“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.
The bears—all of them, if Vasily’s tracking devices had been working properly, two dozen, at least—were on the bridge. On Troitskiy Most. Some of them were just lying in the center of the traffic lanes, muzzles down. Two had draped themselves over the stone barrier facing the Winter Palace, heads slumped, like pelts hanging themselves out to dry. The rest were staggering aimlessly around up there, thudding into each other, stumbling to their knees and lurching back onto their feet. Occasionally, one turned fully in Thomas’s direction. It was those moments he would never afterward shake from his dreams: those eyes, devoid of everything but life; those blank, mouthless spaces, which should have rendered the faces friendlier, like stuffed things, but instead just made them ridiculous. Paper creatures ripped from some giant’s pop-up book, impossible to put back, impossible to sustain or corral or save. Of no tangible worth to anyone.
At either end of the bridge, police had established roadblocks and barriers, and they were making a great show of waving rifles around, though even they seemed confused about where to aim, whether their purpose was to keep people away or bears on the bridge. Around them, almost everyone but Thomas and Ana had cell phones out, and they were snapping photos silently, checking the photos on their screens.
For a long moment—Thomas would remember it as barely a breath—the whole city froze, as though posing for a portrait: snow in streetlight, the Neva and the palaces and the Peter and Paul Fortress and the long blue muzzles of the guns glittering in the blue-black dark, and the faces, dark and light and European and Mongolian and old and even older and, very occasionally, young, all massed together, as individual as snowflakes and also as fractal. One face.
Then—not slowly—one of the bears draped over the stone barrier reared up, swaying on two feet. As one, all the rifles at either end of the bridge and all the raised cell phones along the embankment swung toward it, locked in. The bear paid no attention, seemed instead to be staring up at the stars, and it was shaking, its whole body shuddering and rippling.
“It’s roaring,” Ana murmured, her voice seeming to wisp apart as it streamed into the air.
And Thomas realized she was right. Not that he’d ever seen this happen before, or ever would again, but there was no question: that, right there, was how a mouthless bear roared. And now, it was doing it harder, positively bellowing its… whatever it was—frustration? Hunger? Desperation? Loneliness?—in absolute silence.
Right beside that bear, two more rose up, and there was a thunderous, impressively unified click as a hundred safety catches popped off a hundred rifles. But no one shot, and the silence rippled and resettled with the snow as more bears rose in twos and threes.
Then they were all up, swaying, shuddering, heads thrown back, muzzles straight up in the air. For at most five seconds, all of them shuddered and strained together, as though a whole bear-forest had somehow sprouted right in the center of Trinity Bridge.
Did one of them slip? Knock into the others? Thomas would never be sure. All he knew with any certainty was what he saw, as Ana clutched his hand, sobbed silently beside him, hung there, leaning into the night over the Neva:
The first bear, the one who’d risen, gave a last heaving, soundless bellow. Then—as though it had somehow roared itself out of its skin—its body sagged all the way forward, its legs bumping the stone barrier as it tumbled off the bridge into the air. Before it had even landed, other bears followed, tipping forward one after another like lemmings, plummeting into the river and sending up spumes of icy spray that drove the crowd ducking and shouting backward.
But Thomas and Ana stayed where they were, watching bears surface one by one, the water bearing them up, ferrying their broken, motionless bodies down the canals, through the snow-draped night and out of St. Petersburg toward the Gulf of Finland.
There should have been… Thomas wasn’t even sure what. A collective wail. A chorus of gasps. A moment of silence, just to mark that something had happened. Was passing. Something living.
Then the police whirled on the crowd. Briefly, Thomas panicked, thought they might open fire, worried he could end up trapped—or shot—against this wall in the midst of a riot, a mindless surge.
Instead, with astonishing speed, the crowd along the embankment dissolved into its thousand separate parts, its couples and tour groups, its office mates and solitary travelers bumping and cutting behind and in front of one another. This wasn’t a surge, just a separation. And by the time he realized that, got himself steady on his feet, and cleared his head, Ana was gone.
Gone. Where?
“Ana!” he called, just once, thought he saw her across the street, head down, black hair streaming as she burrowed through the throng. If I were you, throng, Thomas thought, with a smile so faint that the first movement of his head melted it off his face, I’d get out of her way.