She has always wanted kids in the future. She did when she was little, and even now she wants them. She would name the girl Polina and the boy Aleksandr. They would look more like their father than like her, but Aleksandr would have her nose and Polina would have her hands. It is a situation she replays again and again and again in her mind, how she would clean and cook and sew and teach Polina while Aleksandr was at school and her husband was at work, likely a banker. When the boys would come home, dinner would be hot and waiting in their small dining room, table set with simple yet elegant linens. Her husband would say the graces before they ate, and Aleksandr would eat too fast and get a tummy ache.
It was cruel, the detail in which she remembers the life she wants to have had.
Sometimes she visits the orphanages and hospitals in the South where the government hasn't the money to buy anesthetics for surgery, and she whispers to all the Chernobyl babies that it will be okay and tells them to be strong for their mother is here with them. Is that not who she is, their mother? These children of the streets are hers by default. They seem comforted by her words, even if they scream as they are tied to chairs and blindfolded. They trust her, even as their noses bleed and their tonsils are quickly ripped from the backs of their mouths. Perhaps they know, in that mysterious way of children, that she is their mother – the mother of every child in Belarus, or maybe they feel the loss of children she would never know like how she feels them missing the parents, the life, they never will know.
When she leaves the orphanage, she cries in her car on the way home to Minsk. When she asks the government for money to buy anesthetic machines so the children don't feel the pain of their bodies being torn, they ask her what other section of the country can they take money out of. When it is proposed that she send the kids away to get medical treatment, she refuses the idea.
What mother would send away her babies?