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“All the rest of it ...”

Yurka had also fantasized about “the rest of it”

when he was alone. But he figured that didn’t concern anyone but himself, because it was his own body, and Yurka knew a way to solve that problem that didn’t involve Volodya at all. Sure, Volodya was an object of desire, but that didn’t mean Yurka was going to go act on his feeling. Yurka had known for a long time now, obviously, that people could do “the rest of it”

not for procreation but just because it felt good. And after seeing the magazine, he had guessed that there were ways to do it other than the traditional way. Recently, he’d realized that might even mean it was possible to do it with people other than girls. But for him and Volodya to do it? No. No, that was too much. Yurka could deal with his problems himself. And to tell the truth, he didn’t even think of it as a problem at all!

But evidently Volodya did. And he was so desperate, he was even ready to go to a doctor—anything to forget. To forget it all. Which meant to forget Yurka, too. But Yurka couldn’t allow that! What was he supposed to do? Volodya was terribly afraid of his own desires, but wasn’t that because he longed to fulfill them? Was that why he was telling Yurka all this: because subconsciously he actually wanted Yurka to push him to do “the rest of it”? Because he wanted Yurka to convince him that essentially there was nothing dangerous about “the rest of it”? That it was probably just the opposite: that happiness is entrusting yourself to a person who loves you?

And that was the biggest thing of all of it, for Yurka: Volodya had fallen in love with him! As he remembered it, his dark thoughts disappeared as though they had never been. Volodya loved him! Could anything in the whole world be more important than that? No! The future, all those fears, this “abnormality”—all of it was nonsense, none of it meant anything, none of it was worth worrying about if Volodya was in love with him. So what if a “normal”

man would find this absurd? It made Yurka so happy that he wanted to laugh out loud—so much that he couldn’t hold back. He burst out laughing, grabbed Volodya’s arms, turned Volodya around to face him, pushed him back on the pile of newspapers, and jumped on top of him, chortling, “What am I supposed to be afraid of you for? What are you going to do, hold me so tight, you squeeze me to death? Go ahead, please, hold me as tight as you want.”

“It’s not what I’m going to do—I’m not going to do anything to you. It’s what I want to do ... I’m like a maniac or something ...”

Volodya made a pretty poor maniac. It was impossible to take his threats seriously when he was sitting on the floor, squashed into submission by a Yurka who was holding him down.

“And what do you want to do, exactly?”

Yurka knew already, but he wanted Volodya to admit it out loud.

“That’s not important. None of it’s going to happen anyway.”

But Volodya was only protesting verbally; physically, he wasn’t moving a muscle.

“Yes, it is important! Tell me! What?”

“I don’t want to do anything that’ll harm you! And I won’t! Yurka, it’s harmful! It is! It’s an abomination, it’s vile desecration! I wouldn’t do that to you for—”

“But what is ‘it’? This?”

Yurka put his hand under Volodya’s shirt.

“Yurka, stop!”

Volodya roughly snatched Yurka’s hand away and pushed him off, then knelt on the floor and hid his face in his hands. Yurka had been soaring with happiness—Volodya was in love with him!—but the sight of Volodya, ready to weep, cooled his ardor. Yurka tried to peer between Volodya’s fingers to look into his eyes but could only catch sight of Volodya’s furrowed brow.

“Come on, why are you acting like this, Volod ...”

He stroked Volodya’s hair, but instead of calming down, Volodya flinched and burst out angrily, “Can you really not understand this? Can you really not conceive of where this might lead? You’re not like me. You’ve liked girls before. You haven’t lost everything yet!”

Volodya lowered his hands from his face and looked Yurka right in the eye. “Yurka, promise me, not for show but for real: Swear me an oath you’ll never break. Promise me that I’ll be the only one. Promise that as soon as you get home, you’ll get your act together and fall in love with a good girl ... a musician ... That you won’t be like me. That you’ll never look at any other guy the way you look at me! I don’t want you to be that way! It’s bitter, and it’s scary ... You have no idea how scary it is!”

“Can you really hate yourself this much?”

whispered Yurka, dismayed.

“Can you really pretend you don’t care? Because I’m sick! I’m a freak!”

Yurka itched to slap him so he’d come back to his senses and stop insulting himself. But instead he said, “I do. I do care. And you know something? When you’re a nobody like I am, when you’ve got nothing to lose, all these terrible thoughts just go away. And I can think clearly. Because, look, what if everyone’s wrong?”

“That’s stupid! Everyone can’t be wrong!”

“But what if they are? Because I see the kind of person you are, I know you. This is me talking here! I can be messed up, I can be crazy, but you can’t! You’re the best thing there is. You’re smart, you’re upstanding. I ... Let everything be my fault, okay? I’m the one who’s ruined, I’m as bad as anything—not you! I’m used to everything being my fault! It won’t hurt me to be guilty of one more thing; it’s just a drop in the bucket.”

“You’re spouting nonsense.”

Yurka didn’t bother answering. Nonsense? As long as it made Volodya feel even a tiny bit better, Yurka was willing to both spout nonsense and take responsibility for everything. He was willing to lie and hide. But did Volodya really not need all this? Did he really want to get rid of what Yurka was trying so wholeheartedly to give him? No. That was nonsense!

It was painful to look at Volodya, to see him so despondent now that he’d basically resigned himself to the inevitable. It was terrifying to think about what he wanted to do to himself. And Yurka felt so bad for him. Far worse than he ever felt for himself.

Yurka sat down next to Volodya. He put his arms around Volodya and rested his head on his shoulder.

“What if I say I love you, too?”

Volodya didn’t respond; he didn’t even move. After a pause, he said coldly: “It’d be better if you didn’t say that.”

“I just did.”

“It’d be better if you forgot.”

It was as though Yurka had been stabbed through the heart. No matter how scared Volodya was, no matter how much he was suffering, did he really not understand that hearing those words was simply painful?

“Listen to what I just confessed to you! Doesn’t it make you even a little happy?”

demanded Yurka. Volodya didn’t say anything, but he did smile. Yurka noticed that and continued hotly: “Then I’m going to say something else, too. I also have doubts about a lot of things—there’s also a lot I don’t understand—but one thing I know for sure: you shouldn’t destroy what you’ve built. If everything ends now, if we just quit on each other, I’ll regret it for the rest of my life.”

“No. You’ll be grateful to me. You’re stubborn now, but later you’ll learn. You’ll realize I was right. Because I’m not just saying this. I know more than you about these things.”

“You know more than me? Tell me, then! Tell me already: What is this great thing that you know but I don’t! You’re always lecturing me, but you can’t tell me like it is, Konev’s still too stupid! Wait until you get smarter, Konev, then you’ll understand!”

“That’s not true. I just don’t want to scare you, or ... or disappoint you.”

“Then admit it! What happened to you?”

Volodya sighed in resignation and started talking. “You’re not the first person for whom I’ve had ... this.”

He looked closely at Yurka to see his reaction, but Yurka just nodded and said, “Go on. It can’t get any worse.”

“Well, we’ll see about that ... The first one was my cousin. He came to stay with us while he was getting enrolled in university. We hadn’t seen each other for many years. I’d even managed to forget what he looked like, but then here I see him again. He’d grown up, become ... he’d gotten ... I don’t know how to describe it. He’d become remarkable. He’s older than me; I had always been drawn to him and wanted to be like him. And then I saw him and was just transfixed. Everything that had anything to do with him seemed good and important to me. I lost my head whenever he was near. And all of a sudden, I felt ... it. And not for just anyone, but for my own cousin!”

He turned toward the window, pressed his temple against the wall, and said in despair, “Just think, Yur, think how disgusting I am! Think what this filth inside me is capable of making me do. He was my cousin! My own blood, my family, my father’s brother’s son. We even have the same name: his first name’s also Vladimir and his last name’s also Davydov; just our patronymics are different ...”

“Did you tell him?”

Yurka asked dully.

“No, of course not.”

Now Volodya was speaking softly. “I never told anyone about my cousin, and I probably won’t ever tell anyone else, not even my parents. Especially not them. I have never felt as much horror as I felt then, and I probably never will. Because to be any more scared than that would be more than I could take: I’d die of heart failure. It got so bad that when I woke up in the morning, I’d look in the mirror and genuinely not know how I hadn’t gone gray yet. I’m not joking and I’m not exaggerating, Yur. I got scared of myself, I got scared of other boys: What if they awakened this filth inside me? And then I started to be scared of absolutely everyone. I haven’t always been as closed-of as I am now, you know. And I don’t hate people. I avoid them because I’m afraid: What if they see it inside me?”

Yurka didn’t know what to say, or whether he needed to say anything at all. He pulled Volodya away from the wall and hugged him hard. He rubbed his shoulder for a while, then went still. Bursts of rain kept spitting doggedly into the fogged-up window. It was now late at night, and it just kept raining and raining. Volodya’s breathing gradually went from panicked gasps to slow, even breaths. He began calming down and maybe even dozed of a little; Yurka didn’t check, since he was afraid of disturbing Volodya. Yurka was sleepy himself, and as he relaxed, his left hand accidentally fell down onto Volodya’s belly.

“Yura, are you testing me? I already asked you to move your hand. I forbid you to touch me there.”

Yurka flinched in surprise, then got mad: What did he mean, he forbade him?! Scowling, he retorted, “And I forbid you to put your hands in boiling water!”

“Oh, would you just stop,”

said Volodya, giving up without a fight.

“The bonfire’s tomorrow,”

said Yurka, petting Volodya’s belly through his shirt. “Do you even understand that? Tomorrow is the last time we’ll see each other! Maybe even the last time in our whole lives!”

Volodya shot a surly glance at Yurka’s hand, then looked pointedly at Yurka. Yurka understood his complaint.

“Fine, have it your way! I’ll move my hand! But you know what? I’m going to be leaving so much behind at Camp Barn Swallow that it can’t be counted. I’ll be leaving half of myself here! And when I get back home, the thing I’m going to regret more than anything else is that I moved my hand. And don’t tell me that it’s for my own good, that it’s for the best, and that I’ll be grateful nothing happened, and that you’ll be grateful nothing happened. You don’t even believe that yourself!”

“Of course I don’t believe that!”

Volodya exploded.

It turned out he hadn’t calmed down at all; he was just pretending, and really he had gotten worked up about something again. Now he poured everything out on Yurka’s head in a rush:

“You’re talking about this ‘tomorrow,’ but look at the time: it’s already Friday. The bonfire’s today. Today is the end. As soon as we separate, I’m going to lose my mind from missing you ...”

He heaved a shuddering sigh. “Yura, please, understand me! I’m so lost, I’m so tired of going back and forth! As soon as I make up my mind to do it, to go get treatment, I swing over to the opposite extreme: more than anything in the world I want to keep what we have now! And then I think about you and I get afraid again, because I don’t want the same thing to happen to you—”

Yurka interrupted him. “It’s too late to be afraid of that, because it’s already happened! With you! I’ve told you a thousand times, I don’t know what other words to use. Volodya, if it weren’t for you, I wouldn’t have started playing again! Music came back to me, thanks to none other than you! Goodness and meaning came back into my life because of you, so you can’t be bad. And today’s not an end at all, not if you don’t want it to be. Volodya, look, I’m not your cousin. And it’ll be different with me. I understand you, and I—I love you. And now I know for real, not from books, how hard it is to become each other’s first love, how hard it is to be each other’s first love. But then staying that for each other is easy as pie. Let’s do what it takes to stay that way, okay? Because we’re friends, first and foremost, and I’m not going to betray you, and I’m not going to abandon you. I’ll write you and support you.”

The whole time Yurka was talking, Volodya stared at him without blinking, his eyes radiating his desperate desire to believe those words, to believe that everything would work out for them.

“I’ll write you, too,”

Volodya said finally. He smiled. “I won’t skip a single letter. I’ll write twice a week, or even more, and I won’t even need a reason.”

“There, you see? Now we’re talking sense.”

“You got that right.”

Volodya chuckled. “I’m a little less afraid I’ll lose my mind now ...”

Yurka realized, suddenly, that he was freezing. To warm up, he stretched out his goose bump–covered legs and started rubbing them with his hands.

“Oh!”

he remembered. “Tchaikovsky didn’t write in his diary that sodomites should be exterminated, too, did he?”

“No,”

Volodya scoffed. “He was one of them. They didn’t put you in prison for that back then. But he suffered from it, too. He called it ‘feeling Z’ and wrote about how—”

“There, see?”

Yurka interrupted him, to keep Volodya from getting bogged down in a discourse on suffering and torment again. “He didn’t start any wars. Just the opposite! He was a genius.”

Yurka wanted to shout the word “genius,”

but his teeth were chattering from cold. He shivered.

Volodya, of course, noticed that Yurka was freezing and started taking of his own jacket, evidently planning to drape it over Yurka’s shoulders, but Yurka stopped him. “Better to warm my legs.”

Volodya nodded and put his hands on Yurka’s ankles. His hands were so warm, as though it weren’t freezing! He started rubbing his hands briskly up and down Yurka’s legs. Yurka felt the warmth spreading through his body—not regular warmth, but that special warmth, Volodya’s warmth. He shut his eyes, luxuriating, and so didn’t see Volodya lean forward, but he felt the heat on his knee. It was so cold that Volodya’s lips on it felt burning hot.

Yurka stared at him, not daring to move a muscle. Volodya caught his eyes and smiled. He slowly breathed out another puff of heat onto Yurka’s skin, then leaned over to kiss the other knee.

Yurka couldn’t help it: he reached down and took hold of Volodya’s shoulders and tried to pull him toward his face. “Kiss me. The grown-up way. Like in the boat.”

“Yura, we shouldn’t ... Don’t stir ... that in me. Even without any kissing you’re too good at getting me excited, I can’t sleep for half the night afterward. I don’t want to get all handsy with you again and then regret it.”

“But I want you to! And you, you’re ... stirring me up, too; you’re over here kissing me on the knee!”

“I know, I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to ... God, I’m even seducing the most innocent, the most—”

“Stop blaming everything on yourself!”

Yurka erupted. “You keep creating all this blame and guilt and then heaping it on yourself! Is what we’re doing really bad? Does it really hurt anyone?”

“No, but Masha might tell.”

“Tell what? She doesn’t even know where we are right now. She’s sacked out over in the cabin, fast asleep. Look, I don’t want to ruin our last day because of her. Volod, it’s our last day! What if we never see each other again? What if we really—”

“Masha or no Masha, we shouldn’t.”

Volodya hugged Yurka’s head to his shoulder. “This can only lead to ... to something improper. And I’m responsible for you.”

“For cripes’ sake! Look, what if after this I go do something bad without telling you—some act of vandalism? Are you responsible for me then? No. Come on, Volodya, quit treating me like I’m a little kid.”

“Well, okay. But let’s not start up right this minute, okay? I barely got to sleep the night after the boat. We have to get up early tomorrow, and we’ve stayed up late enough as it is.”

“But tomorrow is already here,”

said Yurka, smiling.

He was warmed up. But now Volodya went quiet. Evidently he was immersed again in yet more worries. But Yurka didn’t resist. He wanted only one thing: for Volodya to rest his head on Yurka’s chest and then let him think about whatever he wanted as he listened to the beating of Yurka’s heart.

They held each other again. Yurka turned his desire to reality, pulling Volodya close and hugging his head to his chest. The nosepiece of Volodya’s glasses bit into him, so Yurka pulled them off Volodya’s nose without asking. Volodya didn’t offer a word of protest; he just put Yurka’s hand on his head the way he’d done that time under the willow, so Yurka would stroke his hair. And Yurka was unable to refuse him.

The rain slowed. Falling raindrops tinkled and plinked. Eventually, dawn began striping the sky in the gaps between gray rain clouds. It was time to leave, but ending their embrace, even just tearing away from each other for a few seconds, was too hard. It was all but impossible. As they said their goodbyes, their kisses were many and frequent: kisses on the lips, but not grown-up ones, not like the kisses in the boat.

They threw caution to the wind and left together. But once they reached the intersection of the path to the unfinished barracks and the Avenue of Pioneer Heroes, Volodya realized he’d forgotten to throw away the newspapers he’d spread in the barracks to cover up their tracks. He shook Yurka’s hand in parting and turned to head back.

Yurka was still a little angry at Volodya for not kissing him properly, and for not letting him touch his stomach, and for ... well, there was a lot he was mad at Volodya for. Easier to say that Yurka was just mad about everything.

As he trudged back to his own cabin, he remembered his final threat that he would perform some act of vandalism without telling Volodya. He stopped and looked around, checking that no one was nearby, and raced back to the intersection where he and Volodya had parted ways. He’d remembered that he still had a piece of chalk in his shorts pocket.

The intersection was freshly paved and formed a perfect square, as though it had been created specifically to be an artist’s canvas. Yurka thought about what he should write. Maybe the first letters of their first names and the year, like in the lovers’ bower? No, writing something like that would be too risky. Obviously the V could be hiding Vitya, or Valya, or Valera, or any number of other names, while the Yu could be Yulya, not Yura. But then the dwindling rain would hardly wash away the writing by the time the bugle played reveille. And if it didn’t, and if Masha did somehow find out about his and Volodya’s absence, then things would get ugly for them. No, writing their initials was off-limits. But what did he need both initials for? Yurka had never liked the first letter of his name; it was awkward and weird-looking. The letter V , though: now, that was a different story altogether ...

He got the chalk out of his pocket. He bent down and, with a flourish, started drawing the most gorgeous letter in the world, V , the first letter of his favorite name. He traced around it, making the lines thicker and then shading them, and then realized that just the one letter all by itself wasn’t enough. There had to be a meaning hidden in his “act of vandalism.”

It had to conceal a feeling: the feeling he’d been afraid to call love, even to himself, up until that night. But love was precisely what it was. Yurka knew that now.

He loved that letter, and he loved that name, and he loved that person, and he lovingly drew a big, beautiful heart around the V . He used to laugh at people who drew things like that. He used to think it was stupid, childish. But that was before he’d met his V.

Yurka heard footsteps on the path leading to the unfinished barracks. He recognized them and suddenly felt shy. Volodya had finished so quickly! But Yurka wasn’t done drawing his heart yet. He pulled the chalk down in a crooked line, intending to bring it to meet the other line to make the point at the bottom of the heart, but out of nowhere he started to feel uncertain: What would Volodya think when he saw it? Maybe he, serious as he was, would think it was silly. Maybe he’d think it was just naive childishness and tell Yurka, “You need to grow up!”

And then Yurka would be not just embarrassed but hurt.

To avoid being caught red-handed, he blindly drew a final line with his chalk and then ducked into the bushes. But he accidentally spoiled the heart: instead of a sharp point at the bottom, there was a curve. It wasn’t a heart at all. It was an apple. An apple that had the letter V inside it.

Volodya noticed the letter. He stopped. His shoulders shook—was he laughing?—and he shook his head back and forth a few times. Yurka thought Volodya would leave after that, but Volodya stood over the drawing for a good minute, examining it from various angles, as though he was trying to commit every flourish and every little detail to memory. Yurka was getting sopping wet in the sodden bushes, but he had no complaints. He admired Volodya as the older boy stood over that uneven, misshapen heart.

Volodya moved to take a step, and Yurka’s heart skipped a beat: he couldn’t be about to scuff it away, could he? But Volodya had no intention of scuffing or trampling anything. He gave the heart a wide berth, walking all the way out in the grass. He could’ve walked along the edge of the paving stones; it would only have smudged the heart a little, just a teeny, tiny bit, just a centimeter of it. That’s what Yurka would’ve done. But Volodya walked around the heart, treading on the wet, muddy grass.