Authors: Laura Kasischke
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.
Incredible, it seemed, that the nurses had simply let Eric and Holly walk out of the Pokrovka Orphanage #2 with a fairy princess! Just a calm farewell, and the door opened, and now they had this little girl all to themselves. Forever! (Of course, that it had cost them thousands of dollars, piles of paperwork, and nearly two years of their lives wasn’t forgotten, but here it was! This day! Seeming sudden and miraculous and completely unearned!)
After they’d managed to stop laughing (trying to do so as quietly as they could so as not to awaken their restlessly dreaming daughter), Holly said, “Well, we’ll never know what she meant. So maybe her mother had a heart defect. It doesn’t mean Tatty does.” She looked down at Tatty then, the little blue-pink seashells of her fingernails, her long dark hair. “
Clearly
Tatiana doesn’t. And so maybe Tatty had a sister who died. Well, so did I. Two of them.”
And after that, neither Tatiana’s genealogy nor her mitochondrial DNA, nor her mother or sister was ever mentioned again. They never speculated whether Tatiana might have inherited her love of horses from some Mongol ancestor or whether her lovely singing voice had been passed down from a gypsy grandmother. They never again wondered aloud whether there’d been a sister, whether the sister had died or might still be out there somewhere, alive. Neither of them speculated as to whether there might be manic depression tucked away in those genes, as there was in Holly’s, or heart disease, cancer, anything. Their daughter had come to them without a legacy. She was so beautiful and perfect she did not need one.
BUT, NOW, LOOKING
into her daughter’s face—her huge eyes, her mouth full of raw meat and a little pink rivulet of animal blood trickling down her chin—Holly felt terribly afraid.
She was, herself, the one holding the enormous knife over her head, but she was afraid. Afraid of her daughter.
No one
is born without a legacy.
How had she let herself believe otherwise all these years?
Of all people, Holly should have understood that genes are destiny. That the past resides inside you. That unless you hack it off yourself, perhaps, or have it surgically removed, it follows you to your dying day.
It was why she’d wept inconsolably one night years ago when Eric had said, beside Holly in bed, after having passed by the open door of the bathroom where Tatiana stood at the mirror brushing her glossy black hair: “My, God, her mother must have been a beauty.”
Holly had sat up fast, and found herself to be weeping before she even knew he’d wounded her.
“Oh sweetheart, oh sweetheart,” Eric had said. “What a stupid, stupid, stupid thing for me to say.”
He’d thought she was jealous! He thought that she’d heard in it the implication that she was not, herself, Tatiana’s mother. But that wasn’t it. He’d held her so tightly then that she thought she might break, but she let him, as she grieved there in his arms for the mother of Tatiana, for a woman she knew, in her heart, was dead.
Now Holly could see in her daughter’s enormous dark eyes not only herself but the Christmas tree behind her, and the picture window filled with blizzard beyond that, and even her daughter’s reflection in that window—and the girl in that reflection looked unfamiliar to her. She was not the same child they’d plucked, that first Christmas, out of her crib at the Pokrovka Orphanage #2.
“Tatiana.”
Holly said her daughter’s name quietly the first time, but when her daughter lunged at her, she screamed it:
“Tatiana!”
Tatty grabbed at the knife in Holly’s hand, spitting the half-chewed meat out in her mother’s face as she did, as Holly managed to swing away and to throw the knife over her daughter’s shoulder. It clattered into the sink behind Tatiana, and Holly took hold of her delicate wrist and held it fast. And then everything seemed to stop:
They both stood still in the kitchen, breathing hard, neither of them saying a word. The only sound was their heavy breathing—except for what might have been, beyond that, the very light, sandy silence of snow falling on top of more snow. And, Holly thought, could she perhaps hear Tatiana’s heart in her chest? Or was that the sound of her own heart?
The two of them stood like this for a long minute—so still it was as if a spell had been cast on them. Tatiana was not struggling to release her wrist from her mother’s grip. Perhaps it was clear to her that her mother, the larger and stronger of the two of them, was not going to let go. She went very stiff, instead, and then she sagged, seeming to admit her defeat.
“What’s the matter with you, Tatiana?” Holly finally asked, in a voice that sounded so calm she hardly recognized it as her own. “Tatiana, what’s wrong with you?”
Tatiana said nothing.
She closed her eyes, and Holly could see how beautifully and naturally blue her daughter’s eyelids were. Until Tatiana, Holly had never seen anything like it. She used to stand over Baby Tatty’s crib and gaze down at her daughter’s closed eyes, and marvel.
She’d adopted a china doll! Or she’d somehow found, as if under a cabbage or in a nest near the chimney, a child so glorious in every detail that she
couldn’t
be of this world. She
had
to be special. She might have supernatural powers, be immortal! Such a child would
have
to live forever!
Of course, she didn’t. She wasn’t perfection. No one was. But that was fine:
“Perfection is terrible,” Sylvia Plath wrote in a poem. “It can’t have children.”
And this fact, that she wasn’t perfect, revealed itself so gently as Tatiana grew older that, rather than being a disappointment to Holly, it made Tatiana even more magical. She wasn’t, for instance, the first child in her kindergarten class to learn to read, but when she did Tatty was so wildly enthusiastic and so proud of herself that she read
everything.
She sat buckled into the child seat as Holly drove her to school and shouted out every word she saw that she could read:
Stop! For! May! See! Sale! One! Buy! Buy!
Holly tried to praise her after every word, but if she was distracted somehow and forgot, Tatty would reach up and touch Holly’s shoulder with her little hand (the soft, pawlike hand of a five-year-old!) and say, “Mommy? Did you hear?”