If they only knew, he thought, not without satisfaction. He looked at the brunette girl closest in the corridor, shivering in shirtsleeves against the open window, beautiful with her cigarette clutched against her lips. She turned toward him, and he saw what was on her shirt.
For a single, ludicrous moment, Thomas was angry. A Plastic People of the Universe shirt, with a fist and flowers, and the words CHARTA 77 stenciled in rainbow letters underneath.
You have no idea, Thomas wanted to shout at her. You missed it. Those savage, magical nights in the crypts of Leipzig churches with AuSSchlag and some stolen guitars and rotten beer, or, during his St. Petersburg year, with Zoopark and a single overloaded, half-blown amp in one of the crumbling buildings Putin had now “saved”—rescuing it from ruin and squalor and the free and dreaming young—with the authorities always coming, with vodka bubbling in their bloodstreams as though from an oil vein they’d tapped themselves, he and Jutta (who had won the same fellowship he had) and Vasily’s crew and some fugitives from the Baltics hurling themselves together, flinging their voices out broken windows to be spirited off down the Prospekts into the Neva All his friends from then scattered or gone now, that whole world reduced to slogans and images, useful only for silk-screening onto oblivious young people’s T-shirts.
Then, even more ludicrously, Thomas wanted to ask where he could order such a shirt.
Turning away, he let himself laugh at himself. And that felt good, only right. It’s what they were always in danger of forgetting, had always had to remind each other about, constantly: how funny it all was. How much fun.
He moved a little ways down the corridor toward a window he could have to himself. He was still standing there hours later, staring out at the glass towers, the already-jammed roads around the half-constructed S8 as the train glided into Warsaw through the early morning gray. Everything out there looked so clean even in the sleety overcast of the morning: the squares, the rails sparkling with winter wet, the bundled-up commuters with their briefcases and ear buds. Nothing like the Poland he’d heard such grim tales of in his youth, from the few Poles he’d known then. Warsaw was just another anywhere now, even its formidable ghosts roped off, penned in their carefully preserved ghetto habitats, exactly as threatening and sad as snow leopards at a zoo.
What, he wondered, could Vasily possibly be doing, after all this time, that even he could believe might matter? That was worth coming all this way for?
Later, to his surprise, Thomas actually managed to sleep. He awoke to an empty cabin and, from the bustle in the corridor, understood that the train was already arriving at Vitebsk Station. He shrugged hurriedly into his coat, stuffed last night’s shirt into his bag, sucked at the thin, nicotine-tinged film of sleep on his teeth, remembered that taste, and realized abruptly that he was there.
Here!
Instantly, his gloom lifted like something he’d dreamed (this the reality, this his world, where he most belonged). Stumbling over his untied shoes in his excitement, Thomas exited the cabin, worked through the clumps of sleepy travelers, showed his invitation letter and hastily arranged tourist visa to a glazed-eyed customs official who barely even glanced at them, and ducked across the platform to emerge at last into the Vitebsk main hall. For a while, he just stood on those palatial stairs, staring up into the domed iron ceiling, his hand on the chipped marble of the banister, listening to the snarl of this least Russian of Russian cities sweeping across the grand checkerboard tile to greet him.
Though he’d packed little, he decided to check his bag into luggage storage until he had some idea where he might be staying. Then he realized he was starving, and wondered where the closest place might be to find a slab of chleb and some black coffee. Descending the stairs, he kept accidentally bumping into people who bumped him in return, glowering as he grinned back. The wind whistling in the open front doors was freezing, somehow white even when it wasn’t visible, laced with ice. Head down, hurrying, now, Thomas pushed out onto Zagorodny Prospekt and threw his arms wide to the winter. He lifted his watering eyes into the wind, turned for the metro, which was right where he’d remembered it, and saw the bear.
He froze, held still. The muscles in his back cleaved to his spine, yanking hard, as though someone was running a flag up him. He waited for the bear to lurch to its feet, for his own lips to unlock themselves, let him shout.
But the bear…
It was less than twenty feet away, not leashed as far as Thomas could see, not attached to anything or anyone, but aligned in the exact center of the parking space closest to the building. Exactly in the center, perfectly between the lines, as though it had been parked there. It had its huge, shaggy head on its paws, its legs folded beneath it, and it was watching people and cars go by with enormous brown eyes, muzzle down, mouth invisible. Snow settled on its fur and accumulated, and no one seemed even to glance at it. Thomas thought he might be looking at a lifelike statue, something animatronic, even, until the bear shuddered, shook the snow off its thick coat, and settled again.
A bear.
Other than Thomas, the only people paying even the slightest attention seemed to be children who tugged at their parents’ hands, pointed with their mittens. The parents barely bothered glancing around. One man stopped in front of Thomas to snap a picture with his phone before darting back inside the station.
Only then, exhausted and starving, did Thomas come to the full realization that he had no idea where to go. He had nowhere to stay, no one to call. No one to yell “Bear!” to. In the wild Yeltsin years, when Vasily had somehow cajoled his shady new friends into forging Thomas travel documents and luring him back, he’d always somehow arrived with an address or a name, or else he’d come with somebody. Or maybe he’d just known somehow: which abandoned building, which warehouse-turned-improvised-workspace/gallery, which bridge over which canal.
And now he thought maybe he did know where to start, after alclass="underline" the place they’d always come back to, sooner or later, no matter how many times they’d gotten rousted or arrested there.
Yes. He knew where to begin, assuming it was even there anymore: Malevichskaya, where it really had seemed, for those few brutal, brilliant years right before and after the Wall fell, that the world—or a world, anyway—was being born. Reborn.
If nothing else, Thomas still knew roughly where that was. To reorient himself, he set off toward the canal, burrowing through wind that was even colder than the wind he remembered. He marveled at the icicles dangling like pendants from parking signs and awnings, but even more at the crowds of bundled-up Russians bustling about their business. At a buzzing, Starbucks-colored café, Thomas gave up hunting chleb and settled for a western-style latte and a dry scone. He sat at a tiny table by the window for a while, watching snow swirl over and around everything, as though the whole Earth had been given a long, hard shake. He watched the Russians passing. The Russian women passing. He remembered the joke—which was really a truism—they’d all used to pass around, when members of Vasily’s loose collective poured into St. Petersburg from Poland, Czechoslovakia, Estonia and Germany and the Ukraine and Lithuania and Hungary: