How do you tell the real Russians? Look for the cheapest clothes.
Not anymore. Thomas felt more like a spectator at a Paris runway show (albeit an icy one): woman after woman with hair flowing long under elegant fur and faux-fur coats and hats, gliding over the ice in thigh-high black boots with six-inch heels like winter gazelles. It was disorienting, also mesmerizing. He was about to get up when, right in front of the window, one of those miraculous women slipped, banged hard against the glass before him, caught herself, and pushed upright. He caught a glimpse of red cheek, bright blue eye under an oil gush of black hair. Then the woman gazed straight into the window, straightened her coat, saw him staring back… and smiled.
This beautiful young Russian woman, striding through her city, and it was clearly her city now. And she was laughing at herself, smiling at him.
A magical, almost unimaginable moment, Thomas thought, something that would never have happened in the nervous, battered St. Petersburg he’d known. Yet again, he wondered why he’d come, what he was doing there, how anything he could offer, even as a spectator, could possibly matter now, in the world as it had become, which bore so little resemblance either to the one he remembered or the one they’d all convinced themselves they’d been creating.
He was standing now, half-thinking he might catch this woman before she left, actually speak to her, just to be speaking to someone. He’d lifted his hand to try to catch her attention when the bear reared up behind her.
The woman didn’t see it, not at first, and she didn’t see Thomas grab the table, reach out to hammer a warning on the glass, and then think better of that. It followed me, Thomas thought, heart thundering, then realized that was ridiculous.
It wasn’t even the same bear; at least, he didn’t think so. This one was blacker, also bigger, or maybe that was just how it looked up on two legs, towering over the sidewalk, swaying, ribs protruding through its patchy fur, almost more stray cat than bear except for its size.
And behind it—all around it—the Russians, in their heels and hoods, with their briefcases and smartphones, just kept walking, funneled around the bear and the woman and never even looked up.
Again, Thomas reached to bang the glass, and again he didn’t, for fear of scaring the bear or making it angry. He watched its head sink, noted the look in its eyes—not vacant, just… not here… and then it reached out one spike-clawed paw and touched the woman’s shoulder.
With a gasp Thomas saw rather than heard, the woman startled, whipped around, shrank back. And then, instead of cowering, dropping into a ball at the bear’s feet, or screaming for help, she spun on her spiked heel and hurried away, folding herself fast into the crowd. In seconds, she was gone.
And the bear, dropping to all fours, loped after her, or at least in the general direction she’d gone.
Not even bothering to button his own coat, pulling on his gloves as he moved, Thomas exited the coffee shop into the brilliant white light, the white wind, this impossible St. Petersburg of fairy tale women shadowed by bears. His next idea seemed to drop on him out of the whitening sky: he should follow the animal.
Why? He didn’t ask; he just acted. It seemed, to what was left of his old instincts, the thing to do. The city as stage, he was thinking. Remembering. The city, new…
The bear was already a full block ahead, only intermittently visible and mostly as a bubble in the crowd, a floating space the pedestrians avoided. Thomas hurried after it, trying to get closer, but for all its lumbering, the bear moved quickly, and the crowds slowly. At street corners, it paused on all fours at the edge of the curb with its paws in the slush, as though waiting for the light. But then it would just stagger out into the street, and cars would honk, stop in a spray of muck, and wait. And no one—not the drivers, not the pedestrians surging around it—seemed even to look. Or rather they looked, but blankly, as though the bear were a newspaper box or a fire hydrant, something that had always been there. Something not to trip over.
At the corner of Nevsky Prospekt, the bear lurched into a stumbling gallop, caught up to a bus, and boarded as the doors closed. The bus rumbled away over the canal toward the city center. And for a shivering moment, Thomas just stood, watching the traffic, feeling as alone as he’d ever remembered feeling, almost bereft, practically in tears.
Why? he wondered again. He realized he needed to call Jutta, knew that wouldn’t help right thisatis second, and left his phone in his pocket.
It was too cold just to stand, though, too cold even to be out here much longer. He’d had only one other idea about where to go, and he didn’t know what he would find or whether there would be any open doors waiting for him when he got to Malevichskaya. Assuming he could still find it.
He found it easily enough. As it turned out, there were signs.
Signs. And not just signs, but banners strung like flags from the sides of buildings, catching and flapping in the never-ending wind. Mostly, the banners featured scrawled graffiti, black and white, the words in German, Swedish, Arabic, for God’s sake. No esk, and niin paha and Freedom is Space for the Spirit, and when Thomas saw that, he felt an absurd surge of pride. The words were in English. But they’d been brought there by a German artist, for one of the first “exhibits” officially allowed at Malevichskaya. And they stood out—rang out—still.
It was the red Russian words underneath, though, printed in large, almost Stalinesque block lettering, that rattled Thomas most, so much, in fact, that he had trouble recognizing them at first. He parsed them out slowly.
NON-CONFORMIST. ART. CENTER.
Center. As in… museum? As in…
It was a relief, strangely, to turn off Nevsky and immediately find the crowds thinning, then vanishing altogether. The buildings seemed to gray with each passing block, almost to shudder back in time to a darker, lonelier, more familiar Russia. What windows there were had drawn curtains in them. The banners advertising the Center and the exhibit on current display there disappeared as Thomas approached the Center itself. He wondered if there would be more signs out front, carpeting, perhaps a few of those craggy, hunched Russian women the state had always planted inside and at the doors of every museum he’d ever been to in this country, to glower at attendees, daring anyone who crossed their path to ask a question, disturb the silence.
To his relief, he found none of those things. In fact, he somehow walked right past the shadowed, brick breezeway that led off the street and through to the old courtyard of condemned buildings. He only realized his mistake half a block later and had to double back. At the mouth of the breezeway, he stopped once more. He looked, and he listened.
There was more flapping in there, though whether of banners, clotheslines, whirling bits of refuse, birds, Thomas had no idea. There was one sure way to find out, and he really did have nowhere else to go, no other signal he could send to alert anyone he’d once known that he had come as instructed.
He moved into the breezeway, which swallowed the winter light. There were shadows aplenty in there, the wind whining as it sluiced through, stinking like sewage in a pipe. Thomas heard more flapping but no voices. Head down, he burrowed forward, wanting out of the dark, back in the light, and then he was indeed out, standing at the mouth of his old courtyard, staring up at that beautifully maintained bust of Lennon—John, of course—over the crumbling stone archway. ВвЕдитЕ в люБви, he read, the lettering and the arch of the words perfect mimics of the ARBEIT MACHT FREI over the gates of Auschwitz. Vasily’s idea, from decades ago. Thomas had never liked it. Vasily had assured him that was the point. Or, one possible point. Thomas could still see him posing underneath, dark eyes glittering with mischief, close-lipped smile splitting his beard like a fault line, hand in the air with a paint brush poised in his fingers like a baton.