Freedom is Space for the Spirit Read Online Free Page B

impossible, transparent blue he’d only ever seen in Russian women’s faces. Lake Baikal blue, he’d always told himself, though he’d never actually been to Lake Baikal, and anyway had no idea where people with eyes that color came from. How beautiful, he thought, this person must once have been. Still was, for anyone she allowed to see her face.
    She was holding the phone away from her ear and gazing openly at him. Better, and more unlikely, still, she was … not exactly smiling ; that would be overstating. But for a Russian far from St. Petersburg’s bustling, cosmopolitan, tourist-swarmed heart, trapped behind a desk across a room from a post office, she was coming dangerously close.
    Thomas gestured out the window at the empty lot. In his clumsy Russian, he asked, “Does that really say … paintball ?”
    Then the woman just up and did it, grinned outright. “Welcome to the New Russia.”
    Grinning back, Thomas unfolded the copy of the article from his coat pocket and held it out, pointing at the writer’s name. “I want to see—”
    But the woman was up, shoving her chair from the desk, walking away with the grin expunged from her face. She moved straight to the back of the room, hissed furiously at the little bald man back there behind the tumbling, collapsing stacks of paper on the room’s largest (though by no means newest) desk. The man stood, nodding. The top of his head barely reached the woman’s shoulders. He nodded again, patted the woman’s hand, knocked back the vodka in the well-used glass atop the nearest stack of papers, and moved toward Thomas. The woman stayed at the back, arms folded, watching through those glacial blue eyes that had been watching, Thomas thought, for a thousand years. Oh, yes, he knew that look. That mix of outrage, annoyance, and nervousness verging on terror. He’d known it all his life, though it had been years, now, since he’d last seen it.
    â€œ Dobrý den ,” said the bald man. He didn’t offer Thomas a hand, and indeed didn’t even stop at the woman’s desk. Instead, he stepped toward the front door, then through it onto the sidewalk. He hadn’t brought a coat, and he didn’t stop for one. Thomas followed him out.
    The moment the door closed and they had taken up positions under the inadequate overhang, the bald man whirled on Thomas, an accusatory finger punctuating his words. “You’ve upset Larisa.”
    Larisa , Thomas thought. Meaning cheerful . He couldn’t remember why or how he knew that. Probably because he’d known several Larisas once. Then. Even one or two cheerful ones.
    Casting about, Thomas tried to call up the Russian for Excuse me but couldn’t. Was there Russian for excuse me ?
    â€œI apologize,” he tried instead.
    To his surprise, the bald man switched instantly into perfect German. “You just walk in here, waving that?” His finger stabbed at the unfolded papers Thomas still held. “What do you want with Yelena Alyakina?”
    Thomas blinked, took a breath. “Want? I wish to … I just want to speak to her. About this article.”
    â€œWhy would you be interested in that?”
    Abruptly, Thomas was annoyed. Or maybe that was his alarm increasing. “Weren’t you? Or were these published by mistake?”
    â€œWho are you?”
    â€œWhat?”
    â€œWho are you?” The man actually poked him, hard, right under the scarf along the collarbone.
    Even after all these years in the West, Thomas instinctively recoiled at that question. And because he did, he thought he understood this newspaper’s man reaction after all. This was caution, plain and simple, instinctive and learned the hard way.
    But about this? About mouthless bears? Wind whistled through him as though he wasn’t even there, was a dead tree sprouting from the cracking sidewalk.
    He was nothing here. And he always