Freedom is Space for the Spirit (2 page)

What
, he wondered,
could Vasily possibly be doing, after all this time, that even he could believe might matter? That was worth coming all this way for?

Later, to his surprise, Thomas actually managed to sleep. He awoke to an empty cabin and, from the bustle in the corridor, understood that the train was already arriving at Vitebsk Station. He shrugged hurriedly into his coat, stuffed last night's shirt into his bag, sucked at the thin, nicotine-tinged film of sleep on his teeth, remembered that taste, and realized abruptly that he was there.

Here!

Instantly, his gloom lifted like something he'd dreamed (
this
the reality,
this
his world, where he most belonged). Stumbling over his untied shoes in his excitement, Thomas exited the cabin, worked through the clumps of sleepy travelers, showed his invitation letter and hastily arranged tourist visa to a glazed-eyed customs official who barely even glanced at them, and ducked across the platform to emerge at last into the Vitebsk main hall. For a while, he just stood on those palatial stairs, staring up into the domed iron ceiling, his hand on the chipped marble of the banister, listening to the snarl of this least Russian of Russian cities sweeping across the grand checkerboard tile to greet him.

Though he'd packed little, he decided to check his bag into luggage storage until he had some idea where he might be staying. Then he realized he was starving, and wondered where the closest place might be to find a slab of
chleb
and some black coffee. Descending the stairs, he kept accidentally bumping into people who bumped him in return, glowering as he grinned back. The wind whistling in the open front doors was freezing, somehow white even when it wasn't visible, laced with ice. Head down, hurrying, now, Thomas pushed out onto Zagorodny Prospekt and threw his arms wide to the winter. He lifted his watering eyes into the wind, turned for the metro, which was right where he'd remembered it, and saw the bear.

He froze, held still. The muscles in his back cleaved to his spine, yanking hard, as though someone was running a flag up him. He waited for the bear to lurch to its feet, for his own lips to unlock themselves, let him shout.

But the bear …

It was less than twenty feet away, not leashed as far as Thomas could see, not attached to anything or anyone, but aligned in the exact center of the parking space closest to the building.
Exactly
in the center, perfectly between the lines, as though it had been parked there. It had its huge, shaggy head on its paws, its legs folded beneath it, and it was watching people and cars go by with enormous brown eyes, muzzle down, mouth invisible. Snow settled on its fur and accumulated, and no one seemed even to glance at it. Thomas thought he might be looking at a lifelike statue, something animatronic, even, until the bear shuddered, shook the snow off its thick coat, and settled again.

A bear.

Other than Thomas, the only people paying even the slightest attention seemed to be children who tugged at their parents' hands, pointed with their mittens. The parents barely bothered glancing around. One man stopped in front of Thomas to snap a picture with his phone before darting back inside the station.

Only then, exhausted and starving, did Thomas come to the full realization that he had no idea where to go. He had nowhere to stay, no one to call. No one to yell “
Bear!
” to. In the wild Yeltsin years, when Vasily had somehow cajoled his shady new friends into forging Thomas travel documents and luring him back, he'd always somehow arrived with an address or a name, or else he'd come with somebody. Or maybe he'd just
known
somehow: which abandoned building, which warehouse-turned-improvised-workspace/gallery, which bridge over which canal.

And now he thought maybe he did know where to start, after all: the place they'd always come back to, sooner or later, no matter how many times they'd gotten rousted or arrested there.

Yes. He knew where to begin, assuming it was even there anymore: Malevichskaya, where it really had seemed, for those few brutal, brilliant years right before and after the Wall fell, that the world—or
a
world, anyway—was being born. Reborn.

If nothing else, Thomas still knew roughly where that was. To reorient himself, he set off toward the canal, burrowing through wind that was even colder than the wind he remembered. He marveled at the icicles dangling like pendants from parking signs and awnings, but even more at the crowds of bundled-up Russians bustling about their business. At a buzzing, Starbucks-colored café, Thomas gave up hunting
chleb
and settled for a western-style latte and a dry scone. He sat at a tiny table by the window for a while, watching snow swirl over and around everything, as though the whole Earth had been given a long, hard shake. He watched the Russians passing. The Russian
women
passing. He remembered the joke—which was really a truism—they'd all used to pass around, when members of Vasily's loose collective poured into St. Petersburg from Poland, Czechoslovakia, Estonia and Germany and the Ukraine and Lithuania and Hungary:

How do you tell the real Russians? Look for the cheapest clothes.

Not anymore. Thomas felt more like a spectator at a Paris runway show (albeit an icy one): woman after woman with hair flowing long under elegant fur and faux-fur coats and hats, gliding over the ice in thigh-high black boots with six-inch heels like winter gazelles. It was disorienting, also mesmerizing. He was about to get up when, right in front of the window, one of those miraculous women slipped, banged hard against the glass before him, caught herself, and pushed upright. He caught a glimpse of red cheek, bright blue eye under an oil gush of black hair. Then the woman gazed straight into the window, straightened her coat, saw him staring back … and smiled.

This beautiful young Russian woman, striding through her city, and it was clearly
her
city now. And she was laughing at herself, smiling at him.

A magical, almost unimaginable moment, Thomas thought, something that would never have happened in the nervous, battered St. Petersburg he'd known. Yet again, he wondered why he'd come, what he was doing there, how anything he could offer, even as a spectator, could possibly matter now, in the world as it had become, which bore so little resemblance either to the one he remembered or the one they'd all convinced themselves they'd been creating.

He was standing now, half-thinking he might catch this woman before she left, actually speak to her, just to be speaking to someone. He'd lifted his hand to try to catch her attention when the bear reared up behind her.

The woman didn't see it, not at first, and she didn't see Thomas grab the table, reach out to hammer a warning on the glass, and then think better of that.
It followed me
, Thomas thought, heart thundering, then realized that was ridiculous.

It wasn't even the same bear; at least, he didn't think so. This one was blacker, also bigger, or maybe that was just how it looked up on two legs, towering over the sidewalk, swaying, ribs protruding through its patchy fur, almost more stray cat than bear except for its size.

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.

N
ON-
C
ONFORMIST.
A
RT.
C
ENTER
.

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. Вв
Е
дит
Е
в лю
Б
ви, 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.