Freedom is Space for the Spirit

by Glen Hirshberg

  And behind it—all around it—the Russians, in their heels and hoods, with their briefcases and smartphones, just kept walking, funneled around the bear and the woman and never even looked up.

  Again, Thomas reached to bang the glass, and again he didn’t, for fear of scaring the bear or making it angry. He watched its head sink, noted the look in its eyes—not vacant, just … not here … and then it reached out one spike-clawed paw and touched the woman’s shoulder.

  With a gasp Thomas saw rather than heard, the woman startled, whipped around, shrank back. And then, instead of cowering, dropping into a ball at the bear’s feet, or screaming for help, she spun on her spiked heel and hurried away, folding herself fast into the crowd. In seconds, she was gone.

  And the bear, dropping to all fours, loped after her, or at least in the general direction she’d gone.

  Not even bothering to button his own coat, pulling on his gloves as he moved, Thomas exited the coffee shop into the brilliant white light, the white wind, this impossible St. Petersburg of fairy tale women shadowed by bears. His next idea seemed to drop on him out of the whitening sky: he should follow the animal.

  Why? He didn’t ask; he just acted. It seemed, to what was left of his old instincts, the thing to do. The city as stage, he was thinking. Remembering. The city, new …

  The bear was already a full block ahead, only intermittently visible and mostly as a bubble in the crowd, a floating space the pedestrians avoided. Thomas hurried after it, trying to get closer, but for all its lumbering, the bear moved quickly, and the crowds slowly. At street corners, it paused on all fours at the edge of the curb with its paws in the slush, as though waiting for the light. But then it would just stagger out into the street, and cars would honk, stop in a spray of muck, and wait. And no one—not the drivers, not the pedestrians surging around it—seemed even to look. Or rather they looked, but blankly, as though the bear were a newspaper box or a fire hydrant, something that had always been there. Something not to trip over.

  At the corner of Nevsky Prospekt, the bear lurched into a stumbling gallop, caught up to a bus, and boarded as the doors closed. The bus rumbled away over the canal toward the city center. And for a shivering moment, Thomas just stood, watching the traffic, feeling as alone as he’d ever remembered feeling, almost bereft, practically in tears.

  Why? he wondered again. He realized he needed to call Jutta, knew that wouldn’t help right thisatis second, and left his phone in his pocket.

  It was too cold just to stand, though, too cold even to be out here much longer. He’d had only one other idea about where to go, and he didn’t know what he would find or whether there would be any open doors waiting for him when he got to Malevichskaya. Assuming he could still find it.

  He found it easily enough. As it turned out, there were signs.

  Signs. And not just signs, but banners strung like flags from the sides of buildings, catching and flapping in the never-ending wind. Mostly, the banners featured scrawled graffiti, black and white, the words in German, Swedish, Arabic, for God’s sake. No esk, and niin paha and Freedom is Space for the Spirit, and when Thomas saw that, he felt an absurd surge of pride. The words were in English. But they’d been brought there by a German artist, for one of the first “exhibits” officially allowed at Malevichskaya. And they stood out—rang out—still.

  It was the red Russian words underneath, though, printed in large, almost Stalinesque block lettering, that rattled Thomas most, so much, in fact, that he had trouble recognizing them at first. He parsed them out slowly.

  NON-CONFORMIST. ART. CENTER.

  Center. As in … museum? As in …

  It was a relief, strangely, to turn off Nevsky and immediately find the crowds thinning, then vanishing altogether. The buildings seemed to gray with each passing block, almost to shudder back in time to a darker, lonelier, more familiar Russia. What windows there were had drawn curtains in them. The banners advertising the Center and the exhibit on current display there disappeared as Thomas approached the Center itself. He wondered if there would be more signs out front, carpeting, perhaps a few of those craggy, hunched Russian women the state had always planted inside and at the doors of every museum he’d ever been to in this country, to glower at attendees, daring anyone who crossed their path to ask a question, disturb the silence.

  To his relief, he found none of those things. In fact, he somehow walked right past the shadowed, brick breezeway that led off the street and through to the old courtyard of condemned buildings. He only realized his mistake half a block later and had to double back. At the mouth of the breezeway, he stopped once more. He looked, and he listened.

  There was more flapping in there, though whether of banners, clotheslines, whirling bits of refuse, birds, Thomas had no idea. There was one sure way to find out, and he really did have nowhere else to go, no other signal he could send to alert anyone he’d once known that he had come as instructed.

  He moved into the breezeway, which swallowed the winter light. There were shadows aplenty in there, the wind whining as it sluiced through, stinking like sewage in a pipe. Thomas heard more flapping but no voices. Head down, he burrowed forward, wanting out of the dark, back in the light, and then he was indeed out, standing at the mouth of his old courtyard, staring up at that beautifully maintained bust of Lennon—John, of course—over the crumbling stone archway. ВвЕдитЕ в люБви, he read, the lettering and the arch of the words perfect mimics of the ARBEIT MACHT FREI over the gates of Auschwitz. Vasily’s idea, from decades ago. Thomas had never liked it. Vasily had assured him that was the point. Or, one possible point. Thomas could still see him posing underneath, dark eyes glittering with mischief, close-lipped smile splitting his beard like a fault line, hand in the air with a paint brush poised in his fingers like a baton.

  Comrades. Citizens of St. Petersburg. Your city, new …

  “But those words,” Thomas had protested, just the once. Meaning Arbeit macht frei. “Surely, those are nothing to laugh at.”

  “What else could one possibly do with them?” Vasily had answered, his grin furrowing even farther than usual up his cheeks, as though he were splitting in half right there in the courtyard. Twenty-five years and both of their countries ago.

  Thomas opened his mouth to call out now but caught himself. New Russia, Putin’s Russia, Center for Non-Conformist Art this all might be. But it was still Russia. He could feel it. Reaching up, brushing the bottom of Lennon’s chin with his fingers as he passed, he slipped through the archway.

  Wherever the new Center was, Thomas couldn’t see it, and there weren’t any more signs. The courtyard looked almost precisely as he remembered: two conjoined, condemned buildings where all of their studios had been, sagging into themselves like old loaves of bread, their cracked windows tilting together, the cobblestone chipped and worn underfoot, all the doors shut, daring anyone who’d come to knock.

  Except that in his time—at least, in the times when anyone living and working here wasn’t being arrested or hiding from being arrested—anyone who did knock got invited in immediately, got a tour and chleb and whatever cheap vodka was handy. Got to sit and play music, if they played any, or sing along to some if they didn’t. Got to stick on clown noses and fuck drunkenly in stairwells, go off on gallivants to free-climb the sides of abandoned buildings when no one was looking, set paper boats festooned with flags or little origami figures of Gorbachev and Gromyko in kimonos drifting down the Neva toward whoever might be stirred or startled or offended or amused by them.

  Today, though, his knocks brought only more silence. More flapping, which mostly came from the single, tattered banner strung like drying laundry from one of the high, leaning windows. FREEDOM IS SPACE FOR THE SPIRIT.

  And also terribly lonely, he thought. For himself more than for her, he really needed to call Jutta. He did want to talk to her, let her put the phone to her belly so he could whisper to their unborn child. Tell the child where he was.

  But he
just couldn’t. Not yet, not here. Not in the empty echoes of this Center of nothing, which had been his Center once.

  The place wasn’t just empty, he realized. It was abandoned. Thomas took in the blank, cracked windows, the black space behind them, the warped wooden doors shut tight, artful paint spattered down them like decorative bloodstains, all of it motionless and meaningless as a diorama in a museum. Which is precisely what this was.

  For sentiment’s sake only, Thomas wandered a bit, shivering as the wind whistled over him, catching snow on his tongue and in his ears. He only went up the leaning, wooden staircase at the back left because his and Vasily’s room had been up there once, and he only went to the door at the end, which hadn’t been their door, because he could see something stuck to it, flapping almost silently, uselessly, like a clipped wing.

  A poster, he thought at first, but there was more than one sheet of paper, a little packet clipped together and stuck to the door with a single strip of blue masking tape across the top.

  An eviction notice, perhaps? Good God, a museum display of an eviction notice?

  Absently, he reached out, tugged the papers from the door, and turned them over. Then he just stood in the shadows of the overhang, shivering and staring.

  FROM WHERE, he read, in English, a smudged, reduced copy of the front page of one of those odd St. Petersburg newspapers published by and for some loose-knit or imaginary community of expats. FOR WHOM, OR WHAT?

  Underneath the headline was a grainy photograph of a bear actually splayed on a bench, right in the middle of the Field of Mars, its head turned idly away from the camera toward the people passing on the paths, not a single one of them looking back in its direction. In the corner of the photograph, tiny but unmistakable thanks to the red ink in which it had been written, was the word FISTS.

  Which wasn’t a word, of course, but an acronym, Thomas realized. Freedom is Space for the Spirit.

  And that meant that this had been left here for him. By Vasily.

  Maybe.

  Turning the papers into the light, Thomas read fast, then faster. Then he went back to the beginning and started again.

  None can even say when we first saw them. One day, they were just among us, as though they always had been, and now they always are. They’re on our buses, our metro cars. We glimpse their reflections in mirrors, out windows, as we sip our Arabian coffees in insulated paper cups and eye ourselves in our sleek new Italian shoes. They shamble from alleys and wander in and out of churches and the museums we have at last been granted access to, like creatures escaped from a Levitan landscape, bringing the mood of those landscapes with them. They prowl the canals and the garbage-strewn, teeming alleys around Sennaya Square at evening, bumping against harried shoppers haggling over apples, trailing bits of discarded ribbon or cloth in their claws or on the pads of their feet. Silent, hulking, aimless, they drift among us, not just toothless but mouthless …

  At that, Thomas startled, glanced at the grainy photo, but he couldn’t quite make out the bear’s face. He thought furiously back, remembering the creature he’d seen in the parking space outside Vitebsk, and the second one brushing and sniffing at the smiling woman’s shoulder outside the coffee shop.

  Mouthless?

  He didn’t know, hadn’t noticed. Surely, if that were true, he would have seen.

  With an increasing sense of urgency, even alarm (though why, really, should he be alarmed?) he scanned the rest of the article. It revealed little. The bears had appeared only in St. Petersburg, as far as the writer knew, and only a few weeks before. There had been momentary panic, a few clumsy politsiya attempts at “roundups” that, according to the article, had felt and looked more like arrests than animal control. Almost immediately, following a brief and embarrassing episode with Tasers, captured by dozens of citizens on their sleek, new cell phones, the roundups had stopped. A politsiya official had given a brief press conference and said his force had limited resources and would be devoting them to “more pressing and concrete threats such as Chechen guerillas and homosexuals.” And from then on, the bears had been left to wander. They’d simply become part of the cityscape. An advertising gimmick, some guessed, though no one knew for what. A practical joke, but on whom, by whom?

  “A work of art?” the article’s author postulated. “The Great Bear of Russia gone toothless and old, or wild and free, or gentle and loving to its own people at last? The shambling emblems of a Russia that even Russians have long since ceased to dream?”

  Your city, new, Thomas thought.

  The copy of the article was smudged, the lettering along the bottom virtually unreadable except for the journalist’s name—Yelena Alyakina—and the name of the paper. That was enough. Thomas would start there.

  Folding the packet into his coat pocket and leaving his freezing hands there, Thomas hurried down the steps, across the empty courtyard, through the breezeway, and back out toward Nevsky Prospekt. At an internet café, he paid for fifteen minutes of computer time, located the newspaper office (which was annoyingly far, well out of the city center, but reachable by metro and a long, cold walk), and set off immediately again into the flurries.

  The farther he got from the canals, from the banners on lampposts and the glittering displays in frosted shop windows, the more the streets started to look like the streets he remembered: faceless buildings hulking and gray, though even those looked different now, had most of their windows, for starters; the downturned, inward-aimed faces of passersby huddled into their tatty scarves and old galoshes, none of them catching one another’s eyes or stopping at windows to gaze at reflections or flash smiles at lonely strangers. Every ten blocks or so came one of those giant, glitzy chrome-and-neon post-Communist neighborhood centers that had sprung up all over what had once been the East when it was East no longer, complete with market, pool hall, district office, electronics stands.

  Too long, while the wind worried and nipped at his insufficient coat and his thin Berlin gloves, Thomas walked, trying to leap the dirty slush pooling at every crumbling curb without bumping anyone, ducking back against buildings as Hungarian-built, Soviet-era buses lumbered past, spewing diesel fumes into the air to mix with the snow. Wheezing like bears, Thomas thought. Then he thought of Vasily, wondered where he was. And he remembered something, or almost did. Whatever it was made him feel even more lost. Also, it made him nervous, in a way he couldn’t even begin to name.

  Oh, old friend, he thought. Ya ne ponimayu

  The newspaper office was housed in a single linoleum-tiled room on the ground floor of a particularly faceless neighborhood center, divided from a post office by a crumpled, folding plastic screen. The heat in the building apparently wasn’t working, despite the occasional clanking of pipes in the walls and overhead. Every time anyone in the winding, endless postal line—something else that clearly hadn’t changed since Soviet times—or behind one of the scattered newspaper desks spoke, more breath streamed into the air, the clouds of it floating up toward the ceiling, muffling sound and making the whole room feel like the lounge of some nineteenth-century opium den. At a black wooden desk at the front of the newspaper office, a gray-haired woman with her forehead in her hand nodded into a telephone, occasionally growled terse responses in Russian, and didn’t so much as look up when Thomas approached. He’d been standing there a good three minutes before she stuck a finger in the air that he assumed was for him and read as a signal to wait. He looked around for a chair or a bench, found none, felt instinctively that he should step back, give the woman space. But in his head were bears, and the dead, shadowed stairwells at Malevichskaya, and the packet of paper in his pocket. He stayed where he was.

  After another ten minutes, when the woman still hadn’t so much as made eye contact, Thomas decided he should just stroll past her. He had never liked this about Russians, new or old: the way they dared you to challenge, would despise you if you did, would ignore you if you didn’t. He glanced out the window at the sprawling, empty lot across th
e street, strewn with paper cups, piles of discarded wooden planks, broken glass. That was the St. Petersburg he had known. Towering over it all was a billboard with fresh, red Cyrillic lettering, the letters dripping as though still wet, though they weren’t, not with anything but sleet.

  Slowly, Thomas parsed out the unfamiliar word. Then, startled, he glanced at the desk and was surprised to see the gray-haired woman openly watching him. Her eyes behind the glasses were that impossible, transparent blue he’d only ever seen in Russian women’s faces. Lake Baikal blue, he’d always told himself, though he’d never actually been to Lake Baikal, and anyway had no idea where people with eyes that color came from. How beautiful, he thought, this person must once have been. Still was, for anyone she allowed to see her face.

  She was holding the phone away from her ear and gazing openly at him. Better, and more unlikely, still, she was … not exactly smiling; that would be overstating. But for a Russian far from St. Petersburg’s bustling, cosmopolitan, tourist-swarmed heart, trapped behind a desk across a room from a post office, she was coming dangerously close.

  Thomas gestured out the window at the empty lot. In his clumsy Russian, he asked, “Does that really say … paintball?”

  Then the woman just up and did it, grinned outright. “Welcome to the New Russia.”

  Grinning back, Thomas unfolded the copy of the article from his coat pocket and held it out, pointing at the writer’s name. “I want to see—”

  But the woman was up, shoving her chair from the desk, walking away with the grin expunged from her face. She moved straight to the back of the room, hissed furiously at the little bald man back there behind the tumbling, collapsing stacks of paper on the room’s largest (though by no means newest) desk. The man stood, nodding. The top of his head barely reached the woman’s shoulders. He nodded again, patted the woman’s hand, knocked back the vodka in the well-used glass atop the nearest stack of papers, and moved toward Thomas. The woman stayed at the back, arms folded, watching through those glacial blue eyes that had been watching, Thomas thought, for a thousand years. Oh, yes, he knew that look. That mix of outrage, annoyance, and nervousness verging on terror. He’d known it all his life, though it had been years, now, since he’d last seen it.