Finally, the list had arrived in the post. But when he’d opened the US government envelope, his heart beating fast, he’d been disappointed to see that the personal details of the adoptive families had been blacked out. Now he sipped his tea and slowly ran his thumb down every page, taking his time, carefully considering each name, trying to pick up the trail that had gone so cold in the dozen years since 1945.
Every morning Ilarion gave thanks in his prayers for his new life as hieromonk; a simple, quiet and deeply contemplative existence that was a bulwark against his harsh childhood in war-torn Berlin and his firsthand experience of the atrocities that people could commit. Still, he felt deeply guilty about losing his brother. He had let down his dead parents by failing to take care of the little boy, and he wanted to find him, and if he needed help, to give it to him.
With his rudimentary English he was able at least to puzzle out the meaning of each column: name, sex, age, hair and eye color, date of birth if known, and date and place of adoption. Many of the children had been so young that all that was listed was a first name or no name at all. The saving grace was that before the war there hadn’t been that large a Russian population living in Berlin—mostly émigrés who had fled the Communists, like his own parents. He silently thanked them for giving their sons traditional Russian names. It should be relatively easy to find a “Yuri” on a list with many boys named Hans or Wilhelm, though the names weren’t grouped alphabetically, or by birth or adoption date; it was like the list had been pulled together from a random pile of adoption papers. It occurred to Father Ilarion that he had no way to tell if a page was lost or if an adoption had been missed. He sighed, and carried on.
When he found his thumb suddenly next to a row describing a boy named Yuri, it was so startling he gasped. His eyes flicked along the row, disbelieving. Might this be him?
The birthday was listed as unknown, and the boy’s age estimated as seven. Date of adoption was 1947, but Ilarion couldn’t tell if that meant when the boy was taken from Berlin or when the paperwork was completed. His brother had been born in 1935, so this one was too young. Still, he made a neat question mark in pencil beside the entry.
He found another Yuri, and made another mark. By the time he reached the bottom of the list, he had four possible leads, none of them perfect. Then he realized he had skipped the many children with no names listed. Slightly exasperated, he started again, this time looking at any male child orphaned in Berlin who was born around 1935. It was slower going, but after a half hour he reached the bottom again. He quickly flicked the pages, counting 23 possibles. He shook his head slightly. Not possibles. Children.
Father Ilarion took a short break to make more tea. As the kettle boiled he stretched his back, and twisted his hips to ease the pain in his shorter leg. It was how he had lost Yuri. He’d been badly injured working as a bricklayer on a building site, a trade he’d learned from his father. He hadn’t been able to get word from the hospital to his little brother, and by the time he’d made it back to the basement where the brothers had been sheltering, Yuri was gone, along with the only picture they had of their mother and the locket she’d treasured. In the chaos of the war-torn city, he couldn’t find him. But after years of searching through death records for any sign, he’d realized that Yuri could have been adopted, and started a whole new search. He held his hands close to the kettle, happy for the radiative warmth, then wrapped his warmed palms around his damaged thigh, which still hurt when he was cold or when the weather changed. When the kettle started whistling, he retrieved a hard biscuit from the tin on the shelf, poured the steaming water over his already used teabag, and returned to the desk.
Now to be a detective. His brother had been lost in the heart of Berlin. His date of birth of 1935 was definite, so he would have been nine, but Yuri had been small for his age, so maybe the authorities thought he was seven or eight. The other certainties: blue eyes and light-brown hair.
A thought struck him. American spellings of unfamiliar foreign names might vary, so he was going to have to recheck for Yuriy, or Juri, or anything similar. He pursed his lips at the extra work, then smiled as he thought of a quote from the endless comfort of his faith: Until you have suffered much in your heart, you cannot learn humility.
The monk went through the list again, prioritizing. He settled on two good matches, both Yuris with brown hair and blue eyes, seven maybes, and eleven long shots. He held the two pages with the closest matches up to his eyes, inspecting every bit of information carefully, and made a discovery. The Army functionary who had crossed out the family information had not been scrupulous. Some of the black lines were thin or wavered enough that parts of the letters were visible. Ilarion went to the window, flattened the printed sides of the two sheets against the glass and started copying everything he could discern.