Freedom is Space for the Spirit (5 page)

“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—”

“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.

“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.