Cyril comes to America: an overseas adoption.

Russian telephones, depending on your frame of mind, can be an annoyance or an adventure--not unlike the country itself. On our first night in Moscow, sodden with jetlag and fatigue, my wife and I were jolted awake near midnight by an unfamiliar staccato chime.

"Da?"

I couldn't make out what was being said.

"Do you speak English? Pa angliyski?"

"Yes, two hundred dollars U.S.," the voice assured me. "Are you to like girl for night?"

I hung up the phone.

"Who was it?" Anne-Marie asked.

"A call girl."

"At least she had the decency to phone ahead."

Two months earlier, the connection from Moscow was much worse, which was understandable insofar as we were driving along the Taconic Parkway in upstate New York when Anne-Marie's cell phone rang. The Russian coordinator of our adoption agency wished us a Merry Christmas and had just succeeded in explaining that our application had been approved when her voice dissolved in static.

"It's these damned hills," I complained as we zigged along a nasty curve outside Carmel. "Try calling Barbara."

Anne-Marie got through to the agency's U.S. office and asked to speak to our caseworker. Yes, she had just talked to Moscow herself. Yes, there was a baby available for placement. A boy, eight months old. Anne-Marie relayed each bit of information to me as I accelerated to pass a minivan full of Hasids just outside of Fishkill.

"Where?" I asked. "In Moscow?"

"Where is he?" she shouted into the telephone. We were going around Bear Mountain and I was afraid she would lose the connection again.

The caseworker shuffled through her files.

"Novosibirsk. In Siberia. You should plan on leaving sometime in February."

At the airport in Moscow, our interpreter and driver found us fighting off a platoon of taxi touts and put us in the car. Marina, the interpreter, was a university student in her early twenties; Sergei, the driver, was of indeterminate middle age. During the long ride to our hotel, Marina began to go over procedures with us.

"I hope you declared how much cash you were carrying to customs," she warned us. (We had.) "Did they stamp the declaration?" (They did.) "Could you show it to me?" (We were happy to.)

Then she handed me a folder. "This is registration for the hotel. Please fill out now, as you will be saving the time later on. Sometimes desk can be very busy."

The Hotel Russia is extremely large (I seem to recall seeing the name in a Guinness Book of World Records entry) and has "Brezhnev Era" all but carved over the front door. With more than five thousand rooms it is hardly ever full and will probably never turn a profit (the municipal government, which owns it, plans to tear it down as soon as the demolition funds can be raised). At the reception desk, Marina went to the front of the line and said something to one of the clerks, who was at that moment refusing to acknowledge an extremely excited young man pounding his fist on the counter and pointing to one of the soldiers sitting at a table by the elevator. As the young man continued to shout, the clerk took our papers and handed over a key. Marina walked us to the elevator and pointed to the soldier sitting at his desk.

"You will have to show this to him each time you go upstairs."

"What was that man so upset about?"

"It was not to do with you. He was angry that they would not let him bring a girl upstairs. You must call me tomorrow to arrange flight to Novosibirsk. May I borrow a pen?"

She wrote out her telephone number on the back of a baggage claim.

"Is this Montblanc?" she asked.

"Yes it is," I admitted. "It was a gift."

"Very nice. Who would not to love such a gift?"

I said something noncommittal as Sergei passed by with the smaller of our bags.

"Sergei likes cologne," Marina added helpfully.

Novosibirsk, like Cleveland, comes as a pleasant surprise the first time you visit it. Flat and sprawling, it is like all Russian cities made up largely of cheaply built concrete apartment towers, but since there is far more land to spread them out here you do not carry away the overwhelming sensation of squalor that is almost unavoidable in Moscow. A local ballet troupe is justly famed, and there are a number of other institutions and landmarks (the railway station, the circus, the research park, etc.) that are "second only to Moscow" in size or importance.

There is a point in Novosibirsk that is said to be the geographical center of Russia. Now that they have rebuilt the tiny church that Nicholas II once raised on the spot, it has become a tradition for couples to be photographed there on their wedding day. One afternoon, while we were waiting to receive our court date, Anne-Marie and I walked through the icy streets to visit the spot. A young man agreed to take our picture and walked part of the way back to our hotel with us afterwards. When we told him we lived in New York, he nodded gravely.

"My father lives in Brooklyn."

It was a common response. Just about everyone has some close relative living abroad, and many Russians told us that remittances sent from abroad are the only thing that has averted universal destitution during the past ten years. In a country where 5,000 rubles ($160) is considered a good month's wage, a few twenties sent through the post now and then can make a great difference. I asked the boy if his father was happy in America.

"He cannot practice medicine there, but he makes good money."

"How?"

"He moves furniture."

"You must miss him."

"As soon as I finish school I will be leaving myself."

"You don't think things are going to improve?"

He smiled the way teenagers do when they don't want to laugh in your face.

"Oh, no. Things are going to get much worse."

The first thing we noticed when we walked into the orphanage was a strong smell of cabbage. Anne-Marie, who spent much of her childhood in Ireland, found this comforting. I, who spent the first two years of my life in an orphanage but have always detested cabbage, found it oddly comforting as well. The director of the orphanage, an efficient and kindly woman named Natalia, took our coats and asked us to fill out more forms (there was some confusion about how to transliterate the "Mc" in Anne-Marie's maiden name into Cyrillic characters), and wondered whether we could afford to donate some medical supplies. I assured the director that we could and offered her an envelope full of rubles (our interpreter had suggested the amount), which she accepted without counting. Then she led us through an assembly room (small chairs, hardwood floor, mirrors and ballet barres on the walls), a conservatory (glass ceiling, hanging plants and potted flowers), past a laundry (moist air and the smell of detergent), and into a long vestibule.

She opened a door and we found ourselves in a large ward with one C-shaped playpen running the length of three walls. Ten or twelve infants were inside, crawling, sleeping, drooling, crying, chewing on various objects, staring into space, hitting toys with the flats of their hands, smiling, laughing, screaming, and babbling. One or two were being fed. Others were trying to stand by pulling themselves up against the playpen rails. A tape deck was playing Tchaikovsky.

The director spoke to the ward monitor, who looked at us and back to the director. Natalia walked us into a small adjoining room and asked us to take off our shoes. As I was undoing my laces, Anne-Marie began to sob and I looked up. The ward monitor and two other women stood at the doorway holding a baby who had just closed his fingers around Anne-Marie's thumb.

"This is Cyril."

Cyril laughed.

Above the bench in the courtroom there was a double-headed eagle, a very ancient dynastic symbol representing the union of church and state. It looked newer than anything else in the room, which was dingy and functional and reminded me of the secret tribunal in The Spy Who Came in from the Cold. We stood when the judge entered and listened to a long Russian preamble that our interpreter did not bother to translate. We had been carefully prepared by our coordinators and knew what the order of the proceedings would be. I would declare our petition of adoption. The director of the orphanage would then offer her report and recommendation, as would the representative of the city welfare agencies. Finally, the prosecutor would offer the state's argument concerning the best welfare of the child. Some prosecutors were known to oppose overseas adoptions on principle and would argue against the petition as a matter of course. The judge would retire to her chamber for a few minutes after all reports had been made and return to issue her verdict.

I made my petition quickly, using phrases I had memorized over the preceding days, and waited for the judge's questions.

"If this child were to develop serious medical conditions, would you wish to return him to the custody of the state?"

"Certainly not."

"Will you tell him he was adopted?"

"Yes, just as my parents told me."

She nodded and turned to the prosecutor, who stood and asked me the worst question anyone can be asked in an overseas adoption hearing.

"Why do you think you should be given preference over a Russian family in adopting this child?"

I had been prepared for this, so I knew what to say.

"I don't. I simply ask that my petition be judged according to its merits."

"Do you think he will be happier in America than in Russia?"

This sounded like an easy question to blow, so I pretended to misunderstand the translation and thought it over. The judge had read my dossier, as had the prosecutor. I knew that they knew every public detail of our lives, and many of the private ones. Besides that, the judge had already received the French perfume we had been assured was her favorite. The prosecutor had been given nothing.

"I think that he will be far happier in a loving home," I replied, "than in an orphanage. I know I certainly was."

Back in Moscow once more, we stayed in a new Marriott on Tverskaya Street. There were so many Americans with freshly adopted babies there that Anne-Marie started calling it the Marriott Maternity. All along the hallways that opened onto a central atrium, the sounds of crying could be heard at most hours of the day or night. Catering to its clientele, the management served bacon and eggs at the breakfast buffet, but also included porridge and kasha for the children. Some of the parents had adopted two or even three children, and each morning families of four or five could be seen happily conversing at a single table in several languages. The maids' housekeeping carts included stuffed animals along with soap and towels.

At Kennedy Airport, the customs lines were even worse than they were in Moscow. Cyril, having slept through most of the flight, yawned and looked lazily about at the posters and the luggage trolleys as they clacked by. When we reached the booth, I handed over our passports and the sealed INS packet the American Embassy had prepared for us. The customs clerk, not having expected the extra paperwork, angrily tore the envelope open and began stamping the various forms with a groan. Anne-Marie gave me a worried look.

"Is something wrong?" she asked.

The clerk looked up, about as apologetic as a New Yorker can be.

"No problem, just a nuisance. These things are a lot of work."

"You're telling me."

We collected the papers and walked through the glass doors into the lobby. Cyril looked around him, yawned, and fell back asleep.

James J. Uebbing is a New York City writer and editor.