric and Holly the location and function of a heart.
Holly had decided then that something had been lost in translation. She wanted to ask no more questions. When Eric started to request some clarification, Holly had willfully muddied the waters by asking Anya a question she couldn’t possibly answer or understand: “So, do you think there could have been a mitochondrial genetic disease?”
By then the other nurse’s sharp look had caught Anya’s blue eye—but it didn’t matter. Holly hadn’t asked it because she wanted an answer. Shortly after that, they said their good-byes, which were not nearly as dramatic as Holly had thought they would be.
Those nurses, who’d cared for Tatiana for the first twenty-two months of her life, bid her farewell with only a few terse nods and pats on the head—and then Eric and Holly left with Baby Tatty marching purposely, bravely, into the wan Siberian sunlight, as though to her doom, between them.
And as they walked out of the orphanage into the Siberian spring (such contrast to the winter landscape they’d left behind three months earlier), Holly again snapped a rubber band in her mind.
She would not let Anya be the wicked fairy godmother shoving her way into the back door of the christening. No one had the slightest idea what troubles had plagued Baby Tatty’s relations and ancestors, and never would. As with Holly’s own forebears, it would have been a list of horrors, quite possibly, but Baby Tatty smelled of verbena now, and her cheeks were rosy red, and each little finger was perfect—and her hair was so long! What twenty-two-month-old child had hair so long? And, although her eyes were not as large as they had seemed at Christmastime, they were dark and wide and Holly was now going to devote her entire life to filling those eyes with beautiful sights!
Eric, however, still wanted to worry.
“Jesus,” he said an hour later as they sat on a bench in the center of the nearly empty train station atrium. “What do you think Anya meant?”
The only other passengers waiting with them there were an old woman who seemed unable to sit down, pacing the station from one corner to the next as if she were looking unsuccessfully for an exit, and a young man in a blousy white shirt who stood and stared out the window at the tracks, devotedly chewing at his fingernails. “Did she mean that the mother died of some kind of heart defect?” Eric asked. “And that Tatiana had a sister? That the sister also died of—”
Here Eric mimicked Anya’s fist tapping her chest, just above her heart.
Holly laughed, looking at the serious expression on her husband’s face, and his pantomime. “Well,” she said, “maybe they were stabbed to death, stabbed repeatedly in their hearts.” Morbidly, Holly turned the heart-tapping gesture into a stabbing one. She wanted to show Eric how absurd it would be to guess at Anya’s meaning. They would never know. Of course, it wasn’t really funny, but the absurdity made Eric laugh—the idea that mild-mannered Anya might have been miming a fatal stabbing with that gentle thumping of her own heart with her fist.
Then, both of them being so close to the edge of hysteria already—exhaustion, joy, relief—they both laughed far longer than the joke warranted. They were so filled with an ecstatic terror they had never before experienced or even imagined! Their daughter, their beautiful dark-haired daughter in her little white hard-soled shoes was nodding in and out of a gentle, fitful sleep between them on the bench in the train station, and they could not contain their laughter.