Glen Hirshberg: Freedom is Space for the Spirit

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?”

“Who are you?”

“What?”

“Who are you?” The man actually poked him, hard, right under the scarf along the collarbone.

Even after all these years in the West, Thomas instinctively recoiled at that question. And because he did, he thought he understood this newspaper’s man reaction after all. This was caution, plain and simple, instinctive and learned the hard way.

But about this? About mouthless bears? Wind whistled through him as though he wasn’t even there, was a dead tree sprouting from the cracking sidewalk.

He was nothing here. And he always had been .

Thomas almost walked away. What he really wanted to do was call Jutta, catch the next train home. But the bald man was staring at the unfolded papers in Thomas’s hands. And now he mostly looked sad. Maybe.

“I’m…” Thomas started, and realized he didn’t even know how to explain. “I was once… I am looking for them. For Vasily Litvinov—you know him?—and his… I’m just trying to find my friends.” In frustration, Thomas rubbed at his frozen cheeks and forehead with his gloved hand. The skin of the glove felt even colder than his own. “I wondered only if I could speak to…” He held up the paper, pointing out the name of the journalist once more.