Freedom is Space for the Spirit (6 page)

“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.”

“Pray.”

“Such prayer, Thomas. Do you remember going to Orthodox masses with me? Just to watch all those people stand in their nooks, their private corners, for hours and hours, while priests chanted and stepped out among them and went back up on their stages or whatever they call them, doing all those incomprehensible, ritualized things? Well,
this
praying makes that look…” For the first time, Vasily met Thomas's gaze straight on. There were tears in his eyes. Here was the Vasily Thomas had known, marveling at and even loving the world. Thomas had forgotten he could do this. That this was the very center of his art, of his whole being.

“
New
,” Vasily breathed. “Young. Diluted. What the Orthodox do … what we do, any of us … it's like the
ghost
of prayer. The atavistic
memory
of prayer.”

“Vaska,” Thomas said. “Tell me about the bear ceremony.”

At that, the tears in Vasily's eyes actually spilled over. His hand rose to his cheek, spread across his stubble-free cheek as though feeling the wall of a cave. As though Vasily had never felt such a cheek before. “Oh, Thomas. The bear ceremony. Such an inadequate name.”

“
Chert poberi
,” Ana hissed, clutching the bars.

“I only saw the one,” Vasily said. “But such a one. And afterward … I learned. I
learned
, Thomas. I talked to the shamans. They're all shamans-by-night now, of course. Grocery clerks or oil field worms by day, if you can call what they have up there day. I went to their huts or their flats. I brought them vodka, and vodka, and more vodka. And I listened while they talked. I heard what they knew, all the forgotten things they know. And eventually, when they realized that I was learning, they started teaching me. And I realized, at last, what gift I could bring back to poor, confused, mafia-infested, Starbucks-infected, Putinized, brutalized, baffled, beautiful St. Petersburg: a memory from an even more savage, beautiful time we've all forgotten, or denied, or repressed, or dreamed. A kiss—my kiss—to the northernmost city in the world, from the far East they've forgotten is even there.”

Abruptly, he giggled. “Or it would be a kiss. If not for what happened with the damn mouths. Oh, my poor students. Your poor Alyosha, Ana. I didn't intend that.”

“Poor Alyosha?” Ana whispered. Abruptly, she stood. Reared, really. Anyone but Vasily would have lunged for the cage door, smashed it shut, prayed it locked, to keep Ana out. “Where is he?” she said.

Only then did Vasily seem actually to register the question. He met her gaze straight on. “You've probably seen him more recently than I have.”

Understanding dawned so fast in Thomas, and so softly, it was like awakening, or remembering. Ana understood too, he suspected, because she hadn't lunged, had gone frighteningly quiet. Maybe she'd somehow guessed all along.

But how could she have? It was absurd. Insane. Impossible.

Forgotten …

Ana gave the bars one more feeble rattle, banged her forehead against them. “Uncle Vasily,” she said. “Just say it.”

Thomas started to ask how, realized that was always the wrong question, with all art but especially with Vasily's. Also, what did it matter? It had happened. There were more important questions now: What did it mean? Was it meant to be temporary?

Could any of them be saved?

“Vaska. How long have they … since you did this? Since
your
ceremony? If you did this …
changed
them … and if they have no mouths…”

Vasily was up, now, striding back and forth through the leaves, waving the last nub of banana like some fat stub of lecturer's chalk. “It's the most wondrous part, really, isn't it? The best part. Because, Thomas, Ana,
even I don't know!
Did I do it wrong? Did I misunderstand the instructions they gave me? Or did they leave something out? This could be
their
art. Do you understand?
Their
joke. The grocery-clerk shamans of the nowhere-East, conjuring fairy-tale man-bears with no mouths, tricking a madman”—he stopped in mid-babble, whirled, did a little curtsey, and went right back to pacing, waving the banana—“into turning them loose to wander and wonder and slowly starve to death on the streets of the city Russians built to connect them to the world that isn't Russia. That whole winking world of marvels beyond the Urals, across the Black Sea, that we never have quite made sense or become part of…”

Reasoning with him, Thomas knew, was useless. It was also the only possible or sane course. The only chance. “Vasily. These bears. These …
students
.
Your
students.”

“They participated willingly, Thomas. Gleefully. They gave themselves to the moment, as we all learned to do. I told them exactly what was going to happen. Except for the mouths. I didn't know about the mouths.”

“And the ending,” Ana said, her voice no longer angry, spilling from her lips in a haze of heavy, white breath. “I am thinking you didn't mention the ending.”

“So, you
do
remember,” Vasily said, practically dancing. “Ana, you probably know more about the Nivkh bear ceremony than I do; your grandparents actually grew up there and—”

“I remember my
babushka
's stories. You monster.
Zver
. I remember the ending.”

“The ending?” Thomas asked, and Ana turned to him. Her expression seemed so far away and fragmented, it was as though he were viewing it through a kaleidoscope.

“Of the bear ceremony,” Ana said flatly. “When the shamans murder and dismember the bear.”

Vasily had snatched up his iPad, and now he was staring into it, waving his finger and talking to it like a wizard over a cauldron. “Ooh,” he said. “Look! They're gathering.”

He held up the iPad. On it was displayed what Thomas first took for some sort of game screen, a grid with little dots moving over it. Then—by the blue veins of the canals—he realized he was looking at St. Petersburg, a street map of the city center. And then he understood what the dots were.

“What…” Ana started, but Thomas waved her to silence.

“Bears?” he said. He didn't have to manufacture any of the wonder Vasily expected when his acolytes addressed him. Wonder was certainly one of the things he was feeling. “How did … You're tracking them?”

“GPS,” Vasily crowed. “In little pendants around their necks. Like pet tags.” He beamed.

Transformed, mouthless man-bears under a shaman's spell. Their every aimless, hopeless movement tracked via satellite. Old-world magic, new-world magic. New Russia and old. As art, Thomas thought … as Situationist prank … it was …

“I think maybe you better hurry,” Vasily said to Ana, his voice suddenly soft, almost human. Almost an uncle's, and with real love in it. “
Moya lyubimaya
. I think perhaps it is ending.”

Pounding her fists once more against the cage, Ana whirled and ran. For a single second, Thomas hesitated, thinking there was something he should say to Vasily, do for or maybe to him. But Vasily was just standing amid the leaves, not even looking at Thomas anymore, and suddenly, he seemed so small. Forgotten, older, soon to be old, as empty of purpose or thought or hope—whatever that might be or once have been—as the gorillas they'd once glimpsed here, all those years ago.

Spinning away, Thomas stumbled up the incline and after Ana through the flurrying snow.

Of course, this being St. Petersburg, not Paris or London or New York or, God knew, Berlin—and the sprawling outskirts of St. Petersburg, at that—it took them almost two hours, by bus and then metro, and then another metro to reach Nevsky Prospekt. By the time they reemerged onto the street, the day had already darkened. Flurries filled the air, winking against the glowing streetlights and the brilliantly lit Winter Palace like migrating snow sprites swarming over the rooftops and street stalls and buses, settling on the drawn-up hoods and scarves of all the people—the dozens, the hundreds of people—surging, seemingly as one, toward the Palace Embankment.

Shivering in the cold, Ana grabbed his hand. “Oh, Thomas,” she breathed, the first words she'd uttered other than Russian curses and her Alyosha's name since they'd left the woods around the Pavlov Institute.

“Come on,” he said, pulling her along through the crowd.

They couldn't run—there were too many people—but they moved fast, angling sideways, cutting between couples and families, darting around parked cars and between idled buses stranded in the surge of pedestrians. They rode the surge. It felt, Thomas realized, surprisingly like those last days at the Wall. Or rather, those first days of Wall-lessness, with people massing like water at the lip of a crumbling dam, sloshing over it, exploding through it.

Except without the joy, somehow. Without the convulsive release.

Without the hope, he understood abruptly. Which had probably been imaginary, or at least ephemeral, even then. But it had been there. Whereas this … this was just about seeing now. About being there to see. That was all anyone, East or West, hoped for anymore.

The crowd hustled them forward, spilled out onto the Palace Embankment where traffic had stopped dead, the few cars along it seeming to float in the roiling river of people like unmanned gondolas. Still clutching Ana's hand, Thomas pulled her forward, nudging and bumping bystanders aside, until he somehow found them a spot right up against the stone wall separating the streets from the Neva. Not until Anna was safely ensconced alongside him did he look up. And not until she gasped did he see what she had seen.