Moscow but Dreaming

However, after so many years of reading, of writing those letters himself—because what else was there to do for those exiled and dishonored but to reach for the unknown strangers’ kindness?—he found himself growing weary, and the words flowed together in a soft, gray susurrus of complaint. So it was surprising for him to click on a name that did not look familiar and to be jolted to awareness by the words, so crisp and true.

“My dearest,” the unknown Lucita Almadao started, “It is in great hope that I reach out to you. I am the widow of the General Almadao, an important figure in my country’s history. However, after the military takeover and the dismantling of our rightful government, my husband was given to a dishonorable death. To this day I weep every moment I think of the cruelty of his fate.”

The storm intensified and the draft from the windows hissed and howled, and the candles in their tarnished candelabra guttered. The prince hurriedly downloaded the letter onto his Blackberry—cracked screen, half-dead battery—because he just couldn’t bear the thought of not finishing it that night. The electricity cut off at that very moment, and the prince sighed.

Emilio took the candles to the dining room, further away from the offending window and the drafts, to the comfortable chair where the prince could wrap his feet in a blanket and read on the handheld screen, its light blue and flickering and dead.

“Imagine my horror,” the honorable Lucita Almadao wrote, in the words that betrayed the genuine emotions of the one who had suffered deeply and sincerely (the prince had an eye for such things since like knows like), “Imagine the paralyzing terror of one caught up in a dream, unable to wake up, as he was taken to the cobbled courtyard. I remember the white linen of his shirt in the darkness, fluttering like a moth, its wings opening and closing over one sculpted collarbone; I remember the rough soldiers’ hands on his sleeves, patches of darkness cut out of the fabric, and the yellow and red of their torches, long sleek reflections on the barrels of their rifles—at least, I think those were rifles.

“I apologize, my dearest one, my unknown friend, for my mind wanders when I think of such matters. It is of course of no concern to you, but I seek your help in freeing his not insignificant fortune from the bank—the Bank of Burkina Faso, to be exact. I seek your help in accessing these funds, since because you’re a foreign national with no ties to my husband, the operation may be easier for you. I loathe to think about money at such a time . . . ”

The Blackberry finally gave up the ghost, a pale bluish flicker, that dissipated in the yellow candlelight. The prince gave a small wail of disappointment, but soon settled by the window to watch the furious dance of the snowflakes in the cone of the streetlight down below his window. And in his mind, another dance, entirely imaginary, unfolded slowly, like a paper fan in the hands of a young girl: the hands grabbing arms, a shiny sliver of a sharp blade pressed against dark throat . . . the sad fate of the deceased general kept replaying as he remembered the widow’s letter, every word heavy with salt and sorrow.

The next morning the electricity was back, even though Emilio, thoughtful and far-sighted as always, had already transferred perishables onto the slowly thawing window ledge, and started drinking the beer before it grew warm. Once the refrigerator started humming again, Emilio returned the unfinished beverage into the security of the manufactured cold, plugged in the recharger for the Blackberry, and turned on the electric stove to make breakfast.

The Prince sat in the warmest corner of the kitchen, the orange upholstering of the corner seat shifting under his bony backside as if ready to detach from its padding, and composed the letter in his mind. He could not let the plea of the unknown but suffering widow Lucita Almadao go unanswered—he had spent a cold and mostly sleepless night under his thin blanket, tossing from one side to the other—not because of the prominent springs in his couch but rather because her words cut to the heart. He was too busy to even dream about the Bank of Burkina Faso.

After breakfast, he dutifully logged into his account. The mailbox full with the usual pleas:

“I am writing in respect of a foreign customer of our Bank who perished along with his next of kin with Korean Air Line, flight number 801 with the whole passengers on 6th of Augustus 1997,” wrote one. “The reason for a foreigner in the business is for the fact that the deceased man was a foreigner and it is not authorized by the law guiding our Bank for a citizen of this country to make such claim. This is the reason while the request of you as a foreigner is necessary to apply for the release and transfer of the fund smoothly into your reliable Bank account,” insisted another. The words as familiar as the Prince’s own; the only difference between these people and himself was that he suspected the truth about the Bank of Burkina Faso.

He started on the letter to Lucita Almadao, the widow of the slain general. “My dear unknown friend,” the prince wrote, “your words had reached me albeit perhaps not to the effect you have intended—for I am too looking for a foreign national to obtain access to 11.3M Euros I have deposited in the Bank of Burkina Faso while I was still the rightful ruler of my beautiful Burundi. I now live in exile, in a cold and frozen city, and I look for assistance from a foreign national such as yourself. I promise complete confidentiality . . . ”

The prince frowned at the screen. The words came out in a familiar pattern, honed by many months of repetition, but they failed to convey the emotion he felt while reading the widow’s epistle. He deleted the paragraph and started again.

“My dear friend,” he wrote, “I apologize for deviating from the form, but the very nature of the Bank of Burkina Faso demands that I should be straightforward with you. You may not know it, but you do not have to be a foreign national to access the funds.” He stopped and rubbed the bridge of his nose—he could feel the tension building in his sinuses, like it did every time he tried to put into words what he had intuited about the Bank. “You only need to know what the bank is, but I cannot trust this information to electronic words, for they wander and get lost and fall into wrong hands, so I beg for your help, my dearest one in the transfer . . . that is to say, if you were to hint at your whereabouts, perhaps there would be another way.” He hit “Send” before the familiar fog settled over his mind and erased the intermittent knowledge of the Bank’s secret workings.

It was afternoon when the Prince had decided that there was no point in lounging about, since Lucita Almadao wouldn’t answer right away—no one wanted to appear overly eager or gullible. Instead he took a shower, and told Emilio to iron his good shirt. After tying a tie and wrapping himself into a mothbitten shearling coat that had seen innumerable better days, he headed to the bus stop.

There were two advantages to living in Moscow that the prince cold see: public transportation and access to classical music. Whenever the mood struck, he headed to the center of the city (bus, then subway)—just like there was always a fig in fruit in every jungle, so there was always a theater in Moscow with a concert or an opera about to start. The tickets, like the public transportation, were accessible to the masses thus killing their appeal for the upper class. The prince had ceased to be the member of the latter some years ago, and although he disapproved of the local weather, he waited patiently for the bus that appeared just as the sensation in the prince’s toes and ears started to disappear. He hurried inside, and bounced and jostled all the way to the subway station fifteen minutes away. It was an inconvenience living on the outskirts, but the only habitation he and Emilio could afford was a fifth story walkup on the southeast end of the city.

Once he entered the subway station, it was warm and placid, the stray dogs were coming home from the city’s center—they took the subway, riding up and down the escalator with the expression of quiet and standoffish dignity, so that they could spend their days begging by the restaurants and robbing tourists of their hotdogs. Now the dogs poured out of the outbound trains with the rivers of ruddy, white, and black fur, as the human passengers stepped carefully around them. The prince smiled as he waited on the platform, surrounded by beige and yellow marbled columns, and wondered if the sheer numbers of stray Moscow dogs gave them the sort of elevated, exuberant intelligence rarely seen in these beasts elsewhere in the world. He wondered if they possessed some sort of a collective mind, and the thought itched again in the corners of his eyes and between his eyebrows, and he rubbed the bridge of his nose. The bank manifested much today.

As soon as he boarded the train, largely empty, the Blackberry in his pocket buzzed, urgent. It took him a moment to tilt the screen away from the overhead lights’ glare, and even then he read the name of the message several times, just to make sure that the crack on the screen wasn’t deceiving him somehow. The message was from the widow Almadao. The prince’s heart pulsed in his fingertips as he tapped the screen and read her stumbling words.

“My dearest one,” she wrote, “it is such a surprise to read your message—words of a man who knows both suffering and hope, and I envy you your dignity and humility—I cannot tell how I cried and howled, and threw myself against the walls, how I broke my fingernails on the frozen cobblestone of these streets, on these icy embankments.