Freedom is Space for the Spirit (3 page)

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 the 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.

“
Dobrý den
,” said the bald man. He didn't offer Thomas a hand, and indeed didn't even stop at the woman's desk. Instead, he stepped toward the front door, then through it onto the sidewalk. He hadn't brought a coat, and he didn't stop for one. Thomas followed him out.

The moment the door closed and they had taken up positions under the inadequate overhang, the bald man whirled on Thomas, an accusatory finger punctuating his words. “You've upset Larisa.”

Larisa
, Thomas thought. Meaning
cheerful
. He couldn't remember why or how he knew that. Probably because he'd known several Larisas once. Then. Even one or two cheerful ones.

Casting about, Thomas tried to call up the Russian for
Excuse me
but couldn't.
Was
there Russian for
excuse me
?

“I apologize,” he tried instead.

To his surprise, the bald man switched instantly into perfect German. “You just walk in here, waving that?” His finger stabbed at the unfolded papers Thomas still held. “What do you want with Yelena Alyakina?”

Thomas blinked, took a breath. “Want? I wish to … I just want to speak to her. About this article.”

“Why would you be interested in that?”

Abruptly, Thomas was annoyed. Or maybe that was his alarm increasing. “Weren't you? Or were these published by mistake?”