Page 19

“Olga Leonidovna was right about some things,” the potential kidnap victim mused aloud. “The partisans were under constant suspicion. There were two thousand German soldiers in Obol, a whole convoy of executioners. Torture and death were assured for any partisan who fell into their hands ... and here we are depicting these heroes as though they didn’t even feel fear!”

“What she wants is professional actors!” said Yurka indignantly. “The moral of the show is to demonstrate that anyone can be a hero,” he said, repeating the educational specialist’s words. “You know what, though? Kids like us today wouldn’t be able to fight like those kids did during the war, much less win. But here she is, asking us to portray them.”

“Yikes, shut it, Konev. You’ll jinx us. We can do it ... ,” Ksyusha said gloomily.

“I told you we should’ve done something modern,” Ulyana protested, and in a soft, pleasant voice, started the poignant duet from Athena and Venture : “You’ll wake with the dawn’s first ray ...”

Polina stared dully at the floor.

Volodya ignored the protest. He glanced at Yurka and shrugged. “Yes we would. It’s war. They’ll kill you anyway. Your only choice here is to either surrender or get revenge for the ones they already killed. But enough lyricism. Time to get to work.”

A tense atmosphere settled over the auditorium. Volodya already turned into a stereotypical demanding artistic director whenever he stepped inside the theater, but now he was utterly pitiless, ignoring everything around him to focus solely on rehearsal. He blew his top, and yelled at the actors, and scolded the little kids, even though they were already sitting as quiet as mice.

But Yurka didn’t hide his boredom. There was a long way to go until his scene as Krause, and it was by no means certain Volodya was even going to rehearse it. So what was he supposed to do with himself? Sit around languishing until rehearsal was over and then hope Volodya would be in the mood to talk? No way. Yurka was tired of all the waiting and hoping. The last three hours had felt like an eternity.

There was an incident with Ulyana during rehearsal. She was overacting badly, and after yet another repetition of her monologue, Volodya’s patience snapped. He cut her off in the middle of a word, shouting: “Can you really not hear yourself, how terrible you are?! Do you not understand you’re an Avenger? You’re a partisan, Ulya! Why are you reciting your lines in a singsong like a four-year-old at a preschool parents’ day?!”

Yurka cringed, squeezing his eyes shut: on top of the general tension and Olga Leonidovna’s criticism, Volodya had gone too far. It was no wonder that Ulyana burst into tears. And Volodya immediately regretted his words, of course, and rushed to console her. He put one arm around her awkwardly, and she seized the opportunity to bury her face in his shoulder, getting tears, snot, and mascara all over his sleeve.

“Ulyana, I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to ... What I said was stupid ... Come on, now ... don’t cry ...”

But Ulyana just sighed and pressed even closer to Volodya.

Yurka was boiling with rage and jealousy: here was another one, just like Masha, turning on the waterworks to make Volodya grovel. And it was working! Conscientious, kindhearted Volodya was there on the double with his apologies, demeaning himself in front of her. Well, aren’t you just so sympathetic! thought Yurka indignantly. Dancing with random Mashas because you feel sorry for them ... Did you feel sorry for me, too, and that’s why you wanted to kiss me?!

He stomped angrily to a far corner of the theater, then sat down in a seat at the end of a row that was obscured in the darkness of the closed curtain. Scowling, he fixed his eyes on the bust of Lenin gathering dust in a corner. He remembered how a couple of days ago Volodya had made him carry the incredibly heavy bust off the stage like he was some kind of porter. Yurka snorted and frowned even harder. He sneaked a look around and saw that nobody was paying the least attention to his travails. Only Vladimir Ilych gazed morosely at him with his blank plaster eyes.

“What are you looking at?” mumbled Yurka. Nobody heard him. Onstage, Ulyana was still convulsed with sobs and Volodya was still murmuring apologetically to her.

Lenin, obviously, didn’t answer Yurka’s question.

Yurka stood up and walked up to the bust. On its pedestal, it was about as tall as he was. “Nobody needs me,” Yurka complained. He reached out to Lenin’s forehead and ran his hand over the rough plaster of the leader’s bald head. He heaved a sigh. “You and me, we’re the same, huh? Nobody needs you either, you’re standing over here in the corner too, gathering dust ... Eh, Vladimir Ilych, you’re the only one who understands me.” He grasped the head of the plaster statue in both hands, leaned forward, and kissed Lenin right on the forehead. “Thank you for listening to me ... I actually feel better now ...”

“Yura!” hissed Volodya behind him. “What on earth are you doing?!” Judging by his tone, he was furious.

Yurka turned around and looked at the artistic director. Indeed, Volodya was furious, no doubt about it: his eyes flashed lightning.

“What? I’m rehearsing!” protested Yurka, and began reading his lines, whispering them into Lenin’s ear: “My brave Fr?ulein, deep in the heart of this small mechanism”—he stuck out two fingers to make a pistol and poked it into Lenin’s temple—“lies one single solitary round. It is not large. But it is deadly. All my finger has to do is twitch, completely by accident, and there will no longer be any need for long, drawn-out conversations. Ponder this, my brave Fr?ulein. Your life is priceless, but it would be so easy to simply end it with one careless move ...”

“Yura, what’s with the anti-Soviet antics?!”

Yurka turned around and looked at him, nonplussed.

Volodya closed the distance between them and said right in Yurka’s ear, “You do get how that looks from the outside, right? You’re insulting the memory of the leader of the revolution.”

Yurka scoffed. “Oh, to hell with that revolution! To hell with Leonidovna and her partisans and Fascists! That’s all she and Palych ever do: paint some people as all evil and some people as all good ...”

“What? You’re complaining because they’re calling Fascism evil?! Have you lost your mind? Have you gotten so into your part that Fascism isn’t automatically evil now?”

“I’m not saying that! But what about the opposite? Maybe Communism isn’t automatically good. Think about it! Volodya, have you really never wondered why they only ever talk about the same things when it comes to Fascist Germany? The war, the annihilation, the concentration camps ... But what about the social structure, the political system? Why don’t we get anything about them? Could it be because at that time in the USSR everything was exactly the same way? Just instead of Jews in the camps, it was dissenters, and instead of Aryans, it was Party members? The Germans even had their own version of Pioneers!”

Volodya frowned. “What are you getting at?”

Yurka didn’t know. There he went again, talking utter nonsense just so people would pay attention to him, like a little kid. Yurka didn’t like it. He disgusted himself. But he couldn’t stop. He couldn’t let Volodya go back to Ulyana.

“I’m saying that Germans are people too, like us. They’re not all scum.”

Volodya scoffed. “But how do you know if they’re scum or not? Because you have an uncle who lives there? So what? Now they’re okay, but back then the whole country had become murderers!”

“Not all of them!” exclaimed Yurka.

“Well, obviously not all of them! But, Yura—” Volodya paused. He exhaled in frustration. “Look, you have to have better judgment! I know you want to think and speak your mind freely, and you can, but just not here! You have to adjust your behavior to fit the situation, and if you can’t, then you need to learn to lie! Nobody should even think the things you’re saying aloud!”

“Seems like I’ve heard this somewhere before,” growled Yurka through gritted teeth. “But I’m talking about something else, Volodya. Our honored Communist Leonidovna is only demanding our patriotism so she can check a box. Our quasi-Komsomol girls here are nodding their heads, but then they go cry their eyes out when you’re mad at them. Just look around: nobody gives a crap about the heroes! These girls are only here because of you!”

“And you have some other reason?” Volodya’s eyes flashed. He turned around to leave.

Yurka was also here because of Volodya, actually. But Volodya ... Volodya was doing the show not to check a box, not to attract somebody’s attention: he legitimately wanted to showcase the Pioneer Heroes’ feat for people, to let people know about it. He was the only one who was genuine about any of it, and he probably felt very lonely.

“Yes! I do care!” In any case, Yurka decided to correct his mistakes later; right now all he wanted was for Volodya not to have the last word.

Time stretched out longer and longer, as though it weren’t half an hour but half a day. The clock’s second hand seemed to be making fun of Yurka, crawling slowly and stumbling at every tick, so much that it felt like there should have already been five more each time the hand finally moved.

Finally Volodya clapped loudly, stood up, and said, “That’s it for today, folks.” Yurka noted that the time was only eight fifty by the clock, even though finishing early was completely out of character for the artistic director, especially now, when every minute counted. “Go take a break. Polya, Ulya, and Ksyusha, your task is to rehearse the Avengers’ dialogue a few more times, just among yourselves. Especially you, Ulya. Have the girls help you. You’re still overacting a bit. And you, Sashka, are a dead Fascist, so remember that and stop snoring when you’re lying onstage! Dead! Not asleep! Got it?”

Everyone he addressed nodded.

“You’re dismissed.”

The little kids scattered. The girls, whispering to each other, also proceeded languorously to the exit. The last person to leave the stage was Ksyusha. Yurka happened to be at the other end of the auditorium at that moment and saw her walk up to Volodya, but he didn’t hear what she asked him. Volodya shook his head no.

After Ksyusha left, Yurka demanded, with a twinge of jealousy in his voice, “What did she want?”

“She was asking me to come to the dance.”

“And?”

“No go.” Volodya shrugged nonchalantly. “We still have a bunch of work to do here. Speaking of which, come on, I wanted to talk to you about the set.”

He got onto the stage and called Yurka to follow him. Yurka’s brows shot up— What, he seriously wants to talk about the set now?! —but he trudged along anyway.

“Look,” said Volodya, gesturing toward the back left corner of the stage. “This is where we’ll arrange the HQ set: desk, chairs, the propaganda posters up there—a base, basically. And over here”—Volodya walked over to the right side of the stage—“we won’t open the whole curtain, and this will be where we do the outdoor scenes. We’ll have the hollow log here, their hiding place. We still need to think of a way to hide the rifles so they’re not visible from the audience, though: our log isn’t actually hollow like theirs was, ours is a regular one.”

Yurka was only listening with half an ear. Normally he would’ve wanted to get into the details, but he couldn’t get himself to focus on anything but the fact that he and Volodya were finally all by themselves in the empty movie theater.

“Well, but maybe we could actually put the log right up next to the curtain and then stick the rifles under the curtain ...” Volodya ducked behind the curtain and gave the heavy fabric a sharp tug. A cloud of dust enveloped him. “Ugh! Crap, now we’ll have to beat the curtain, too ...”

Yurka couldn’t stand it anymore. He strode quickly up to Volodya and shoved him so that Volodya fell back against the wall, pinning the curtain to the wall behind him. Yurka grabbed the edges of the curtain and wrapped the dusty fabric around them both, hiding them from the empty auditorium.

“What are you doing?” asked Volodya, somewhere between indignant and surprised.

“I’m picking up where we left off.”

Volodya shook his head: “Not here I won’t. What if somebody comes ...”

“But nobody can see us!”

“Yes ... that’s right ... ,” whispered Volodya, and put his hands on Yurka’s shoulders.

Yurka screwed his eyes shut and lunged for Volodya’s lips. Their lips touched and Yurka just stood there like that, holding his breath and keeping his eyes shut tight, afraid the same thing would happen now as at the power shed and Volodya would push him away. But Volodya didn’t push him away. Volodya’s hands tightened on Yurka’s shoulders and he pulled Yurka in. That innocent touching of lips to lips called forth such a storm of feeling in Yurka that he felt as if both a tender, romantic Viennese waltz and the nimble, surging “Ride of the Valkyries” had started playing at the same time inside him. It caught him in a whirl and tossed him up into the very sky, almost like what the music had done to him a couple of hours ago. But until now, he’d been clueless about the fact that playing music was hardly the only thing that could make him soar. And that heaven started not way up in the sky but somewhere about a hundred and seventy centimeters from the ground, at the level of Volodya’s lips. And also that, from now on, everything would be different, everything inside him would change—and everything outside him, too: the nights would now be bright, the winters warm.

Suddenly Volodya tensed, his back going tight as a bowstring as he turned his face away, although he pressed Yurka even closer, clutching him almost painfully tight. Yurka had no time to react before he went deaf: Volodya sneezed so loudly that Yurka’s ears rang. Then he sneezed again. And again. As they fought their way out of the dusty curtain, they were both laughing, Yurka with his head thrown back, but Volodya bent double, from sneezing, or guffawing, or both.

They both continued giggling stupidly as they made their way back to the Troop Five cabin. And Yurka also got the hiccups.

That night the little boys didn’t run riot. They didn’t even ask for a scary story. Volodya had probably worked them too hard. This was the first time Yurka wasn’t glad they fell asleep so quickly, because it meant Yurka had to leave.

Their goodbye handshake was a little awkward. All night Yurka had been dying to ask Volodya one burning question, but he just couldn’t muster the courage. Now, as they stood in silence, right hands clasped, Volodya wouldn’t let go, as though he were waiting for something. When Volodya finally released his hand and softly said, “Bye,” Yurka had no choice. He had no more strength to wait until tomorrow. He panicked: “No! Wait! I want to talk to you. I have something to ask you.”

“What?”

“I don’t get it. You were talking about there’s a girl you like, and—”

“Is that really what I said?” Volodya interrupted. Yurka stared at Volodya, confused. “I didn’t say ‘girl.’ I said ‘person.’”

“But then who is it?”

“It’s a long story. Forget about it,” urged Volodya. Out of nowhere he hugged Yurka, then just as suddenly released him. “And then I’ll forget about the ‘girl from my building,’ too.”

“It’s hard to forget something like that,” grumbled Yurka.

Volodya snorted mirthlessly. “Tell me about it.” He took both of Yurka’s hands in his own and said regretfully, “Yur, we can’t keep dragging this goodbye out. Irina’s going to notice. And it really is time to get some sleep. Right now the main thing’s to make it to tomorrow, right?”

“Wrong. I’m coming to you today,” said Yurka firmly. “Tonight, late, after everyone’s asleep. At midnight, or maybe a little later.”

“No. We can’t risk it, especially not after this afternoon.”

“I’m not asking you. I’m telling you. I’m coming. I’ll tap on the window.”

“Don’t ...”

“Even if you don’t wait up for me, I’m still coming.”

“Well ... okay, then. I won’t be able to get to sleep anyway, after today. Just be careful and stay out of trouble.”

Waiting until the little kids fell asleep was no problem, but it was a long time until the senior troops went quiet. As soon as Yurka lay down in bed, all the day’s accumulated tiredness hit him like a ton of bricks. He kept drifting off, but with a supreme effort of will he caught himself every time and made himself wake up. He wanted to see Volodya again too badly to let himself doze off.

Once the camp had gone not only quiet but dark—some of the outside lights were turned off after lights-out—Yurka knew it was time. He got up, dressed, and left the cabin.

This was the first time he’d seen the camp so quiet and empty. His imagination ran wild, fed by the lack of sleep and the day’s trepidations: Had the enemies of the Soviet Union gone ahead and hit the place with an atomic bomb, killing everything around? He couldn’t hear any owls hooting or any barking from the dogs over in Horetivka; only the crickets gave themselves away with their violently loud chirping. Yurka had even heard that some insects, like cockroaches, were capable of surviving a nuclear war.

All the windows of all the cabins were completely dark. At last he reached the Troop Five cabin, which was just as dark and quiet as the rest.

Yurka instantly found the window he needed. He stepped up onto the small ledge formed by the base of the cabin and knocked. A few seconds later, a pale face with glasses appeared out of the darkness. Yurka pointed back behind himself at the bushes and whispered soundlessly that he’d wait for Volodya there.

Volodya came out dressed all in black a couple of minutes later, but even that brief wait felt like an eternity to Yurka. He rushed out to meet Volodya and grabbed his hands, but Volodya jerked back: “What are you doing, they’ll see! Not here.”

“Fine,” grunted Yurka sullenly. He held tight to Volodya’s wrist and dragged him through the bushes toward the athletic fields.

“What kind of Pandora’s box have I opened here?” hissed Volodya, running behind Yurka.

They went by the tennis and basketball courts to end up by the pool. The only thing past the pool was dense woods. Right now it was petrifyingly dark out here. The water rippling in the pool looked black, and the moonlight cast shadows onto it from the tall trees. At the far side of the pool, past the row of starting blocks, statues of swimming Pioneers stood with their backs to the woods. Two white plaster silhouettes, of a girl in a swimsuit with an oar and a boy getting ready to dive, glowed like ghosts against the background of the dark, gloomy woods. But Yurka couldn’t have cared less about how scary it all looked. He barely registered it. Instead, he dragged Volodya on, skirting the pool to hide behind the pedestal of a statue.

He took a step toward Volodya, wanting to embrace him, but Volodya pushed him away: “Wait, people can see us. Let’s get down.”

Volodya sat on his knees on the grass right next to the pedestal and pulled Yurka down. Yurka submitted, but he was horribly offended. “If you push me away just one more time, I’ll disappear out of your life for good. I’ll—I’ll run away for real!”

“Fine,” said Volodya. In the dark, it was hard to tell which emotions were playing across his face. “I’m sorry. You know why I do that ... But I won’t do it anymore.” Then he paused. “So you did mean to run away earlier? Where were you?”

“Over there.” Yurka gestured in the general direction of the road. “I went out to the bus stop.”

Volodya took a deep breath and let it out slowly, as though he were trying to get himself under control and calm down.

“For five hours?! Yura, I just about lost it looking for you!” Volodya whispered hotly. “I ran around the camp like a crazy person. I checked every room in the unfinished barracks, every single one! And there’s forty of them in there! But you weren’t anywhere. And I was afraid to ask about you, in case anyone figured out that you were up to who-knows-what again and told Leonidovna. You know how fast rumors spread here, and if she found out, that’s it: Consider yourself already kicked out of camp. And that was if I could find you! But what if I couldn’t?!” Now Volodya was doing his best to yell at Yurka in a whisper.

“Oh, simmer down! What could happen to me? This isn’t my first time here; I already know every—”

“Who knows what could happen? Something could! Do you have any idea what kind of things I was imagining?”

“Like what? That I went to drown myself?” Yurka chortled.

“And you think that’s funny? Want to see how it felt to be in my shoes? Because I can do that for you. I can do that for you right now!” It was clear that Volodya was barely holding himself back from shouting at the top of his lungs: he was breathing heavily, and his hands were shaking—possibly his whole body, too.

“Okay, okay, calm down. I’m here, nothing happened, everything’s fine.”

“I thought I’d strangle you as soon as I saw you!”

“Don’t worry so much. It’s just me. I mean, I understand that you are responsible for me—”

“What the hell does responsibility have to do with it! You’re a living human being and you’re my ... my friend. And especially after everything that happened yesterday ...”

“Then strangle me, if you want! Just quit freaking out.”

Yurka faltered to a halt in mid-sentence. He was flustered. Volodya had suddenly put his arms around him.

“I’m not angry anymore,” he said quietly. “I stopped being angry as soon as I saw you play.”

He released Yurka from his embrace, making Yurka almost groan aloud in despair. Yurka wanted it to keep going; he wanted their embrace to be permanent; he didn’t want to let Volodya go at all. Yurka, still on his knees, shuffled closer to Volodya and took his shaking hands in his own.

“If you had just heard me play instead of seeing me, you would’ve kept wanting to throttle me,” Yurka said half-jokingly.

“Don’t talk nonsense. You play really well,” said Volodya. Tenderly and very, very slowly, as though he were trying to sense the warmth of Yurka’s hand with every cell of his skin, he ran his fingers along Yurka’s palms and whispered, “Yura, take care of your hands. They really are delicate.” He lifted Yurka’s hands, then bent down his head and kissed them tenderly.

Yurka was terribly embarrassed. His face started flaming and he could feel himself going red all the way up to the crown of his head. His cheeks were burning—but forget his cheeks: his fingers spasmed and then turned to stone, so he couldn’t straighten them. That was what made him good and truly self-conscious. Yurka cast about frantically for something to say and seized on the first thing that came to mind. It was also the stupidest thing. “Yours are too! I mean, I like your hands a lot too. They’re so soft ... as if you ... as if you moisturize them.”

“No,” chuckled Volodya. It looked like he’d finally been able to relax. “I don’t do anything special to them.”

Yurka’s vision was going blurry from how close he was to Volodya. He desperately wanted to kiss him but was too shy to ask. He shifted in his seat, moving carefully closer to Volodya, and lamely mumbled something without even knowing what he was saying. “Nothing at all?”

The main thing was to talk, to distract Volodya with conversation—didn’t matter about what—and keep nudging closer.

“No,” said Volodya slowly, flustered. “Well, maybe I wash them in really hot water sometimes ...”

Yurka was willing to swear he’d seen Volodya raise his eyebrows, even in the dark. Now Volodya was very close, just a couple of centimeters away, but kept making no move to kiss Yurka. It was as though he were waiting for something. Maybe the thing to do was just ask directly?

But Yurka, in his impatience, whispered something completely different—“Really, really hot water?”—and edged just a teeny bit closer.

Volodya was sitting in the exact same place in the exact same position, stroking Yurka’s hand and looking at Yurka with flashing eyes. “Almost boiling.” He smiled. “Why?”

“Maybe I should, too?” Volodya was already too close. Yurka couldn’t breathe.

“No, it would hurt you,” Volodya said seriously. Then he laughed. “Yura, what are we even talking about?”

“I don’t know ...” Yurka exhaled heavily, decided to hell with his shyness, and pressed his lips to Volodya’s.

Suffocating from nerves and rapture, Yurka was afraid Volodya would push him away again. But that didn’t happen. The kiss was innocent and very long. But even if it had lasted an eternity, it wouldn’t have been enough for Yurka.

Suddenly, Volodya reached out and touched a lock of Yurka’s shaggy bangs and said, “I’ve wanted to do that for a long time.” He smoothed the lock of hair, then stroked Yurka’s ear and temple tenderly.

It was ticklish, but felt so good that Yurka moved his head, pressing his temple up under Volodya’s fingers.

It was like he was a cat asking to be petted.

Volodya chuckled quietly.

He took Yurka’s hands in his own again.

Without speaking, he ran his nose along Yurka’s cheek.

There was more pleasure and tenderness in that gesture than in all their kisses combined, making something inside Yurka burst open.

They stayed there, hiding behind the statue, kneeling in front of each other and holding hands, until the sky went from black to inky blue.

Volodya started and looked around at every sound, even though it was always obvious that it wasn’t footsteps but the wind, or pine cones falling in the woods, or someone rattling their shutters far, far away.

But no matter how dangerous and scary it was, he probably wanted to stay just as much as Yurka did.

Afterward, Yurka couldn’t get to sleep for a long time.

His wildly joyous thoughts made his heart do a frenzied tap dance.

As if it were possible to fall asleep when everything was rumbling and rattling inside him, and his internal voice was refusing to shut up, and on top of that it wasn’t whispering, or burbling, but shrieking with happiness! When his hands just itched to open the window, and his feet ached to carry him to the troop leaders’ room, and he wanted to wrap himself, legs and arms and all, around Volodya and never let him go.

Although—no, it would be better to steal him away, to drag him off into a dark corner and then wrap himself around him.

But, actually, it didn’t matter where they twined themselves together: Let them do it in the middle of the main square, as long as nobody bothered them! Yurka never managed to figure out the best way to turn into twining ivy and wrap around Volodya, since he finally fell asleep.

His dreams were just as confused.

Yura blinked a few times and looked around.

It had started raining again, and the wind had picked up a little and was blowing cold droplets into his face.

The cracked asphalt led farther, to the athletic fields, where the morning calisthenics had been held.

The fields hadn’t fared much better than the rest of the camp.

But one thing that had been preserved amazingly well was the big banner stretched out over the podium where the phys ed instructors had stood to demonstrate the exercises.

The banner was sheltered from the wind and rain underneath a long awning, so on the faded cloth it was still possible to discern athletes crossing the finish line, as well as the slogan ALL WORLD RECORDS MUST BE OURS!

The twenty-five-meter pool had been on the other side of the athletic fields.

There were lots of swim races.

Yura remembered the splashing, the shrill whistle blasts, and the troop leaders’ shouting as if it was yesterday.

But now all that was left of the pool was a great big pit whose far edge was crumbling in.

The little tiles had come off the walls and rainwater had collected at the bottom and gone all green and swampy.

Only the starting blocks, with their barely legible lane numbers, could indicate to the random passerby that this had once been a pool.

But the weathered, broken statues of swimming Pioneers, covered in a layer of green, still stood on their pedestals.

The woods behind them had grown considerably thinner.

Yura heard the rumble of excavators and the whine of chain saws coming from out past the trees.

He walked a little way into the trees and saw large clearings in the middle of what had once been a thick coniferous forest.

The trees were coming down fast here, and out in the distance he could see a construction site.

Past that bristled the triangular roofs of completed homes.

Yura sighed and returned to the statues of Pioneers.

He walked up close to the pedestal and stood at the exact place where that evening, twenty years ago, he and Volodya had spent half the night kneeling face-to-face, holding hands, unable to let each other go.

Yura chuckled, remembering how badly his legs and back had hurt afterward.

But his smile evaporated immediately: this exact place was soon to be wiped from the face of the earth.

Yura’s childhood, his happiest memories, were going to be destroyed irreplaceably, by progress as well as by time.

Of course, nobody needed an abandoned Pioneer camp anymore.

It was just taking up space.

Yura imagined the “new”

stepping on Camp Barn Swallow like a giant’s enormous foot, crushing it.

Soon, nothing would be left.

Nothing left of what had been so precious to him.

He stood by the base of the statue and looked down at the ground.

This was where they had sat, where Volodya had held his hand, and embraced him tightly, and promised he’d never push him away again.

Yura smiled to himself.

His memories warmed him from the inside.

How na?ve he’d been then.

Just a dumb kid who had no idea how serious the thing that was happening to them was.

At the time, everything had been pure emotion for Yurka: the rapture of first love, the joy of it being requited, the sweetness of reciprocation ...

Maybe it was good that Yurka had been such an absolute child. Because thanks to his innocent, childlike view of things, he hadn’t punished himself the way Volodya had. He hadn’t hated himself; he hadn’t hurt himself; and—this was the main thing—he hadn’t made the terrible mistake that Volodya would go on to make, in the very near future, just a few years after working at Camp Barn Swallow.