Freedom is Space for the Spirit (4 page)

“Who are you?”

“What?”

“Who
are
you?” The man actually poked him, hard, right under the scarf along the collarbone.

Even after all these years in the West, Thomas instinctively recoiled at that question. And because he did, he thought he understood this newspaper's man reaction after all. This was caution, plain and simple, instinctive and learned the hard way.

But about this? About mouthless bears?
Wind whistled through him as though he wasn't even there, was a dead tree sprouting from the cracking sidewalk.

He was nothing here.
And he always had been
.

Thomas almost walked away. What he really wanted to do was call Jutta, catch the next train home. But the bald man was staring at the unfolded papers in Thomas's hands. And now he mostly looked sad. Maybe.

“I'm…” Thomas started, and realized he didn't even know how to explain. “I was once … I am looking for them. For Vasily Litvinov—you know him?—and his … I'm just trying to find my friends.” In frustration, Thomas rubbed at his frozen cheeks and forehead with his gloved hand. The skin of the glove felt even colder than his own. “I wondered only if I could speak to…” He held up the paper, pointing out the name of the journalist once more.

All at once, the bald man burst out laughing. He folded his arms across his substantial chest, perhaps just against the cold. When he spoke, his voice was gentle and perhaps a little proud. “That would be difficult,” he said.

“Sorry?”

“I can not help you. And neither can Yelena Alyakina.” He nodded once more toward the article. “She is gone.”

“Gone.”

“I sent her away. For her own safety, you understand. Just in case. If you want to come back next month, perhaps—”

“No,” said Thomas. “No, I don't understand. Safety from what?”

“From what do you think?”

“But … for this? For bears in the street? Who would be upset about … And anyway, isn't this the New Russia?”

The bald man stopped laughing, kept smiling. But this was a smile Thomas recognized. Every Russian he'd ever met had a version of it. “New Russia. Old Russia. The price is the same for both. I'm sorry. I hope you find your friends.”

With that, the editor left him in the street and returned to his office. Thomas watched through the window as he nodded curtly at Larisa and made his way, head down, to his desk.

And now, Thomas realized, he had absolutely nothing. Maybe he'd been on the wrong trail all along, and none of this had anything to do with Vasily's telegram. The telegram itself, he realized, could have been the joke. The art. Maybe the project had been prying one-time friends from their far-away, comfortable, bourgeois lives with a few taps of tired keys and a tossed-in, worn out acronym. A cryptic STOP.

Fumbling with frigid fingers, Thomas found his cell phone in his pocket. He would call Jutta, make his way back toward the Winter Palace, perhaps drift once through the Russian Museum, stop at the market outside the Church of the Savior on Spilled Blood and be a good capitalist and buy his wife one of the kitschy Stalinist chess sets she sometimes used in her own art. Then he would catch the night train back to Berlin. This time, he'd be so tired, he might even sleep, partying Poles in the corridors or no. He had already turned away in the direction of the bus stop when another hand slid into the pocket he'd just emptied.

His reaction was old, instinctive, born in industrial Berlin warehouses in the shadow of the gutted Wall, in the strobing, strafing lights and hash haze and raw hunger of those impossible nights in the winter of 1989, 1991, when the beats blasting off turntables seemed to be—really were—rattling kings off thrones and girders off buildings, when bodies and minds were hurling themselves together, combining, recombining, the people of a dozen collapsing nations smashing themselves together as though thrown into a continent-wide supercollider, charged and aroused, blindly groping and exploring and igniting. Picking each other's pockets for pennies for food.

Slamming his own elbow against his ribs, he trapped the hand in his pocket, heard its owner cry out, whirled hard on her, and used the motion of his body to drive her to a knee in the snow. Then he stared down in surprise and alarm.

“Ana?” he said.

“Let me go,” she snarled in Russian, ripped her hand free, and stood up. She was a full foot taller than he remembered, and of course she would be; he'd last seen her when she was perhaps twelve years old, sitting where she most loved sitting, on her Uncle Vasily's lap, smearing his beard with the paint on her fingers.

How had he even recognized her? Because she was still Ana the black-haired and black-eyed, and her face had always stuck with him. She looked like some Native American chief's daughter, he'd always thought, with only a storybook basis for the thought: her skin a deep tan, hair wild and dark. She glared up at him now with tears in her eyes.

“Ana, I'm sorry.” He drew her to her feet, but she shoved away from him. “What are you doing here, and—”

“You have to find him,” she hissed. The knees of her shabby corduroy pants were wet through, and she slapped at them once with her hands.

“I know,” he said. “I will. That's why I've come. I—”

“Something's wrong.”

Thomas realized he knew that, too. More than anything, he wanted to lift a hand to Ana's face, wipe the tears not quite leaking from her lashes. But she wasn't letting those tears fall, and he knew better.

“How did you—”

“Yelena Alyakina.”

“You know her?”

Despite the unshed tears, Ana rolled her eyes. “At your service.”

“Wait.
You—
”

Ana was as much spitting as speaking, and Thomas wasn't sure he was catching it all. Apparently, whenever the paper had a story that the editor felt might endanger the writer, that story got the byline
Yelena Alyakina
. And then Ms. Alyakina got sent to Turkey for a while.

Thomas was still sorting all of that out when he realized Ana had long since stopped explaining and was instead jabbing a finger at his coat.

“Your pocket. Thomas, now.
Mudak
.”

“My…” Thomas glanced down at his coat, and the wind whipped snow in his face. Until that moment, there had been sun somewhere overhead, out of sight but there, which was why the world had seemed so white. But now, it was graying as he breathed.

“I was putting something
in
,” Ana said more slowly, as though
he
were the child. “Not taking out. After Vasily gave me the story … or, after Alyosha made him—”

“Alyosha?”

Ana stamped a booted foot hard enough to crack the ice atop the sidewalk. “Before they went into hiding. Vasily left that for you. In case you ever came. I don't think he really thought you'd come.”

“He didn't?” Thomas murmured. Then he shook his head. It didn't matter. “Why not just give it to me?”

Ana's voice came out bitter, mocking, not at all the way he'd ever heard her address or talk about her uncle. “Just following instructions. He thought you'd appreciate the game. He's seven years old and always has been.” The tears almost escaped this time, but she beat them flat with her lashes. “Also, something is wrong.”

In his pocket, Thomas found the crumpled scrap of brown paper Ana had stuffed there. It wasn't stationery or even from a sketchbook; it had been cut from a bag. On it was a sketch, crude, very much indeed like something drawn by a seven-year-old.
Because Vasily can't draw
, Thomas remembered.
He has no artistic skill whatsoever except his brain. His raw talent.

At first, Thomas couldn't even figure out what the sketch represented. The moment he did, words he'd forgotten he even knew spilled from his mouth, as though Vasily had reached through the paper and nicked him. “Koltooshy Pavlovo,” he said.

“
What?
” Ana whispered, and from her whisper, he suspected she felt the same tremor of unease he did. He wondered if she knew why, because he wasn't at all sure he could explain.

“I…” In frustration, Thomas shook his head. “How's your German?”

Ana shook her head. “Not enough.”

“English?”

“Yes. Okay.”

“It's a gorilla,” Thomas said, in English. “He … We were walking there once. In the woods, out by the Pavlov Institute. Someone we knew was holed up out there. Hiding out, I think. We couldn't find the apartment, and there were many abandoned buildings, or maybe they weren't actually abandoned, but anyway, we couldn't find anyone. And in the woods—not even in a clearing, it was just leaning on this hillside, like it had dropped from a plane—was this miserable iron cage. Maybe…” He held up his hands, illustrating the size. “Two meters by three? Maybe? And inside it…” The shiver that had been building under his ribs rippled across his skin, and the wind kicked up and spirited it away, taking a part of him with it. “Inside it, there were two gorillas.”

Ana looked as though she might shove him into traffic. She had always been Vasily's favorite, all of their favorite, really. Their little collective's mascot. Hers was the ferocious, black-eyed face of the blazing future none of them had actually believed was coming. Not really.

Had it come, though? Was this it?

“The gorillas were pathetic, Ana. You could see ribs. Their hair was falling out. It was like they'd been there, by themselves, for years. Just maybe left out in the woods. Part of some experiment that had been discontinued. Or maybe they'd escaped. That was your uncle's joke. They'd maneuvered their cage off the back of a truck and tumbled down this incline and come to rest there.”

“That joke isn't funny.”

“Very few of Vasily's jokes were funny.”

“Alyosha,” Ana mouthed, or at least, that's what Thomas thought she mouthed. Certainly, she was tearing up again.

Thomas spoke slowly. He felt as if he were edging up to something, peering over the edge of something. “That was the day he told me about the bear ceremony.”

Ana jerked, looked up, stumbled half a step back. For a few seconds, she just glared at him.

“Ana, what—”

“There's a bus,” she snarled. “Come
on
!” Grabbing his hand, she did indeed tug him straight out into the road, and then they were splashing across it, ankles-deep in slush as boxy, rusted Russian cars blared at them and drivers screamed obscenities through closed windows. The bus driver, wrapped up tight in a hooded parka, glanced in their direction—Thomas saw him register them—closed the bus doors, and started pulling away from the curb.

And Ana darted right into the bus's path, stopped dead, and aimed that glare of hers straight through the blowing snow and diesel smoke into the bus's front window.

Then, to Thomas's amazement, the driver laughed. He honked hard and opened the door. Ana pulled Thomas around the side and up the bus steps.

Fumbling in his pockets again, Thomas said, “Ana, I don't have … I don't even know the correct…”

But Ana had already paid. She received two tickets back from the scowling, balaclava-clad ticket woman standing next to the driver and started shouldering through the old men blocking the path toward the back of the bus. Thomas followed. The bus lurched into traffic through a black cloud of its own exhaust, and Ana pulled up short, tipping back against him. He put out an arm to steady her, glanced up, and so came face to face, at last, with a bear.

For a long, surreal moment, he just stood there. Bodies bumped wordlessly against him, no more apologetic or even sentient than boats in a marina. No one else turned around, or dove for the front of the bus, or screamed. As far as Thomas could tell, only he and Ana even bothered looking. Everyone else was pointedly looking elsewhere. Anywhere but at the bear.

And it really was a bear, not a man in costume. It was up on two legs, well over six feet tall, hunching to fit under the roof. Once, it shook itself, blowing air out its snout. The snout itself was black and wet, the mangy fur falling out in patches, flecked with snow and dirt. What looked like a scrap of tissue was stuck to one twitching ear, as though the creature had nicked itself shaving. Under the snout, it had more patchy fur but no teeth. No
opening
, even, where a mouth could have been, which made the face look …
Exposed
was the only word that popped into Thomas's mind. Not just bare but stripped. Like a wall scraped of a mural. Like Malevichskaya with no one in it. Like an empty lot, cleared even of rubble.

But it was the eyes that he would remember most. They did, occasionally, swing down toward him or brush over him, deep brown and full of feeling, but not any feeling Thomas recognized. At some point, it occurred to him—absurdly, because given the absurdity of the entire situation, why would this matter?—that the time of year was wrong. That whatever was happening had been ill conceived, right from the beginning.

“Shouldn't you be sleeping?” he said softly, to the bear, in Russian.

Ana was no longer clinging to his arm, though she'd edged back alongside him, as close to clear of the animal as she could get without leaving his side. Thomas could feel her gaze on him, but he ignored it for the moment.

The bear's ears twitched. It gazed back, or maybe just gazed, not as though it understood or would answer if it could. Twenty minutes before the bus reached Koltooshy Pavlovo, at the edge of some sort of military compound ringed with woods, the animal abruptly stirred, dropped to all fours, bumped Thomas and Ana and the old men aside, and lumbered out of the bus. Before Thomas could even see where it went, the bus pulled away.

“He was gone so long,” Ana murmured, seemingly to herself.

Thomas closed his eyes, tried to blink away the animal's face, to fight down the feeling that he was drifting farther by the second from anywhere he had ever imagined or wanted to be. When he opened his eyes again, he saw woods, snow slanting sideways as it turned to sleet, Russians huddled around benches at exposed bus stops, motionless as crows on wires.