Freedom is Space for the Spirit

by Glen Hirshberg

  “Not always.”

  “—and he’s a clown. And he has always considered everyone he ever met as pawns. You understood this, yes?”

  “I … understood that. Yes.” He hadn’t always. Certainly, he had at the end.

  “And when he called to me, that day he reappeared, he didn’t jump up to hug me. He was excited to see me, all right. He was even more excited because he was sitting there with my … with Alyosha. With my friend. He wanted me to see that. So, naturally, I was the last piece he needed.”

  “Yes,” Thomas said, already comprehending. He marveled at Ana’s clarity. She was Vasily’s niece, for sure. “You were the audience.”

  “I was someone to tell.”

  Yet again, Thomas felt that shudder of apprehension that had plagued him ever since his arrival. Only, now it had intensified. “Okay. So. What did he tell you?”

  Sucking in her cheeks, she did a pretty fair impersonation of Vasily’s excited, reedy whine. “‘I’m going to turn it inside out, Ana. I’m going to make the city new.’ That’s what he said, and that’s all he would say, and Alyosha wouldn’t say any more either. He just laughed when my uncle did. Three weeks later, I saw my first bear.”

  In the sleet, the bus had slowed, its single working windshield wiper slapping at the cracked front glass, more like a whapping cat’s tail than a blade. Around him, people seemed to have settled as the clusters of riders thinned, looking down in their laps and eying each other sidelong. Almost no one else on the bus seemed to be speaking.

  “Ana,” Thomas said after a time, partly just to keep from leaping off the bus, from running, though he had no idea where he would go or why he felt so sure he should go there quickly. “You think Vasily has something to do with the bears.”

  She shrugged. “The night after I saw my first bear—at the market, next to an onion stand—Vasily showed up at my flat. I … He was so drunk, he could hardly even stand. He’d already thrown up all over himself, probably more than once. And he was spouting such nonsense. ‘Bears, Ana. We’ll set them free.’ There was something about some military complex. Or zoo. Or laboratory. All those things, actually. ‘It’s rescue!’ he kept shouting. ‘It’s a party!’ Then he threw up on my floor, on my new rug, and I threw him out on the street and told him to come back sober. I remember he laughed at that, so I said, ‘Less drunk.’ And he said, ‘See you.’

  “The next day, Alyosha called and woke me up to say he was going off with V. V, he said, as if anyone ever called my uncle that. He said they’d be underground for a while, that he’d call as soon as he was back. And that was the last I heard from either of them.”

  A zoo, Thomas thought. Military complex? “I don’t understand,” he finally said. “Why would even Vasily want—”

  “We’re here,” Ana said abruptly. “Scheisse.” To the driver, she snapped, “Podozhdi.”

  The bus lurched to a stop, eliciting glares from turned-up faces all around them. An old woman in a balaclava barked something at Ana, and she laughed as she tugged Thomas off the bus. Before Thomas had even gotten all the way free, the doors were sighing shut. The bus plowed back into traffic, spraying muck and slush.

  “What did that woman say?” Thomas mumbled, bending to wipe at least some of the sleet off his pants before realizing it was hopeless. He was wet through.

  “She said, ‘Your friend’s Western tones are grating to my ears.’”

  Still hunched, Thomas glanced up. “You’re kidding.”

  “This is not something I do,” Ana said. If she’d smiled then, he might have gathered her to him, held her, told her it would be all right.

  Instead, she looked past him down the sidewalk at the pedestrian bridge that angled away from the community center, across a little reservoir into surprisingly dark and tangled woods. “Thomas? I think we should hurry.”

  Without another word, they started toward the bridge. Sleet swept across them, stitching the air into a grimy gray curtain that rippled with their passing, brushing wetly against them. A very few locals, sticking to the muddy track from the apartment complexes up the hill, scurried by with their heads down. The bridge’s railings were weirdly white wood that looked almost plastic, and on the rippling surface of the little reservoir, a single duck floated, its feathers Soviet-housing-complex brown and mottled. By the time Thomas and Ana reached the trees, water was rilling down their necks into their coats. It felt frigid, and worse, gummy. More like mucus than rain.

  Under the scant cover of a bare hemlock tree, Ana pulled Thomas to a stop, and they stood for a moment, listening to the forest rattle with the patter. Just visible through the snarled bushes and dead hemlocks ahead, Thomas could already make out the hulking brick buildings of the Pavlov Institute, where the great man himself had made that most Russian of scientific discoveries: that living things are slaves to their patterns, and do what they are conditioned to do.

  “Okay,” Ana said, wringing her hair. “Where?”

  Shivering, Thomas eyed her. “What?”

  “You brought us here. You said you’d been here with Vasily. This is where he sent you. Where?”

  She was getting ready to shove or yell at him again. It was almost funny in a terrible sort of way. In a way Vasily would have found funny. “Ana. I have no idea. How would I…” His voice trailed away.

  He had been here once. But he was fairly certain that except for the Pavlov Institute buildings, which they hadn’t entered, few or none of the other structures around them had even existed then. And the woods had seemed wider and wilder, less like an overgrown yard, more like somewhere gorillas, or bears, might be …

  “This way,” he said abruptly, and stepped back out into the sleet. How did he know? He didn’t. But here he was, leaning into the wet, wild wind with his nose in the air like a dog. Like Pavlov’s dog. Vasily’s dog.

  Shoving aside branches, ignoring the freezing water streaming down his neck into his sweater, he moved left, then forward, past buildings, down a little slope he didn’t exactly remember, but there was something in his brain, a scent, a memory of a sight, something.

  “Thomas?” Ana said, and her voice now was the one she’d had when he’d known her last. When she was a little girl. “The bear ceremony. What did Vasily tell you about the bear ceremony?”

  Mostly, Thomas was watching the woods, staring into each not-quite clearing, each shadowed wild place in the lee of those brooding, lightless buildings that had been lightless then, too, that he and Vasily had imagined were lightless always but vibrating with sound, not at all unlike their squatters’ studios at Malevichskaya. In fact, they’d imagined these buildings haunted by Pavlov and his dogs, ringing and barking to each other in the dark.

  “I don’t remember, Ana. Nothing, I don’t think. That … bears were important? That your people—”

  “Our people,” she snorted.

  “—picked a bear. Every winter, right? And invited guests. Lots of guests, from far away.” Guests from far away, he thought, noting and then suppressing the thought with a shudder.

  And then he realized that he was sure: whatever was happening here, Vasily had done it. Even the time of year was right, after all. Vasily had told him, years ago: the Nivkh bear ceremony was a winter festival. A feast involving ritual dancing, some sort of teasing of the bear (What had that line in the article said? “A brief and embarrassing episode with Tasers…”). A celebration.

  “There,” he said suddenly, and stopped ankle-deep in a rutted row of muck plowed some indefinite time before by some sort of multi-wheeled military something.

  Without waiting for Ana, he plunged off the path, down another surprisingly steep incline, through an accidental—no, natural—hedge of tall, dead bushes, their thorns brittle, breaking against his coat sleeves like old brick, like chunks from the smashed-in Wall. He burst into a little copse, not so much a clearing as a half-open space under two towering dead hemlocks, like an amphitheater tipped up on its side. In the center of the copse, right where the
shadows met the light, propped between half-visible, centuries-old underground roots, sat the gorilla cage.

  “This is it,” he whispered, as Ana burst through the hedge and reached him. “We found it.”

  Together, they stared at the rusting black iron bars of the cage. The door hung open, half off its cracked hinges, as though whatever had been in there really had escaped. The idea thrilled Thomas, somehow: those two bedraggled, shriveled apes loose in these woods, maybe crouched right over their heads on the dead branches. He remembered the gorillas’ eyes, their alien, animal gazes, not so close to human after all, and he shuddered and glanced up. Of course, there was nothing above but empty sky, sleet slanting down.

  “Found what?” Ana said, her voice furious, exhausted, disgusted. To Thomas’s alarm, she sank to her haunches, dropping her head into her gloved hands. With her wet, black hair streaming down her back, she looked at once peaceful and wild, crouching there. Like a gorilla, or a bear. She looked up. The wildness in her did not dissipate. “Is that all he told you?”

  “About this?” Thomas said. “About what we’re doing here? He didn’t tell me anything, remember? He drew me a gorilla on a bag and you—”

  “About the bear ceremony. I’m gathering he didn’t tell you the end.”

  “It has an end?”

  “It has…” Ana snatched up some sticks in her fist and snapped them between her fingers. “I hardly remember. These were children’s stories, you understand. Something my ded and my babushka taught us. My parents didn’t even want them talking about it after we moved to Moscow. They had a huge fight about it once. My parents wanted us to be ‘proper Russians.’ I think Babushka actually attended one, one time. She said at the end, they—”

  “Oh, blin!” came a snarl from up the hill. “Shit, shit, shit. What are the chances?”

  Half-stumbling, half-plunging down the hill on the other side of the copse came a gray-haired dwarf in a splotchy green overcoat, spectacles in one hand, what looked like—and, indeed, turned out to be—an iPad in the other.

  He had both arms flung wide for balance, and not until he’d reached Ana and Thomas did his hood slide back so they could see his face.

  “Uncle Vasily?” Ana breathed, stood, and started forward.

  But he was already past her, diving into the gorilla cage, yanking the door shut with a clang, spinning in what seemed six directions at once as he gathered a pencil, a notebook, a stained gray rug, and a bunch of browned bananas out of the mounds of dead leaves on the floor of the cage. Plopping himself on the carpet, Vasily opened his iPad case, pulled free a single banana and half-peeled it, slid the pencil behind his ear and the spectacles onto his face. Only then did he look up.

  “Oh. Guten Tag, Ana. Thomas. You got my messages.” He spoke mostly English, with sprinkles of Russian, then German.

  Thomas stared at his friend. Even grayed—and he was all the way gray, and also beardless, clean-shaven as a little boy—and even sitting in a gorilla cage in the middle of the woods, Vasily looked only like himself. It was the eyes, Thomas thought, it had always been the eyes: expressive but also unfathomable, mesmerizing. Rasputin without the power-lust. Situationist Rasputin.

  “You were supposed to find me this way,” Vasily said, grinning. “I’ve been sitting out here for days, waiting. And so of course, I get up to use the toilet in that building there and replenish my banana supply, and that’s when you show up. Come in here! Let me embrace you.”

  For one ridiculous moment, Thomas didn’t want to enter the cage. Then he started forward, and as he did, Ana bumped him aside, grabbed the bars, and rattled them. “Uncle Vasily, where’s Alyosha?”

  Just like that, Vasily forgot Thomas was there. Thomas watched it happen. At this moment, Ana was the better audience. Therefore, she was the center of Vasily’s world.

  “Ahh.” He spread his hands, shrugged, and smiled. “How would I know?”

  “He’s not with you? He said he was with you.”

  “He did? When?”

  “Uncle Vasily. Please. Where are they hiding?”

  Vasily just grinned wider, his mouth like a red rip in the gray day.

  Ana shook the bars, still more snarling than pleading, but not much more. “Where is Alyosha?” She sank back to her crouch, meeting his gaze at eye-level.

  “Vaska,” Thomas said, stepping up beside Ana but instinctively staying outside the cage, in her world, not his.

  Mouth full of banana, Vasily ignored them both. Many times, Thomas had seen him like this. Asking direct questions would be pointless, counterproductive. He would only discuss what he wanted to discuss. And what he wanted to discuss was his art.

  “Vaska. This … Your bear ceremony. That’s what this is? You learned it in the East?”

  “Learned it? Well. I conceived it there. Yes.”

  “From—”

  “From just being in that world, Thomas. Oh, you should have come. You should have seen—you would not believe—how those people still live. In those villages, way out in the taiga, with winter coming in. Half-dark all the time except when it’s completely dark. Snow so deep that it took me weeks, once I got back, to walk right again. It was as if I’d been on a ship and couldn’t get my land legs. Most of them still live in these little, tiny huts with wood stoves, except the ones who live in the one giant Soviet apartment monolith they built for the Party members and oil workers’ families in the middle of the only square in what they call a town. So, what do they do at night, when they’re not working? When no one’s watching?”

  It took Thomas a moment to realize Vasily actually expected an answer. Ana, he suspected, was close to leaping through the bars to wring her uncle’s neck. On the path above them on the other side of the hedge, people tramped up and down through the muck. The sleet had eased some, softening into ordinary, white St. Petersburg snow.

  “I don’t know, Vasily. What do they do? Play snow football?”

  “Hah. Yes. Sometimes. Also, they have an annual Stalin’s head ice-sculpting contest. That’s quite something to see.”

  “You’re kidding.”

  “The better question is, are they kidding? I was among them for four years. Still have no idea. Wonderful. But mostly, I am sorry to report, what they do at night is watch.”

  “Watch. You mean storms? The ice?”

  He snorted. “Their cell phones. They have a brand-new tower. They watch a lot of One Night of Love.” Taking another bite of banana, Vasily grinned again. “They … what’s the American phrase … they binge-watch. They drink. They have drinking games based on plot twists. Very inventive. Very amusing.” His voice dropped to a whisper, and he poked a single index finger up in the air. “And then—only sometimes, and only very late at night, when they’re huddled around their stoves or their radiators, and a brand-new wind comes howling down off the Pole, and they think no one else alive could possibly be watching or listening—do you know what they do, Thomas? They pray.”

  “Pray.”

  “Such prayer, Thomas. Do you remember going to Orthodox masses with me? Just to watch all those people stand in their nooks, their private corners, for hours and hours, while priests chanted and stepped out among them and went back up on their stages or whatever they call them, doing all those incomprehensible, ritualized things? Well, this praying makes that look…” For the first time, Vasily met Thomas’s gaze straight on. There were tears in his eyes. Here was the Vasily Thomas had known, marveling at and even loving the world. Thomas had forgotten he could do this. That this was the very center of his art, of his whole being.

  “New,” Vasily breathed. “Young. Diluted. What the Orthodox do … what we do, any of us … it’s like the ghost of prayer. The atavistic memory of prayer.”

  “Vaska,” Thomas said. “Tell me about the bear ceremony.”

  At that, the tears in Vasily’s eyes actually spilled over. His hand rose to his cheek, spread across his stubble-free cheek as though feeling the wall of a cave. As though Vasily had nev
er felt such a cheek before. “Oh, Thomas. The bear ceremony. Such an inadequate name.”

  “Chert poberi,” Ana hissed, clutching the bars.

  “I only saw the one,” Vasily said. “But such a one. And afterward … I learned. I learned, Thomas. I talked to the shamans. They’re all shamans-by-night now, of course. Grocery clerks or oil field worms by day, if you can call what they have up there day. I went to their huts or their flats. I brought them vodka, and vodka, and more vodka. And I listened while they talked. I heard what they knew, all the forgotten things they know. And eventually, when they realized that I was learning, they started teaching me. And I realized, at last, what gift I could bring back to poor, confused, mafia-infested, Starbucks-infected, Putinized, brutalized, baffled, beautiful St. Petersburg: a memory from an even more savage, beautiful time we’ve all forgotten, or denied, or repressed, or dreamed. A kiss—my kiss—to the northernmost city in the world, from the far East they’ve forgotten is even there.”

  Abruptly, he giggled. “Or it would be a kiss. If not for what happened with the damn mouths. Oh, my poor students. Your poor Alyosha, Ana. I didn’t intend that.”

  “Poor Alyosha?” Ana whispered. Abruptly, she stood. Reared, really. Anyone but Vasily would have lunged for the cage door, smashed it shut, prayed it locked, to keep Ana out. “Where is he?” she said.

  Only then did Vasily seem actually to register the question. He met her gaze straight on. “You’ve probably seen him more recently than I have.”

  Understanding dawned so fast in Thomas, and so softly, it was like awakening, or remembering. Ana understood too, he suspected, because she hadn’t lunged, had gone frighteningly quiet. Maybe she’d somehow guessed all along.

  But how could she have? It was absurd. Insane. Impossible.

  Forgotten …

  Ana gave the bars one more feeble rattle, banged her forehead against them. “Uncle Vasily,” she said. “Just say it.”