Freedom is Space for the Spirit Read Online Free

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    Absently, he reached out, tugged the papers from the door, and turned them over. Then he just stood in the shadows of the overhang, shivering and staring.
    FROMWHERE, he read, in English, a smudged, reduced copy of the front page of one of those odd St. Petersburg newspapers published by and for some loose-knit or imaginary community of expats. FORWHOM, OR WHAT?
    Underneath the headline was a grainy photograph of a bear actually splayed on a bench, right in the middle of the Field of Mars, its head turned idly away from the camera toward the people passing on the paths, not a single one of them looking back in its direction. In the corner of the photograph, tiny but unmistakable thanks to the red ink in which it had been written, was the word FISTS .
    Which wasn’t a word, of course, but an acronym, Thomas realized. Freedom is Space for the Spirit.
    And that meant that this had been left here for him. By Vasily.
    Maybe.
    Turning the papers into the light, Thomas read fast, then faster. Then he went back to the beginning and started again.
    None can even say when we first saw them. One day, they were just among us, as though they always had been, and now they always are. They’re on our buses, our metro cars. We glimpse their reflections in mirrors, out windows, as we sip our Arabian coffees in insulated paper cups and eye ourselves in our sleek new Italian shoes. They shamble from alleys and wander in and out of churches and the museums we have at last been granted access to, like creatures escaped from a Levitan landscape, bringing the mood of those landscapes with them. They prowl the canals and the garbage-strewn, teeming alleys around Sennaya Square at evening, bumping against harried shoppers haggling over apples, trailing bits of discarded ribbon or cloth in their claws or on the pads of their feet. Silent, hulking, aimless, they drift among us, not just toothless but mouthless …
    At that, Thomas startled, glanced at the grainy photo, but he couldn’t quite make out the bear’s face. He thought furiously back, remembering the creature he’d seen in the parking space outside Vitebsk, and the second one brushing and sniffing at the smiling woman’s shoulder outside the coffee shop.
    Mouthless?
    He didn’t know, hadn’t noticed. Surely, if that were true, he would have seen.
    With an increasing sense of urgency, even alarm (though why, really, should he be alarmed?) he scanned the rest of the article. It revealed little. The bears had appeared only in St. Petersburg, as far as the writer knew, and only a few weeks before. There had been momentary panic, a few clumsy politsiya attempts at “roundups” that, according to the article, had felt and looked more like arrests than animal control. Almost immediately, following a brief and embarrassing episode with Tasers, captured by dozens of citizens on their sleek, new cell phones, the roundups had stopped. A politsiya official had given a brief press conference and said his force had limited resources and would be devoting them to “more pressing and concrete threats such as Chechen guerillas and homosexuals.” And from then on, the bears had been left to wander. They’d simply become part of the cityscape. An advertising gimmick, some guessed, though no one knew for what. A practical joke, but on whom, by whom?
    â€œA work of art?” the article’s author postulated. “ The Great Bear of Russia gone toothless and old, or wild and free, or gentle and loving to its own people at last? The shambling emblems of a Russia that even Russians have long since ceased to dream?”
    Your city, new , Thomas thought.
    The copy of the article was smudged, the lettering along the bottom virtually unreadable except for the journalist’s name—Yelena Alyakina—and the name of the paper. That was enough. Thomas would start there.
    Folding the packet into his coat pocket and leaving his freezing hands