Free Freedom is Space for the Spirit by Glen Hirshberg Page B

things (though in another life), he’d expected these kids on this train to welcome him into their conversation, and never mind his not-so-cheap sneakers, his dry-cleaned slacks, and neat, salt-and-pepper professor’s beard.
    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