Glen Hirshberg: Freedom is Space for the Spirit

All at once, the bald man burst out laughing. He folded his arms across his substantial chest, perhaps just against the cold. When he spoke, his voice was gentle and perhaps a little proud. “That would be difficult,” he said.

“Sorry?”

“I can not help you. And neither can Yelena Alyakina.” He nodded once more toward the article. “She is gone.”

“Gone.”

“I sent her away. For her own safety, you understand. Just in case. If you want to come back next month, perhaps—”

“No,” said Thomas. “No, I don’t understand. Safety from what?”

“From what do you think?”

“But… for this? For bears in the street? Who would be upset about… And anyway, isn’t this the New Russia?”

The bald man stopped laughing, kept smiling. But this was a smile Thomas recognized. Every Russian he’d ever met had a version of it. “New Russia. Old Russia. The price is the same for both. I’m sorry. I hope you find your friends.”

With that, the editor left him in the street and returned to his office. Thomas watched through the window as he nodded curtly at Larisa and made his way, head down, to his desk.

And now, Thomas realized, he had absolutely nothing. Maybe he’d been on the wrong trail all along, and none of this had anything to do with Vasily’s telegram. The telegram itself, he realized, could have been the joke. The art. Maybe the project had been prying one-time friends from their far-away, comfortable, bourgeois lives with a few taps of tired keys and a tossed-in, worn out acronym. A cryptic STOP.

Fumbling with frigid fingers, Thomas found his cell phone in his pocket. He would call Jutta, make his way back toward the Winter Palace, perhaps drift once through the Russian Museum, stop at the market outside the Church of the Savior on Spilled Blood and be a good capitalist and buy his wife one of the kitschy Stalinist chess sets she sometimes used in her own art. Then he would catch the night train back to Berlin. This time, he’d be so tired, he might even sleep, partying Poles in the corridors or no. He had already turned away in the direction of the bus stop when another hand slid into the pocket he’d just emptied.

His reaction was old, instinctive, born in industrial Berlin warehouses in the shadow of the gutted Wall, in the strobing, strafing lights and hash haze and raw hunger of those impossible nights in the winter of 1989, 1991, when the beats blasting off turntables seemed to be—really were—rattling kings off thrones and girders off buildings, when bodies and minds were hurling themselves together, combining, recombining, the people of a dozen collapsing nations smashing themselves together as though thrown into a continent-wide supercollider, charged and aroused, blindly groping and exploring and igniting. Picking each other’s pockets for pennies for food.

Slamming his own elbow against his ribs, he trapped the hand in his pocket, heard its owner cry out, whirled hard on her, and used the motion of his body to drive her to a knee in the snow. Then he stared down in surprise and alarm.

“Ana?” he said.

“Let me go,” she snarled in Russian, ripped her hand free, and stood up. She was a full foot taller than he remembered, and of course she would be; he’d last seen her when she was perhaps twelve years old, sitting where she most loved sitting, on her Uncle Vasily’s lap, smearing his beard with the paint on her fingers.

How had he even recognized her? Because she was still Ana the black-haired and black-eyed, and her face had always stuck with him. She looked like some Native American chief’s daughter, he’d always thought, with only a storybook basis for the thought: her skin a deep tan, hair wild and dark. She glared up at him now with tears in her eyes.

“Ana, I’m sorry.” He drew her to her feet, but she shoved away from him. “What are you doing here, and—”

“You have to find him,” she hissed. The knees of her shabby corduroy pants were wet through, and she slapped at them once with her hands.

“I know,” he said. “I will. That’s why I’ve come. I—”

“Something’s wrong.”

Thomas realized he knew that, too. More than anything, he wanted to lift a hand to Ana’s face, wipe the tears not quite leaking from her lashes. But she wasn’t letting those tears fall, and he knew better.

“How did you—”

“Yelena Alyakina.”

“You know her?”

Despite the unshed tears, Ana rolled her eyes. “At your service.”

“Wait. You— ”

Ana was as much spitting as speaking, and Thomas wasn’t sure he was catching it all. Apparently, whenever the paper had a story that the editor felt might endanger the writer, that story got the byline Yelena Alyakina . And then Ms. Alyakina got sent to Turkey for a while.

Thomas was still sorting all of that out when he realized Ana had long since stopped explaining and was instead jabbing a finger at his coat.

“Your pocket. Thomas, now. Mudak .”

“My…” Thomas glanced down at his coat, and the wind whipped snow in his face. Until that moment, there had been sun somewhere overhead, out of sight but there, which was why the world had seemed so white. But now, it was graying as he breathed.

“I was putting something in ,” Ana said more slowly, as though he were the child. “Not taking out. After Vasily gave me the story… or, after Alyosha made him—”

“Alyosha?”

Ana stamped a booted foot hard enough to crack the ice atop the sidewalk. “Before they went into hiding. Vasily left that for you. In case you ever came. I don’t think he really thought you’d come.”

“He didn’t?” Thomas murmured. Then he shook his head. It didn’t matter. “Why not just give it to me?”

Ana’s voice came out bitter, mocking, not at all the way he’d ever heard her address or talk about her uncle. “Just following instructions. He thought you’d appreciate the game. He’s seven years old and always has been.” The tears almost escaped this time, but she beat them flat with her lashes. “Also, something is wrong.”

In his pocket, Thomas found the crumpled scrap of brown paper Ana had stuffed there. It wasn’t stationery or even from a sketchbook; it had been cut from a bag. On it was a sketch, crude, very much indeed like something drawn by a seven-year-old. Because Vasily can’t draw , Thomas remembered. He has no artistic skill whatsoever except his brain. His raw talent.

At first, Thomas couldn’t even figure out what the sketch represented. The moment he did, words he’d forgotten he even knew spilled from his mouth, as though Vasily had reached through the paper and nicked him. “Koltooshy Pavlovo,” he said.

“ What? ” Ana whispered, and from her whisper, he suspected she felt the same tremor of unease he did. He wondered if she knew why, because he wasn’t at all sure he could explain.

“I…” In frustration, Thomas shook his head. “How’s your German?”

Ana shook her head. “Not enough.”

“English?”

“Yes. Okay.”

“It’s a gorilla,” Thomas said, in English. “He… We were walking there once. In the woods, out by the Pavlov Institute. Someone we knew was holed up out there. Hiding out, I think. We couldn’t find the apartment, and there were many abandoned buildings, or maybe they weren’t actually abandoned, but anyway, we couldn’t find anyone. And in the woods—not even in a clearing, it was just leaning on this hillside, like it had dropped from a plane—was this miserable iron cage. Maybe…” He held up his hands, illustrating the size. “Two meters by three? Maybe? And inside it…” The shiver that had been building under his ribs rippled across his skin, and the wind kicked up and spirited it away, taking a part of him with it. “Inside it, there were two gorillas.”