Freedom is Space for the Spirit by Glen Hirshberg Read Free Book Online

something in his brain, a scent, a memory of a sight, something.
    â€œThomas?” 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.
    â€œI don’t remember, Ana. Nothing, I don’t think. That … bears were important? That your people—”
    â€œOur people ,” she snorted.
    â€œâ€”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.
    â€œThere,” 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.
    â€œThis 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.
    â€œFound 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?”
    â€œAbout 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—”
    â€œAbout the bear ceremony. I’m gathering he didn’t tell you the end.”
    â€œIt has an end?”
    â€œIt 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