Glen Hirshberg: Freedom is Space for the Spirit

Ana looked as though she might shove him into traffic. She had always been Vasily’s favorite, all of their favorite, really. Their little collective’s mascot. Hers was the ferocious, black-eyed face of the blazing future none of them had actually believed was coming. Not really.

Had it come, though? Was this it?

“The gorillas were pathetic, Ana. You could see ribs. Their hair was falling out. It was like they’d been there, by themselves, for years. Just maybe left out in the woods. Part of some experiment that had been discontinued. Or maybe they’d escaped. That was your uncle’s joke. They’d maneuvered their cage off the back of a truck and tumbled down this incline and come to rest there.”

“That joke isn’t funny.”

“Very few of Vasily’s jokes were funny.”

“Alyosha,” Ana mouthed, or at least, that’s what Thomas thought she mouthed. Certainly, she was tearing up again.

Thomas spoke slowly. He felt as if he were edging up to something, peering over the edge of something. “That was the day he told me about the bear ceremony.”

Ana jerked, looked up, stumbled half a step back. For a few seconds, she just glared at him.

“Ana, what—”

“There’s a bus,” she snarled. “Come on !” Grabbing his hand, she did indeed tug him straight out into the road, and then they were splashing across it, ankles-deep in slush as boxy, rusted Russian cars blared at them and drivers screamed obscenities through closed windows. The bus driver, wrapped up tight in a hooded parka, glanced in their direction—Thomas saw him register them—closed the bus doors, and started pulling away from the curb.

And Ana darted right into the bus’s path, stopped dead, and aimed that glare of hers straight through the blowing snow and diesel smoke into the bus’s front window.

Then, to Thomas’s amazement, the driver laughed. He honked hard and opened the door. Ana pulled Thomas around the side and up the bus steps.

Fumbling in his pockets again, Thomas said, “Ana, I don’t have… I don’t even know the correct…”

But Ana had already paid. She received two tickets back from the scowling, balaclava-clad ticket woman standing next to the driver and started shouldering through the old men blocking the path toward the back of the bus. Thomas followed. The bus lurched into traffic through a black cloud of its own exhaust, and Ana pulled up short, tipping back against him. He put out an arm to steady her, glanced up, and so came face to face, at last, with a bear.

For a long, surreal moment, he just stood there. Bodies bumped wordlessly against him, no more apologetic or even sentient than boats in a marina. No one else turned around, or dove for the front of the bus, or screamed. As far as Thomas could tell, only he and Ana even bothered looking. Everyone else was pointedly looking elsewhere. Anywhere but at the bear.

And it really was a bear, not a man in costume. It was up on two legs, well over six feet tall, hunching to fit under the roof. Once, it shook itself, blowing air out its snout. The snout itself was black and wet, the mangy fur falling out in patches, flecked with snow and dirt. What looked like a scrap of tissue was stuck to one twitching ear, as though the creature had nicked itself shaving. Under the snout, it had more patchy fur but no teeth. No opening , even, where a mouth could have been, which made the face look… Exposed was the only word that popped into Thomas’s mind. Not just bare but stripped. Like a wall scraped of a mural. Like Malevichskaya with no one in it. Like an empty lot, cleared even of rubble.

But it was the eyes that he would remember most. They did, occasionally, swing down toward him or brush over him, deep brown and full of feeling, but not any feeling Thomas recognized. At some point, it occurred to him—absurdly, because given the absurdity of the entire situation, why would this matter?—that the time of year was wrong. That whatever was happening had been ill conceived, right from the beginning.

“Shouldn’t you be sleeping?” he said softly, to the bear, in Russian.

Ana was no longer clinging to his arm, though she’d edged back alongside him, as close to clear of the animal as she could get without leaving his side. Thomas could feel her gaze on him, but he ignored it for the moment.

The bear’s ears twitched. It gazed back, or maybe just gazed, not as though it understood or would answer if it could. Twenty minutes before the bus reached Koltooshy Pavlovo, at the edge of some sort of military compound ringed with woods, the animal abruptly stirred, dropped to all fours, bumped Thomas and Ana and the old men aside, and lumbered out of the bus. Before Thomas could even see where it went, the bus pulled away.

“He was gone so long,” Ana murmured, seemingly to herself.

Thomas closed his eyes, tried to blink away the animal’s face, to fight down the feeling that he was drifting farther by the second from anywhere he had ever imagined or wanted to be. When he opened his eyes again, he saw woods, snow slanting sideways as it turned to sleet, Russians huddled around benches at exposed bus stops, motionless as crows on wires.

“Vasily, you mean? Where did he go?”

“East. Home, he said. Bullshit, as usual, because he’d never even been there. We don’t have relatives there, now, none that anyone I know has ever spoken of. I don’t even know if there are Nivkh—our people—there anymore. But that’s where he went. Way out in the taiga somewhere. For years, Thomas. He’s been gone for years . He left no number, no address, no way to reach him. He never wrote. He never called. And I don’t mean just us, either. I’ve run into most of your old, idiot crowd. Yakov. Timofeev. Larisa.”

The names chimed in Thomas like bells rung for the dead, even though he had no reason to think any of them had died. They’d just stopped being who they were, same as he had. Grown up, given in, gotten married, gotten tired, gotten sane.

“How are they?” Thomas asked.

“Old,” Ana snapped. Once again, she looked as though she wanted to slap him.

“And Vasily?”

“Vasily.” If they’d been outside, Thomas was fairly certain she would have spit. “I actually thought we’d never hear from him again. God , I wish we hadn’t.”

Did her voice just break? Thomas wondered. If it had, she got control of it immediately.

“Then, one day…” She balled her gloved fists against her chest. “Not more than three months ago… there he was. Just plunked in one of those new, overpriced cafés near Dom Knigi, with an entire tray of chleb piled up in front of him that he was devouring by the fistfuls, as if he hadn’t eaten during the whole time he’d been away. As if he’d been in a gulag and just gotten released.

“Also, already, it was like the old days. Except instead of you and Jutta and Yakov and Timofeev and Larisa, he had a whole new set of… what is the English… acolytes ringed around him, lapping up his every lunatic word.” She glanced up, grabbed Thomas’s eyes with her own. “Sorry. ‘Friends.’”

“ Acolytes is fine,” Thomas muttered. “ Acolytes is probably right.”

“Ridiculous people. Bearded students from St. Petersburg State, or bums from the street. A whole new generation of so-called artists.” Her voice dropped so low that Thomas almost missed the last bit. But he heard her all right. “My artist,” she said.

Alyosha , he thought.

“They all laughed when he laughed. They nodded along while he rambled and dribbled crumbs all over himself. Same prityazatel’nyy black beard, probably dyed, now. Same beady little bird eyes.”

Again, as the bus shook her against him, Ana looked up at Thomas. In her, though, Thomas saw feelings he did recognize and in fact knew all too well. “Don’t misunderstand, Thomas. Please. I loved Vasily. I loved my uncle. I love him. But he’s a fraud—”