Three Stations

17

At three weeks Katya was still a part of her mother. Every taste and smell, warmth and touch, was her mother. When she was startled her mother's voice soothed her, and if she could not focus farther than her mother's face, that was enough. Like the earth and moon, they seemed to be in perpetual orbits around each other, and when she woke and heard a different voice, her universe began to collapse. The babushka Auntie Lena went into the Kazansky Station ladies' room and came out as Magdalena, still an imposing woman but colorfully dressed, with hoop earrings and hennaed hair. Basket in hand, she swept through the waiting room and joined her partner, Vadim, who had made his own transformation from drunken soldier to sober civilian. Together they left the station and crossed a side plaza with a statue of Lenin to an eight-story apartment house that overlooked Three Stations.

Usually she put on her Auntie Lena act to troll for girls. Hard class always had a couple. She would soften them up with stories about money to be made in Moscow and share snapshots of herself and a "daughter" in front of an expensive car. Why endure the boredom of a rural village giving sex for free to pimply youths when a glamorous life awaited them in exclusive clubs as escorts of the wealthiest, most dynamic men in the world? Then Vadim would step in as a menace or a friend in need; he could play it either way.

The baby was pure luck. Vadim had gotten drunk with a General Kassel, who confided how his wife was driving him crazy from wanting a baby. Not a shelter baby or some disease-ridden four-year-old delinquent, but a real baby. If possible, one with no birth certificate or history. The general was being reassigned to a new post two thousand kilometers from the old. It would be nice if they could show up without having to explain to people the miraculous addition of a newborn. The general named a figure that was astronomical. At best Magdalena and Vadim had hoped for a pregnant girl who would prefer her freedom and money in her pocket to pushing a stroller with a snotty, bawling baby. Maya was the dream candidate.

"I'll tell you just how this will go. The new parents will examine the goods-that's only natural-but they will have milk, diapers and rattle laid out so they can play mommy and daddy right away. It will take fifteen minutes. They won't want us hanging around."

At the elevator Vadim asked if the baby's diapers were clean.

"Yes. She's a beautiful baby. The general and his wife should be very happy."

"What if it's a trap?"

"You're always so nervous. That girl's not going to go to the police. She's on the run. She's our ticket. A healthy baby without a single record? Who doesn't even exist on paper? That's one in a million." When the baby started to fuss, Magdalena smiled indulgently. "Our golden baby."

The Kassels were in a second-floor apartment borrowed from friends who were on holiday. The general welcomed Vadim and Magdalena with a bonhomie that didn't hide the sweat on his forehead. He had brought in a doctor the same way a sensible man has an auto mechanic check out a used car before buying.

The general's wife bit her knuckles. Her fingertips were already raw.

She said, "You should have given me more warning."

"Everything happened so fast. And we're leaving tomorrow."

However, she was ready with nappies and formula, as Magdalena had predicted, right down to the rattle.

The doctor warned the Kassels not to get their hopes up. Generally a baby was abandoned for a reason. The chances of a street foundling not being damaged or sickly were poor.

Magdalena opened the basket. "See for yourself."

While the doctor unwrapped the swaddling Vadim tried to entertain the general and his wife with lies about the baby's provenance, how the mother was a young ballerina forced to choose between the baby and a career. He tailed off when he noticed that no one was listening. The room's attention had shifted to the examination.

The human face was a map. The shape, size and position of the ears could imply one syndrome. The spacing of eyes, mouth or nose could imply another. Or genetic damage. No alarms yet.

She was quiet while the doctor listened to her chest and back, but she fussed during her ear exam and cried vigorously about having a light shined in her eyes. The doctor looked in the baby's mouth for thrush and checked the palate. Felt her abdomen, scanned her for rashes, bruises or birthmark and finally gave her a shot of hepatitis B, which didn't make her any happier.

"This is a well-cared-for infant," the doctor said.

"Is it healthy?" the general demanded.

"Oh, yes. Off a brief examination, thriving."

"Didn't we say so?" Vadim jumped out of his seat and shook the general's hand. "Congratulations, you're a father."

"I am! I feel different already!"

"This is an expensive blue blanket. Where did you get this child?" the doctor asked, but his question was overwhelmed by the popping of champagne corks and the lusty crying of the baby.

Magdalena said, "There's a good set of lungs. That's a good sign, much better than a silent baby."

Vadim clapped. "Everyone wins. The baby gets a loving home and the mother can return with a clear conscience to the pursuit of her art."

The wife said she was afraid of holding the baby and everyone assured her it would become second nature. Magdalena and Vadim stayed for one more toast, took their money and left. The doctor left a minute later.

"We're on our own now, the three of us," Kassel said. The plan was that they would leave the next day by train to his new posting, a thousand kilometers away, in a fresh start as a happy family.

"She's rejecting the bottle," his wife said.

"She was probably breast-fed. She'll get used to the bottle."

"I can't breast-feed."

"Of course not, that's what the formula is for."

"Why did you even mention breast-feeding?"

"It's no big thing."

"It is a big thing. She wants her mother."

"She's just hungry. As soon as she adjusts to the bottle, she will be fine."

"She doesn't like me."

"You're new to her."

"Look at her." The baby was red from kicking and squalling. "She hates me."

"You have to hold her."

"You hold her. Why did you bring her? Why is she here?"

"Because every time we see a baby, you tell me how much you want one."

"My baby, not somebody else's."

"You said you wanted to adopt."

"Some idiot from a shelter?"

"This is a perfect baby."

"If it were a perfect baby, it would shut up."

"Do you know how much I paid for this baby?"

"You paid for a baby? That's like paying for a cat."

And the baby cried.

There were no complaints because everyone in the surrounding apartments was at work. The baby cried itself to exhaustion, slept and regained enough strength to cry again. Just in case, the general turned on a television with the volume up. His wife pulled on a sleep mask and went to bed. Neither tried to feed the baby again.

During a lull in the crying, he carried a pillowcase stuffed with baby paraphernalia to a refuse bin in the basement. When he returned he found the baby on the floor, hoarse from crying, and his wife standing over it with her fists against her ears.

He asked, "What are you doing?"

"I can't sleep."

"So you moved her?"

"Someone has to. It just keeps crying. You're a general; order it to shut up."

"I'll get rid of it."

"Then do it."

In the bedroom closet Kassel found a shoe box complete with tissue to nestle in. As if that were an amenity.

The baby was a mess, its eyes swollen almost shut, nose stopped with mucus. A wheezing, shivering, smaller baby. He put it in the shoe box and taped the lid shut. Decided on no airholes. Put the shoe box in an oversize shopping bag and took the stairs down rather than meet anyone in the elevator.

The general didn't know Moscow well but his plan was to leave the bag amid the crowds and confusion of Three Stations. The problem was that when he got to Kazansky Station, he discovered how little confusion there actually was. Everyone moved with a purpose and had four or five eyes instead of two and all on the watch for suspicious behavior. He regretted the shopping bag; unfurled, it was large and gaudy and had an Italian logo that drew attention. He had to be casual. Unrattled. Even so, when the box shifted in the bag he panicked and headed for the nearest tunnel. He found himself in a pedestrian underpass that was a gallery of stalls staffed with women who would no doubt detect a baby's least whimper. Kassel was grateful to reach the blaring speakers of a music stall.

The problem was that his wife was so high-strung. She wasn't meant for the army life of moving from one dreary outpost to another, living in cold-water housing and forced to be grateful for that at a time when thousands of officers of the highest ranks were being shoved into early retirement. She said a million times that the only thing that would make her happy was a child.

Toward the end of the stalls, militia officers were stopping people at random to check their papers and search their bags. It was a fishing expedition for bribes and Kassel's impulse was to backtrack because he had forgotten his ID. If he had been in uniform, he would have been waved through. Instead the flow of foot traffic trapped him and pushed him toward an officer who was already reaching for the bag when a gang of street kids, none older than eight, squirmed through. They came and went like a swarm of gnats and collapsed the line, and by the time order was restored, the general was safe on the other side.

Now that he believed that luck was on his side, he marched directly to the boarding platforms, where he joined a crowd of passengers. He set the shopping bag down and stared down the track with a cigarette between his teeth, the picture of impatience, moving only to avoid the giant suitcases of day peddlers and the sharp edge of porters' carts. The baby was silent. No kicking, no fuss. Although the general took no pleasure in harming a baby in any way, he felt he had kept damage to a minimum.

Simple plans were the best, the general thought. When the train pulled in, he would join the disembarking riders and leave the shopping bag and baby behind. At this point it seemed providential that he hadn't had an ID to show the militia. There was no way to identify him. It was as if the baby had passed through the world as undetected as a gamma ray. As if it had never existed at all, not officially.

People stirred as a commuter train approached across a field of rails. This was the end of the line. As it drew closer the general saw riders standing in the aisles, folding their newspapers, closing their cell phones. He was in the perfect position to slip among them.

Only where was the Italian bag?

The bag had been at his feet and he hadn't strayed more than a few steps, yet it had disappeared. In the press of riders leaving the train and others boarding, the bag had vanished.

He melded with the stream of arrivals. Either the bag had been kicked into the gap between the platform and the train or a thief had unwittingly done him a favor. The general felt a guilty relief and could barely keep from running.

The scare came later, in the middle of the night, when two detectives knocked on the apartment door. Kassel felt that someone at the platform must have seen him with the bag. But the detectives only asked questions about a dead prostitute in a totally unrelated case and he honestly said he couldn't help. So, overall, he felt he had done fairly well. In fact, the memory of the baby was already starting to fade. At sunrise a half-dozen runaway kids hit a twenty-four-hour supermarket on the same street as police headquarters. They came like a gang of mice and created as much nuisance as possible, stuffing jars of Spanish olives and tins of tuna fish into their pockets, picking over organic fruit and avocados with their dirty hands. Some days ice cream was the target, other days any aerosol to sniff.

Security cameras tried to follow them, although grown men and women chasing homeless six-year-olds did not make a pretty picture. The staff ejected the kids as discreetly as possible and took a quick inventory of stolen items, petty stuff not worth reporting to the police, including sliced bread, strawberry jam, orangeade, energy bars, baby formula, nappies and a bottle.