Chapter 44

Day Five

Before I get into our story of the fifth day, the day we were going to meet Liana and her family, I will back up a few weeks to first tell another story.

I wanted to take gifts to Roma’s family members I was finally meeting in person.  What do you give people you’ve never met? As an artist, I could think of one way I could share myself. I painted small rocks, a current popular American art trend. Here are some of them. 

For Liana, Roma’s sister, I decided I would paint a small, 8×10 inch portrait of Roma. Should I “return” Roma to Liana as the precious little boy she adored, or as the handsome young man with whom she would never be reunited.  I had a favorite photo him that I decided to paint, as the sweet, smiley boy to whom she was so devoted.

In my favorite photo, Roma was an eight year old, just six months older than when Liana last saw him in early 2002. I couldn’t decide on a background. Suddenly I decided on a familiar scene from Georgia I had seen while investigating Roma’s ancestral home. I had sent some of his ashes to be buried beside his father, and traveling there to meet his family, I decided a Georgian scene made sense, at least to me.

In my investigations of the Republic of Georgia, one picture kept coming up. I was drawn to the mysterious image of an ancient hilltop church. I hoped it held some significance to their family, or at the very least, it was a recognized national symbol for Georgia.  I convinced myself it would work.

I studied lots of internet images of the fabled fourteenth century structure that sat isolated atop of a high mountain peak, surrounded by a veiled, sacred vastness with even higher mountains for the backdrop.

But I knew nothing of the area. I wasn’t even curious about another unpronounceable location name. I simply loved the image.

The photo I chose had clouds. I normally don’t like to paint clouds. As I struggled with their realism, Bruce suggested I leave them out. “They look too stripe-y. Too straight across,” he critiqued. Headstrong, I was determined to persevere.  Finally satisfied, I sat the painting aside, and before we left, I wrapped it in pink rose paper, and slipped it in a gift bag for Liana. 

Fast forward a few weeks. Misha and Lia were picking us up on the morning of June 8 to head to our next adventure. On this day, we were traveling to meet Liana who was also traveling across those rugged Caucuses mountains from Russia. As usual, we had no idea where we were going, only that Liana would be at the other end of the day’s journey.

I could tell by the way Lia’s eyes danced when she said “Kazbegi” that the region was special to her. Thus was my introduction into our destination of day five. the day. There would be a few stops along the way, because we could hardly drive three hours without passing points of interest.

Lia and I, alone in the middle seat of the white van and without a translator were mostly silent. Misha was engrossed in a conversation with Bruce. I had ample time to recall the scenario that joined us all together. I recalled the joy in finally locating Liana in the closing days of 2014, and the heart wrenching message I had to send her less than a year later. Our plans to reunite the long-lost siblings, separated almost thirteen years, was not to be.

During this highly anticipated and emotional drive to meet Roma’s sister, my eyes leaked for most of the three hour trip. According to Roma’s stories, Liana, ten years his senior, was a doting and stable figure for him in his turbulent childhood. She had loved him well. Her love had taught him how to love and trust others, which made his transition with us in 2002 easy. He understood family; he knew how to love and bond.

Not only had I grieved for Roma the past one year, six months, and two days, I had grieved for Liana, and then Lia when I became aware of the extended close-knit family, a family who I had grown to love and respect from our first awkward translations on VK.com, Russia’s social media. My favorite topics of conversation for weeks was this unbelievable and miraculous news.

I glanced over at Lia often, who smiled back at me through her own tears. Lia understood. Sweet Lia was wearing pink roses to honor my love of the now sacred-to-me flower. They were on her shirt and on her black canvas shoes. I reached out and squeezed her hand, so wishing there was no language barrier, and we could just chat freely, yet thankful for universal languages, like smiles and tears. 

We stopped at a couple of sites along the way. Another beautiful church, and an impressive overlook at the astounding beauty of the snowcapped mountains. The air chilled as we headed north and up into the mountains. We stopped to climb up on a glacier, a first for me. I never imagined Georgia, only twice the size of the small state of Maryland, would have so many varied attractions. 

When we finally pulled off the road up to the little pink cottage in the rural village, my heart was pounding. When I saw Liana, my leaky eyes gushed, seeing this beauty who had lovingly and sacrificially cared for her little brother, my youngest son.  All eyes were on us, as we embraced.

Our translator in this region was another Sudzhashvili cousin. She was an English teacher at a nearby school. As we ate lunch, our translator listened to Lia, Liana, and the other Russian and Georgian speakers tell her the story. I knew they were talking about Roma and our adoption, because often they would gesture to us, as if we understood their foreign words. The translator’s eyes would fill with tears as she listened, probably for the first time, to the details of the story. Then she turned to Bruce and me, visibly touched, and said, “You hear stories like this, but you don’t expect them to happen in your own family.” I certainly related to that sentiment.

After lunch, we sat and the translator made it possible to share our thoughts with each other. I told Liana to ask me anything. But instead Liana shared her heartbreaking memory of when she went to say her final goodbye to Roma in 2002, as the orphanage officials told her she could, yet when she arrived, he was already gone.

Understandably heartbroken and angry, she demanded to know why. They told her that his new family, us, showed up early and insisted on taking him immediately. It was a lie. We were actually surprised by the swiftness our paperwork was accepted, making it possible for us to fly to Russia much sooner than we thought possible. And once in Roma’s home region, we were shocked that Roma was delivered to our host family’s door two days before the court date. Our adoption agency had told us we would take him after our court appearance when Roma would officially become our son, and not before. I was sad to see so much pain in Liana’s eyes as she relived the devastating memory. Perhaps they had done it to spare the siblings the agony the separation would cause. I’ll never know. The authorities had also had her write out a statement relinquishing all rights to her brother. That seemed an unnecessary cruelty, since she had no power, and she tortured herself for years for turning him over to the orphanage to what she believed was best for him. Her signed form was a formality. It changed nothing. And it made nothing legal.

She spoke to the translator passionately. “He wasn’t an orphan. He had a mother and a father. They distracted me away, and took him. They had no right to take him.”

We all closed our eyes, and exhaled in unison, fighting against the assault of a fifteen year old memory of a then-seventeen-year-old girl who had no control over a helpless situation. Even Misha, was wiping his tears.

When those of us around the table blocked our minds of tortuous memories, and paused sufficiently, I offered Liana my gift bags.

I had University of North Carolina NCAA championship tee shirts for Liana’s boys, ages seven and nine. I was confident Roma would want his nephews to have shirts of his favorite college team. I brought his NY Yankee baseball cap and a few other sports jerseys in his private and cherished collection.

In one of the gift bags was a rock with a painted pink rose. “This is for your mother,” I mentioned the person who was never mentioned. There were understandably complicated feelings surrounding this woman who I will never know, the one who had given birth to Roma and Liana, and two other lost children. The room felt awkward at the reference of her. “Please tell her that Roma forgave her. And I know he would like her to forgive herself.” I had a Russian friend translate my story about the meaning of pink roses, and printed it and enclosed a copy with gift. I wanted Marina, Roma’s mother, to think of the miracle and see God every time she saw a pink rose.

When Liana opened Roma’s portrait, our translator looked at me strangely and asked, “How do you know about this place?” She pointed to the background, the church. I was startled by her sudden reaction. Had I made a mistake choosing that background monument? Was it in some way offensive? I explained that I had seen it on the internet and was drawn to the image.

I didn’t know the name of that church I painted in the background, or its location, when the painting started taking shape weeks earlier. On this afternoon, June 8, 2017, a year and a half after Roma left us all, here on a Sacred pilgrimage, sitting with people who shared his DNA, and who were never really strangers, I would learn that Gergeti Trinity Church was in this region of Kazbegi,  miles from where we sat in Liana’s little pink cottage with pink roses on the tablecloth, on the curtains, on the bedspread, on her dishes. Unknown to Bruce and me, our afternoon plan involved driving to that very church in my painting’s background.

Kazbegi was the home of the Sudzhashvilis.  It had been Roma’s last name, and we kept that name for his middle name. Many of the cousins still live in the village. Our translator’s family business in part was driving tourists to the elevated peak where the church set. The church I had painted in ignorance was our destination on this sacred day of meeting Liana, in a region from where Roma’s family had originated. It all made perfect sense, in the usual way God shows up and shows off in my God-Stories, excitedly told, yet pale in comparison of His greatness.

While we waited for an available vehicle for the assent after tourist peak hours, we drove around the village. When we returned, Igor’s cousins and aunt had prepared a meal for us. As the translator told the story to her mother and brother, I found a photo of Roma on my phone to show them the cousin they would never meet. The brother, Igor’s first cousin, looked briefly at a strangely familiar young man smiling back, and he almost recoiled from the image. He handed it back to me quickly, and waved me away as his tears overtook him, the red rims emphasizing his green eyes, the color of Roma’s. It was too much like Igor, he told his sister. He couldn’t see any more photos. Lia had once told me Igor seemed “doomed from the beginning.” Now his son had met a tragic end too, and dredging up all the sadness was too much for the big man who had played with Igor as a child.

In late afternoon, we got into the four-wheel drive vehicle to make the half-hour drive of steep switchbacks to the top. Looking down out of my window, I could see the rough, rocky paths we had just traversed far below. There were no guard rails to hem us in. Occasionally there were stretches of impotent barbed wire to hold us on the road. I wondered if any vehicles ever slipped off the road and down the side of the sleep mountain. When we were almost to the top, my Fitbit signaled that I had walked 10,000 steps, many of those recorded were from being jostled on the road to the summit. Although I thought of all the dangers we faced, I never had a single fear traveling to the summit location of Gergeti Trinity Church, majestically situated on a 7000′ peak with Mount Kazbek, 16,000″ in the distance.

Once we all unloaded from three-seat Mitsubishi, and walked the rest of the way to the peak, there was a hushed holiness shrouding the fourteenth century church and grounds. Surprisingly, we had the place almost to selves. I imagined the difficulty of bringing building materials to this height almost seven hundred years ago, without modern machinery.

It was a dramatically cloudy afternoon. It had a distinct air of sacredness, almost like an electric charge was in the air. The silence had a sound of its own. The immense mountains looked not so far away until you looked down and saw the tiny villages dotting the far-off valleys. It was hard to take it all in. We walked the grounds and inside the church. We took photos. But the most remarkable sight was what was happening in the sky.

“Look at the clouds,” I pointed, calling to Bruce. I leaned in close to my husband, under his arm as a shield against the late afternoon, altitude, and the spirit chill of a miracle. Yes, God was there. So close.  The “stripe-y” clouds that were in my painting, clouds I had agonized over and refused the easy-way impulse to leave them out, had gradually formed themselves in “stripe-y” patterns. right in our majestic view. Only God! 

I’ll share another story that ran concurrent with this one, but I couldn’t write them at the same time. Each deserve their own sacred space. 

I won’t be able to share this links in a book, so enjoy then now. Here is a link to a video I found on the internet that reveals the spirit of lovely Kazbegi. Put it on your bucket list! 

Continue with Chapter 45