My First Foreign Land

Moscow, 1994
What can I say about Moscow? That visit was my initiation into the mystery of foreign lands, the romance, horrors, and legacy of history, the passion of great story-telling as passed down by the country’s forebears, the magic of an endless sense of time and place. It might also have been the missing link in my life to that point, but I would never have guessed it before that trip. In college, I discovered Dostoevsky and would eventually consider the reading of his books the only real learning I did at the university. Also, my father, a Cuban citizen, had traveled to Russia many times throughout his life, when it was still considered the “Iron Curtain.” 

Now I was in Moscow, and it was too overwhelming of an experience for my 24-year-old self to process. Most of the time, I forgot I was there for the sole purpose of adopting a one-and-half- year-old boy of Mongolian and Russian descent, who would become my son and whom we renamed Alex James. His birth mother had been a student at the University of Moscow. She was a “house painter” by trade, and she named her son the Mongolian word for one who is deeply loved, Fail. On the birth certificate, there was no information about his Russian father.

We had lots of downtime In Moscow. Our two weeks there revolved around court hearings, signing papers, and rare visits to the orphanage and/or the embassy, but these appointments never lasted more than an hour. The various government officials made clear to us that we were not allowed to remove our son from the orphanage until the day before we left the country.

Since my husband did not care to do too much sight-seeing, I spent most of my time with Maria, our translator. Maria was a serious and dignified-looking Russian woman in her mid-40s. She was austere in her thoughts and looks, and she wore high collars and long-sleeved dresses. She had several thin lines on her face and she never joked or smiled. Yet, she was brilliant and enthusiastic when talking about the history, politics, art, and architecture of her country. She once held a post as an instructor of literature at the university, but the fall of communism and its government claimed her job. She found herself displaced, trying to make ends meet by working as a translator to American parents adopting in her country.

She took me under her wing. Recognizing my curiosity and desire to know Moscow, she exposed me to a bit of my son’s culture, something to take back and eventually share with him when he got older. Mostly, she worried about Russia and the toppling of Communism; she told me that corruption was rampant, gangsters were swindling the poor and elderly out of their apartments, and vicious and deadly dog attacks were on the rise. Russia was coming apart, and all its citizens shared her fears of the scourge of violence and governmental injustices. Maria worried that democracy was too new to stick. People were no longer entitled to socialist benefits, including food and medical care. The streets were filled with beggars and homeless kids who turned into delinquents. She hated Russia’s new rich and frowned at their palatial townhouses, including the “monstrosity” being built across the street from the orphanage. Still, as a good, solid Russian, she carried on with stoicism.

Her pet peeve was the censorship of great works of literature. Recently, she was overjoyed to get her hands on Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude, which she read with relish. In our drives around the city, she pointed out buildings where the KGB “once” housed underground torture chambers where those who went in disappeared. “Not common knowledge,” she said, “but everyone knew.” We waited in line at Lenin’s tomb in Red Square with hundreds of other Russians paying their solemn respects to the fallen leader who died at the turn of the 20^th century. We listened to chamber concerts of talented young Russians who played on the first floor salons of converted palaces. At the bathhouse, Maria taught me how to take heat and give a platza to get the blood running by having me slap her naked body with birch tree twigs. We drove to a Pasternak-like countryside right outside the city limits so that I could see the dachas of government officials and the new wealthy – which were mostly obscured by high brick walls and northern pine, spruce, and fir trees. When we stopped at the home of poor country farmer, who was boiling rotten potato skins in deep cast iron pots that were stained by years of use to feed his swine and poultry, I was introduced to his statuesque and beautiful blue-eyed 13-year-old granddaughter who dreamt of modeling in New York City like her mother.

When Maria took me to the famous sites and churches of Moscow, she recalled their history with such passion and anguish I forgot where I was or even that the current year was 1995. I learned that the blood of the people ran through every cobblestone on Red Square, that trees in the city parks had had the accused hanging from every branch, that Peter the Great played with toy boats in the small pond of his summer residence – where we now stood and where he got the idea for the Royal Navy. I also learned that the Orthodox priests, with their flowing beards, beautiful hats, and long embroidered gowns, who sang the service from the second-story balcony of the Orthodox church in Moscow where we attended the mass, would once have been persecuted and slaughtered like Russia’s twenty million believers who died for their faith.

I had to constantly remind myself that it was late in the 20^th century, and we were not in Ivan the Terrible’s or Stalin’s Russia of civil revolution and gulags. It wasn’t only Maria who spoke with fervor, but the woman at the Arbat Street bakery who sold us slices of delicious vanilla wedding cake and the man who dealt in vintage Samovars at the weekend market in the city. Russia was a confluence of ancient and modern times, a magical and sinister place defined by brutal internal terrorism, bloody uprisings, world wars, but also great works of architecture and a thriving culture of art and literature, embodied by the paintings I saw at the Tretyakov Gallery which showed its royal, merchant, and peasant classes endlessly evolving in a new and improved country with the ever-looming past choke-holding the present. Then there was the performance by the Moiseyev Dance Company, whose audience at the Russian National Ballet Theatre was made up of many toddlers who were as quiet and mesmerized as the adults by performances that celebrated the tradition of Russia’s rich folk history. The three-ring circus we attended brought out the city’s people dressed in their Sunday finest.

Russia required a simultaneous allegiance to all states of mind, times, classes of people, cultures, wars, philosophies, governments, and religions. It would take me a lifetime to process it all, and even then I don’t think I ever really could.

Even our host family lived in a contradiction of time and place. Their comfortable three-bedroom apartment in a well-to-do area of the city had few appliances. The mother washed clothes on a washboard in the bathtub and hung them to dry on lines hanging from the balcony railing, as did all her neighbors. She made her own mayonnaise, cracked the nuts she baked into her breads, and mixed and froze cream, sugar, ice, and fruit to make us strawberry ice cream. Her thin frame and constant cough reminded me of a dying and romantic figure in a Russian novel.

Across the street from our host family’s apartment was Luzhniki Park, the site of the 1980 Summer Olympics, which was boycotted by President Jimmy Carter after Russia invaded Afghanistan the year before. On the grounds of the park stood a church from around the 14^th century, which the Nazis ransacked for its gold during the war. Services were still held there on Sundays, and some of the women who attended the mass came to the park with buckets to collect water from a nearby stream that has been responsible for many miraculous healings.

When we left Moscow with our new son, Alex, I also left with a new-found taste for world-wide adventure.My memoir, "The Continent of Ruby," available at:http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00TT5DDWO