Moscow but Dreaming

THE BANK OF BURKINA FASO

One knows that one was a good ruler when even in exile (accursed, dishonored) one still has a loyal servant who remains, despite the tattered cuffs and disgrace, despite the wax splotches covering the surface of the desk like lichen on tombstones, remains by one’s side and lights the candles when darkness coagulates, cold and bitter, outside of one’s window.

The deposed Prince of Burundi nodded his gratitude at Emilio, the servant with a dark and hard profile, carved like stone against the white curtains and the shadow of sifting snow behind them, like a restless ghost. The Prince then carefully perched his glasses, held together by blue electrical tape, at the vertiginous hump of his aristocratic nose, and turned on his computer.

The Wi Fi in most Moscow apartment buildings was standard but spotty during snowstorms, and the prince hurried to get out as many emails as he could before the weather made it impossible to send anything out. He saved reading of his email for the very end, until after his messages were hurtled into the electronic ether and he could have the leisure to read through the hundred and twelve messages in his inbox.

None of them were replies—he was not surprised; daily, he steeled himself, preparing for just such outcome. After all, wasn’t his own inbox filled with desperate pleas, cries for help he had neither wherewithal nor opportunities to answer? The best he could do was read them all, and let his heart break over and over.

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.

“Yes, my dear unknown friend, I am in the same city as you are—and it is getting dark at four PM, and the shadows stretch, long and blue, in the hollows between snowdrifts. There’s slush on the roads and sidewalks, and my black shoes have permanent salt marks, like a wrack line.

“None of it matters; only that the fate has brought us to the same city, too peopled and desolate for words, just as it is fate that we can perhaps salvage what we can from the Bank of Burkina Faso—together, if only you would help me.”

The prince’s eyes misted over, and he brushed the unbidden moisture from his cheekbone with the edge of his hand. He had never met her, and yet as he read her email, he anticipated every word before his eyes had a chance to take it in, and every heartbeat doubled in his chest, as if it became an echo chamber.

“If the fate has brought us together,” he wrote back, “perhaps it will let us find each other; perhaps we shall meet among the dust and music and musty odor. Meet me at the House of Music in an hour.”

The House of Music, a relatively small building housing a decent orchestra that offered a small but reliably good range of classical music, and was rarely sold out. Today was no exception—the prince paid his admittance, checked in his embarrassing coat, and wandered down the raspberry colored carpet in his thin-soled and soaked shoes toward the lobby and the concession stand.

He recognized her from afar—she was tall, even taller than him, and the saffron frock loosely gathered at her dark shoulders draped as if it was made when her figure was fuller and younger; its tattered hem splayed on the carpet like feathers.

She recognized him too: she smiled and waved as she lifted the glass of lemonade to her lips painted the color of the inside of a hibiscus flower.

The concert started with the obligatory Pachelbel’s Canon and Bach’s Fugue and Sonata, but they were barely aware of the music, delirious with happiness at having found each other and muddled by the habitual fog that always accompanied any attempt to think about the Bank of Burkina Faso in a logical manner.

Yet, together and with the help of the strings and the organ, undeterred by the bellicose glances of other music lovers, they managed to tell each other what each of them knew.

The problem with the Bank was the inability of anyone who had deposited money there to get it back. Phone calls resulted in requests for foreign nationals, and playing of recorded strange music. And the physical location of the bank remained unknown—Burkina Faso has been scoured from border to border, by millions of those who had no hope now of returning their fortunes or rewarding the long-lost nexts of kin. It was concluded then that it must be present elsewhere in the world, and in all likelihood the bank did not have a permanent area of residence—hence the constant demand for foreign nationals, since if it moved around, everyone was a foreign national. That made sense, even through the muddled thoughts.

The prince had developed a hunch that the bank’s existence itself was not a permanent or assured thing. “You see,” he told the widow Lucita Almadao, “once I dreamt about that bank, and I saw it in my mind—clear as day. I saw the porticos and the red bricks of its facade, even the tiny cracks in the cement between the bricks. And the next day, I received a letter from someone I knew, who was able to claim his money that night. He never returned my emails where I asked for locations and details, but I’m sure that my dream helped him somehow.”

Lucita Almadao clapped her hands once, and caught herself as the lone sound resonated in the air as the orchestra had fallen momentarily silent, and a few faces turned around to look at them. “I dreamt of it too!” she said in a frenzied whisper, more of a hiss. “It was last summer.”

“Mine too. And then several times after that.”

“And did it happen every time?”

“No, only once.”

She tugged her lip thoughtfully. “So your dreaming might be

not the only condition. Necessary, but not sufficient.” “I’m not sure it is even necessary. I mean,” he had to slap his own hollow cheek slightly to keep his thoughts on track. “I mean that maybe it doesn’t have to be me but anyone—it happened to you.”

“To us. Do you remember the date of your fateful dream last summer?”

“July 15th.”

“Mine too! Maybe what is necessary is that more than one person dreams it.”

Applause broke out around them, and they shuffled with the rest of the crowd into the foyer, for the intermission. The prince sweated and palpitated, and felt his forehead and ears grow too warm from the combined excitement of finding her and being able to talk about the bank to someone, in person. Together, it was easier to break the pall it cast over their thoughts.

They bought lemonade and drank it by the window—if one pulled apart the wine-colored velvet of the drapes, one could see the snow that started sifting from the low clouds, flaring like handfuls of beads when it hit the cones of streetlights and disappearing in the darkness. One could also see several stray dogs sitting by the entrance, waiting patiently for the patrons to leave, concession-stand leftovers in hand.

“These dogs scare me,” Lucita Alamadao said, looking over the prince’s shoulder. “The other day, one of them startled me just as I was buying food from a street vendor, and I dropped it.”

“This is how they hunt,” the prince said, still looking out the window. “They are like lions, and hotdogs are their prey. We’re merely a vehicle. I heard that these dogs are becoming more intelligent. They know how to take the subway.”

“I’ve seen them there.”

“I think they might have a single mind among them.” Once again, his sinuses itched and filled with pressure. “Do you think they can dream?”

Lucita Almadao’s eyes, reflected in the dark pane of the window, widened. “Dogs?!”

“Why not? If it is us who’s dreaming the bank, we cannot enter it. I would dream it for you, but I’m not enough.”

“My dearest one,” she quoted softly. “I need your assistance. We can write the others.”

“And who will want to be the dreamers while everyone else goes to claim their fortunes?”

Outside, the dogs howled with one voice.

It wasn’t an easy task, to train the stray dogs to dream. Their collective mind seemed very focused on food and warmth— especially warmth, since the nights had grown bitter. The prince had opened the doors of his walkup to them, despite Emilio’s protestations—had no other choice, really. They slept on the floor and by the radiator, under the kitchen chairs, on Emilio’s pullout couch. The apartment smelled like warmed fur, and filled with quiet but constant clacking of claws on the parquet.

The prince was at first terrified and then amused when the dogs started paying for their lodgings: they arrived with wallets, sometimes empty, sometimes with money in it. One day, as he was traveling to see the widow Lucita Almadao, he learned how the dogs got the wallets.

As the train slowed down, pulling closer to the station, the prince saw a stray dog hop onto the seat next to a well-dressed man, the sheen of his sharkskin jacket making a lovely contrast with a crisp white shirt and his striped burgundy tie, which looked Italian and expensive. The dog whined and smiled, his thick tail of a German shepherd mix thumping against he vinyl of the seat. The man smiled and petted the dog’s head gingerly— who wouldn’t, looking at those bright eyes and pink tongue. The train pulled into the station and the doors hissed open, just as the dog thrust his muzzle into the man’s jacket, grabbing the wallet from his inner pocket, and bounded onto the platform, just as the stream of incoming passengers hid him from view and prevented the robbery victim from chasing after. The man cursed, and the prince buried his face in the newspaper. That night, a German shepherd mix showed up at his door, with an Italian wallet, moist but otherwise undamaged, in his mouth.

Lucita Almadao stopped by every now and again, to help talk to the dogs and to pet the stray heads, their tongues lolling gratefully and eyes squinting with pleasure. She told them about the Bank of Burkina Faso and her dead husband, breaking the dogs’ and the prince’s hearts anew. He talked to them too and showed them the emails, the constant stream of pleas by the lost and the banished, the plaintive song playing in a loop, asking again and again for assistance from foreign nationals in their quest to liberate their stolen millions or to reclaim rightful inheritance. The dogs listened, their heads tilted, their ears pricked up. Most of them left in the morning to take the bus and the subway, but came back at night, with wallets and an occasional watch.

It took them almost all the way to New Year, but slowly, slowly, the dogs started dreaming in unison: their legs twitched as if they were running, and their tails wagged in their sleep. When the prince looked out of the window, he occasionally glimpsed a brick or a part of the wall, a segment of a bank vault hovering, disembodied, over the no-mans land of the frozen and snowed over yard. Once, he ran for the apparition but it crumbled, and a piece of dream-wall fell on his shoulder, almost dislocating it.

The dogs were getting better at dreaming as the prince and the widow Lucita Almadao got worse: the two of them barely slept, sustained by the flickering candlelight and Emilio’s stern stares, by the sleepless hope that left them ashen in the mornings, desolate in the first gray light falling on the stalagmites of candlewax. The dogs left in the morning, and the widow Almadao sometimes left with them, and sometimes, bowled over by fatigue, she curled up and slept on Emilio’s couch, dog hair clinging to her black, cobweb-thin mantilla. The prince dozed off in his chair and waited, waited for the dogs to come back home.

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.