Irina Bjørnø - Kaleidoscope. English edition

Proofreader Jeanne Richardson

Photograph Irina Bjørnø

© Irina Bjørnø, 2019

© Irina Bjørnø, photos, 2019

ISBN 978-5-4496-2130-6

Created with Ridero smart publishing system

All of my work (all of my stories) is a fantasy of the author. All matches of names and events are pure coincidence! My style is mystical realism.

Everyone is given a gift in his life. One person receives a small one, another – the great, some- for loan time, and some – forever. Each and everybody. The gift – to write books and to make new discoveries, the gift – to comfort people or the gift to entertain and to make the people forget their life’s problems for a moment, the gift – to organize the life in a better way or the gift to love one. Everyone gets his own, personal and unique gift.

Dimitry had got a strange gift from his fate, not many people in the world had such a gift: he was able to find fake banknotes and stock bonds and sort them out from the real one printed in the National Bank. He could tot only distinguish but feel fake signature on the bank check or bank bonds. He didn’t know how he managed to do it. He just “knew” it as a famous chef knows how much salt or spices should he add into the famous sauce. And Dimitry – he felt the money, he felt it with his whole body, brain, fingers, as a pianist feels the music, as a lover feels the women body – with all his cells, with the whole being. He had been working in the financial department of criminality in the Scandinavian National Bank for many years. There were only a few experts in the world like him, but he could work without ultraviolet light lamps or infrared devices, except his antique magnifying glass, which he had got from his grandfather and used daily.

Being an expert in false money banknotes he was involved in the investigations dealing with controversial cases of signature’s forgery on people wills and other securities papers, and he had never made a mistake. NEVER!!!

His work was paid fairly well, and it was enough to have a little house with a garden, a car and a small pension in private insurance company. He loved his job, as well as his cold Nordic country, purged by winds, with the most socialistic system in the world with a rich welfare with equally distribution of social benefits among the not so big and rather generous population.

People in his country were neither particularly the rich nor the noble, in spite of the oldest royal house in the world and fairytale of world famous H. C. Andersen about princes and princesses, where a simple driver monthly wages was the same as a bank clerk wages. Dimitry was used to it, even though he was differed from the other Scandinavians because of his name.

His name showed his belongingness to the history of Russia. He was called Dimitry Romanoff, was a prince by blood and a surviving relatives of the Tsar Romanoff’s deadly affected branch. He was the offspring of the family which managed to escape from Peter the Third’s repressions and was the survivor relative of Peter the Great.

He was born in Switzerland, but moved to Scandinavia many years ago, when he had remarried his second Scandinavian and totally not-noble wife.

For many years he had lived in the shadow of storms that raged in Russia in connection with the building of so called “New Russian mafia-controlled capitalism” model, but from time to time the rumours that some political groups in Russia would wished to see the Romanoff’s dynasty to sit on the patriarchal throne of mother Russia and to take the responsibilities for the fortunes of the people, suffering from the greedy post capitalist criminal bands, reached him.

Dimitry was not interested in politics, but he played a role in Russian emigrant society, which was established in Scandinavia since the time of the execution of Nicholai the Second family and the escape of Nicholai mother, a little fragile and doll-beautiful Minnie – Tsarina Maria Feodorovna, and a sister of Scandinavian king, who was firmly seated on his throne in that time and was beloved by everybody in his rainy homeland.

Dimitry Romanoff was a part of a small circle of titled noble Russian-related persons still living in Scandinavia with their traditions of Russian Christmas bazaar, Faberge Easter eggs with diamonds and rare exhibitions of the pictures and portraits belonged to the Russian Grand Duchess Olga, who ended her life in Canada unknown and in poverty.

These people, who were last peaces of Russian Empire of Tsar Nikolai time assemble together several ones or twice a year on the occasion of birthdays, funerals and the Russian Easter, playing their noble roles in this small society as usual.

Dimitry’s Russian language was poor and with a strong French accent, but he would always attended these yearly assemblies with his immensely upstanding neck, holding out his hand ready for the aristocratic and surely Romanoff way to greet others. But no one kissed his hand, and he could not stand that advanced familiarity with kisses on the cheeks. It is at those meetings he felt his “blue blood” of Romanoff’s house very vividly, but later, coming back to a little house with a garden, where everything had to be done by himself – he felt different, not as Romanoff with “blue blood”, but as best in the world specialist in banknotes forgery, which make him almost the most unique person in the world, and that he was the most proud of.

Russia – always being so unpredictable – suddenly felt great love for everything, connecting with Romanoff, the Tsar, to everything that had gone in the past and trying now to patch the blood holes of its history by insisting on reburial of the exiled Russian Tsarina, little Minnie, who had been lying peacefully since the distant 1928 in Roskilde’s Cathedral and now shoul be reburied next to the glorious Russians Tsars and Grand Duchess, next to her legitimate Russian husband, tsar Alexander III.

She, Minnie, did not actually loved her Russian husband and even was a little afraid of, but political marriages were at her time in vogue, and she could not deny her father’s will, who betrothed her first with a gentle and intelligent Grand Duke of Russia, Nicholas, who had suddenly died in Nice, and later to the next living pretender to the Russian throne, big and not so culturally polished Alexander, Nikolas brother.

Dimitry was invited to the ceremony of reburial as a living representative of the Romanoffs House of Glory. He and his untitled wife were sent the first class tickets from the Putin’s government and he went to his first meeting with the unknown “Mother Russia” together with some representatives of the Scandinavian Royal House.

He was greeted in the airport with fanfare, the red carpet from the plane into the airport building, a first-class hotel, for which he was never able to pay for himself and the real royal honourers. He had a personal guide: long-legged Russian Natasha who has adorable makeup and latest fashion dress and actually looking like Natasha Rostova from Leo Tolstoy very thick and very famous roman. She accompanied him and his wife everywhere – during Tsarina Minnie’s reburial, and during their trip to the gold plated Peterhof, and during the excursions into the Winter Palace as well.