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It wasn’t the best time to come back here. It had been pouring rain for a week now, and Yura knew from the weather report that it was going to keep raining just as long. But he hadn’t had a choice. It was the end of his tour, and his plane ticket back to Germany tomorrow was right there in his wallet. So there had been no other time for him to visit Camp Barn Swallow.

Half-frozen, soaked from the constant drizzle, Yura looked at the moss-covered sculptures, and the abandoned athletic fields, and the crumbling walls of the mess hall. Then the clouds gathered and the camp went dark, as though the sun had sunk over the horizon. But it hadn’t: it was six o’clock, too early for sunset in September. Yet too late for reminiscing. Yura gave his head a shake. No more wasting time. I’ve got to get where I was going, do what I came to do.

Stumbling in the tall, wet grass, he went back to the path leading to the river beach. Part of it was paved with big gray pavers, but as soon as he got past the junior cabins, the pavers were replaced by a narrow, steeply sloping path of sand.

Yura looked down at the path made of concrete pavers, with sedges and dandelions growing in the cracks, and remembered the newspapers that had been spread on the floor in the unfinished barracks. What was it he’d thought back then? But what if these newspapers were from the future? Not even the very distant future, just a little, even just from the summer of ’87 ... or what if they were from five years from now, or ten years ... or maybe twenty ... Yurka smiled sadly. Now he knew.

The rest of the year 1986 had gone by in a fog. The initial period was unbearably sad. When Yurka got back to Kharkiv, it was as though he’d landed in some completely foreign, unfamiliar world. It seemed that everything around him was a bad dream and that all he had to do to get back to Camp Barn Swallow was simply wake up. But no matter how hard Yurka pinched himself, how much he tried to lie to himself, this was his reality, here in the stifling city, inside his old apartment’s same four walls. The only things Yurka had from that June when he had been so happy were the photo tacked to the rug on the wall by his bed, and the memories, and Volodya’s letters.

“When I got back to my room and unpacked my things,” began Volodya’s very first letter,

I thought it was completely nuts that I didn’t have anything to remember camp by. Because it’s true, Yur, we left everything in the time capsule except our troop pictures. When Olga Leonidovna went to pass the pictures to Lena and me for us to hand out to the kids, our bus had already pulled out. You would’ve cracked up if you’d seen Leonidovna running after us. The bus driver didn’t see her and we had to yell at him to stop. Imagine that. Did you imagine it? I can actually see you smiling.

I hope you got your troop picture, too. I’m sending you my picture of Troop Five. Send me your picture of Troop One in return. Only if everyone in your troop is in the picture, of course.

Yurka and Volodya exchanged pictures by mail, and Yurka managed to attach the photo of Volodya’s troop to the rug hung on the wall behind his bed. He had decided it had to be exactly there, because the windows of his room were to the east and the first rays of the sun fell precisely on that spot.

Volodya had a fake smile in that photo. He looked calm and collected, but tense. Olezhka stood next to him on one side, chubby Sashka on the other. The boys were frozen at attention, all ironed and washed and combed. Behind them rose the statue of Zina Portnova; above them stretched the cloudless sky. Yurka looked at that photo every morning, thinking each time how artificial it looked. Only Yurka knew exactly what Volodya was hiding behind his smile and the shining lenses of his glasses.

Volodya’s letters were the only way Yurka made it through the first couple of months. Of course, he tried as hard as he could to hide his sad longing from everyone: he smiled for his parents, he hung out with the guys from his building, he ate, he drank, he went to visit his grandmother, he helped his mom around the house and his dad in the garage. But in his thoughts Yurka was always returning to Camp Barn Swallow, and he counted the days from letter to letter. In them he found confirmation that Volodya really existed, that he was still with him, that he apparently still loved him. But they were separated by almost a thousand kilometers between Kharkiv and Moscow. It was so unjust! Yurka had always assumed love could conquer anything, but distance turned out to be immune to love’s power.

Finally, by the time winter came, it got a little better. Yurka had resigned himself to all of it, and his pangs of sad longing eased, as though the first cold snaps had touched his heart with frost, too.

Now, as Yura stepped from one concrete square to the next, it was like he was moving along a timeline from one year to the next. The next paver was almost as good as new, unbroken, without a single crack or weed. And at the start of 1987 their relationship had been just the same, just as clean and whole, even though they’d been longing for each other for over half a year by then, in their separate cities, comforted by the only thing they could do to span the distance.

Volodya wrote often, about everything. At first Yurka’s parents were surprised: What was with all these letters? Why were there so many of them? Why did they come so often? Yurka explained, of course, that it was his pen pal, a friend he’d made at Camp Barn Swallow who lived in Moscow, and so the only way they could be friends was like this, at a distance.

And Yurka knew that, just looking at the letters, the boys really did seem like nothing more than friends. They formulated their thoughts in such a way that nobody could suspect anything was amiss.

Yurka learned how to read Volodya between the lines. He knew when routine phrases were hiding references to their mutual past and individual present. Without seeing Volodya’s gestures, just imagining them, Yurka could decipher Volodya’s mood in the letters, in the handwriting, in the smudges and inky fingerprints on the paper. He knew what word had made Volodya sharply poke his glasses back up and which word had made him frown. Yurka imagined Volodya’s room, and Volodya himself, sitting at his desk at the window. He imagined Volodya at his classes, where he listened to his instructors and chatted with his classmates. The only thing he didn’t know was what exactly all those people were talking about. Volodya didn’t write much about those conversations. He was secretive, afraid of saying something wrong, despite the fact that now people were allowed to talk about a lot of things.

In a speech he gave in February 1986, Gorbachov had publicly mentioned the new concepts of “glasnost” and “democratization” for the first time. But Yurka didn’t truly understand all that, all the changes related to perestroika and the new way of thinking, until 1987.

Those concepts were everywhere: out on the street, and on television, and inside people’s homes. The progressive majority was genuinely trying to make it happen, although many Soviet citizens didn’t trust perestroika, and some were afraid of it. But the loudest, most insistent calls for change didn’t come from the grown-ups; they came from the children. Their insistence rang like an alarm bell throughout the entire country. Who would’ve thought: Pioneers criticizing adults, and boycotting the All-Union Pioneer Convention’s formal resolution ceremony, and asking whether the Pioneers as an organization should even exist at all. Somewhere inside Yurka, he was starting to sense that if children were being allowed to critique the status quo, then big changes really were coming. And indeed they came.

The year 1987 saw the legalization of businesses and co-ops. The shortage of domestic goods got worse, but foreign goods appeared and markets started opening up. Girls passed around rare copies of the highly coveted fashion magazine Burda Moden , printed in Russian in Germany; it had only recently started coming out in the USSR. Young people went around in bright, eye-popping parachute pants and jackets with snaps and studs. Yurka managed to get ahold of a pair of high-waisted, balloon-legged Pyramid jeans, ones with the actual camel patch on the rear pocket, and he was very proud of them. But none of these new foreign treasures made him as happy as the photo from Camp Barn Swallow his mom had brought home one day from work. It was the one Pal Palych had taken after the show. Yurka put it in a frame and spent hours turning it over in his hands, examining the faces of everyone in the cast as they stood in the theater opposite the stage. Although the most pleasant face of all to examine was of course Volodya’s as he stood with his arm around Yurka in the photo.

The Komsomol still held sway as the formal organization uniting Communist youth, but other, informal groups of young people started to pop up, too. There were rockers, who ran around the city at night; metallists and punks, who were the most aggressive; and a new generation of “hippars,” peaceable hippie types who liked worn jeans, strings of beads, and friendship bracelets. In one of his letters, Volodya wrote about the “Lyubers,” the outwardly civilized-looking, muscular guys from the Moscow suburb of Lyubertsy who were determined to rid Moscow of “informals,” “cleansing” it of anyone who, in their opinion, dishonored their “correct” way of life. The Lyubers beat up the informals, forcibly cut their “too-long” hair, and tore off any clothing with trinkets and frills.

Volodya emphasized, “They don’t pick on me,” obviously to reassure Yurka. But Yurka just laughed: Why would they?

There were no Lyubers in Kharkiv. But Yurka, who considered himself neither an “informal” nor a “formal,” bowed to fashion and grew out his hair to his shoulders. He stopped spending a lot of time with the guys from his building. He and his father watched the revolutionary new TV program Outlook every Friday, and he wrote Volodya three times a week, and three times a week Volodya answered him.

Volodya’s handwriting revealed much to Yurka. It was usually neat and compact. But when Volodya was agitated, the letters were slanted and the tails of the letters that went below the line were long and narrow, like dashes. When Volodya was angry he pressed down with the pen so hard that he tore through the paper. But one letter arrived written so nicely it was almost calligraphy. Yurka noticed immediately and asked Volodya never to rewrite his letters again and to always just send them as he’d written them, even if there were crossed-out words, or smudges, or even inkblots. Those are more genuine , Yurka thought. More alive.

Soon they developed the habit of coloring the corners of their envelopes, so that when they were looking in their mailboxes they could immediately recognize each other’s letters. Yurka was the one who started it. One time he decided to write the childish “Waiting for your letter—the sooner, the better!” and started writing the letter w in the top left corner, but, thinking better of it, he changed his mind and colored over it to cross it out. In reply, he got a letter with the same marking.

And so they lived through all of 1987. Yurka half-heartedly studied for winter exams at the technical college he’d started just so he wouldn’t have to go into the army to do his mandatory two years of service, and in December he asked to visit Volodya. But he knew it would be a no. Back in ’86, Volodya had already written Yurka, saying, “I won’t come visit you, and I won’t invite you to come visit me, until you are accepted into conservatory.” And as Yurka thought, when Yurka asked to see him, Volodya just reminded Yurka of what he’d said back then.

Yurka had been vacillating about the piano, full of misgivings, but every day his desire to continue his studies grew. Volodya’s ultimatum was the push he needed, the last straw, and Yurka obeyed and began studying. It was a little scary. Yurka blamed himself for giving the piano up. And once he’d cleaned all the junk off his piano, put the photo from Camp Barn Swallow on it, and sat down to play, he began harshly cursing himself for ignoring his mother, father, and everyone else who’d tried to convince him to start playing again before his hands forgot.

Yurka quickly saw that he wouldn’t be able to get himself ready to apply to the conservatory on his own. He told his parents, so his father found him a tutor. It turned out that the tutor was the meanest, least popular teacher from Yurka’s old school. It took Yurka a lot of effort to understand that the hated Sergey Stepanovich only yelled at him because he was so genuinely invested in Yurka’s future and talent. Because Sergey Stepanovich did yell at him like crazy before they even began, reminding Yurka of how lazy and arrogant he’d been at school and saying Yurka still didn’t even know the basics, so he definitely didn’t have enough experience to improvise yet. And once he’d heard Yurka play, he issued his verdict: “Not even average. Poor. Poor minus.” But he reassured Yurka’s mother that Yurka did have talent. What he told Yurka, however, was that if he wanted to develop that talent, he had to stop showing off and finally start listening to people with more experience.

Yurka communicated this to Volodya. Volodya offered a few scant words of praise. Volodya usually sounded quite unemotional, if not downright indifferent—he was afraid of someone reading their letters. He closed each letter with a note asking Yurka, in veiled language, not to talk openly about what had happened between them, and he kept his own emotions to a bare minimum. But sometimes they broke through despite him. And it was exactly these rare moments that Yurka remembered better than everything else.

Sometimes I miss Camp Barn Swallow so much, it’s all I can do not to lose my mind. I don’t remember one specific thing, it’s the entire summer, as a whole. These memories are kind of confused. I remember events but I don’t remember faces or voices.

But that one night when we cut a certain something into the bark of the willow—that, I remember in detail. Yura, how are you? Are you doing okay? How’s your health? Are you sleeping well? Do you have friends? Did you get a girlfriend yet? You don’t write anything about that.

When they replied to each other in their letters, they never explicitly addressed the questions that had subtexts. For regular questions they’d write something like, “You asked why I’m still not playing. My answer is that it’s because ...” But for special ones, they developed a special rule: Ask and answer them only in the last paragraph. Volodya’s question about Yurka’s condition was written in the last paragraph, and Yurka answered him in the last paragraph, too, briefly, but in a way that he knew would be perfectly clear:

Recently on TV they were showing reruns of the live Leningrad-Boston teleconference that first aired when you and I were at Camp Barn Swallow. And one of the Soviet women, answering an American woman’s question about whether we in the USSR have TV shows about sex, said “There’s no sex in the USSR, and we’re strictly opposed to it!” Did you hear about that? Absolutely hilarious. The guys from my building—by the way, I see them about once every hundred years; they’re all the same—are always repeating “There’s no sex in the USSR” any chance they get. And you know what? I’m getting a little tired of it.

Yurka wasn’t lying. He knew perfectly well even without any TV or newspapers just how false that claim was, even though he didn’t engage in the supposedly nonexistent activity again himself, either in 1986 or in 1987.

Yura took another step. Another square concrete paver, another year: 1988. A year that flew by insanely fast. A year in which he and Volodya were again unable to meet. If the paver really had been a newspaper, then the most attention-grabbing headlines would’ve doubtless been “Shortages Increasing: Essential Goods Beginning to Dis appear from Shelves,”

“AIDS Epidemic! Number of Infected Grows to 32,” and “Richter, Diaghilev, and Tchaikovsky, too? Famous Homosexuals of the USSR and Russia.”

A liberal, uncensored media was coming into being. In newspapers and magazines, people started bringing up topics that used to be not just unacceptable, but unimaginable! The concept of “prostitution,” for example. Now there were articles saying not just that it existed currently but that it had apparently always existed, in the eighties, and in the seventies, and in the sixties! (By 1989, there was even a Soviet movie about prostitutes: Inter-devochka .) Yurka watched Yeltsin on TV and saw Little Vera at the movie theater, where he saw sex on the big screen for the first time.

Yurka continued getting ready for the conservatory entrance exam, studying music both new and old as well as composing his own pieces. Inspired by his memories of Camp Barn Swallow, he wrote a melancholy melody and sent Volodya the sheet music with a note: “This is about the unfinished barracks. Remember?” Then he waited, so nervous his hands shook, to see what Volodya would say. To his great delight, Volodya’s answer came quickly:

I asked a classmate of mine and she was able to play your melody on the piano. Yura, I liked it so much! Please write more music! Write about the willow, about our theater, about the curtain ... I mean, write about whatever you want—the main thing is that you write!

A friend of mine has a Japanese tape recorder. I’ll borrow it for a day and ask my classmate to play it again and I’ll record her playing. So that’ll be great, to be able to listen to your melody over and over again, whenever I want! To remember camp, and of course to remember you.

In 1988, people began talking openly about homosexuality in the USSR. Yurka found out about a new epithet: “blue,” a slang term for “gay man.” The newspapers were filled with articles about great figures of world culture “who were also.” People talked contemptuously about “homosexuals,” making jokes and ridiculing them. But Yurka didn’t think of himself as one of them. For him, everything was the same as it had been before: he loved someone, and that person apparently loved him, too, and that was that. But Volodya, on the other hand, was starting to fall apart: “Do you have a girlfriend? Yura, get a girlfriend,” he advised, but Yurka couldn’t figure out whether he was being playful or serious. In the very next letter, though, the advice turned into a demand, which was then repeated every time, bounding with its slanted, narrow cursive handwriting from letter to letter.

“You ask about it as though a girl was some kind of house pet,” said Yurka, deflecting Volodya with a joke. But then he added, seriously: “See how many good people are one of ‘them’? Wait, no—not good people: great people!”

But Volodya wasn’t to be placated. And the last straw for him was when the AIDS outbreak in Elista was announced on TV. “Yura, do you know about AIDS? It’s this disease they have in the West. It’s fatal. Prostitutes, bums, and ‘they’ get it. It takes people who get it a very, very long time to die, and they suffer horribly,” wrote Volodya, pressing so hard that in a few places there were tiny holes in the paper.

Nature invented an incurable disease to exterminate people like me! It means I have to go to the doctor before it’s too late, otherwise on top of everything else I’ll get it, too! And how much harm will I cause then? Because you heard about what happened in Elista, right? Some hospital missed that a patient had AIDS and infected five adults and twenty-seven children with an unsterilized needle! And it looks as though those aren’t even the final figures! And, Yura, that patient was just like me; how else could he have gotten AIDS?!

Yurka replied that Volodya was just having a panic attack and that he needed to calm down and stop taking responsibility for all the world’s problems. He wrote that the disease didn’t just pop up out of nowhere, and that he knew Volodya knew it perfectly well himself; that the disease was a virus, and a virus kills without choosing its victims because it’s inanimate, it doesn’t care. But Volodya wouldn’t budge. His fear of getting it grew so strong that it imprinted itself in his mind and his mentions of his own “disease” became more and more frequent: “It’s the cause of all my problems. I have to go to the doctor for treatment. And it’s high time you got a girlfriend. Otherwise, who knows ...”

Yurka ignored the comments about a girlfriend and “who knows.” He knew that with letters alone he’d be unable to calm Volodya down; they needed to see each other, or at least talk. Yurka begged Volodya time and time again to find a person with a home telephone whom Yurka could call from a phone booth, but Volodya always refused.

Yurka, worn out as he was by Volodya’s panic, didn’t spare a thought for himself. Desperation flowed from every single line of Volodya’s letters, and even though Yurka knew it was temporary, and that Volodya would eventually calm down, his fear was weighing down Yurka’s heart like a millstone. Yurka would’ve done anything to make Volodya feel even a tiny bit better. He would’ve accepted and forgiven him anything—except “treatment.”

Sometimes Yurka succumbed to Volodya’s panic, too. Then he would go get the picture of the group in the theater and look for a long time at him and Volodya: weary, overworked, and sleep-deprived, but beaming, because they were together. They were at each other’s sides. That photo was a genuine, delicate treasure in black and white, the most important thing in the world. When Yurka looked at it, and remembered what had happened in the past, and imagined how he and Volodya would meet in the future, he calmed down. They had been afraid of a lot back then, too, but they’d still been together and been happy. And if they’d been happy once, it meant they’d be happy again!

As Volodya’s panic continued, Yurka gradually realized, with a sickening sense of helplessness, that he was indeed going to have to give Volodya the world’s best calming remedy: the picture of the theater group. Copies had been passed out at Yurka’s mom’s factory, since that was the easiest way to get the pictures to the kids, but Yurka knew that Volodya didn’t get one, since, like some of the other camp employees, he had no connection to the factory that sponsored the camp and was from a different city. Hoping that once Volodya saw them together and remembered, he would come back to his senses, at least a little, Yurka took the photo out of the frame and, with heavy heart, mailed it to Volodya. Yurka didn’t comment on this act at all, continuing to write about the same thing in different ways:

On TV they said AIDS is transmitted through blood. And my father says that to avoid getting it, you have to keep from getting cut, and you have to stay away from other people’s cuts—that is, from their blood. And you have to use only your own needles, and bring your own scalpels to operations. My mom says you have to bring all your own scissors and clippers when you go to the salon. But none of those things apply to you, do they? No! So everything is okay, you don’t need to do anything. Just take a sedative and get some sleep.

What Yurka really wanted to ask Volodya about was sex. Was Volodya having it with anyone? And if so, was he using a condom? But he was embarrassed to write that kind of thing. So instead of questions, he sent Volodya a few booklets his dad had brought home from the hospital. Every single one of them had “AIDS is sexually transmitted” written on it in giant letters.

On top of everything else, Yurka was starving for information. If the Elista outbreak really had been caused by one of “them,” then what did they do with the guy? Had they tried to cure him—not of AIDS, which was obviously incurable, but of “that disease”? And if so, how? And what even was it, anyway?

It was useless to ask Volodya, but Yurka had to feed that hunger for information somehow. So he took a desperate measure: he asked his father.

“It’s a mental disorder,” replied his father tersely, hiding his face behind the newspaper.

“Genetic or acquired?” Yurka demanded.

“I don’t know.”

“But you’re a doctor! And you talk to other doctors!”

“I’m a surgeon.” His father suddenly put down the paper and studied Yurka’s face with his stern, doctor-examining-a-patient look: “Why are you even asking?”

Yurka sighed heavily and dropped his gaze to the floor. Telling the truth about Volodya would be a betrayal. But as far as he was concerned—no, despite his love for Volodya, Yurka still couldn’t describe himself that way to himself, much less to his parents.

“I’m just curious,” he scoffed. “It’s true, though: Look how many of them there are!” He nodded at the radio, which was playing a song by the deliberately shocking Valery Leontiev.

A disgusted expression similar to Yurka’s own distorted his father’s face. His father hid behind the newspaper again and muttered, “It’s abnormal, in any case, and you’d be best keeping your distance from people like that. They could start to affect you psychologically and make you get off track.”

“How do you treat it?”

His father lowered the newspaper again to look at him and frowned.

“Yura, I’m a surgeon!” For the first time in a month his father raised his voice. “They used to treat it in special clinics, but I don’t know exactly how. And I know even less about what they do about it now, or whether they even do anything at all. Everything has been turned topsy-turvy. Those blues should be isolated from normal people, but instead they’re performing onstage. Have you seen that Leontiev?”

It was a rhetorical question.

Yurka was still just as information-starved, but now, after this conversation, he felt almost dirty.

He left the conversation empty-handed.

On the radio, Leontiev—the flamboyant performer his father hated so much—was finishing up his song about Afghanistan.

It wasn’t topical anymore: the war in Afghanistan had ended, and the USSR had removed its troops that spring.

The hysteria over the AIDS outbreak in Elista made people forget, temporarily, what else was happening in their country.

The shortage of food products was getting worse.

Stockpiled cases of canned fish were stacked in the corners of Yurka’s family’s kitchen.

His mother pickled every single vegetable from his grandma’s garden and got on his nerves by constantly repeating the rumors that soon the salaries at the factory where she worked would be paid in what the factory manufactured: ball bearings.

His father got into the habit of reading the crime news.

He’d hide his face behind the newspaper without saying much, and more and more often he just smoked his dwindling supply of cigarettes in complete silence.

Yurka quit smoking, but he, too, read about the constant shoot-outs, the arson, and people being tortured with irons.

When the words “racket” and “racketeering” became commonplace, when even regular people found themselves having to deal with the mafia, that was when the entire Konev family first started seriously considering emigrating to East Germany.

But in 1988 it was still too hard.

The concrete paver of 1989, all shot through with cracks and overgrown with weeds, crunched under Yura’s boot.

That year had been overflowing with anxiety because Volodya had calmed down far too abruptly and quickly, and also because Yurka had taken and failed the conservatory entrance exams, and because of his family’s search for ways to leave the USSR.

The Iron Curtain had fallen and all paths were open to Yurka, but the past didn’t want to let him leave, while the future didn’t want to let him in.

That whole endlessly long year, as he waited for something different, Yurka was tormented by a premonition: You think it’s bad now, but just you wait.

It’s going to get worse.