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  It took me a long time just to walk across the campus from the pharmacy to my building. I laid down on a bench and slept for three hours. When someone finally woke me, chiding me for sleeping on the bench in the middle of the day, I went back to my building, collapsing as soon as I got there. Understandably, that frightened my teacher Irina and my classmates, but by then Dr. Nina had gone home for the day and no one knew about the medicine I had been sent to get. I collapsed at my desk and slept through school that afternoon. When I requested to be excused from dinner and go to bed instead, my teacher became even more alarmed.

  I awoke in the middle of the night with a lump in my throat obstructing my breathing and my ability to drink. I was terribly thirsty. When the doctor came in at 9:00 the next morning she immediately knew what was wrong. She called an ambulance and I was taken to the hospital. There, my stomach and blood were cleaned by a series of very uncomfortable processes. It turns out that the child dosage for that medicine was ¼ pill a day and I had swallowed eight of them! I ended up in the hospital for almost a month. They told me later I had come close to dying and that if I had taken even just one more pill, I would not have survived. It was a valuable lesson for me and scared me from ever taking illegal drugs. To this day I am very cautious taking medications of any kind.

  While in the hospital, after I began to feel better, I became the nurses’ helper. I loved being there and helping take care of the other children. I didn’t want to be released. But my erratic behavior was not over. About a week after returning to Sunnyville I got into an ugly fight with the nurse on duty in our building. Her name was Lucine. She was an Armenian woman and all of the children hated her. She was just plain mean to us, and most of us were afraid of her. She was picking on one of the girls and I spoke up to defend her. Lucine lashed out at me. With frustration, hurt, and anger toward Lucine swirling inside me, none of which I had ever confronted or dealt with, it all bubbled to the surface. I don’t remember exactly what she said to set me off; whatever it was, though, I had had enough. I grabbed a pair of scissors and yelled, “You leave us alone. You do this again and I’m going to kill you!”

  I knew, as the words were leaving my mouth, that I didn’t mean it. She had just pushed me too far and in anger I struck back. We children went back to our rooms. I calmed down and thought everything was fine. What I didn’t know was that the nurse immediately reported the incident to my caretaker who, unfortunately, happened to be Irina that week (Irina and Melana were continuing their rotation of duties as they had at the first sanatorium).

  Irina concurred with Nurse Lucine that I had “mental problems” and promptly had me committed to a mental hospital.

  I was escorted to a big, old building in St. Petersburg with bars on the windows. Children in this institution were classified in one of two categories upon admittance and treated accordingly. One was the straightjacketed, fully drugged approach for children with severe problems. Most of them never left. The other approach was less severe, utilizing some behavior modification drugs while still allowing the child to function as normally as possible. Fortunately, I was in this latter group.

  Since work was believed to be the best medicine of all, I didn’t have school while I was in this institution. Instead, I spent my days packaging ladies’ nylons for the State. I slept in a huge room with fifty beds, and for the entire time I was there was never allowed outside.

  I remember sitting on my windowsill, behind the bars, watching—and longing for—the world outside. I spent much of my time lying on my bed, thinking about my life. Life was not making much sense for me. Why was I even alive? What was the purpose of my existence?

  When she returned to Sunnyville the next week Melana was angry with Irina. While she agreed that I needed to be punished for threatening the nurse, she did not agree that I had mental problems, much less that I needed to be put in a mental institution. But her hands were tied. At that point she could not protect me or rescue me.

  During the time I was in the mental institution, my adoptive mother Larisa was kept informed. After about four months she came and had me released and gave me two choices: I could go back to live with them, or go to the streets. I chose the streets. I lived on the streets for a very short time—a few weeks—before the police caught me and took me back to Orphanage Number 51.

  Unfortunately for me, while Melana was still there as a caretaker, she was no longer with our class. I was back “home,” but with all new caretakers and teachers who rotated from day to day. The director of Number 51 wanted to send me to a special needs orphanage where I would basically have been locked up for the rest of my life. She resented having to take me back in, since I was legally not an orphan, and would love to have gotten rid of me. Her reasoning for putting me into a special needs facility wasn’t so much about my well-being as much as it was that she was fearful of what I might do as a result of my trauma with my parents, my life on the streets, and my recent stay in the mental facility. I’m sure to her I was a bad risk, and one she was tired of.

  When Melana heard what the director wanted to do she literally got down on her knees and begged her to reconsider. Once again, Melana was proving good to her promise to protect me from harm that she made on the day she met all of us five years earlier. The director relented, and I was able to once again join my class.

  It was a rough adjustment for me. While at some level I was thankful to be taken in by the orphanage, after several years with Melana, life at the sanatoriums, and my six-month interlude with Tetya Marina and Dyadya Misha, I faced, for the first time, the stark reality of life as an orphan. There were no more hugs or kisses or individualized attention and affection, no more birthday parties. I continued my process of introspection I had begun during my months at the mental institution, wondering who I was and what was the purpose in living. I questioned why I had to go through all that I had endured. Most of all, I yearned for purpose. I was fearful of what was to come. I was now thirteen years old and I knew that in a few short years the state system would turn me out on my own. I desperately wanted to cling to hope, but I found nothing within myself with which to muster hope.

  At this time in my life I hated men. There was a caretaker at Orphanage 51, Alexander, who struck me once when we were all away at winter camp. I was so enraged I took off on my own and walked back to the orphanage—all thirty miles. I cried much of the way, screaming a vow I made to myself: “I will never let another man touch me ever again!” My emotional and physical state when I arrived back at Orphanage 51 must have garnered some sympathy because they allowed me to stay at the orphanage all by myself, with just the women on security. Or maybe they just didn’t know what to do with me. I certainly didn’t.

  Not long after this I had my first court appearance with my parents to hopefully dissolve the adoption. The court was back in the town where they lived and I was accompanied by a social worker, Konstantin. My parents didn’t bother to show up.

  Things continued to spiral down. At one point during this dark period of my young life I had just had enough and I took off, running as far and as fast as I could from Orphanage 51. The director reported it to the police. “If you catch him,” she said, “don’t bother bringing him back here!” When the police did catch me they took me directly to the juvenile delinquent home.

  This was a huge building, surrounded by barbed wire fencing, bars on all the windows, and guarded by military. This was the place they housed kids who repeatedly ran away from home—or orphanages. It was also where they put kids who had committed crimes. It was basically a holding ground for kids while the authorities decided what was to be done with you.

  There were two sections. For most of the older kids, and those who had committed crimes, it was more like a jail where they were housed in cells. The other section was more like a group home for runaways of all ages, some of whom had committed petty crimes.

  Upon my arrival I was placed in the infirmary while they processed me and determined into which section they would pu
t me. I was there for three days. I slept on a wooden bench with no blankets. They would bring me a little food in a small aluminum bowl twice a day. For all of my years in orphanages and all my visits to the police department, this was my first experience at being locked up. It was frightening to say the least.

  I had no idea what was going on during those three days. I assumed they were talking with the orphanage director and my legal parents. They surely had access to my records and knowledge of my stay in the mental hospital. I had good reasons to fear the worst. Maybe my time was up and they would lock me away and “throw away the key.” In some ways I couldn’t blame them.

  I was relieved when, at the end of those three days, they moved me into the group home. It had a playroom and a huge bedroom, like the orphanage, with forty or more beds. The toilets were nothing more than holes in the ground—like an outhouse, inside. There were sinks with cold water; no showers. The smells in the place were horrendous. We had police officers for guards. And I was on the “good” side!

  Homosexuality was very prevalent in the juvenile delinquent center. The boys told me horrible stories about peeing in the younger boys’ mouths after they fell asleep, or worse yet, molesting them. I was so scared to go to sleep at night that I rarely slept.

  I endured this for three months. One horrific morning, before the rest of the children were awake, some older boys came to me and stripped me of my clothes. As it happened, Konstantin, the social worker from Orphanage 51, arrived to pick me up, just as I was about to be molested. To this day I have no idea why he was sent there or why I was released, I was just thankful that it happened and that I got out of there when I did.

  Kolya (Melana’s husband), Maria, Sveta, Melana, Edik, and me, at the Kozeevas’ dacha. This was taken in between my stays at the mental institution and the juvenile home

  Back at Number 51 I was introduced to three new caretakers. One of them was a man named Vladimir. He was a father of two grown children and was a choreographer for our dance classes. He was a very artsy man who loved little boys. He never molested anyone that I knew of but always used inappropriate touching. He hated me and Ed, joining in with those who called us “the Aristocrats.” He hated the way we dressed, our cleanliness and manners, and the fact that we didn’t smoke, drink, or swear like the rest of the boys. It drove him crazy. Vladimir, like so many of my countrymen, was an alcoholic who often came to the orphanage drunk. And he continued to drink while he was at work. He was one of our summer camp directors the next summer and he drank all day, every day, during the weeks we were there.

  One night that summer all of the counselors were out on the lake drinking after the kids had gone to bed. We were staying in an old building at the camp that had been around since World War II. It had never been renovated, they just kept adding another coat of paint. The building probably had sixty coats on it.

  The counselors came back to the building at about 4:00 a.m. One of them left a cigarette burning by the electric heater. What started as a small spark quickly engulfed the entire house in flames. I heard a woman outside, screaming, “Fire!” One of the counselors ran into our room, shouting for all of us to get outside immediately, telling us to leave everything behind. Fortunately, no one was hurt and everyone escaped. The building—all seven thousand square feet of it—burned to the ground in less than thirty minutes.

  Vladimir and his wife came running from their building to the burning building. His wife, who was responsible for the inventory at camp, was screaming, “We must save the mattresses!” In true Soviet style she was more concerned for the mattresses than for the sixty children whose lives had been in danger.

  They officially shut down the entire camp after the fire. It was a public facility and most of the children there had parents who paid for them to go to camp. But because Orphanage Number 51 was closed for the summer we were the only kids who remained there for that last month. With only the clothes on our backs, we moved to another building. We spent our last weeks of summer camp cleaning out the burned-out building. A bright spot for us was that the counselors would let us go to the lake and swim each evening after working and getting dirty all day.

  One of our counselors was a devout Russian Orthodox. She found out that I was interested in church and began to take me to the old Orthodox church across the lake. It was about an hour’s walk for us since we had to go clear around the lake. I enjoyed going to church once again for the first time in several years. One Sunday as we walked, she challenged me to be a spiritual leader to the other orphans and she asked me if I would like to meet with the pastor to discuss my becoming a kroystniy otetz (“godfather”). I eagerly agreed.

  I met with the batushka (as priests in the Russian Orthodox Church are known) and he informed me that to become a “godfather” I needed to lead others to baptism. He told me that it was my responsibility to talk to the other orphans about the importance of baptism and he gave me a little prayer book. Like many liturgical denominations, in the Russian Orthodox Church the members do not pray their own prayers, they read and memorize written prayers. The batushka told me to bring some kids the following Friday night so they could confess their sins and then they would be baptized on Sunday. I took my assignment very seriously. I selected thirteen kids and persuaded them to come for confession and baptism at the appointed time.

  Shortly after the baptism we left camp and all returned to Orphanage 51. I continued to take my role as “godfather” seriously and felt it was my job to make sure my “godchildren” grew spiritually, even though I really had no idea what that meant.

  Tanya, one of my thirteen “godchildren” and a classmate, was a social orphan. Her mother was an alcoholic and her father was handicapped. The father retained legal rights even though the mother’s parental rights had been revoked. Tanya lived at the orphanage because her father could not care for her. She did, however, get to go home for visits on the weekends.

  One Monday she didn’t show up at Number 51 after her weekend visit. When the caretakers called her home, Tanya’s father said that she had taken the bus to return to the orphanage that morning.

  It was two weeks later that they found her body. It was in a culvert by the highway. She had been raped and stabbed ten times. By the time they found her, animals had gotten to her body. Tanya’s best friend Sveta (my first “love”) had to go down and identify the body. Even though there wasn’t much left of her to identify, Sveta knew her by her hands and the little ring on her finger.

  I went to a Russian Orthodox church in the city that night and lit a candle for Tanya’s salvation, a tradition in the church. The church refused to do a memorial service for her because she was an orphan. I felt the weight of the world upon me. I felt that the other kids would be looking to me for spiritual leadership, for comfort, and for peace amidst their anguish, but inside I knew that I had nothing to offer them.

  Our entire class went to the cemetery. Because she was an orphan she had to be buried outside the city. We had to escort her body there ourselves. We carried the casket out from the morgue, put it on the bus with us, and rode with her on the long journey to her grave.

  My classmates all stood around the grave and looked to me in bewilderment. I laid a candle on her casket and said the Lord’s Prayer, the only thing I could think to say at the time. I was broken up by Tanya’s murder, but I was also heartbroken to realize that I had failed everyone as a spiritual leader. For all its ritual and “spirituality,” my religion had nothing to offer me when I needed it most, and I in turn had nothing to offer to the others. I turned my back on the Russian Orthodox Church that day, and accelerated my journey into darkness, despair, and hopelessness.

  About that same time, one of our classmates, Sasha, was adopted. Even though we never talked about adoption or even thought about it much (and after my experience, I certainly never wanted to think about it again), it hit all of us pretty hard. It was not just difficult to lose one of our “family,” but also to realize that he now had a family and we di
dn’t. Within days of Sasha’s leaving with his new family, the parents of one of the girls in our class got their parental rights back and came to take her home again.

  I should have been happy for those kids, yet I wasn’t. It just made me more sad and depressed. To make matters worse, my friend Misha (who was also a social orphan, with a single mom) got word that his mother was found dead in her apartment. She had been dead for almost a month before they found her. Misha took it very hard. Yet again I found myself with no words of comfort or answers for a grieving friend. Like me, Misha was now a true orphan.

  I became a real loner. I found myself crying uncontrollably all the time. One “disco night” at Number 51, while everyone else was dancing and having a good time, I ran up onto the stage and rolled myself into the curtain and just cried. I spent a lot of time alone in my room, contemplating, reflecting, wondering. I felt hopeless. I saw no purpose in living. I remember thinking, “Why was I born? What’s the point?” The orphanage was by a river and I would often sit on the embankment just to be alone to think and cry. It was there at the river’s edge that I began contemplating how to end my life. I thought about how I would go about drowning myself. I tried choking myself with my own hands, and one time with a rope, but I would pass out before I could successfully end my life.