Freedom is Space for the Spirit
Page 5
Thomas started to ask how, realized that was always the wrong question, with all art but especially with Vasily’s. Also, what did it matter? It had happened. There were more important questions now: What did it mean? Was it meant to be temporary?
Could any of them be saved?
“Vaska. How long have they … since you did this? Since your ceremony? If you did this … changed them … and if they have no mouths…”
Vasily was up, now, striding back and forth through the leaves, waving the last nub of banana like some fat stub of lecturer’s chalk. “It’s the most wondrous part, really, isn’t it? The best part. Because, Thomas, Ana, even I don’t know! Did I do it wrong? Did I misunderstand the instructions they gave me? Or did they leave something out? This could be their art. Do you understand? Their joke. The grocery-clerk shamans of the nowhere-East, conjuring fairy-tale man-bears with no mouths, tricking a madman”—he stopped in mid-babble, whirled, did a little curtsey, and went right back to pacing, waving the banana—“into turning them loose to wander and wonder and slowly starve to death on the streets of the city Russians built to connect them to the world that isn’t Russia. That whole winking world of marvels beyond the Urals, across the Black Sea, that we never have quite made sense or become part of…”
Reasoning with him, Thomas knew, was useless. It was also the only possible or sane course. The only chance. “Vasily. These bears. These … students. Your students.”
“They participated willingly, Thomas. Gleefully. They gave themselves to the moment, as we all learned to do. I told them exactly what was going to happen. Except for the mouths. I didn’t know about the mouths.”
“And the ending,” Ana said, her voice no longer angry, spilling from her lips in a haze of heavy, white breath. “I am thinking you didn’t mention the ending.”
“So, you do remember,” Vasily said, practically dancing. “Ana, you probably know more about the Nivkh bear ceremony than I do; your grandparents actually grew up there and—”
“I remember my babushka’s stories. You monster. Zver. I remember the ending.”
“The ending?” Thomas asked, and Ana turned to him. Her expression seemed so far away and fragmented, it was as though he were viewing it through a kaleidoscope.
“Of the bear ceremony,” Ana said flatly. “When the shamans murder and dismember the bear.”
Vasily had snatched up his iPad, and now he was staring into it, waving his finger and talking to it like a wizard over a cauldron. “Ooh,” he said. “Look! They’re gathering.”
He held up the iPad. On it was displayed what Thomas first took for some sort of game screen, a grid with little dots moving over it. Then—by the blue veins of the canals—he realized he was looking at St. Petersburg, a street map of the city center. And then he understood what the dots were.
“What…” Ana started, but Thomas waved her to silence.
“Bears?” he said. He didn’t have to manufacture any of the wonder Vasily expected when his acolytes addressed him. Wonder was certainly one of the things he was feeling. “How did … You’re tracking them?”
“GPS,” Vasily crowed. “In little pendants around their necks. Like pet tags.” He beamed.
Transformed, mouthless man-bears under a shaman’s spell. Their every aimless, hopeless movement tracked via satellite. Old-world magic, new-world magic. New Russia and old. As art, Thomas thought … as Situationist prank … it was …
“I think maybe you better hurry,” Vasily said to Ana, his voice suddenly soft, almost human. Almost an uncle’s, and with real love in it. “Moya lyubimaya. I think perhaps it is ending.”
Pounding her fists once more against the cage, Ana whirled and ran. For a single second, Thomas hesitated, thinking there was something he should say to Vasily, do for or maybe to him. But Vasily was just standing amid the leaves, not even looking at Thomas anymore, and suddenly, he seemed so small. Forgotten, older, soon to be old, as empty of purpose or thought or hope—whatever that might be or once have been—as the gorillas they’d once glimpsed here, all those years ago.
Spinning away, Thomas stumbled up the incline and after Ana through the flurrying snow.
Of course, this being St. Petersburg, not Paris or London or New York or, God knew, Berlin—and the sprawling outskirts of St. Petersburg, at that—it took them almost two hours, by bus and then metro, and then another metro to reach Nevsky Prospekt. By the time they reemerged onto the street, the day had already darkened. Flurries filled the air, winking against the glowing streetlights and the brilliantly lit Winter Palace like migrating snow sprites swarming over the rooftops and street stalls and buses, settling on the drawn-up hoods and scarves of all the people—the dozens, the hundreds of people—surging, seemingly as one, toward the Palace Embankment.
Shivering in the cold, Ana grabbed his hand. “Oh, Thomas,” she breathed, the first words she’d uttered other than Russian curses and her Alyosha’s name since they’d left the woods around the Pavlov Institute.
“Come on,” he said, pulling her along through the crowd.
They couldn’t run—there were too many people—but they moved fast, angling sideways, cutting between couples and families, darting around parked cars and between idled buses stranded in the surge of pedestrians. They rode the surge. It felt, Thomas realized, surprisingly like those last days at the Wall. Or rather, those first days of Wall-lessness, with people massing like water at the lip of a crumbling dam, sloshing over it, exploding through it.
Except without the joy, somehow. Without the convulsive release.
Without the hope, he understood abruptly. Which had probably been imaginary, or at least ephemeral, even then. But it had been there. Whereas this … this was just about seeing now. About being there to see. That was all anyone, East or West, hoped for anymore.
The crowd hustled them forward, spilled out onto the Palace Embankment where traffic had stopped dead, the few cars along it seeming to float in the roiling river of people like unmanned gondolas. Still clutching Ana’s hand, Thomas pulled her forward, nudging and bumping bystanders aside, until he somehow found them a spot right up against the stone wall separating the streets from the Neva. Not until Anna was safely ensconced alongside him did he look up. And not until she gasped did he see what she had seen.
The bears—all of them, if Vasily’s tracking devices had been working properly, two dozen, at least—were on the bridge. On Troitskiy Most. Some of them were just lying in the center of the traffic lanes, muzzles down. Two had draped themselves over the stone barrier facing the Winter Palace, heads slumped, like pelts hanging themselves out to dry. The rest were staggering aimlessly around up there, thudding into each other, stumbling to their knees and lurching back onto their feet. Occasionally, one turned fully in Thomas’s direction. It was those moments he would never afterward shake from his dreams: those eyes, devoid of everything but life; those blank, mouthless spaces, which should have rendered the faces friendlier, like stuffed things, but instead just made them ridiculous. Paper creatures ripped from some giant’s pop-up book, impossible to put back, impossible to sustain or corral or save. Of no tangible worth to anyone.
At either end of the bridge, police had established roadblocks and barriers, and they were making a great show of waving rifles around, though even they seemed confused about where to aim, whether their purpose was to keep people away or bears on the bridge. Around them, almost everyone but Thomas and Ana had cell phones out, and they were snapping photos silently, checking the photos on their screens.
For a long moment—Thomas would remember it as barely a breath—the whole city froze, as though posing for a portrait: snow in streetlight, the Neva and the palaces and the Peter and Paul Fortress and the long blue muzzles of the guns glittering in the blue-black dark, and the faces, dark and light and European and Mongolian and old and even older and, very occasionally, young, all massed together, as individual as snowflakes and also as fractal. One face.
Then—not slowly�
�one of the bears draped over the stone barrier reared up, swaying on two feet. As one, all the rifles at either end of the bridge and all the raised cell phones along the embankment swung toward it, locked in. The bear paid no attention, seemed instead to be staring up at the stars, and it was shaking, its whole body shuddering and rippling.
“It’s roaring,” Ana murmured, her voice seeming to wisp apart as it streamed into the air.
And Thomas realized she was right. Not that he’d ever seen this happen before, or ever would again, but there was no question: that, right there, was how a mouthless bear roared. And now, it was doing it harder, positively bellowing its … whatever it was—frustration? Hunger? Desperation? Loneliness?—in absolute silence.
Right beside that bear, two more rose up, and there was a thunderous, impressively unified click as a hundred safety catches popped off a hundred rifles. But no one shot, and the silence rippled and resettled with the snow as more bears rose in twos and threes.
Then they were all up, swaying, shuddering, heads thrown back, muzzles straight up in the air. For at most five seconds, all of them shuddered and strained together, as though a whole bear-forest had somehow sprouted right in the center of Trinity Bridge.
Did one of them slip? Knock into the others? Thomas would never be sure. All he knew with any certainty was what he saw, as Ana clutched his hand, sobbed silently beside him, hung there, leaning into the night over the Neva:
The first bear, the one who’d risen, gave a last heaving, soundless bellow. Then—as though it had somehow roared itself out of its skin—its body sagged all the way forward, its legs bumping the stone barrier as it tumbled off the bridge into the air. Before it had even landed, other bears followed, tipping forward one after another like lemmings, plummeting into the river and sending up spumes of icy spray that drove the crowd ducking and shouting backward.
But Thomas and Ana stayed where they were, watching bears surface one by one, the water bearing them up, ferrying their broken, motionless bodies down the canals, through the snow-draped night and out of St. Petersburg toward the Gulf of Finland.
There should have been … Thomas wasn’t even sure what. A collective wail. A chorus of gasps. A moment of silence, just to mark that something had happened. Was passing. Something living.
Then the police whirled on the crowd. Briefly, Thomas panicked, thought they might open fire, worried he could end up trapped—or shot—against this wall in the midst of a riot, a mindless surge.
Instead, with astonishing speed, the crowd along the embankment dissolved into its thousand separate parts, its couples and tour groups, its office mates and solitary travelers bumping and cutting behind and in front of one another. This wasn’t a surge, just a separation. And by the time he realized that, got himself steady on his feet, and cleared his head, Ana was gone.
Gone. Where?
“Ana!” he called, just once, thought he saw her across the street, head down, black hair streaming as she burrowed through the throng. If I were you, throng, Thomas thought, with a smile so faint that the first movement of his head melted it off his face, I’d get out of her way.
“Turkish?” he heard a laughing voice say, in English, right next to him.
Surprised, he turned, started to answer, “German,” and realized the man—kid, really, college kid—was talking to the speckle-faced, green-eyed, laughing redhead he was tugging behind him.
Food, Thomas realized. They were talking about food.
“This place is incredible,” the girl said. And then they were gone too. And Thomas was practically ripping his gloves off his hands, pulling out his phone and punching at the speed-dial.
“Jutta?” he said before she’d even spoken, had barely even answered. “Jutta, it’s me.”
“Yes, I hear that,” she said. Laughing.
His wife, laughing. Thomas almost hung up on her, too, almost threw the phone into the Neva, let it follow the bears. The dead and beautiful bears.
“And so?” Jutta was saying, her laughing voice filling his ear. “Did you find him? What has he got up to now?”
Oh, you know, Thomas very nearly answered. Killing some kids. Watching Russians Snapchat it.
“Can I talk to our son?” he said.
“Can you…” Jutta started, and Thomas thought she’d actually heard, understood. But of course she hadn’t. She was still laughing. “Here he is.”
Of course, Thomas had nothing to say to him, either. Except, in the end, “Hello.” And so, he said that. Then he said it again. And he went on doing that, in his mind, out loud, to his son, all the way back to Vitebsk Station to catch the next train home.
About the Author
GLEN HIRSHBERG received his B.A. from Columbia University, where he won the Bennett Cerf Prize for Best Fiction, and his M.A. and M.F.A. from the University of Montana. His first novel, The Snowman’s Children, was a Literary Guild Featured Selection. His collection, The Two Sams, won three International Horror Guild Awards and was named a Best Book of the Year by Publishers Weekly. Hirshberg has won the Shirley Jackson Award and been a finalist for the World Fantasy and the Bram Stoker Awards. You can sign up for email updates here.
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Contents
Title Page
Copyright Notice
Begin Reading
About the Author
Copyright
Copyright © 2016 by Glen Hirshberg
Art copyright © 2016 by Greg Ruth