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Polina narrated: “On August third, the Young Avengers dealt their heaviest blow to the enemy: at eighteen hundred hours exactly, the power station was blown sky-high.” Yurka chopped his hand down, giving the signal, and then three things happened at once: there was the sound of an explosion, a red spotlight lit up the power station, and the flat with the power station painted on it fell down. Gasps came from the audience. Yurka perked up and lifted his hand, ready to give the next signal. The narrator announced, “This task was accomplished by Zina Luzgina.” Onstage, Katya, who was performing that role, stood up from the bench she’d been sitting on inside the hut.

“Fifteen minutes after the power station, the flax mill was destroyed, complete with the drying chambers, storage facilities, and machine room.” Yurka chopped his hand, giving the signal. There was the sound of an explosion as the second flat with the flax mill painted on it glowed red, then fell down. “This task was accomplished by Nikolay Alexeyev.” Pasha stood up from the bench.

“An hour later, the brick factory was blown to bits. This task was accomplished by Ilya Yezavitov.” Olezhka, his chin raised proudly, stood up. Once again Yurka gave the signal, and once again came the explosion, the red light, and the clatter of a flat falling to the ground. Then, suddenly, Olezha’s high but confident voice rang out over the audience: “For the Motherland!” Yurka turned to look. He couldn’t believe his ears: it really was Olezhka! At the beginning of the performance, he’d been nervous and kept messing up his lines, but then his delivery became more and more confident until now, when, for the first time Yurka could remember, Olezhka had pronounced a clear, ringing r .

Then the excited Petlitsyn sprang up from his chair. He was early. He was supposed to wait until after Polina’s narration: “Five minutes after the explosion of the brick factory, the peat processing plant blew up. This task was accomplished by Yevgeny Yezavitov.” Yurka gave the final signal, waited for the sound and light, and watched the fourth flat fall over, then rushed to the piano.

He cautiously peeked out from behind the curtain. Onstage, the Young Avengers who had caused the explosions were still standing in their places. The audience was still rustling and exclaiming in excitement. Volodya saw Yurka and smiled and nodded. Yurka’s chest swelled with pride. He ducked back behind the curtain, grinning: they’d really laid on the pathos and fervor! He hadn’t expected this much of a success himself! And here he was amid the thundering audience, and the lights, and the kids’ solemn faces, and over it all was Masha, proudly pounding out the “Internationale” on the piano.

“No one was caught that day,” continued the narrator. “On August nineteenth, 1943, a station warehouse was burned down, destroying twenty tons of linen that was ready to be shipped to Germany. The fire then spread to a manufacturing warehouse, destroying ten tons of grain allocated for Fascist troops! But this time, shortly before the fire, Ilya Yezavitov had been seen near the warehouse ...”

Olezhka walked all the way across the stage and exited behind the curtain. The remaining actors stood where they were.

“Ilya left in time and joined the partisans. The Germans noticed that Ilya went missing from the town of Obol right after the attacks. His escape was what ultimately convinced the Germans that there was an underground organization of local residents in Obol and that the acts of sabotage were performed by them, not by the partisans.”

“The authorities’ response to our infrastructure attack was too weak,” pronounced Zina Portnova loudly. “The Germans rounded up a few suspects but quickly released them. Too quickly. They’re up to something!” She got up and left, just like Olezhka.

The narrator intoned the last sentence of the first act: “Zina Portnova left and joined the Kliment Voroshilov partisan troop. On August twenty-sixth, 1943, the Gestapo arrested almost all the members of the underground resistance that were left in town, along with their families.”

“That’s it! It’s time!” Yurka started shaking. He was standing in the wings near the piano, all cleaned up, hair combed, in a perfectly tied neckerchief, white shirt, and gray trousers. Masha was just getting up from the piano and glared angrily at him. But he didn’t care. His heart was beating hard enough to break through his rib cage and his fingers had gone numb. He couldn’t straighten them. He knew that any second now Mitka would slowly and smoothly cover the left side of the stage with the curtain and uncover the right side of the stage, where the piano was.

Yurka looked out into the audience. There were so many people out there! How many times had he played the Lullaby in front of the cast without being afraid? But the cast was different: he wouldn’t quite call them family, but they were like the boys from his building back home—his people, familiar. It was also true that before Camp Barn Swallow Day he’d played out on the outdoor stage, where anybody walking by could’ve heard him, like Pal Palych, and all the troop leaders, and even the Pioneers who were sneaking out during quiet hour. But that was just practice. Only a few individual people were listening, and they wouldn’t have cared if he’d made a mistake. But this was it, now: he had an audience!

The second it fully dawned on Yurka that he was about to play his song, his Lullaby, in front of everyone, his memory ricocheted back to a bad perm and enormous glasses, a table covered in exam papers, and a verdict: “Weak!” He was worthless. He couldn’t do it. And if he couldn’t do it back then, after he’d trained for several months, what would happen now?

The curtain slid up, the creaking rope indicating that it was time for Yurka’s performance.

If only I could rip out this stupid heart, maybe I could at least breathe , thought Yurka. He heaved a shuddering sigh and approached the piano. His cotton wool legs were capable of bending, even of straightening—but his fingers still weren’t.

It had felt so good, back then, on the outdoor stage! The cook had been banging the pots and pans while the phys ed instructors lolled around on a bench loudly doing a crossword puzzle. But the main thing was that Volodya had stood behind him and tried to keep him from playing by putting his hands over Yurka’s eyes. And Yurka hadn’t been afraid in the slightest ... But right now he was, even though it was all the same people here in the movie theater with him: the two phys ed instructors, and the cook, and even her pots and pans.

And Volodya was here, too.

Yurka stood stretching his fingers and trying to concentrate. He pretended that Volodya was standing behind him, tittering silently—but did Volodya even know how to titter, though?—and covering Yurka’s eyes with his warm hands, and that everything was going dark.

Yurka squinted his eyes shut, and everything really did go dark.

“Pull it together. You’re not at an exam. You’re onstage. Everything is fine. There’s no perm. There never was such a thing as that perm in your life! But there was such a thing as Volodya. And all this right here is for him.”

Inhale ...

Just watch me the whole time, like you promised , came the thought, full of entreaty. Yurka knew that this thought, sent out into nothingness, would still find its target. His shaking stilled, and his numbed fingers came back to life and began to do as he bid them.

... exhale.

The moment he touched the keys, everything disappeared; the voices in the audience went quiet. It was as though he himself sank into darkness. All that remained was a single, solitary gaze. Yurka didn’t need to turn around to feel it. The music, too, remained.

Yurka played as though in a fog. The slow, lingering melody alternated with bolder echoes of the main theme, and it seemed like his heart was beating in sync with them. The music filled Yurka completely, penetrating the most guarded recesses of his soul and raking through it, pulling everything out of it in a melody that was sometimes frenzied, other times tender and calming: sadness, and longing, and fear ... and love. As Yurka let the music in, it passed through him, washing away his emotions. The sounds spoke for him, and he knew that the person these feelings were for would understand. The music was saying everything for Yurka: the love he felt, and the yearning he would suffer, and how fiercely he didn’t want to part, and how unbelievably happy he was to have met this person. The music promised that Yurka would wait for him without fail and would keep hoping even when there was no hope left.

Yurka lifted his hands from the keys. Only then did he realize he’d finished. A rising ovation thundered at him from the audience. Yurka couldn’t comprehend how much time had passed. He flinched, turned toward the audience, and immediately sank into Volodya’s eyes, which were sad and happy all at once.

The rope creaked and the curtain slid down, hiding Yurka from the audience. Polina came out onto the edge of the stage in front of the curtain and announced, “End of Act One. There will be a fifteen-minute intermission.”

Yurka’s heart was hammering so hard in his chest that he thought everyone around him must be able to hear it. Had he done it? Had he played well?

The envy in Masha’s eyes was his answer. Seeing that Yurka had noticed her expression, she quickly turned away. But Yurka couldn’t care less about Masha right now. He wanted to laugh out loud, happily, joyfully. He covered his mouth with both hands and then did burst into laughter. He went offstage and hid by the edge of the curtain so nobody would see him and think he’d lost his marbles.

Someone grabbed his elbow and dragged him away. Yurka turned around: Volodya!

“Hey, what do you think you’re doing? They’ll see!”

But the hallway behind the stage was empty, and the actors’ muffled babble could be heard from behind the closed door of the supply closet. Volodya opened the door to a long, small room lined with shelves piled with stuff: the prop room. Volodya shoved Yurka in, shut the door, and held him tight.

Yurka stood with his hands by his sides, breathing in the dense, dusty smell and blinking rapidly, trying to get used to the semidarkness. He couldn’t move a muscle. Volodya buried his face in Yurka’s neck, breathing heavily, and his heart was beating as loudly and feverishly as Yurka’s had been just a minute ago after he finished the Lullaby.

“Thank you,” breathed Volodya.

When Volodya said that, his warm breath washed over Yurka’s neck, and it tickled, which almost made Yurka giggle. But he didn’t. He wasn’t in any mood for laughing anymore. He was just really sad.

And that was just how Volodya was holding him: sadly. And desperately. He squeezed Yurka tight, clutching fistfuls of Yurka’s shirt. As though this were the last time ... as though if he let him go, he’d never get to hold him again ...

Yurka got a lump in his throat and his eyes started burning. He wanted to say something, or at least get his hands free so he could put his arms around Volodya, too, but he couldn’t do any of those things.

“Magnificent, Yura,” said Volodya, without letting go. “You did great. That was magnificent.”

Yurka smiled. “Well, I don’t really have a choice, you know. I have to show you that I can be counted on—that I can make my own decisions.”

Volodya held Yurka out at arm’s length and studied him intently. “But I never said that you—”

“But you think it! You blame yourself for my actions, you think of yourself as some kind of terrible evil ... and you decide for me when it comes to figuring out what’s good for us and what’s bad!”

Volodya didn’t respond. He just frowned. Yurka, realizing that this was neither the time nor the place to make Volodya even more upset, reached out to hold Volodya again.

They stood like that for almost the whole intermission. Yurka couldn’t sense the passage of time. He only came to his senses when they heard the tramping of feet behind the door.

“It’s starting. You have to go,” Volodya whispered sadly.

“Uh-huh,” said Yurka dejectedly. “Volod, the kids are hurt that you’re not looking at them. Start watching them, okay? They really are trying.”

Volodya nodded and pulled his hands away. No matter how much Yurka wanted to stay here forever, in such a loving embrace, he had to let Volodya go and return to helping the actors.

He ran out of the prop room and was in the wings by the time the curtain slid up to reveal the left half of the stage. The stage decorations were the same as before: the Young Avengers’ headquarters in the hut. The actors were sitting inside around a table. Galya was sitting outside on the porch steps, winding bandages and singing “In the Field a Young Birch Stood.” Zina ran over to her and kissed her on the cheek.

“Is the medic going out on rounds soon?” she asked. And when her sister nodded, she continued happily, “Galka, I’m headed out on a job. Now, don’t you worry: I’ll be back this evening.”

The narrator said, “The partisans had sent Zina back into town to establish contact with those of the Young Avengers who were still alive.”

Villagers started coming out onstage, almost all the extras in the whole show. Zina, looking around warily, walked up to a few villagers and acted as though she were asking them something. Whenever one shook his head no, Zina would continue dejectedly on to the next one, again looking around furtively before asking. In this fashion she ended up in the middle of the stage, where she stopped. At the narrator’s next words she opened her eyes wide as if fearful.

“In 1943, thirty of the thirty-eight members of the underground were captured and executed. On November fifth, in the village of Borovukha, near Polotsk, in the Byelorussian SSR, Yevgeny Yezavitov and Nikolay Alexeyev were executed. A day later, so were Nina Azolina and Zina Luzgina. The Fascists tried to beat information about the underground resistance out of them—who its members were and what they were planning—but they failed.”

As the names of those who had been executed were read aloud, the actors playing them got up from the table in the hut and walked away. Their empty seats were covered by the slowly moving curtain. The last two members of the underground resistance left alive, Ilya Yezavitov and Fruza Zenkova, jumped up from their seats and ran through the crowd of locals gathered upstage, then continued offstage. As they did, a little girl from the crowd stepped forward and pointed at Zina.

“That’s her—there’s your partisan! She’s strutting all over the village free as you please!” The Germans seized her on the spot.

That was the end of the scene. The curtain fell.

The show was going beautifully. The kids had acted the most tragic scene well, with great intensity. There were even sobs in the audience. But Yurka’s good mood was gone. Those last ten minutes with Volodya in the prop room had left him aggrieved and negated all the joy of the smoothly running show and his perfectly played Lullaby. Why, oh, why had he revisited their conversation from the unfinished barracks?!

Yurka rubbed his forehead as though summoning more suitable thoughts to his brain, because it wasn’t over yet: Krause was about to appear. Yurka’s entrance was coming up.

He looked out into the audience. Volodya was looking at the stage, but his eyes were unreadable. They were empty. Pal Palych called out to Volodya, asking him something. Volodya started, then nodded and forced a smile.

Yurka tucked his tie into his shirt, draped the German officer’s uniform jacket over his shoulders, and went onstage, into the left half that was still covered by the curtain. He sat down at the table and leaned back in a chair languidly. It was strange, but he didn’t feel any agitation at all. It was as though he’d left all his worries and fear back there, at the piano, and right now all he had to do was play his part, just say a few lines ...

Polina’s voice was hoarse from fatigue as she recited, “Zina was tortured for over a month, but she didn’t reveal anything. Soon a new Gestapo officer took over her case, Oberleutnant Krause. He used a different interrogation tactic ...”

The curtain slid away. Some Germans, holding Zina by the arms, brought her onstage and sat her down opposite Yurka.

“My brave Fr?ulein, I am aware that your parents remain in Leningrad. And I am also aware that your beloved city has fallen. A new flag flies above it. But I assure you that all you have to do is agree to a small compromise and share a few bits of information with Hitler’s army command, and I will personally ensure that such a brave Fr?ulein as yourself will have a chance to see her family again ...”

Zina didn’t speak. She just looked at him sullenly. Yurka got a heavy pistol out of the table drawer and turned it over in his hands, declaring, “My brave Fr?ulein, deep in the heart of this small mechanism 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 ...” Zina gave the pistol a long, pointed look, so the audience would notice. “Ponder this carefully, Fr?ulein,” Yurka repeated.

He put the pistol down on the table. Without taking his eyes off it, he pulled a pack of cigarettes out of his jacket pocket and extracted a cigarette. Suddenly the silence was broken by a loud shrieking of brakes. Krause/ Yurka started and turned around to face the window drawn on the back wall. As a result, he had turned away from Zina. Come on, Nastya! thought Yurka. Grab the pistol!

But Nastya didn’t. She’d been very concerned about getting this scene right, so finally the confused Yurka turned around to look at her and saw that she was looking out into the audience at Volodya, apparently hoping he would be watching her. But he was watching someone else instead. That someone was Yurka. Volodya was biting his lip and frowning as though something were hurting him, and looking at Yurka with a peculiar look that was heavy, and haggard, and pleading. Yet, when their eyes met, the corners of Volodya’s mouth twitched up for just a second.

Time sped back up. Portnova grabbed the pistol and immediately shot Krause. Yurka collapsed for real, coming down with a crash and hitting the back of his head on the ground. Everyone in the audience gasped. Volodya made as if to stand up. Trying not to grimace from the pain, Yurka flashed him a smile, indicating that everything was fine. The back of his head sure hurt, though. He’d have a lump there.

Sashka the German came running as soon as he heard the shot. This was his second death scene, and the entire audience clearly knew what was coming next. Portnova’s second bullet got him. While Portnova was stepping over the moaning German soldier, more of them came running onstage, holding their automatic rifles at the ready. Portnova took off running, but the sound of shots rang out and she fell down. She had been shot in the legs. She had left a bullet for herself, so Zina pressed the barrel of the gun to her heart and pulled the trigger, but it didn’t fire. She didn’t get a chance to try again: the Germans grabbed her and pulled her offstage. The curtain closed as Masha started playing the “Internationale.”

“Ready to paint, girls?” Yurka asked as he got up. The actors nodded and sat Nastya/Portnova down in the chair they’d prepared for her, then laid clear plastic sheeting over her clothes and quickly painted white gouache paint over her hair and gray paint on her eyes.

The stage decorations for the execution were quick to set up: the crew just added a drawing of a brick wall to the village scene background that was already on the backdrop. That was all—that was the entire set for the last scene of the show. The extras playing villagers went to stand out along the edges while the Germans gathered in the middle, near the execution wall.

Vanka, who was supposed to go get Portnova and lead her to be executed, was standing with the extras, daydreaming. Yurka muttered a curse and hissed his name as loud as he dared. He didn’t notice. His neighbors tugged on his sleeves and he looked at Yurka, but it was too late: the curtain had already opened. Yurka cursed again, grabbed Krause’s uniform jacket from off the back of a chair, and put it on, and then he, not Vanka, led Portnova to her execution.

Polina narrated: “In the torture chambers of the Polotsk prison, Zina was put through agony: her tormentors put needles under her fingernails, and burned her with hot irons, and poked out her eyes, but Zina withstood all these tortures and never gave up her comrades or her motherland. Although she was blind, she used a nail to scratch a picture on the wall of her cell: a heart over a little girl with braids and the caption ‘sentenced to death.’ On the morning of January tenth, 1944, after a month of torture, seventeen-year-old Zina, who had been blinded and whose hair had gone completely gray, was led to her execution.”

Nastya walked over to the wall, limping and stumbling. Yurka had insisted she limp, since Zina had been shot in both legs and it was unlikely she had been given medical care. Portnova stood with her back to the wall, Yurka was given a toy rifle, and the sound of automatic rifle fire rang out. Zina fell.

There was complete silence in the audience and onstage. Masha held the pause, then started playing the Moonlight Sonata.

Polina said the words that brought the show to a close: “Two thousand German soldiers had been billeted in Obol, where the Young Avengers and Zina Portnova lived. Members of the underground had located the German gun positions, counted their soldiers, and tracked their movements. Over the course of their operations, several dozen enemy troop trains, with all their ammunition, equipment, and manpower, were prevented from reaching the front. Hundreds of vehicles used by the German military were blown up by mines laid by the Young Avengers. Five key infrastructure enterprises that were going to be utilized by the Germans were destroyed. In the Obol garrison, several thousand of Hitler’s men met death at the Young Avengers’ hands. ‘It’s as terrible here as it is at the front,’ one German soldier wrote home.

“Thirteen million children died in the Great Fatherland War. Of the thirty-eight Young Avengers, thirty were executed. Ilya Yezavitov and Yefrosinya Zenkova remained among the living. Zinaida Martynovna Portnova was posthumously named a Pioneer Hero by the Vladimir Lenin All-Union Pioneer Organization in 1954. On July first, 1958, by decree of the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet of the USSR, she was posthumously named Hero of the Soviet Union and awarded the Order of Lenin.”

Polina walked offstage. The curtain closed. After a few moments of silence, the theater erupted in thunderous applause.

The audience was gone. The only people still in the theater were the cast and the administration. Yurka, dejectedly surveying the mess left backstage after the show, wondered who would pick it all up, and when.

But right now there wasn’t time for that. Volodya, Olga Leonidovna, and Pal Palych came onstage to join the actors. The educational specialist beamed in satisfaction. “Great job, everyone! The show turned out very well! I thought it’d be much worse, given how little time you had,” she praised them. But then she had to sour it all by adding: “I have just one observation, but it’s very important: it looked like your Portnova didn’t leave to join the partisans, but ran away in shame after she betrayed her comrades.”

Yurka’s right nostril twitched. He was barely able to keep from telling her what he thought of her. That Olga Leonidovna, she sure knew how to spoil the mood! But Volodya’s exhausted look brought him back into line immediately.

The camp director, on the other hand, was openly delighted. “Hem ...” He clapped his hands. “Your performance was excellent. Good work! I especially noted the success of the scene where the factories get blown up. Whose idea was that?”

Several people looked at Yurka, but he shrugged: “We all came up with it together.”

“Hem ... Fine, very fine. Good teamwork is doubly good!”

“Yes, Volodya, you’ve done great work!” Olga Leonidovna went all nice again. “You succeeded in gathering and organizing everyone ...”

“Thank you, of course, but this was all a shared effort,” replied Volodya. “You helped a lot with the extras, too, Olga Leonidovna, but I just sat the whole show out in the audience.”

“We couldn’t have done it without Yurka!” Ulyana interjected suddenly. “He was running his feet off backstage, helping everyone and making sure everything was running smoothly!”

“And he played the piano really beautifully!” Polina said encouragingly.

“And he kept his head when Vanka kept not shooting Zina!” added Ksyusha.

Yurka was stunned at first but then felt the color flooding his cheeks. He was only rarely praised, and never in front of the administration, and definitely never by the Pukes! Without knowing how to react, he looked helplessly at Volodya, who was smiling.

“That’s right, Konev, this is a pleasant surprise! Not like last year,” said Olga Leonidovna. “Friendship with Volodya is having a positive effect on you!”

Off to the side, someone started huffing indignantly. Yurka stole a look and saw Masha scowling and glaring at the educational specialist.

“Well! In honor of such an event”—Pal Palych clapped his hands again and turned to Matveyev—“Alyosha, get the camera! In honor of such an event, we will ... ahem ... have our picture taken!”

Alyosha nodded and ran off backstage. He came back a minute later and thrust the camera into the director’s hands, saying, “Pal Palych, maybe it’d be better for me to do it? You know I have experience, remember ...”

“No, Alyosha. No, it’s an expensive new piece of equipment, so let’s have me do it myself.”

Pal Palych examined the camera as though it were a UFO. Then he nodded to himself with yet another affirmative “Hem” and began arranging the kids: “So then. Those of you who are taller, get in the middle. Shorter ones sit on the bench. No, Sasha, you get on the edge, by Yurka. Now, then ... Volodya, hold on: Where are you going? Let’s have you sit on the bench in the middle, too. Konev, don’t follow him! You stay where you are!”

“Wait for me!” Mitka shouted from offstage. “I’ll be right there. I’m just changing my shirt ...”

A minute later he came out from backstage looking a little silly: flustered, sweaty, and disheveled, and holding Yurka’s red cap. When Yurka saw him with it, he decided they should swap: he’d pulled his neckerchief out from underneath his shirt and arranged it on his chest for the picture but then decided that a Pioneer neckerchief didn’t go with a Fascist uniform jacket. He tossed the jacket to Mitka.

“And I’ll take that,” Yurka said, taking his cap from Mitka and plopping it on backward, satisfied. Apparently a red baseball cap went with a Pioneer neckerchief just fine.

Mitka stood next to Yurka. Yurka sniffed, then held his breath. He’d realized why Mitka had changed shirts: clearly he’d sweated buckets hauling that curtain up and down.

“Get ready ... ,” said the director.

Yurka saw Volodya shake his head as though he was thinking, Ah, the hell with it. Volodya jumped up, moved Mitka over, and stood next to Yurka.

“Volod ... hem ... Now, what’s this?” said Pal Palych, letting air out through his pursed lips in reproach.

“This is even better, Pal Palych!” Volodya assured him.

“Hem ... ah, well, yes. That is, yes. That is better. So. Everyone get ready ... Three ... two ... one ...” And he clicked the shutter.