The Last Will

An urn has gone missing. Inside were the ashes of Anatols Imermanis, a Latvian crime writer and poet, whose last will was to be scattered in Paris. For him, living behind the Iron Curtain in Soviet Latvia, Paris was an impossible dream – both surreal and tantalizingly real. In those years, every Soviet citizen knew the bitter joke: “I again wish to go to Paris” – because the wish could be repeated endlessly, but the journey itself was forbidden.