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years.”
    â€œDon’t make me cry,” says Luba. “Last month Moscow. Before that, Thérèse. My heart’s already broken. ”
    â€œSo he was waiting in the closet, this Boris, singing old Jeanne Bichevskaya songs” — Luba snorts — “to keep himself amused. But then four years into this he had an adventure, a quite amazing adventure and he forgot all about his first owner.”
    Luba looks doubtful.
    â€œHis first owner was in the baby business.”
    â€œLike me,” says Luba.
    â€œLike you were ,” I say. Last year Luba gave up her pain-in-the-ass Russian-Canadian adoption agency to go into the import/export biz. “Different kind of imports,” she joked after she’d packed crates of birth certificates, reports from social workers, notes from doctors, provincial certificates — Russian, French, English, a mess of languages and papers — into storage. She wasn’t leaving the business completely, she said. For good friends at a good price, she’d be willing to pull some strings.
    The business of hooking up Russian babies with Western couples desperate for babies was noble, brutal and comedic. Luba had entertained me with stories when we’d first met: the adoptive mum who arrived in a Siberian outpost demanding McDonald’s. The couple who packed six weeks’ worth of kosher food into their suitcases before setting off for Moscow. (Aeroflot charged them for the extra weight.) The man who rang up $2,000 of long-distance phone calls from St. Petersburg to Montreal, then sent the bill to Luba. The woman who threw a cellphone at Luba when she found her new daughter had brown hair, not blonde.
    People behaved in outrageous ways when they adopted children, Luba said. I would be different, of course.
    â€œ Vite ,” says Luba, and looks back at her car again. She’ll be out of here soon.
    â€œSo the coat, this faithful old bag of cloth and feathers, is sitting there in his closet, getting nibbled by gluttonous Moscow moths, when one day, the door flies open and warm hands grab him and pull him free. Boris had almost forgotten what it was like to be touched.”
    â€œNo sex,” says Luba. “No fair.”
    And then Boris is out on the street again. My Moscow, he thinks, as the soft hands cradle him, crush him against the wool of another coat. He is being taken somewhere. He recognizes the stops of the Metro, the names like music: Tyoplystan, Konkovo, Belyayevo. Then he’s being rushed up the ten-lane roar of Leninski Prospekt. Gorky Park! Boris is ready to weep with the memories, but at a corner, he is thrust into another set of hands. I have been so cold! the new voice says. Arms push through his arms, a back spreads through his back.
    â€œBoris is ful filled ,” I say and Luba rolls her eyes.
    Then he and the person are running to a waiting car. Yaroslavl, he hears.
    â€œThat’s where we sent you,” says Luba. We have agreed not to talk about Yaroslavl. But there it is: out of my mouth, in the air.
    â€œWait,” I say. “The story.”
    Boris has never been to Yaroslavl before and neither has his wearer, apparently. She — Boris thinks it’s a she, though her voice is pitched low and he’s having trouble understanding her bad French and worse Russian. Mostly she speaks English. This doesn’t stop her from asking question after question of Alexei, the man behind the wheel. She wants to know everything: the climate of Yaroslavl, the exact population, the political situation, the social conditions. Alexei has not much to say about any of it. Early on he said, “I am Moscow,” and now mostly nods da and shakes nyet , because he doesn’t seem to much care about this woman. Boris tries to draw himself closer around her.
    Perhaps bolstered by this, the Woman, as Boris now thinks of her, pushes on. Has Alexei ever been to Yaroslavl’s Baby Orphanage #2 on