Glen Hirshberg: Freedom is Space for the Spirit

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.

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.