Freedom is Space for the Spirit Read Online Free Page A

there, Thomas hurried down the steps, across the empty courtyard, through the breezeway, and back out toward Nevsky Prospekt. At an internet café, he paid for fifteen minutes of computer time, located the newspaper office (which was annoyingly far, well out of the city center, but reachable by metro and a long, cold walk), and set off immediately again into the flurries.
    The farther he got from the canals, from the banners on lampposts and the glittering displays in frosted shop windows, the more the streets started to look like the streets he remembered: faceless buildings hulking and gray, though even those looked different now, had most of their windows, for starters; the downturned, inward-aimed faces of passersby huddled into their tatty scarves and old galoshes, none of them catching one another’s eyes or stopping at windows to gaze at reflections or flash smiles at lonely strangers. Every ten blocks or so came one of those giant, glitzy chrome-and-neon post-Communist neighborhood centers that had sprung up all over what had once been the East when it was East no longer, complete with market, pool hall, district office, electronics stands.
    Too long, while the wind worried and nipped at his insufficient coat and his thin Berlin gloves, Thomas walked, trying to leap the dirty slush pooling at every crumbling curb without bumping anyone, ducking back against buildings as Hungarian-built, Soviet-era buses lumbered past, spewing diesel fumes into the air to mix with the snow. Wheezing like bears, Thomas thought. Then he thought of Vasily, wondered where he was. And he remembered something, or almost did. Whatever it was made him feel even more lost. Also, it made him nervous, in a way he couldn’t even begin to name.
    Oh, old friend, he thought. Ya ne ponimayu
    The newspaper office was housed in a single linoleum-tiled room on the ground floor of a particularly faceless neighborhood center, divided from a post office by a crumpled, folding plastic screen. The heat in the building apparently wasn’t working, despite the occasional clanking of pipes in the walls and overhead. Every time anyone in the winding, endless postal line—something else that clearly hadn’t changed since Soviet times—or behind one of the scattered newspaper desks spoke, more breath streamed into the air, the clouds of it floating up toward the ceiling, muffling sound and making the whole room feel like the lounge of some nineteenth-century opium den. At a black wooden desk at the front of the newspaper office, a gray-haired woman with her forehead in her hand nodded into a telephone, occasionally growled terse responses in Russian, and didn’t so much as look up when Thomas approached. He’d been standing there a good three minutes before she stuck a finger in the air that he assumed was for him and read as a signal to wait. He looked around for a chair or a bench, found none, felt instinctively that he should step back, give the woman space. But in his head were bears, and the dead, shadowed stairwells at Malevichskaya, and the packet of paper in his pocket. He stayed where he was.
    After another ten minutes, when the woman still hadn’t so much as made eye contact, Thomas decided he should just stroll past her. He had never liked this about Russians, new or old: the way they dared you to challenge, would despise you if you did, would ignore you if you didn’t. He glanced out the window at the sprawling, empty lot across the street, strewn with paper cups, piles of discarded wooden planks, broken glass. That was the St. Petersburg he had known. Towering over it all was a billboard with fresh, red Cyrillic lettering, the letters dripping as though still wet, though they weren’t, not with anything but sleet.
    Slowly, Thomas parsed out the unfamiliar word. Then, startled, he glanced at the desk and was surprised to see the gray-haired woman openly watching him. Her eyes behind the glasses were that