Glen Hirshberg - Freedom is Space for the Spirit

“There,” he said suddenly, and stopped ankle-deep in a rutted row of muck plowed some indefinite time before by some sort of multi-wheeled military something.

Without waiting for Ana, he plunged off the path, down another surprisingly steep incline, through an accidental—no, natural —hedge of tall, dead bushes, their thorns brittle, breaking against his coat sleeves like old brick, like chunks from the smashed-in Wall. He burst into a little copse, not so much a clearing as a half-open space under two towering dead hemlocks, like an amphitheater tipped up on its side. In the center of the copse, right where the shadows met the light, propped between half-visible, centuries-old underground roots, sat the gorilla cage.

“This is it ,” he whispered, as Ana burst through the hedge and reached him. “We found it.”

Together, they stared at the rusting black iron bars of the cage. The door hung open, half off its cracked hinges, as though whatever had been in there really had escaped. The idea thrilled Thomas, somehow: those two bedraggled, shriveled apes loose in these woods, maybe crouched right over their heads on the dead branches. He remembered the gorillas’ eyes, their alien, animal gazes, not so close to human after all, and he shuddered and glanced up. Of course, there was nothing above but empty sky, sleet slanting down.

“Found what ?” Ana said, her voice furious, exhausted, disgusted. To Thomas’s alarm, she sank to her haunches, dropping her head into her gloved hands. With her wet, black hair streaming down her back, she looked at once peaceful and wild, crouching there. Like a gorilla, or a bear. She looked up. The wildness in her did not dissipate. “Is that all he told you?”

“About this?” Thomas said. “About what we’re doing here? He didn’t tell me anything, remember? He drew me a gorilla on a bag and you—”

“About the bear ceremony. I’m gathering he didn’t tell you the end.”

“It has an end?”

“It has…” Ana snatched up some sticks in her fist and snapped them between her fingers. “I hardly remember. These were children’s stories, you understand. Something my ded and my babushka taught us. My parents didn’t even want them talking about it after we moved to Moscow. They had a huge fight about it once. My parents wanted us to be ‘proper Russians.’ I think Babushka actually attended one, one time. She said at the end, they—”

“Oh, blin !” came a snarl from up the hill. “Shit, shit, shit. What are the chances?”

Half-stumbling, half-plunging down the hill on the other side of the copse came a gray-haired dwarf in a splotchy green overcoat, spectacles in one hand, what looked like—and, indeed, turned out to be—an iPad in the other.

He had both arms flung wide for balance, and not until he’d reached Ana and Thomas did his hood slide back so they could see his face.

“Uncle Vasily ?” Ana breathed, stood, and started forward.

But he was already past her, diving into the gorilla cage, yanking the door shut with a clang, spinning in what seemed six directions at once as he gathered a pencil, a notebook, a stained gray rug, and a bunch of browned bananas out of the mounds of dead leaves on the floor of the cage. Plopping himself on the carpet, Vasily opened his iPad case, pulled free a single banana and half-peeled it, slid the pencil behind his ear and the spectacles onto his face. Only then did he look up.

“Oh. Guten Tag , Ana. Thomas. You got my messages.” He spoke mostly English, with sprinkles of Russian, then German.

Thomas stared at his friend. Even grayed—and he was all the way gray, and also beardless, clean-shaven as a little boy—and even sitting in a gorilla cage in the middle of the woods, Vasily looked only like himself. It was the eyes, Thomas thought, it had always been the eyes: expressive but also unfathomable, mesmerizing. Rasputin without the power-lust. Situationist Rasputin.

“You were supposed to find me this way,” Vasily said, grinning. “I’ve been sitting out here for days, waiting. And so of course, I get up to use the toilet in that building there and replenish my banana supply, and that’s when you show up. Come in here! Let me embrace you.”

For one ridiculous moment, Thomas didn’t want to enter the cage. Then he started forward, and as he did, Ana bumped him aside, grabbed the bars, and rattled them. “Uncle Vasily, where’s Alyosha?”

Just like that, Vasily forgot Thomas was there. Thomas watched it happen. At this moment, Ana was the better audience. Therefore, she was the center of Vasily’s world.

“Ahh.” He spread his hands, shrugged, and smiled. “How would I know?”

“He’s not with you? He said he was with you.”

“He did? When?”

“Uncle Vasily. Please. Where are they hiding?”

Vasily just grinned wider, his mouth like a red rip in the gray day.

Ana shook the bars, still more snarling than pleading, but not much more. “Where is Alyosha?” She sank back to her crouch, meeting his gaze at eye-level.

“Vaska,” Thomas said, stepping up beside Ana but instinctively staying outside the cage, in her world, not his.

Mouth full of banana, Vasily ignored them both. Many times, Thomas had seen him like this. Asking direct questions would be pointless, counterproductive. He would only discuss what he wanted to discuss. And what he wanted to discuss was his art.

“Vaska. This… Your bear ceremony. That’s what this is? You learned it in the East?”

“Learned it? Well. I conceived it there. Yes.”

“From—”

“From just being in that world, Thomas. Oh, you should have come. You should have seen—you would not believe—how those people still live. In those villages, way out in the taiga, with winter coming in. Half-dark all the time except when it’s completely dark. Snow so deep that it took me weeks, once I got back, to walk right again. It was as if I’d been on a ship and couldn’t get my land legs. Most of them still live in these little, tiny huts with wood stoves, except the ones who live in the one giant Soviet apartment monolith they built for the Party members and oil workers’ families in the middle of the only square in what they call a town. So, what do they do at night, when they’re not working? When no one’s watching?”

It took Thomas a moment to realize Vasily actually expected an answer. Ana, he suspected, was close to leaping through the bars to wring her uncle’s neck. On the path above them on the other side of the hedge, people tramped up and down through the muck. The sleet had eased some, softening into ordinary, white St. Petersburg snow.

“I don’t know, Vasily. What do they do? Play snow football?”

“Hah. Yes. Sometimes. Also, they have an annual Stalin’s head ice-sculpting contest. That’s quite something to see.”

“You’re kidding.”

“The better question is, are they kidding? I was among them for four years. Still have no idea. Wonderful. But mostly, I am sorry to report, what they do at night is watch.”

“Watch. You mean storms? The ice?”

He snorted. “Their cell phones. They have a brand-new tower. They watch a lot of One Night of Love .” Taking another bite of banana, Vasily grinned again. “They… what’s the American phrase… they binge- watch. They drink. They have drinking games based on plot twists. Very inventive. Very amusing.” His voice dropped to a whisper, and he poked a single index finger up in the air. “And then—only sometimes, and only very late at night, when they’re huddled around their stoves or their radiators, and a brand-new wind comes howling down off the Pole, and they think no one else alive could possibly be watching or listening—do you know what they do, Thomas? They pray.”