Glen Hirshberg - Freedom is Space for the Spirit

“Not always.”

“—and he’s a clown. And he has always considered everyone he ever met as pawns. You understood this, yes?”

“I… understood that. Yes.” He hadn’t always. Certainly, he had at the end.

“And when he called to me, that day he reappeared, he didn’t jump up to hug me. He was excited to see me, all right. He was even more excited because he was sitting there with my… with Alyosha. With my friend. He wanted me to see that. So, naturally, I was the last piece he needed.”

“Yes,” Thomas said, already comprehending. He marveled at Ana’s clarity. She was Vasily’s niece, for sure. “You were the audience.”

“I was someone to tell.”

Yet again, Thomas felt that shudder of apprehension that had plagued him ever since his arrival. Only, now it had intensified. “Okay. So. What did he tell you?”

Sucking in her cheeks, she did a pretty fair impersonation of Vasily’s excited, reedy whine. “‘ I’m going to turn it inside out, Ana. I’m going to make the city new. ’ That’s what he said, and that’s all he would say, and Alyosha wouldn’t say any more either. He just laughed when my uncle did. Three weeks later, I saw my first bear.”

In the sleet, the bus had slowed, its single working windshield wiper slapping at the cracked front glass, more like a whapping cat’s tail than a blade. Around him, people seemed to have settled as the clusters of riders thinned, looking down in their laps and eying each other sidelong. Almost no one else on the bus seemed to be speaking.

“Ana,” Thomas said after a time, partly just to keep from leaping off the bus, from running, though he had no idea where he would go or why he felt so sure he should go there quickly. “You think Vasily has something to do with the bears.”

She shrugged. “The night after I saw my first bear—at the market, next to an onion stand—Vasily showed up at my flat. I… He was so drunk, he could hardly even stand. He’d already thrown up all over himself, probably more than once. And he was spouting such nonsense. ‘Bears, Ana . We’ll set them free.’ There was something about some military complex. Or zoo. Or laboratory. All those things, actually. ‘It’s rescue! ’ he kept shouting. ‘It’s a party! ’ Then he threw up on my floor, on my new rug, and I threw him out on the street and told him to come back sober. I remember he laughed at that, so I said, ‘Less drunk .’ And he said, ‘See you.’

“The next day, Alyosha called and woke me up to say he was going off with V. V , he said, as if anyone ever called my uncle that. He said they’d be underground for a while, that he’d call as soon as he was back. And that was the last I heard from either of them.”

A zoo , Thomas thought. Military complex? “I don’t understand,” he finally said. “Why would even Vasily want—”

“We’re here,” Ana said abruptly. “ Scheisse. ” To the driver, she snapped, “ Podozhdi .”

The bus lurched to a stop, eliciting glares from turned-up faces all around them. An old woman in a balaclava barked something at Ana, and she laughed as she tugged Thomas off the bus. Before Thomas had even gotten all the way free, the doors were sighing shut. The bus plowed back into traffic, spraying muck and slush.

“What did that woman say?” Thomas mumbled, bending to wipe at least some of the sleet off his pants before realizing it was hopeless. He was wet through.

“She said, ‘Your friend’s Western tones are grating to my ears. ’”

Still hunched, Thomas glanced up. “You’re kidding.”

“This is not something I do,” Ana said. If she’d smiled then, he might have gathered her to him, held her, told her it would be all right.

Instead, she looked past him down the sidewalk at the pedestrian bridge that angled away from the community center, across a little reservoir into surprisingly dark and tangled woods. “Thomas? I think we should hurry.”

Without another word, they started toward the bridge. Sleet swept across them, stitching the air into a grimy gray curtain that rippled with their passing, brushing wetly against them. A very few locals, sticking to the muddy track from the apartment complexes up the hill, scurried by with their heads down. The bridge’s railings were weirdly white wood that looked almost plastic, and on the rippling surface of the little reservoir, a single duck floated, its feathers Soviet-housing-complex brown and mottled. By the time Thomas and Ana reached the trees, water was rilling down their necks into their coats. It felt frigid, and worse, gummy. More like mucus than rain.

Under the scant cover of a bare hemlock tree, Ana pulled Thomas to a stop, and they stood for a moment, listening to the forest rattle with the patter. Just visible through the snarled bushes and dead hemlocks ahead, Thomas could already make out the hulking brick buildings of the Pavlov Institute, where the great man himself had made that most Russian of scientific discoveries: that living things are slaves to their patterns, and do what they are conditioned to do.

“Okay,” Ana said, wringing her hair. “Where?”

Shivering, Thomas eyed her. “What?”

“You brought us here. You said you’d been here with Vasily. This is where he sent you. Where? ”

She was getting ready to shove or yell at him again. It was almost funny in a terrible sort of way. In a way Vasily would have found funny. “Ana. I have no idea. How would I…” His voice trailed away.

He had been here once. But he was fairly certain that except for the Pavlov Institute buildings, which they hadn’t entered, few or none of the other structures around them had even existed then. And the woods had seemed wider and wilder, less like an overgrown yard, more like somewhere gorillas, or bears, might be…

“This way,” he said abruptly, and stepped back out into the sleet. How did he know? He didn’t. But here he was, leaning into the wet, wild wind with his nose in the air like a dog. Like Pavlov’s dog. Vasily’s dog.

Shoving aside branches, ignoring the freezing water streaming down his neck into his sweater, he moved left, then forward, past buildings, down a little slope he didn’t exactly remember, but there was something in his brain, a scent, a memory of a sight, something.

“Thomas?” Ana said, and her voice now was the one she’d had when he’d known her last. When she was a little girl. “The bear ceremony. What did Vasily tell you about the bear ceremony?”

Mostly, Thomas was watching the woods, staring into each not-quite clearing, each shadowed wild place in the lee of those brooding, lightless buildings that had been lightless then, too, that he and Vasily had imagined were lightless always but vibrating with sound, not at all unlike their squatters’ studios at Malevichskaya. In fact, they’d imagined these buildings haunted by Pavlov and his dogs, ringing and barking to each other in the dark.

“I don’t remember, Ana. Nothing, I don’t think. That… bears were important? That your people—”

“Our people ,” she snorted.

“—picked a bear. Every winter, right? And invited guests. Lots of guests, from far away.” Guests from far away , he thought, noting and then suppressing the thought with a shudder.

And then he realized that he was sure: whatever was happening here, Vasily had done it. Even the time of year was right, after all. Vasily had told him, years ago: the Nivkh bear ceremony was a winter festival. A feast involving ritual dancing, some sort of teasing of the bear ( What had that line in the article said? “A brief and embarrassing episode with Tasers…” ). A celebration.