If You Lived Here, I'd Know Your Name Page 11

  We spend the next few days sightseeing. We take a water taxi down the Thames, making stops at the Tower of London and Buckingham Palace. We go to a Rembrandt exhibit at the National Gallery. At Westminster Abbey, the guard at the door says, “This is a church service. The Abbey is closed to tourists now.” Eliza and I are Episcopalians. We are not tourists, I tell him, we are pilgrims from America, and he lets us in. It’s an Evensong service. The music fills the ancient chapel, and I feel as if I’m standing in my own past. I pray that Stojanka will like us and that everything is all right at home.

  We get lost one night after seeing a play. I cry, at midnight, in an underground station, trying to figure out how to get back to the apartment. I hope we won’t be murdered and thrown in the river. We take the stairs to the street and walk quickly from the empty alleys near the station to a busy intersection and hail a cab. “Let’s not tell Dad,” I say to Eliza. “Let’s pretend we did just fine without him.”

  After four days in London, we take a train to the Cotswolds and visit Chip’s sister, Karen, and her husband, David O’Connor. They are Olympic equestrians and are training at a farm there. Eliza and I walk through old villages named Upper Slaughter and Lower Slaughter and browse in churchyards, reading the verses on ancient headstones and memorials. The last night, we all get dressed up and go to Lord and Lady Something’s house. He is called Froden, which may be his last or first name. There is a pond filled with huge trout. They are “pet trout,” Lady Whatever says. They wouldn’t last long if Christian and his friend Wayner were here, I think. Froden cooks outside. He calls it mixed grill. When he’s done, everything is laid out on platters on the buffet table in the dining room. Sausages, lamb chops, hamburger patties, tomatoes—all burned black.

  Captain Mark Phillips, Princess Anne’s ex-husband, is a guest, too. He is Froden’s neighbor and also coaches the U.S. Equestrian Team. We all stand when he arrives. He is pleasant and unassuming, although everyone is on their best behavior around him. We wait until he sits to be seated, and until he takes a bite, to eat. Eliza doesn’t mention her vegetarian preference. She chews the blackened meat slowly. The captain has a wandering eye, so I have to concentrate to look in the proper pupil.

  For dessert, Froden has made cherries jubilee. He carries the saucepan to the table, pours brandy on the cherries, and lights the whole thing on fire. Everyone claps at the swirling blue flame. When it’s done, he serves it with vanilla ice cream. Froden forgot to pit the cherries, so the captain carefully takes each seed out of his mouth, placing them in a row around the edge of his wide-lipped bowl. I do the same; so does everyone else, figuring this is proper British cherry-pit etiquette. When he’s finished, the captain looks up and, with a sparkle in his good eye, sings a little song. It’s sort of like our “she loves me, she loves me not,” only this one counts the cherry pits to predict when you will marry. “This year, next year, sometime, never,” the captain sings, pointing to each pit with his spoon.

  WAITING IN HEATHROW for the flight to Bulgaria, I think about that odd, friendly meal. The food was awful, but no one minded because of the company. I also think how strange it is to dine with almost royalty one day and be on the way to rescue a Gypsy orphan the next. Suddenly I miss home, Chip, and the kids, and our friends and neighbors who walk into the house without knocking, who help themselves to leftovers or a cold beer, depending on the time of day. In a way, this new child is making all of us even more of one big family. Steve and Linnus have promised to be Stojanka’s godparents. I put their names on all the school forms that ask for an emergency contact and next of kin. All our friends were interviewed by the social worker, who wanted to ensure that we’d take good care of Stojanka. Tonight Steve’s probably making pizza while everyone is arguing loudly—especially if Tom is there—about the new playground at Tlingit Park and why the high school basketball team hasn’t won a game in two seasons.

  Some time ago, when I was writing Lillian Hammond’s obituary, Tom insisted that I separate her blood relatives from the rest of her extended family. It was impossible. She didn’t think that way. Lillian was a Tlingit elder who lived in her clan’s communal home, the Raven House. Her biological son Charlie said his mother liked nothing more than feeding everyone and keeping them safe under her roof. Over the years, Lillian and her husband added to their household by adopting children and adults, Native and non-Native, into their family. Some have brown skin and dark eyes; others are blue-eyed blonds with no Tlingit blood at all. Charlie said his mother believed that “with numbers comes strength.”

  I think Lillian’s tragic childhood made her determined to rebuild her culture and her family in any way she could. She was born in a traditional Tlingit village, but it had disappeared by the time she was an adult. Most of her family members and friends had died of diseases such as chicken pox and measles introduced by white men, or they wandered—like Bulgarian Gypsies—around southeast Alaska. Like the Roma, Stojanka’s people, they were not always welcome in schools or restaurants. Missionaries convinced Native mothers that their babies would be better fed and better educated if they put them in church-run orphanages. Sometimes these children were reunited with their families; often they weren’t.

  When I explained to Lillian’s son that the newspaper needed to differentiate in the “survived by” list between the biological and adopted family members, Charlie looked puzzled. What Tom had actually said was that I could include only her real family. “What’s a real family?” Charlie said. “If a bear cub’s mother is shot and another sow allows him to suckle, she protects that young one the same as the one she birthed. That was my mother. She was a mother bear. We were all her children.”

  I hope I will feel the same way about the daughter I didn’t conceive. I hope I’ll love her like the others, and I hope she’ll love me back. Maybe these doubts trouble me more than I’d like to admit, because on the Balkan Air jet from London to Sofia, my fear of flying returns. The safety-procedures talk looks like a sketch from Saturday Night Live. The stewardess, in a tight, shabby old uniform, smirks as she drapes the flat would-be life jacket over her shoulders, as if to say, “We all know this will only help them find your body.” When the FASTEN SEATBELT sign goes off, most of the passengers light up cigarettes. So do the flight attendants. The engine is so loud that Eliza and I have to shout. One of the tray tables is broken; the other is sticky. Everything is rattling. Eliza looks at me for reassurance. I pretend all’s fine, as if I have taken this flight a thousand times. “This is how it always is on Balkan flights,” I yell. We both laugh, but I do wonder why my friends Rob and Donna, who made this trip to adopt their son, didn’t warn me about the plane. For dinner we are given cold cuts, a chilly brown roll, and a strong-smelling sheep’s-milk cheese wrapped in cellophane. There is free wine. We drink it.

  AFTER TWO DAYS of waiting in line and getting documents stamped and approved in Sofia, we head out across the country on empty freeways to pick up Stojanka. You can’t rent a car or buy gas in Bulgaria, so we have to hire a driver. Which makes me feel rich again. I’ve never had a driver before. It’s all starting to seem like an old movie. Doc, who works for the American adoption agency in Bulgaria, is also with us. A better character actor would be hard to find. He is short, round, and bossy, and he tells us Bulgarian history between Elvis and Beethoven tapes.

  “They have proven,” Doc says, “that Bulgaria is one of the oldest societies in the world. In Sofia they found tools seven thousand years old.” He speaks of the Middle Ages as if they were a few years ago. “The Bulgarians invented the alphabet,” he says, and he makes us memorize the names of the two ninth-century monks responsible so we will be sure to tell Stojanka when she grows up. “Cyril and Methodius,” he enunciates, making us repeat after him, pronouncing the hard C, rather than the familiar sound we use when we say Cyrillic. Doc weeps when he speaks of the five hundred years of Turkish oppression. He makes us promise never to forget the great patriot Vasil Levski, the revolutionary who is credited with over
throwing centuries of Turkish oppression. He planned an armed overthrow of the Turks but was caught and killed before the uprising in 1876, when twenty thousand Bulgarians were massacred by the Turks in front of an American journalist whose name Doc didn’t make us remember. (He must have assumed we knew, this being part of our history, too.) After the story broke, world opinion changed and the Turks had to get out of Bulgaria.

  Not only did Doc tell us all this, and much more, but he insisted on quizzing us. Out of the blue he’d yell, “Vasil Levski,” and Eliza would shout back, “Great patriot.” He didn’t say much about the Gypsies except to remind us that although they are treated badly by his countrymen, the Bulgarians still didn’t let the Nazis take them to the gas chambers, the way they did in other places. He tells us they came to Europe a thousand years ago and were called Gypsies because people thought they were from Egypt. “India is their real home,” he says. “They are Indians.”

  Doc cries again when he tells us that he could have cured Beethoven’s deafness. A retired ear, nose, and throat doctor, he was sent to Ethiopia to work during the Soviet Union years. When he returned, he earned less per surgery than the plumber was paid to fix his sink, he says. Eventually his medical credentials, combined with his language skills and bulldog attitude, landed him a job with All God’s Children, an American adoption agency based in Portland, Oregon. At seventy, Doc is a man with a mission: to match families with the children he thinks they are meant to have. In his single-minded pursuit of building families, he reminds me of Lillian Hammond. He also knows that the mostly Roma children who fill the orphanages have little hope of thriving in Bulgaria, even the new, democratic Bulgaria. Doc doesn’t share his countrymen’s prejudice, but he understands that the brown-skinned, dark-eyed children of the long-wandering people may never be embraced here.

  With no segue, he asks my opinion of Graceland. When I tell him I’ve never been there, he refuses to believe it. He’s visited Elvis’s shrine twice and knows all of his songs. After a stop to pee on the side of the road, he shouts, with a finger in the air, “Elvis has left the building!” and we pile into the car and are on the road again.

  I think we are going to an orphanage to pick up Stojanka. Instead, we meet her at a Shell station on the side of the highway somewhere between Sofia and Dobrich. She is with half a dozen people Doc says are from the orphanage. He says they have been camping. I don’t believe it. I suspect she has been working in nearby fields. I don’t want to argue about it. I’m so happy and relieved to finally see her, although we don’t cry with joy and jump up and down. It is a much more subdued introduction. I touch her hair, smile, and gently squeeze her hands. I don’t want to frighten her.

  Doc tells me I’m supposed to buy everyone lunch at the Shell station grill. I am ill from the car ride. Eliza has been sick to her stomach since our first day in Bulgaria. I’m getting weary of Doc. I want to grab this child and fly home—now. But I can’t even talk to the driver. He doesn’t speak English, and I don’t speak Bulgarian. I also don’t want to upset Stojanka, especially since she doesn’t know a word I’m saying either. Still, when I sit next to her at the table, I feel different than before we met, extremely maternal. Eliza is on her other side, and I can feel her shift into big-sister caring mode. We make a good team. I am no longer a passive, slightly confused foreigner. I am a mother bear with two cubs.

  Doc orders grilled chicken and beef kebabs for all of us. The chicken is raw. I object, but Doc says that’s how they like it, rare. When I won’t eat it, he tries to give it to Stojanka, who has already finished her beef. She was an orphan a few minutes ago but is my child now, and I cannot let her eat it. I will not let her risk salmonella. She is so thin; I want to feed her, but not raw chicken. Doc protests, but this time I don’t let him decide what’s best. I take the chicken off her plate and put it back on the platter. Everyone laughs and grabs the pink chicken kebabs. I think less-than-kind thoughts. I hope they all get really sick.

  We spend the night in a hotel with a portrait of Lenin over the front desk. Doc and the driver have one room, and we girls have another. Stojanka is all I hoped she’d be, and more. She can read and write in Bulgarian, which is a surprise; we were told she had no schooling. We have an English-Bulgarian phrase book, and know how to say critical sentences, such as “I love you” and “Do you have to go to the bathroom?” Eliza is better at Bulgarian than I am, and she and Stojanka can communicate pretty well. Actually, we all can. I don’t understand how it’s possible, but Stojanka is as trusting with us as a newborn, and a lot easier to care for. She takes a long bath, by herself. Eliza and I think it may be the first time she has ever been able to soak in warm, soapy water. Afterward she puts on the pajamas that her new sister J.J. picked out for her in Charlotte’s store in Haines. They are both almost nine. Their birthdays are a month apart. People who haven’t met them, who only know that I have two girls the same age, will ask if they are twins for the rest of their lives. At first, I’ll explain that one is adopted, but after a while I’ll simply introduce them both as my daughters, and leave the inquirer to wonder how that can be—how one child can be so fair and the other so dark.

  IT HAS BEEN almost a year and a half since I first saw the photograph of Stojanka that was being passed around in Haines, and a year since we saw the videotape of her. When people ask why we added a fifth child to an already busy household, I don’t know what to say. When they ask what about the risks of adopting an eight- or nine-year-old—the nature-versus-nurture argument—I also don’t know what to say. It isn’t a logical thing to do. Chip and I adopted Stojanka on a feeling, a good hunch. We like children; we had an extra bed and plenty of ice skates. When other friends in Haines who have adopted Bulgarian children—Kathy and Dr. Jones have two Bulgarian daughters and Rob and Donna have one Bulgarian son and another on the way—asked me to think about it, I really did. When Kathy gave me a picture of Stojanka and asked for my prayers, I gave them. When she brought over a videotape, I asked Chip to watch it with me.

  In the tape, a voice I now recognize as Doc’s interviews Stojanka from a position offscreen. She wears a Disneyland sweat suit and holds a huge Winnie-the-Pooh stuffed bear, no doubt donated by an American church group. She has very short hair, cut that way, I’m guessing, because of head lice. She is pretty, cheerful, and sweet. They speak in Bulgarian and Doc translates. He asks her what she wants to be when she grows up and he tells us she says a doctor. We learn that her favorite color is yellow and that she likes goats. What’s her favorite game? “Construction,” Doc says. “She likes to build things.” We own a lumberyard. Chip whispers, “Finally, someone to take over the business.” Doc asks if she’d like to sing a song, and she does, verse after verse until he cuts her off. She reminds me of Little Orphan Annie. Then there is a spirited argument on the tape. She and Doc go back and forth—and she wins. “She wants to tell you something,” Doc says.

  Stojanka looks right at the camera and speaks slowly and carefully, in English. “Hello, Mommy. Hello, Daddy. I cannot wait to meet you. I love you.”

  • • •

  ON THE WAY back to Sofia the next day we stop at what appears to be an abandoned school but is really an orphanage for some one hundred Bulgarian children. While Doc is inside videotaping them for prospective adoptive families, Stojanka and I walk around the parking lot. It’s ninety degrees and the air tastes like bus exhaust, but there are no buses in sight, just an old Soviet military ambulance and our hired car, a late-model Volvo. The driver is leaning up against the hood smoking. Eliza sits in the back seat with the door open, hoping for a breeze.

  I spend my life finding meaning in small, everyday things—an afternoon of fishing, a walk on the beach, cooking a nice meal. Now, in the middle of a really big thing, I can’t quite get my bearings. Maybe it’s the heat, but I’m a little woozy. Stojanka and I make quite a pair. To impress the Bulgarian officials, I dressed in slacks, a silk shirt, and good shoes. Stojanka wears jeans, a T-shirt, and sneakers, an outfit
she chose from a bag we packed for her in Alaska two weeks ago. She is pretending to be an all-American girl and I’m pretending to be a Middle-Aged Woman of Means. A purse has replaced my regular backpack. I look like my mother.

  By the third loop around the deserted parking lot, I start singing an old country song.

  Well I gotta get drunk and I sure do dread it...

  Stojanka squeezes my hand and smiles, so I sing a little louder.

  Oh, I gotta get drunk and I sure do dread it...

  I end with a flourish in front of the car. Eliza looks up from the back seat. “Are you sure that’s appropriate?”

  “She doesn’t understand the words.”

  But on the next lap I switch to songs that are more American, like “This Land Is Your Land,” until I forget which verse goes where. After beginning “The Star-Spangled Banner,” I quit on the high notes. Then I try “Alaska’s Flag.”

  Eight stars of gold on a field of blue—

  Alaska’s flag. May it mean to you...

  I am about as far from Alaska as I can get, as far from home and the rest of the family as any of us has ever been. All I want to do is get out of these ridiculous clothes and go home.

  ON HER NEW American birth certificate, my daughter’s name is Stojanka Antoanetova Stephanova Lende. It’s a big name for a small girl. I am listed as the mother and Chip is the father. Her birth date is the same day and month as on her Bulgarian birth certificate, but the year listed corresponds to when we adopted her, rather than the year of her birth. Her first name is unusual—it’s the name given to a child who survives after a mother has many miscarriages or stillborn babies. It means “special gift” or “blessing.” The second name is her mother’s family name, and the third is from her father’s family. Stojanka is in the Lende family now, and no one here calls her Stojanka anymore. When she first got here, my father had trouble pronouncing Stojanka on the telephone. When he came to Haines to meet her, he kept calling her Solzhenitsyn. Then one day at the newspaper office, Tom and Steve decided that Stojanka was close enough to Stolichnaya, the name of a brand of vodka that no one can pronounce either, and that everyone just calls Stoli instead. They nicknamed her Stoli—and she liked it.