Freedom is Space for the Spirit (7 page)

The bearsâall of them, if Vasily's tracking devices had been working properly, two dozen, at leastâwere 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 momentâThomas would remember it as barely a breathâthe 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.

Thenânot slowlyâone 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 itsÂ â¦ whatever it wasâfrustration? Hunger? Desperation? Loneliness?âin 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. Thenâas though it had somehow roared itself out of its skinâits 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 beenÂ â¦ 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 trappedâor shotâagainst 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 manâkid, really, college kidâwas 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 youâ¦” 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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