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 facade 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
