We followed our map to what should have been the next museum. Instead we reached a tunnel through the fortress wall.

Dani pushed. The doors wouldn’t open.

We continued to the water—shadow turning to white.

The wind coming off the bay drove us back. Footprints continued.

Far out on the frozen Neva, a lone figure walked toward Saint Petersburg.

We stood watching until he became little more than a black dot against the ice.

~

By late afternoon we reached the prison.

One corridor.

Doors.

Cells.

Another corridor.

More doors.

Each room looked nearly identical.

A narrow bed.

A desk.

A chair.

A small barred window that admitted a stripe of winter light.

They felt austere but not especially brutal.

Outside each door hung the story of someone who’d lived there.

“Look at this one” Dani said.

She’d moved a dozen paces ahead.

I hurried to catch her.

The plaque she found described a prisoner who spent years inside these walls reading, writing, and studying.

According to the museum, he left the prison having earned several advanced degrees.

His quoted remark stayed with me.

“I wasn’t imprisoned. I was exploring the universe.”

Farther down the hall another exhibit explained how prisoners communicated through the walls by tapping coded messages. To stop them, builders packed the walls with springs, horsehair, and insulation.

Then the mood shifted.

The next cells had been divided into smaller compartments. The signs described isolation.

Cold.

Starvation.

Prisoners stripped naked.

Men sleeping directly on iron springs.

Bodies slowly freezing to the floor.

Dani shivered beside me.

The prison I was walking through suddenly sounded nothing like the prison we’d been seeing.

~

When we stepped back outside, the prison disappeared once more into the star-shaped fortress walls.

The wind howled across the bay.

The stones gave nothing away.