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

actually attended one, one time. She said at the end, they—”
    â€œOh, 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.
    â€œUncle 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.
    â€œOh. Guten Tag , Ana. Thomas. You got my messages.” He spoke mostly English, with sprinkles of Russian, then German.
    Thomas stared at his friend. Even grayed—and he was all the way gray, and also beardless, clean-shaven as a little boy—and even sitting in a gorilla cage in the middle of the woods, Vasily looked only like himself. It was the eyes, Thomas thought, it had always been the eyes: expressive but also unfathomable, mesmerizing. Rasputin without the power-lust. Situationist Rasputin.
    â€œYou were supposed to find me this way,” Vasily said, grinning. “I’ve been sitting out here for days, waiting. And so of course, I get up to use the toilet in that building there and replenish my banana supply, and that’s when you show up. Come in here! Let me embrace you.”
    For one ridiculous moment, Thomas didn’t want to enter the cage. Then he started forward, and as he did, Ana bumped him aside, grabbed the bars, and rattled them. “Uncle Vasily, where’s Alyosha?”
    Just like that, Vasily forgot Thomas was there. Thomas watched it happen. At this moment, Ana was the better audience. Therefore, she was the center of Vasily’s world.
    â€œAhh.” He spread his hands, shrugged, and smiled. “How would I know?”
    â€œHe’s not with you? He said he was with you.”
    â€œHe did? When?”
    â€œUncle Vasily. Please. Where are they hiding?”
    Vasily just grinned wider, his mouth like a red rip in the gray day.
    Ana shook the bars, still more snarling than pleading, but not much more. “Where is Alyosha?” She sank back to her crouch, meeting his gaze at eye-level.
    â€œVaska,” Thomas said, stepping up beside Ana but instinctively staying outside the cage, in her world, not his.
    Mouth full of banana, Vasily ignored them both. Many times, Thomas had seen him like this. Asking direct questions would be pointless, counterproductive. He would only discuss what he wanted to discuss. And what he wanted to discuss was his art.
    â€œVaska. This … Your bear ceremony. That’s what this is? You learned it in the East?”
    â€œLearned it? Well. I conceived it there. Yes.”
    â€œFrom—”
    â€œFrom just being in that world, Thomas. Oh, you should have come. You should have seen—you would not believe—how those people still live. In those villages, way out in the taiga, with winter coming in. Half-dark all the time except when it’s completely dark. Snow so deep that it took me weeks, once I got back, to walk right again. It was as if I’d been on a ship and couldn’t get my land legs. Most of them still live in these little, tiny huts with wood stoves, except the ones who live in the one giant Soviet apartment monolith they built for the Party members and oil workers’ families in the