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Once the academic year started, he began associating with Germans as much as possible, even though they seemed like people cast from a completely different mold, with no similarity whatsoever to people from the former USSR.

And entering into a relationship with anybody wasn’t in the realm of possibility.

He felt lost, like nobody needed him, like he was extraneous and powerless.

He tried to fit in with everyone around him, to be like the Germans in his classes, to lose his accent.

But he still stuck out, even if he didn’t open his mouth.

He still thought about Volodya.

He still remembered how much he loved Volodya.

And he still didn’t like women.

However, it didn’t take Yura long to find out that the attitude toward homosexuals in Berlin was totally different from what it had been in the USSR.

Now, back at Camp Barn Swallow, the sandy path cut down steeply from the cliff to the river.

At times Yurka slipped and slid down the sandy slope.

That was how 1992 had been, too: life carried him forward of its own accord.

Yura continued to be a model student and didn’t do anything but study, but everything around him changed.

It changed so much it became unrecognizable.

That was the year that the thing Volodya had been so afraid of happened: Yura started checking out other guys.

He didn’t set out to find a partner or even to meet somebody who was like him.

But one evening an openly gay man, a member of Berlin Pride, came to a college party.

He liked Yura, and although Yura didn’t find the guy sexually attractive, that didn’t keep them from becoming friends.

A little while later, Mick told him about the gay community and invited him to the district where their people hung out and partied in Berlin.

The next weekend Yura went to Nollendorfplatz.

He came out of the metro, walked along the square, and started walking down Motzstrasse, but before he’d taken more than a few steps he stopped short, flustered.

What he saw was nothing he’d ever wished for or dreamed of, simply because he had never been capable of even imagining anything like it.

It was a parallel world, one that was noisy, crowded, bright, and free.

It was as though Yura had landed on an amazing new planet where there was a permanent celebration, where he was not a stranger, where it felt like they’d even been expecting him.

Dozens of songs played in dozens of clubs.

Hundreds of people were strolling all around him.

Some of them, like Yura, were walking by themselves, looking around for someone in the colorful crowd.

But the majority of people were in same-sex pairs.

They were free and uninhibited, almost to a point that felt vulgar.

They walked around holding hands, and they kissed right out in the open, in front of everyone, and nothing happened to them! No disapproving glances, no curses, nothing! Yura couldn’t believe this was really happening.

He froze, eyes wide in amazement.

All he could do was blink, look enviously at the strolling pairs, and sigh, “If only Volodya could see this.” Later, Mick would confirm that this was normal here, that this was a place where the war Yura didn’t even know was being fought had already been won. Still, as someone born and raised in the USSR, Yura was sure that as long as he lived, he’d never be able to make himself walk openly down the street like that, holding hands with a guy.

The asphalt was wet and gleaming from a recent rain.

At his feet lay bright stripes: the reflection of a bar’s neon sign.

A rainbow flag.

Yura lowered his gaze to stare at them, then he released a shuddering sigh and stepped onto the reflection on the ground.

He gathered his courage and walked along the rainbow, following it into the bar where he’d arranged to meet Mick.

He slipped inconspicuously to a seat at an empty table, ordered a beer, and drank it down in a single go.

Not fifteen minutes had gone by before he was surrounded by a group of a dozen-odd people whom Yurka would soon come to think of as nothing other than his real family.

The group included women, and men, and people Yurka didn’t know how to refer to.

They were excited, full of joking and laughter, as a few of them described their plan for staging an action code-named Operation Civil Registry that was going to make a lot of noise.

The gist of it was that on a specific day, August 19, 1992, a whole bunch of same-sex couples were going to apply for marriage licenses at the same time all over the country.

All their applications would get written rejections, of course, and then the couples would sue.

Drunk not on beer but on the atmosphere, Yura immediately agreed to participate.

A “husband” was found for him on the spot, whose name Yura only remembered once he read it in his marriage license application.

Everything happened so fast that it wasn’t until Yura got the official written refusal to accept his application that he realized for the first time what a strange position he’d have been in if his application had been approved.

The pile of mail containing the refusal from the civil registry office held another letter for Yura as well, from his friend from his building back in Kharkiv.

The guy had moved to another neighborhood a long time ago, but he sometimes came back to the neighborhood where he and Yura grew up, to visit his mother.

This is what he was writing about.

His letter shocked Yura.

“I went to visit my mother recently.

She said that some guy had been looking for you.

I didn’t see him myself, but my mother said he had glasses.

Is that the guy you were expecting?”

Yura sent a brief response: “What did he ask? What did she tell him? Did she give him my address and phone number in Germany? Did the guy leave his contact information?”

Another month went by before he got his response: “My mother did not give out your address or telephone number.

She just said you’d gone away to Germany.

He didn’t say anything about himself.”

Yura put in a request: “Go to my old apartment and find out whether that guy went to see them and whether he left his address with them.

And make sure you take any letters! If there’s still nobody there, break into the mailbox.”

There was no answer for a long time.

His friend was living his own life, wrapped up in family and work.

He wasn’t about to run around from one end of the city to the other at Yura’s beck and call, of course.

And he didn’t answer until later, the beginning of November: “The guy went to see them.

He didn’t leave his own address but he took back his own letters.”

Volodya had sent more letters! But irritation pulsed through Yura: Why hadn’t Volodya left his address? Why had he taken the letters back? Had that “You’ll be better off without me” nonsense kicked in again? Yura’s irritation grew into fury.

If Volodya had been there, Yura would’ve hit him.

Enraged and hurt, he fled to Nollendorfplatz.

He hunkered down in a bar, tossing back drink after drink.

By the time he was seeing double, an old acquaintance came up to him: Jonas, his erstwhile “fiancé,” his partner in submitting the marriage license application.

Yura was so drunk that the next morning he couldn’t remember how he’d ended up in bed with Jonas.

But it didn’t keep their fling from turning into a relationship.

And neither did the memory of Volodya.

Way back in ’86, he and Volodya had agreed to meet at Camp Barn Swallow ten years later.

But he didn’t show up, because life got busy and he finally started getting some recognition for his music.

Playing at concerts and continuing his studies—but now as a conductor as well as a pianist—Yura was reaping the fruits of his labor.

But it was Jonas who made him finally forget their agreement.

Jonas was a gay rights activist.

He promoted and supported the gay community’s civic life.

He tried to respect what Yura was doing with his life, but it became clear pretty quickly that either he didn’t like Yura’s music specifically, or he didn’t like piano music in general.

He said it didn’t do anything.

It was just noise.

But they still went to the theater and the opera together.

Once, while they were traveling in Latvia, Yura saw a poster in Russian advertising Roman Viktyuk’s Russian-language production of M.

Butterfly , and even though Jonas didn’t speak a word of Russian, Yura insisted they go see it together.

The production made a double-edged impression.

The nudity was off-putting, as well as the way the acting descended into affectation, and the fact that it was based on real events—and fairly recent ones at that—was shocking.

But the story’s ambiguity was appealing, and so was its moral that love has no gender.

Above all, though, was the simple fact that it was in Russian.

Yura was hearing the language onstage for the first time since he’d left.

M.Butterfly reminded him of what had been happening the first time he saw the posters for the show, back in ’91 in Moscow.

It reminded him of the person Yura had gone to Moscow for.

And after seeing that show, Yura’s dream of writing a composition full of meaning returned to him.

The image of the main character who puts on women’s clothing and feels free was one that followed Yura for many years.

Jonas thought the whole idea of it was just self-mockery, absurd.

But Yura disagreed.

For him this was the beginning of a period of creative inquiries, experiments, and mistakes.

Yura and Jonas were too different, and they both knew it from the beginning.

But maybe it was just this diametric opposition of their personalities, temperaments, and interests that attracted them to each other.

A year after their relationship began, they moved in together.

At first they were still able to forgive each other’s flaws and make room for each other’s interests, but the longer their relationship dragged on, the harder it got for each of them to accept the other’s disdain for the thing that gave his life meaning.

Jonas spent all his time and energy organizing gay events, gay parades, and gay trivia contests.

He wanted gay people to have the same rights as heterosexuals.

But Yura couldn’t see how activism would help much: to accomplish something meaningful, he was sure that Jonas needed to be a politician.

What’s more, he didn’t understand the constant discussions of discrimination.

The whole time he’d lived in Germany, he hadn’t encountered discrimination in his professional life.

Not once.

And no, Yura didn’t hide his orientation, and it never even occurred to him to hide Jonas.

It was just that none of his colleagues ever asked about his personal life, and Yura wasn’t about to advertise it for no reason.

“Gays can’t get married.

That is discrimination,” Jonas would say.

“Why are we forbidden to do what’s allowed for straight people? We’re fighting for rights equal to what hetero couples have.

We’re citizens, too, just like them! You should be out there fighting for your rights too.

Nobody’s going to do it for you.”

Maybe it was his Soviet upbringing, or maybe it was just his temperament, but Yura didn’t think he needed marriage.

What’s more, the provocative nature of gay parades irritated Yura.

And Jonas’s most active project, the creation of gay neighborhoods, was something that Yura thought of as actively harmful.

He didn’t mind that gay neighborhoods existed—they were nice places to make friends and hang out—but he also thought that making more of them was exactly the wrong thing to do.

“You’re literally fencing gays off, putting them in ghettos.

Like in America, where they have white neighborhoods and black neighborhoods, just here it’s gay neighborhoods.

You shouldn’t be expanding the ghettos, you should be getting people out of them entirely.”

One thing Jonas did that Yura completely agreed with and supported was the gay trivia contests, because the contestants were originally from various countries, including ones where homosexuality was a capital offense.

“If you really want to help people,” he told Jonas for the hundredth time, “create psychological resource centers in schools and universities.

But if what you want is to accomplish these goals of yours, you have to go into politics.

It’s the only way.”

After six years of fruitless attempts to learn to accept and love each other as they were, each of them with interests the other considered character flaws, their relationship started to fall apart.

Their love, so bright and exciting at first, grew pale and feeble, then faded away completely.

Their irritation at each other’s interests carried over into everything else.

Jonas’s good looks, which had taken Yura’s breath away when they first met, were no big deal now.

Flaws like the mole on his temple, which Yura had earlier stubbornly ignored, now caught his eye constantly, prompting his disgust.

Yura even started being irritated by Jonas’s walk, his habits, his gestures, the way he dressed, even the way he ate.

And Yura could see in the way Jonas looked at him that Jonas liked him less and less, too.

And maybe Yura did say things wrong and have the wrong opinion sometimes about what Jonas was doing, but Jonas blatantly ignored Yura’s music.

He tried to be out whenever Yura was at home perfecting a new piece; he never asked Yura to play him something; and he never once went to the concert hall to see Yura perform.

With increasing frequency, the most relaxing thing for them to do together was to keep quiet.

Then not talking became habitual.

Soon even the sound of the other’s voice was irritating.

Almost every conversation about music or the community ended with them making a scene.

Then they stopped wasting energy on fighting.

And then they stopped wasting it on sex.

That’s when Yura asked Jonas to take his things and go.

Thus ended that which Yura had once thought eternal.

It was June 30, 1998.

Way back in ’86, he and Volodya had agreed to meet at Camp Barn Swallow ten years later.

But Yura had forgotten about the meeting under the willow.

He’d failed to show up for it two years ago.

Indeed, he now realized, he’d forgotten about a lot of things, and given up a lot of things.

He had ruined his relationship with his parents, who were unable to accept his orientation and treated him more like a distant relative than their own son: his mother was cold toward him, and his father avoided him entirely.

He’d stopped hanging out with his Russian-speaking friends—at least, the ones who weren’t part of the gay community—and he’d sacrificed momentum in his musical career, in which he should’ve been investing a whole lot more time and energy.

Now it was as though he’d come back down to earth from heaven and remembered that, apart from Jonas, there were other things in life.

And more than anything else, he started thinking again about his unfulfilled promise.

Although back in 1991 there’d been no chance of finding Volodya once he had vanished, now, since the advent of the internet, it was at least hypothetically possible.

Yura knew Volodya would have eventually gone back to Camp Barn Swallow.

He didn’t believe it, he didn’t assume it—he knew it.

So, aided by the internet, his first task was to find the camp.

The second task was to go there, even though the meeting time had already passed.

Yura had forgotten the way to Camp Barn Swallow.

To be precise, he had never known it in the first place: the Pioneers were always brought there by bus.

Yura remembered the bus number—410—and that it was near the village Horetivka.

But he was unable to find that one single village out of the hundreds of thousands of them all across the former Soviet Union.

Yura went to all the Russian-language internet chat forums he could find and posted in them about the village, asking whether anyone knew where it was or what had happened to it.

He didn’t get many replies, and even the ones he did get were useless.

A few people knew of a similarly named village, but it was in Moscow oblast in Russia.

Nobody knew anything about a Horetivka near Kharkiv in Ukraine.

Yura began to buy maps and study them closely.

But the village wasn’t on them.

Tired of the constant dead ends, he began to ask himself whether a village like that had ever existed at all.

Maybe after so many years he’d forgotten its actual name and in his head he’d distorted it until it was unrecognizable?

Since his mother had worked in the factory that sponsored the camp, he asked her whether her former colleagues remembered where the camp was, but they either didn’t know or didn’t remember.

He scoured the internet for images of a voucher for a session at Camp Barn Swallow.

He didn’t find any.

He researched the 410 bus, looking for similar numbers, like 41, 10, 710, 70, and so forth, just in case he’d misremembered.

But the ones he found didn’t go anywhere that even remotely resembled the places Yura needed.

After his futile attempt to find the place, he started looking for people: the Pukes, Vanka and Mikha, Pcholkin, Olezhka, and anyone and everyone else he remembered, even Anechka and his nemesis Vishnevsky.

But maybe they didn’t have computers or internet access, or maybe they connected to the internet with dumb usernames at internet cafés; at any rate, Yura failed to find them either.

He wrote the guys from his building asking them to find out the phone number of Public School 18, then called it looking for the Pukes.

But the money he spent on international phone calls was wasted.

Every time he asked himself what he still hadn’t done to find what he needed, what he hadn’t tried yet, he came up with something else to do.

And once he’d tried it, he couldn’t believe that it, too, had failed: It’s just not possible that I can’t find anybody! But it was.

In the end, it looked like the only thing left for him to try was actually going back to the Motherland.

There he’d be able to dig around in archives and find people using telephone books and speak with people affiliated with the factory.

So, unwilling to give up, Yura began planning to take some vacation time soon and travel to Kharkiv.

But his plans were canceled by a phone call from his parents.

His father spoke to him for the first time in four years.

What he said was bad.

Yura’s mother was sick and might not get well again.

The many long years of employment in an unhealthy workplace were making themselves known.

For the next two years, Yura forgot about his plans and about his desire to find Camp Barn Swallow.

His mom was slowly fading away as her disease progressed, and the treatment wasn’t having the expected results.

The only thing that saved him from the bleak atmosphere at his parents’ was music.

It became Yura’s anchor, helping him accept the inevitability of the loss.

He finished his conducting degree and accepted the head of the conservatory’s offer of a position as one of its piano teachers.

During the day Yura taught music and played for the students, while at night, sometimes, when he went to his parents’ place, he played for his mother.

She died in the spring of 2000.

Yura’s father was devastated.

Although he’d never exactly been open and sociable, now he withdrew far into himself, speaking less and less and applying himself to the bottle more and more.

Yura, gazing at him, realized bitterly that even after so many years, after such a shared loss, the single family member who was close to him neither accepted nor forgave him, his son, for who he was.

Time moved ruthlessly on.

Yura recovered from his sorrow.

He began performing in concerts and writing music again.

Relationships flickered in and out of his life, but none of them were as long or as strong as the one with Jonas.

It was lonely.

He caught himself thinking that he wished his home were as loud as it used to be, that people were always coming over again, that good smells came from the kitchen, and that he could feel someone’s back against his side when he was falling asleep.

Never mind that he’d often fought with the owner of that back.

As soon as Yura hit the thirty-year mark, his loneliness became almost physical; it was his constant companion, one that short dalliances or one-night stands were unable to rid him of.

All this time, Yura had watched Jonas from a distance, as though it had nothing to do with him, trying to track what his former lover was up to.

Yura sometimes felt that it was those last words he’d said, during their last fight, that had prompted Jonas to take an important and useful step: he’d joined the Lesbian and Gay Federation in Germany.

Next, Jonas had gone on to become a member of the Social Democratic Party of Germany.

And then, at the end of 2000, Yurka saw that Jonas and his colleagues had achieved their main goal: two of four political parties voted to legalize same-sex unions at the federal level.

The other two parties opposed it, but it became law all the same.

The law went into effect in 2001.

It specified partnership, not marriage; for the time being, gays and lesbians only had access to a minimal series of rights.

But little by little the law was expanded.

And not long ago, in January of 2005, a new expansion had been enacted, allowing gay people the right to register partnerships with citizens of other countries.

In some ways, the news of these expansions just felt like mockery to pathologically lonely people like Yura.

Still, he couldn’t help being proud of Jonas and all he had achieved.

The next year, 2006, was a new stage in Yura’s career.

He began planning his first big tour of Russia and the Commonwealth of Independent States, and it was going to end in Kharkiv.

Although he’d previously lost hope, his knowledge that he’d be going back to Ukraine prompted him to try to find Camp Barn Swallow one more time.

He still didn’t have much hope of success, but he began his search all over again all the same, going through all the Russian forums again, writing in all the chat forums again, searching for nostalgic websites.

And on one of them he finally found a scanned copy of a voucher for a session at Camp Barn Swallow! From the person who published it, he found out that the village of Horetivka really had existed.

That person didn’t remember the exact location, but he did give a general explanation of what highway to take to get there.

All that remained was to lay out a route and find it.

Yura couldn’t do that in Germany, since Horetivka wasn’t on a single map.

But once he found himself in Ukraine, in Kharkiv Oblast, he went out to find it himself.

And he did.

Yura didn’t arrive in Kharkiv empty-handed; he brought with him a dream he’d fulfilled.

He had composed his magnum opus, the one he’d written Volodya about so long ago.

A symphony, one that wasn’t just beautiful, but full of meaning.

It was about freedom.

Yura had allowed himself to be dramatic and old-fashioned.

The symphony began in complete silence, broken by a faint, stifled, cracking tenor.

Moment by moment the singing intensified, becoming louder and more confident, until a choir joined in, but the choir didn’t drown out the man’s voice; it elevated it.

After the choir came the strings, accompanied by piano, and at the very end, the dramatic, grandiose wind instruments came crashing down on the audience.

When he first heard it onstage, Yura seemed to become free himself, although the center of the symphony was neither him as the conductor nor even him as the composer but the tenor, with his stifled, cracking voice.

For a long time Yura thought that his inspiration had been M.

Butterfly .

But today, now that he’d come back to Camp Barn Swallow and remembered his past, he realized that the muse of his most important work wasn’t some character from a play, someone he didn’t actually know, but someone else entirely.

Someone he’d once known very, very well.

The path ended when it hit a lot of overgrown bushes.

Yura stepped onto the sand of the beach and got a faceful of a terrible stench from the river.

Back then, especially after it rained, it had smelled unbelievably delicious here, of summer freshness and mushroomy dampness.

But now the woods had grown thin and scrubby.

On the trees, the yellowing, dried-up foliage was wet and heavy.

The smell of putrid standing water was strong in the air.

As Yura walked past the turn-off to the boathouse, he frowned: through the sparse trees he could clearly discern a heap of boards and debris.

That was all that remained of the dock.

Yura didn’t have time now to turn that way and examine the remains of the place where he’d had his first real kiss.

He kept going.

As soon as he arrived today he’d begun fretting about whether he’d be able to get across the river to the willow, but all his doubts vanished as soon as he stepped through the rusted chain-link gate that used to separate the beach from the woods.

The river wasn’t a river anymore.

All that remained of that once deep and mighty tributary of the Donets River was a swamp, a little green stagnant swamp choked in duckweed.

It made the old Soviet sign at the entrance to the beach—depicting swimmers in deep waves and the caption BEWARE OF STRONG CURRENT! —look like a mean joke.

Yura didn’t know how or why the river had dried up, but he suspected it was because of the construction on the far riverbank.

Maybe the river had been in the way, so they’d filled in the bed? Or built a dam? To hell with it.

Yura didn’t have time to think about it now.

He turned off to the left, hoping there was a chance he’d still be able to find the shallows.

The little trail, which hadn’t been much even back in the day, was long gone by now.

Yura had to make his way through the vegetation.

He reached the path along the high riverbank and stopped.

The sandy bank had eroded and crumbled, but he could still walk on it.

Yura went up to the very edge and looked down: ten or so meters of sand, then nothing but that same duckweed and stagnant water.

He remembered the still pool where he and Volodya had once swam together.

He heaved a sigh.

Their lilies were all dead, because the shallow pool where they’d grown had dried up and turned into stagnant muck, like the river itself.

Yura looked at the far bank.

The bank he was standing on was higher, and from here he could see not only roofs and the wall around the cottage community; he could see some of the cottages themselves.

Many of them were still under construction, but there were a few that were done—and clearly inhabited.

The billboard near the entrance to the village proclaimed: SALES OF ELITE COTTAGES AND TOWNHOUSES.

COMFORT AND CONVENIENCE AWAIT YOU AT THE BARN SWALLOW’S NEST.

LVDEVELOPMENT LLC.

Yura made his way to the shallows and stopped, considering.

The water had disappeared completely here, which was no surprise, considering that this was where the water had always been low.

Still, he was wary, fearing that the wet sludge wouldn’t hold him up and he’d get stuck in it.

But he had no choice.

He had to get to the willow.

Or had he come this whole way for nothing?

Although who knew? Maybe it had all been for nothing.

After all, so many years had passed.

Maybe both the willow and the time capsule were already gone.

Why had he even come here, anyway? Why had he come looking for something that had been lost and forgotten ages ago? But he had to go back, sooner or later.

Maybe it was too late for them, but for Yura himself, nothing had actually ended yet.

He’d come back to clear his conscience, to bring this to a close, to be honest with himself above all and know he’d done everything he could to find Volodya.

He was late, of course, and not just by a day, or a year, but by a whole ten years and then some.

And all that might be left linking him to Volodya was preserved here, under the willow.

Assuming the tree hadn’t been cut down.

His fears proved groundless.

It was still there, bigger and more beautiful than ever.

Its heavy branches, with lush foliage just beginning to turn yellow, bowed down to the ground.

So tense with anticipation he could barely breathe, Yura went down the slope to it.

He parted some branches and slipped through to stand in the space enclosed by the tree’s drooping boughs.

His heart fluttered: everything was the same! Just like then! With just one difference: it was colder, quieter, without the burbling of the river.

But the willow still hid Yura from the rest of the world, just like it used to.