Glen Hirshberg - Freedom is Space for the Spirit

“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 never 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.”

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.