Moscow but Dreaming

They were ready to give up on the night it actually happened— it was a dead hour after the moon had set but the sun had not yet risen, the hour between wolf and dog, when the prince started to fall asleep. A sharp tug on his sleeve woke him, and he startled, wide-eyed. He thought he was dreaming at first when he saw the brick façade and the golden letters over the double oak doors: THE BANK OF BURKINA FASO. The dogs snored in unison, and Lucita Almadao clutched her hands to her chest.

When they ran down the steps, the Bank still stood, not wavering, a solid construction hewn out of stray dogs’ dreams. The sun was rising behind it, casting a faint promise of light like a halo around the bank.

“We better hurry,” Lucita Almadao said.

“Of course,” he answered.

Side by side, they walked toward the bank, their feet leaving

long blue depressions in the old snow, shivering in the cold, the knuckles on his left and her right hands almost brushing against each other.

KIKIMORA

The fall of communism came about when I was in the middle of my PhD in astrophysics; the steel jaws of 1990 followed close behind. My hometown, a speck on the forested expanse of Siberia, felt its hungry bite. Even Novosibirsk, where I attended graduate school, careened into the cold, joyless chaos, buckled by that wolf-year. This was when I decided to move to Moscow, trying to escape the grey limbo.

“Looking for an easy life,” they called it. I just wanted to be able to support myself; is that asking for too much? But there were no need for astrophysicists, and secretute jobs that were abundant did not appeal to me. I had to fall back on my gymnastic childhood, and started teaching aerobics to the tourists who stayed in Ukraina Hotel. There, through the gym window, I could see the river bend carving off the downtown from the rest of the city. And there I met Anya.

She was a maid with the master’s degree in psychology. We ran into each other in the locker room—I was just getting ready for class, and she was cleaning the mirrors. I noticed her because of the way she was looking at me—not sizing up competition, but simply appraising. I introduced myself, and soon we were commiserating on the impossibility of finding a job in one’s field.

We laughed at first, and then grew silent, contemplating the world in which an advanced degree was a requirement for a janitorial job. She was younger than I, but still she felt old and outdated in the scary, shifty-eyed world that was springing around us, the world with no past or future but only a slightly soiled present. Then we kissed.

I looked over her shoulder, to make sure that there was no one watching, and I saw a tall, dark-skinned man with deep green hair, who stood in the doorway. I jolted and pushed her away; she gave me a wounded look, and the stranger was gone.

“Marina?” She stared at me, puzzled and annoyed. “Sorry,” I said. “ I thought there was someone at the door.” She smiled, and a hidden secret place seemed to have opened in her eyes, letting thorough a warm glow. Like a hearth. Like home. Protected from the cold river wind and uncertainty. “When are you getting off?”

“After 6 pm class. You?”

“At eight. You can wait for me, and come over if you want.” I nodded. “Where do you live?”

“Kozhukhovo.”

It was a long trip to the suburbs, but I didn’t mind. We held hands on the subway. Anya laughed.

“What?”

“Just funny. If we were men, can you imagine the looks we would’ve got?”

“Prejudice has its place,” I murmured, sinking my face into the faux fur collar of her coat. Even the most opinionated old women did not seem to think that we were anything more than friends.

It suited me fine—Anya’s wispy hair was brushing against my forehead, and I breathed in the smell of her skin and the stillpresent aroma of mothballs from her coat. Out of the corner of my eye, half-closed in bliss, I saw the green-haired man again. He stood holding onto the overhead rail, oblivious to my attention. Everyone in the subway car either ignored or did not notice him. At first, I guessed him for a Chechen, with his dark skin and an old-style Caucasus cloak, with its ostentatious shoulder pads. But no shoulder pads swept up so abruptly and vertically; the shape of the cloak suggested parts no human body had a right to possess. And the dark hue of his skin was imparted by neither sun nor ethnicity—it was the color of tree bark, furrowed by more than age. He swayed with the car, and his dark green hair shimmered and swayed too.

It occurred to me that he was supposed to have a green beard.

At first, I could not puzzle out the source of this thought; then I realized that I had seen such a creature before. Deep within the Siberian woods, a forest spirit commonly known as a leshy. I smiled at the green-haired stranger. The thought that there was something untouched by the present made living tolerable. His moss-green eyes met mine, and a slow smile cracked the dark wood of his face. That smile made me feel like someone from home came to visit, bringing homemade preserves and letters from long-forgotten relatives.

“What are you looking at?” Anya whispered into my ear. I knew better than to point at the leshy, and just shrugged.

He got off at the next stop, and Anya’s hand snuggled under my elbow.

I was glad to find out that even a place so cold and pedestrian as Moscow in November had its own spirits. After all, it used to be a forest once, and apparently its guardian leshy had endured longer than the trees.

Anya nudged me, and withdrew her soft hand from the comforting proximity of my breast. “We’re here.”

Anya lived with her parents and a grandmother. All of them seemed quite happy to meet me, and fed us supper of stuffed peppers, followed by several liters of tea. It was a warm and homey three-room apartment, replete with a cat and a fish tank. I petted the cat who purred emphatically, and tried to ignore the kitchen-table conversation that centered on politics and inflation, like every conversation did those days. I kept glancing over to the window, where I could see the streetlamps reflected in black river water. I wondered if the granite-encased riverbank was home to rusalki.

The sound of Anya’s name brought me back to the kitchen table.

“She’s almost twenty-five,” her grandmother lamented. “Only in a time like this, how’re you supposed to find a man? All the good ones are barely making ends meet, and all the rich ones—”

She stopped, her wrinkled face expressing a great desire to spit.

“Bandits and thieves.”

“I know,” I said. “I’m twenty-seven.”

Anya’s mother nodded sympathetically, and Anya drank her tea to conceal a fit of laughter.

I never told my parents about my sexual proclivities—I didn’t want to complicate things; yet, I was mad at Anya. I felt dirty as they invited me to stay the night, promising to lay out an inflatable mattress in Anya’s room. They wouldn’t be so welcoming if they knew. I just didn’t like taking advantage of their naiveté.

Anya kicked me under the table. I caught myself, trying to straighten out my facial expression—I knew that I was giving Anya what my grandmother called a “wolf look.” Not pretty on a girl.

We waited until everyone was asleep, and giggled and made love in the dark, hushing each other and giggling more. It was still dark outside, but the quality of the darkness, the way it retreated around the streetlamps in the yard and the edges of the sky suggested that the morning was not far off. I returned to my inflatable mattress, leaving Anya to sigh in her sleep, but felt restless.

I perched on the windowsill. It started to snow, and I watched the fat snowflakes flutter through the cones of light cast by the streetlamps, and disappear into the darkness again. I was not surprised when I saw the leshy standing in one of the light cones, his hair encrusted in a translucent helm of melting snow. “What do you want?” I whispered.

His answer resounded clear in my ears, as if he were standing next to me. “Come with me, and bring her along.”

I glanced at Anya, who smiled in her sleep, the tabby cat curled up on her pillow.

“Yes, her.”

“Why?”

“Trees need water to grow.”

“What do you need me for?”

“You’re a swamp thing, a green kikimora from a Siberian bog, an in-between place that bridges wood and rivers.”

I huffed. I read enough children’s stories to know that kikimoras were nasty, ugly things. “I’m certainly not a kikimora.

Get bent.” I slid off the windowsill and lay down, my heart beating against my ribs. I thought of the fairy tales, of everything I knew about leshys. They seemed malevolent more often than not—they could fool you, twist you around, make you lose your way in a forest. Only until now I never believed the stories. I slept very little that night. My dreams were heavy, suffocating—I had no doubt that it was the leshy’s doing. I dreamt of green slime covering my body, of tree bark growing over my skin, of the tree branches sprouting from my arms and legs. Of poisonous mushrooms in my underarms.

The leshy was apparently offended by my rudeness, and did not manifest himself for a while, except in dreams. Still, I tried to make sense of his words—forest and swamp and water, of his need, of how Anya fit into it. If she were the one he wanted, why didn’t he show himself to her? Was I just an intermediary, or something greater? I could sense his presence in my dreams, deep and dark, tangled and permeated by the smell of the swamp. In my waking life, I spent all my free time with Anya, and often could not wait to get out of my class to see her sweet dimpled face, to feel her soft hand in mine. And when she did not show up for work one day, my heart ached with a premonition of disaster. I called her at home, but no one there knew where she was.