The trip from Kiev to Warsaw took 17 hours.  We stayed awake for most of the time, playing with, feeding and changing Mr. Na.  When he got fussy, Pa and I took turns walking Mr. Na up and down the narrow train corridor outside of our compartment.  The train chugged along the flat, monotonous landscape that stretched endlessly in either direction.

Fellow passengers also walked up and down the corridor to stretch their legs, and for the first time during the trip, I felt nervous.  I knew enough Russian to get by, but not enough to strike up a conversation and up until this point, I didn’t worry too much about it because we had Koko or Klas to help us out.  But on the train, when people smiled and cooed over Mr. Na, and I would return the smile, but I kept very quiet.

By 8 or 9 p.m., after sending Pa on the harrowing quest for food in the restaurant car, we went to sleep in our bunks.  But around midnight, Pa and I awoke to thumping noises that seemed to come from underneath the train.

“You’re not going to believe this,” Pa said looking out the window, “but we’re up on some sort of elaborate jack.”

I joined him at the window.  Sure enough, we could see other train cars raised up by large, rising platforms.

“Did we break down?” I asked.

“I don’t think so,” Pa said.  “But it looks like they’re replacing the wheels.”

It seemed odd that all of the train cars required new sets of wheels and I wondered if it had anything to do with entering Poland.  Sure enough, after I located one of our guide books, I read that trains leaving Ukraine do, in fact, need their wheels changed from 4’-8-1/2” to 5’gauge.  Clearly, we were no longer in Ukraine.

The novelty of it all soon wore off and we managed to go back to sleep in our bunks—that is, until our overhead fluorescent lights came on a few hours later and we were awakened by a loud knock at our compartment door.  Pa got up and unlocked the latch and two men in uniform barged into the compartment.  They looked at me on the upper bunk and without so much as a word, one of the men threw off my blankets.  All I could think was thank goodness I was dressed.  I swung my legs out of bed and they shouted something in Polish or Russian—I couldn’t tell because I was still pretty thrown by what had just happened.  Pa grabbed our passports and handed them to one of the men who smirked.  When he saw that Mr. Na’s passport was Ukrainian he asked, in very broken English, what we were doing with a Ukrainian child.  Pa handed him a folder that contained copies of our adoption decree.  Klas had put one together specifically for the border agents and these guys greedily snapped it out of Pa’s hands and inspected it.  They left without saying a word but we hoped that when they returned, they’d hand us back our passports.  It seemed as though they were unfamiliar with or—dare I say it—a little suspicious of our documents.  But I didn’t care.  I was still seething by the one guy’s abuse of power and if he didn’t have control as to whether or not we’d be allowed to leave Ukraine, I would have considered punching him in the nose.

After about an hour or so (and I have to say at this point, Mr. Na was sleeping through the entire incident—even with the jarring overhead light), one of the men came back and silently handed Pa our passports.  We were too keyed up to go back to sleep and it was 5:00 a.m. Kiev time and 4:00 a.m. Warsaw time, which meant we still had about two hours left on the train.  Thankfully, the lights went back off and we were able to relax again, somewhat, once the train got rolling; but I only managed to doze for the remainder of the trip.

By 6:30 a.m., pulled into the Warsaw train station. I had to waken Mr. Na to get him fed and changed before we could get off since I wasn’t sure how long it would take to get to our hotel.  I took him in one arm, grabbed my suitcase in another and followed Pa to the platform and then up out of the station.  Dawn was just beginning to break and the sky in the east was a lighter shade of gray.  Pa hailed a cab and we got in and asked the driver to take us to the Sheraton, where we would unload our luggage, shower, and eat something before going to our midday appointment at the American Embassy. 

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