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CHAPTER SIX CONFESSIONS OF THE PERSONAL AND THE PERVERSE

The merry-go-round by the junior cabins became their unofficial meeting place. Yurka would go there after lunch, or when he sneaked out of quiet hour, or at night before the dance started, and after a little while Volodya would turn up, too. Yurka liked sitting on the merry-go-round, slowly spinning this way and that, silently gazing into the emptiness before him and thinking about all kinds of things. He liked it when Volodya sat down wordlessly next to him and gazed off into the distance as well. There was something about sitting like that, side by side, watching the little kids and listening to their shouting, that was somehow special, and unusual, and simple, and close to his heart all at once. It made Yurka feel as cozy as when he played in the courtyard of his grandmother’s apartment building back when he was little.

But what he liked best was what they’d been doing the last few evenings when, after rehearsal, Volodya handed Troop Five over to Lena to take care of until lights-out, and Volodya and Yurka thought up scary stories for the kids. Once they’d even missed the signal for lights-out, the time when they were supposed to go and actually tell the stories they’d been inventing.

The first week of the camp session was over, which Mitka’s voice was proclaiming over the loudspeaker as he delivered the morning announcements—as if the Pioneers didn’t already know! Yurka remembered that day well. He and Volodya had been sitting on the merry-go-round, and Volodya had gestured at Yurka’s face and asked, “How’d you get that scar?”

Stillness reigned over the playground. It was quiet hour, when all campers were supposed to be resting in their cabins. Yurka had slipped away as usual; the ever-responsible Volodya had merely reminded Yurka that as soon as they saw anyone coming down the path to the junior cabins, Yurka had to duck into the bushes. This was because of the occasional check-ins on the troop leaders, making sure they weren’t leaving the campers by themselves. But Volodya had nothing to fear, since he and Lena had made an agreement that she’d be on duty during quiet hour, while he’d be on during dances. So she was on duty right now.

Yurka’s hand went instinctively to his chin, where the tips of his fingers brushed the old scar under his lower lip. “Oh, well, it’s from this one time when some hooligans were giving me a hard time. There were three of them, by the way, and just one of me! And so I ...” But then he stopped. Yurka told everyone this version of the scar’s origin. In it, he was a brave scrapper who got his lip busted fighting some street toughs who’d cornered him. But for some reason he wanted to tell Volodya the truth. “Actually, what really happened is that I went flying off a swing when I was eleven. I’d swung up really high because I was trying to impress the little neighbor girls—they were playing nearby—so I held my hands up, and ... well, to make a long story short, I did a nice front flip off the swing, plowed a long furrow face-first when I hit the ground, and only stopped moving when I smashed into the sandbox. I busted my lip so bad that I couldn’t get it to stop bleeding for, like, fifteen minutes. My dad even had to give me stitches! So that’s how.”

Yurka was sure that now Volodya thought he was an idiot and a braggart and would laugh at him, but all Volodya did was smile amiably and note, “But at least you experienced a brief moment of free flight!”

Yurka couldn’t smother a smile: Volodya’s so weird, though , he thought. He’s just too nice and understanding. Yurka would’ve even made fun of himself for something like that, but not Volodya.

“I didn’t actually fly that far,” Yurka said. Then he gave the troop leader an appraising glance. “Your turn! Since I shared my secret with you, now you share something with me!”

Volodya raised an eyebrow in surprise, but nodded. “Sure, ask away.”

“Why did you really come to be a troop leader at Pioneer camp? Because it’s obvious you don’t much like dealing with kids.”

“Umm ...” As he considered his answer, Volodya absentmindedly adjusted his glasses, poking his finger at the bridge of his nose. He sighed and rattled off a phrase he’d seemingly memorized: “It’s a good way to acquire some useful experience and—don’t argue, Yura—to get a good character reference for the Party.”

Yurka scoffed. A week ago, at the opening assembly, he’d have believed that Perfectly Perfect Volodya, the ideal Komsomol comrade himself, didn’t care about anything but his upstanding reputation, but now ...

“Here we go again: you and that character reference! But if we’re being honest here, is that really the only reason? Just to help your reputation?”

Volodya hesitated. He adjusted his glasses again, even though they were already in place. “Well ... not exactly. To tell the truth, I’ve always been really shy. It’s hard for me to get along with people, to talk and make friends. But kids ... My mom works in a day care and she’s the one who advised me to come be a troop leader. She said that if I want to learn how to get along with people, it’d be best to start with children, because they draw you out.” He went quiet again, and Yurka thought that if Volodya adjusted his glasses one more time, he’d have to reach over and smack Volodya’s hand. “You’re actually more effective there. I mean, you get along with them better.”

Yurka proudly sat up straighter, but then slouched again. “We both deserve credit for it,” he said. “I don’t really like messing around with the little kids, either. I mean, I don’t know how to. But if it helps you, then ... Oh! I meant to tell you: yesterday after supper I was going to the cabin and I saw Olezhka. He was out on the playground all by himself, crying, so I went up and ask him what happened, and it turns out that this whole time the kids have been teasing him because of his r ’s, and now that he has one of the main parts, they’ve really started picking on him. The poor little guy’s already insecure, but now he’s hearing all this stuff from the kids, like ‘How are you going to perform onstage when you can’t even say your r ’s!’”

“They really said that? Who?”

“I don’t know. As it is, I only understand every other word Olezhka says, but right then he was crying, too, so I didn’t get much of what he said. But, Volod, I thought about it and it’s true: he pronounces all those words with r ’s really badly, like ‘partisans,’ and ‘struggle,’ and so forth ...”

“It’s true,” Volodya repeated glumly. “It’s not the lead, of course, but it’s got a lot of lines ... He asked to do it, though! And I thought it’d give him more confidence in himself, not less. We have to figure something out, but without taking the part away from him, because then he’d be crushed; he really is trying so hard ... Got any ideas?”

“I do, and that’s what I was going to say! Let’s take the script now, before he’s memorized his lines, and rewrite them so there are as few words with r as possible!”

“He doesn’t have that many lines, but it’s complex, and there’s a lot riding on it; it’s an important role,” Volodya said. “We don’t have time for a thoughtful revision, but we’d still have to get it done as fast as we can! Think about it: How many hours will we need? Six or eight, I’d guess, but where will we find them? We can’t work during rehearsal, and we definitely can’t work while I’m busy with Troop Five ... There’s always quiet hour ...”

“Yeah, right. Even if they give us the okay on rewriting it, letting me out of quiet hour’s another thing entirely,” said Yurka bitterly.

“They gave you to me not as an actor, but as a helper. And right now I really need your help. They can’t make you do it during the competitions, or during civic duty work, or during the dances. And they can’t make you do the rewriting during rehearsal either because I need you then, to help me.”

Yurka felt a brief burst of excitement. Not only would he no longer have to sit around bored to death for two hours—now he and Volodya would have those two hours all to themselves! But his joy quickly faded as soon as he remembered Olga Leonidovna’s stern voice and her constant “Children always have to be kept busy and troop leaders always have to know where their children are.” His troop leader was Ira. Not Volodya. Yurka grew dejected. Let Konev the knucklehead out of quiet hour? Yeah, right! It would never happen. Why was Volodya even teasing him with the possibility?

“I don’t think it’s going to work,” Yurka said.

“I’ll ask the head troop leader, and I’ll also ask Lena to support it. She works with me, after all, she sees everything I do.” Volodya had noticed the change in Yurka’s mood, of course, and clapped Yurka on the shoulder. “Never hurts to try. Let’s see how good a diplomat I am.”

So he did. And the next day, as they were walking to the playground after the beginning of quiet hour, Volodya, who usually spoke quietly while they were still by the Troop Five cabin, almost yelled as he told Yurka about it: “Can you believe it, Yur? It took Olga Leonidovna a little while to agree, but it was basically clear she didn’t really have anything against it—when she’s against something, she lets you know, she comes down on you like a bolt from the blue—but this time she asked what the head troop leader thought, and then as a formality she asked the rest. They all were okay with it, and why not? Makes no difference to them, right, since I’m the one who has to do the rewriting. But then Irina butts in and starts insisting that it’s just the opposite, it’ll actually help Olezhka to have to perform the unchanged script in public because it’ll make him work harder with the speech therapist! I just about fell off my chair—that’s crazy talk, but it’s crazy talk that’ll hurt Olezhka. I don’t even think she really thinks it will help him. She’s just trying to put a spoke in my wheel!”

Volodya still hadn’t been able to make up with her after the scene in the theater. He’d tried to apologize several times, but Ira would end the conversation without letting him finish. Volodya was upset and admitted to Yurka more than once that he was very worried about the continued rift. But this time, at least, despite what Irina said, Olga Leonidovna ended up being more sensitive to Olezha’s problem and granted Volodya permission.

“Really? I’m officially allowed to skip quiet hour?” Yurka couldn’t believe it.

As usual, they were at the playground, on the merry-go-round. Yurka was so happy, he kicked off and set the merry-go-round spinning. Until that moment the fluffy white dandelion heads would only occasionally send their downy seeds up past the boys’ knees and into their noses. Now, disturbed by the wind, the white fluff flew up into the air in a swirling cloud.

As though on command, both boys simultaneously dug their feet into the ground to stop their spinning. Yurka got a fuzzy dandelion seed in his throat. He started coughing and his eyes started watering. Blinded, he blinked stupidly until he could look around, and when he did, he was struck by the beauty of the place. It was as though he were seeing it for the first time. Fluffy little dandelion seeds were still swirling around and floating slowly to rest in the grass. The small white seeds floating through the air were an echo of larger white things floating through the sky: every day, white planes from a nearby airfield flew past Camp Barn Swallow and paratroopers jumped out of them, opening their white parachutes and drifting down to the ground, practicing their landings. It looked unbelievably gorgeous. How had Yurka not noticed that before?

Once he took a good look, he realized that everything was gorgeous here. And Volodya was really gorgeous. Especially today, right now, after he’d delivered his good news, when he was happy, disheveled and red-cheeked, and bursting into such infectious laughter that Yurka started laughing, too. He’d never seen Volodya so happy. Yurka himself had probably never been so viscerally happy. And from that moment on, they would spend every free minute rewriting the script together.

But it turned out that something always got in the way. They lost almost a whole day because of the girl from Volodya’s troop who wanted to go back to her parents so badly. She went into such hysterics that it took both her troop leaders, the educational specialist Olga Leonidovna, and the nurse to calm her down. By that evening Volodya was so exhausted that Yurka let him go to sleep instead of staying up to work.

The second day they lost was parents’ day. It added insult to injury that the day was chaotic and went by too fast. Yurka had actually been looking forward to it just as much as the rest of the kids. But it felt like his mom had just had a chance to hug him when the troop concert began. They’d just had a nice stroll around the camp when it was time for lunch. They’d just finished a game of rucheyok—babbling brook—when it was time to eat again. His mom had just gotten a Chinese jump rope contest going—women against girls—when it was time to say goodbye already.

Yurka felt like he’d barely had time to exchange a few words with his mom. The only thing he managed to even talk about was the theater. He wanted to tell her about Volodya, about how fantastic he was and how they’d become such good friends that now he couldn’t imagine spending a day without him. His mom would probably be glad to hear it: her son had finally come to his senses and was socializing with a real Komsomol member, not with some kind of riffraff! But once Yurka opened his mouth, he felt abashed, unsure how best to convey his feelings or how to even describe them.

Before she got on the bus to leave, Yurka’s mom gave him a kiss and asked carefully, “Have you made friends with any of the girls yet? You didn’t introduce me to anyone ...”

“There’s Ksyusha. I’m going to ask her to dance,” Yurka replied, awkwardly sticking a finger out toward the girl. He suddenly felt very uncomfortable. His mom had never talked to him about girls before.

Yurka wasn’t the only one who was completely exhausted by the end of parents’ day. He didn’t go to sleep, of course, but he had neither the desire nor the energy to work on the script. So he and Volodya just sat on the merry-go-round and chatted about this and that.

In the time that Yurka and Volodya spent together, they became true friends. Usually, though, they didn’t sit around talking but got their notebooks and papers out right away, spread them out on their laps, and bent over them to brainstorm. Or try to.

“Okay. ‘Struggle.’ ‘Struggle ...’” Volodya chewed on his pencil thoughtfully. He pronounced the sounds slowly, seeming to linger over the r . “‘Strrrruggle’ ...”

“Battle. Fight.” Yurka offered a couple of synonyms and suppressed a monstrous yawn.

They’d been at work for ages. The sun was burning hot. Volodya was sitting on the merry-go-round in the shade of a nearby bird cherry tree, not letting the sun hit so much as the tip of his nose. His handsome nose. Which Yurka kept noticing. Yurka himself hadn’t taken off his favorite imported red cap all day. His forehead was sweaty and the buckle of the cap was painfully tight on the back of his head, but he bore the discomfort stoically, rather than run the risk of getting sunstroke even in the shade.

Their work was going well, despite the heat. They’d done more in this quiet hour than they’d done in the previous two combined. But there was still a long way to go. Yurka was tired. He’d been sitting virtually motionless for half an hour and his neck and arms were stiff. He wasn’t complaining, though. This was way more important than scary stories. He rolled his neck, stood up from the merry-go-round, and walked around it, stretching out his stiff back.

“Yeah, ‘fight’ is good,” mumbled Volodya, without looking up from his notebook. “‘Their fight against the German invaders’ ...”

“‘ The fight ... um ... the fight for victory over their attackers’? Hmm ... sounds kind of dumb ...”

“And all those words have r ’s,” Volodya pointed out.

Then it dawned on Yurka: “Enemies!” he said, stopping and jabbing his finger up into the air.

“Exactly!” Volodya looked up from his papers and smiled, his glasses glinting. “Oh—no, wait ... The next sentence talks about the enemy, and that one has to stay like that.”

“Why? Here, let me look at it.” Yurka plopped down on the merry-go-round next to him and grabbed the notebook and papers.

Volodya moved over to him and peered down at the pages. He got out his pencil and was about to point at something in the text with it, but Yurka unthinkingly kicked off at just that moment and the merry-go-round started turning. Volodya lurched and fell down on Yurka so hard that the bill of Yurka’s baseball cap rammed into Volodya’s forehead.

Individual pages slid slowly off the merry-go-round onto the ground, where the gentle breeze sent them scudding in all directions. Both boys turned their heads, following the pages as they fluttered gracefully away. It mesmerized them both. After some time, Volodya looked back down—and blushed. “Oops,” he whispered. Then Yurka noticed it too: Volodya had been holding on to Yurka’s knee. Volodya quickly let go.

“Sor—sorry,” Yurka stammered. He also felt awkward for some reason. He cleared his throat, abashed. Then, pretending to do it casually, for no special reason, he turned his cap around so the bill was in the back.

“That’s a strange way to wear it.” The comment sounded stupid, as did Volodya’s artificially perky tone.

“But I don’t wear it that way. I mean, just now I had to ... well, so you ... it hit you, and I don’t want it to ... I mean ...” He trailed off. Then he changed the subject abruptly: “What, don’t you like it?”

“No, no, it looks good on you. Your bangs stick out so funny. It’s really a cool cap! And your jeans are really cool, and your polo shirt. I remember how you got dressed up for the dance ... that you didn’t even end up going to ...”

“Well, of course, it’s all imported.” Yurka was very pleased with himself. He’d never doubted the fact that he had great threads.

“Where’d you get all this bounty?”

“I have relatives in East Germany; they bring it from there. But this cap isn’t German, though. It’s American, actually.”

“Cool!” exclaimed Volodya.

Flattered and gratified, Yurka launched into a detailed narrative of how he got all his prized imported clothes. Although he didn’t specify that his jeans weren’t actually all that great, since they were made in India, not America.

“You know, over there in Germany, it’s not just the clothes that are awesome.”

“I know, their technology is, too, and their cars. Once in a magazine I saw this one motorcycle—whew!” Volodya widened his eyes for emphasis.

“In a magazine ... Yeah, they’ve got the kind of magazines there that the USSR’ll never have.”

“Check him out! I’m talking about motorcycles here but he’s all about the magazines. That’s not like you.”

“It’s just that you haven’t seen them, so you don’t know what you’re talking about. If you’d seen what I’ve seen ...” Yurka raised and lowered his eyebrows conspiratorially.

“What? What is it?”

“I’m not telling.”

“Yura! Are we in the toddler room at day care or something? Tell me.”

“Okay, I’ll tell you, but it’s a secret, okay?”

“On my honor as a Komsomol member.”

Yurka stared at Volodya, eyes narrowed: “Silent as the grave?”

“As the grave.”

“This spring my uncle came to visit and brought us all kinds of stuff: clothes, of course, and makeup for my mom, and magazines and other things for my dad. They were regular magazines, just in German, with clothes and housewares and whatnot. So, yeah ... that night they sent me off to bed but they stayed in the kitchen with the door closed. Pretty soon, my mom left, so my dad and uncle were in there just the two of them. My room happens to be the one closest to the kitchen, so you can hear kitchen conversations pretty well there ... So the two of them were getting good and boozed up and they’d started talking really loud, so I could hear every word. I just lay there listening, basically. Turns out that my uncle had brought my dad some, ahem, other magazines too. And later when I was at home alone I went and found them.”

“What was in them? Was it something anti-Soviet? If it was, then it’s dangerous to have magazines like that at home!”

“No, not that! I don’t know German well enough yet to read it easily. And there was hardly any text anyway. It was all pictures. Photos.” Yurka leaned so close to Volodya that his lips almost touched his ear and lowered his voice to a whisper. “Of women!”

“Ooh ... Um ... Well, sure, I know magazines like that exist.” Volodya shifted an arm’s length away from Yurka, but to no avail: Yurka all but plastered himself to Volodya and whispered hoarsely, directly into his ear, “They were with men ... You know what I mean? They were with guys ... They were ...”

“Enough, Yur. I get it.” Volodya slid away again.

“Can you believe that?!” Yurka said in an elated whisper.

“I can. Let’s not talk about this anymore, okay? This isn’t a Pioneer camp sort of thing ...”

“Do you really not find this interesting?” said Yurka, disappointed.

“If I say it’s completely uninteresting, I’d be lying, but—it’s not forbidden for no reason! It’s very, very—indecent!”

“Volod, listen, there’s something I didn’t understand about it.” Yurka became animated again. “I saw something unusual ... You’re older, you’ll know this. I want to figure this one thing out ... Were they really taking pictures of it? Or was it maybe, like, a drawing of some kind ...”

Volodya threw himself at Yurka and hissed into his ear, “Yura! It’s called pornography! You are in a Pioneer camp, and I am a troop leader, and a troop leader is telling you that you can’t look at stuff like that. It’s depraved!”

“But you don’t look at it. And neither do I. I’m just telling you what was on there. So explain this to me: Was it just wrong? Is that impossible? Or maybe it wasn’t real?”

“Dammit, Yura!”

“Come on, Volod ... are you my friend or what?”

“Of course I’m your friend.” Volodya blushed and turned away.

“Then tell me. There was the—the normal way. I get that.” Then Yurka, overwrought, blurted out in a rush: “But a few of the photographs showed the guy doing it ... but in the wrong place ... He was doing it down where ... it was where you sit!”

“A chair?” Volodya seemed to be joking, but his expression was not only serious; it was angry.

“Oh, quit it! I just want to know—is it even possible to actually do that? Or not?”

“‘Quit it’?” Volodya imitated him with a sneer. “ I’m supposed to quit it? Yura, you’ve gone too far. We’re done. We’re not talking about this anymore. One more word and I’ll leave, and Olezhka will ‘call on evewyone to stwuggle with the advewsawy,’ and I’ll tell him it’s all because of you!”

Their conversation was cut short by the bugle signaling the end of quiet hour.

“It’s time for you to leave anyway,” muttered Yurka, hurt.

During snack, he listened with half an ear to everyone’s excited chatter about the impending Zarnitsa, “Summer Lightning”—the camp-wide capture-the-flag war game between the troops that most Pioneers looked forward to eagerly. Yurka was preoccupied tormenting himself: he regretted ever asking Volodya about—about that . Volodya didn’t even look his way, and if his eyes did accidentally fall on Yurka’s corner of the mess hall, the expression on the troop leader’s face changed from serious to scornful. Or was Yurka just imagining it? He had been imagining all kinds of things—that he and Volodya had become real, genuinely close friends, for one. But now Volodya’s reaction, and the ice in his usually warm voice, threw that into doubt. It wasn’t as though they’d even had a fight. They’d just had a little tiff, nothing major. But now Yurka was hurt and ashamed by this “nothing major.” A strangely sad longing overcame Yurka.

Pensive and morose, Yurka headed to rehearsal, heaping ashes on his own head as he went: It’s your own fault. What an idiot, asking a Komsomol member questions like that! And not just any old member of the Komsomol but one that’s so greenhouse-flower perfect. And what was I expecting? I’d be better off asking the guys from my building. They might’ve laughed at me, but at least they would’ve been interested! So maybe it had been dumb of Yurka to talk about it with Volodya, but this kind of subject was, first and foremost, a very personal one, and he had been sharing something personal with Volodya ... or rather, he’d been trying to ... But what was he thinking, an ordinary blockhead like him, who hangs out with a bunch of hooligans, trying to be friends with Volodya, a member of the elite? Of course Volodya had rebuffed him, and shamed him, and finished him off with that one look, like a final shot to the head. He’d hit Yurka without even aiming and sent him reeling.

Yurka remembered all this and stopped short: Why’d I ask him, of all people, about this? What was the point? So he’d glare at me, or so he’d understand me? And he says he’s my friend! Yeah, right! A liar, that’s what he is, not a friend! Friends don’t act that way!

The main square in front of the outdoor stage was packed, as always. Girls from Troop Two were chalking some kind of map on the pavement while redheaded, jug-eared Alyoshka Matveyev hovered around them, making suggestions and proffering chalk.

Yurka hailed him. “What’re you up to over there?”

“What do you mean? We’re getting ready for Summer Lightning! This is a map we’re drawing for Central Command. Olka had this great idea: we’ll send scouts to see where each troop is and then mark down here on the map what our scouts find out.”

“But there’s a dance tonight. Your map will be worn away.”

“No big deal. We’ll just trace it out again tomorrow. That’s faster than drawing it from scratch, right?” chattered Alyoshka. “You want to come be one of our scouts?”

“No, I don’t.”

Yurka turned away, but he had only taken a couple of steps toward the movie theater when Alyoshka popped back up and grasped his shoulder.

“Konev, come on, just think about it.”

“Alyosh, Central Command is the main administration of the whole game; they’re the ones who know what all the different troops are doing and keep the game running smoothly. Nobody wants me there. I’m just going to be with my own troop. Why don’t you go ... uh ... go about your business ...”

“Why wouldn’t they take you in Central Command? They’ll take you if you ask. Ask them, Yur! Look at those long legs you’ve got; you run fast ...”

Alyoshka trotted stubbornly behind him, panting, huffing, and dancing around, trying to trip Yurka, or tug his elbow, or just get his attention any way he could.

“Alyosha! You’re—there’s so much you everywhere!” groaned Yurka. “Okay, fine, I thought about it.”

“You did? What’d you decide?”

“Give me a piece of chalk.”

“Here.” Alyosha held out the box and Yurka took a piece.

“Thanks. I’m not going to Central Command. I’m going to stay with my troop.”

“Then what’d you take the chalk for?”

“I have low calcium levels. I’m going to eat it. Oh, they’re calling you, hear that?”

“What? Who? Oh, it’s Olya. Well, bye—but still, you think about it!”

Maybe he should’ve agreed to be a scout? He’d have been able to run around the whole camp and could’ve found a way to stay with Volodka. As they always did during the epic war game, the troops had dug trenches around their bases, and Volodya would surely be worried that some kids, like chubby Sashka, would fall into a trench and break their arms, and their legs, and the trench itself. Of course, Lena wouldn’t leave her fellow Troop Five leader high and dry, but it was obvious that Volodya would need Yurka, too. It was completely and utterly obvious!

Right, like he needs you! protested Yurka’s pride. You pester him and dance around him, just like Alyoshka did to you. All he does is sneer and lecture. Hmpf! I wasn’t doing all that work with those stupid scary stories and that stupid drama club for myself, but he doesn’t care. Well, now he can get by without me! I’m not going anywhere for him anymore. Not anywhere! And definitely not to rehearsal! He’ll be sorry he glared at me! Let him mess around with his own dumb show now. I’m not going to help him! And he didn’t. He was already on the porch of the Troop Five cabin, but he turned around and took off back across the dance floor to the tennis courts where Troop One was scheduled to be playing.

There were two tennis courts, not just one, and Ping-Pong tables, too. Except for Masha and the Pukes, all of Troop One was there under Ira Petrovna’s supervision. Some of the campers were playing badminton next to the tennis courts, others were cheering them on, and a few were just goofing around inside the box created by the chain-link fence around the tennis courts. Yurka liked to lean back against that fence and bounce his whole body on the little wire rhombuses while watching other people play. But today he had no intention of rooting for other people. Today he intended to defeat everyone and take out his anger on the badminton birdies.

When he was still quite a ways from the courts, Vanka and Mikha caught sight of him and waved him over in unison to be part of their team. Yurka was pretty good at badminton, but these two could neither serve nor return worth a darn, so the only people who joined their team were people who didn’t like winning. Yurka did like winning, but he didn’t bother asking to get on anyone else’s team. Without a word, he snatched a badminton racquet and served. The birdie soared over the net and hit Ira Petrovna right in the forehead.

“Sorry!” Yurka shouted. He expected Ira Petrovna to let him have it right then and there, so he held off from serving again. But his troop leader winked cheerily at him and turned around.

Ira had been avoiding Yurka ever since what happened in Volodya’s room. When she and Yurka did have to do something together, she walked on eggshells around him. Yurka wasn’t about to tell anybody what he’d seen, of course, but, judging by Ira’s angelic behavior, she evidently thought he was capable of that kind of backstabbing and blackmail.

Yurka was privately furious— Who does she take me for?! —but didn’t utter a peep out loud: after all, this arrangement suited him. The troop leader had quit putting the blame on him and scapegoating him unfairly, and as a result there was peace between the two of them. It was fragile and awkward, but peace nonetheless.

The same could not be said for Ira Petrovna’s relationship with Volodya, however. As soon as Yurka remembered that, the scene in the theater came flooding back to him, replaying itself in full color: Ira’s white face, her trembling hands, and the tears of fury in her eyes ... Volodya, standing right in front of her, his eyes narrow and mean: “Do you love him or something?” “Oh, man, Ira Petrovna’s never going to forgive him for something like that ... ,” Yurka mused to himself sympathetically. Then he caught himself and spat in disgust: he’d thought about Volodya again!

Volodya was everywhere, even places he couldn’t possibly be. Right now Volodya was without a doubt in the movie theater, working with his actors, but Yurka thought he glimpsed Volodya’s silhouette over there in the bushes.

The game went on. Yurka slashed his racquet as though he wanted to slice the sunbeams to ribbons, not hit a birdie. The sunbeams remained safe and sound, but the disheveled and sweaty Yurka did kill a great many mosquitoes.

Their team led the count. Vanka and Mikha spent almost the whole game standing in place, but Yurka raced around like a man possessed. Before sending the birdie off on its triumphant flight—so lofty it might even hit Ira Petrovna in the forehead again—he turned around and saw Volodya in the bushes again.

This time it was definitely him. Pensively, with a timid smile, Volodya drew nearer to the box of the tennis court but stopped a meter away from the entrance, unable to bring himself to go inside. Instead, he walked around outside the fence and came to a halt behind Yurka, where he stretched his fingers wide through the chain-link fence and grasped the metal rhombuses.

“Why didn’t you come to rehearsal, Yur?” he asked, very quietly.

Yurka still heard him. He batted the birdie away without looking and walked up to the chain-link fence so he could look Volodya defiantly right in the eyes. “I don’t have a part, so what am I supposed to do there?”

“What do you mean, ‘what’?” Volodya looked at him sadly and shook his head. Then he collected himself and in his habitual troop leader tone, he said: “Olga Leonidovna said that whether you have a part or not, you have to come to every rehearsal. You are helping me and I’m responsible for you.”

“So be responsible. What’s that got to do with me?”

“So you already want to leave? They’d send you home without batting an eye.”

“What can they send me home for? I’m playing with my troop, and with my own troop leader, actually. Ira Petrovna’s right here, she’ll confirm it.”

As he waited for an answer, which didn’t come, Yurka bounced his racquet off the toe of his sneakers. Then he looked around and went over to the bench to get a glass of water. Volodya followed him along the fence. “I hurt your feelings,” he surmised, casting his eyes down guiltily.

“As if!” scoffed Yurka. “You didn’t hurt my feelings. I realized there’s not that much I can talk to you about, that’s all.”

“That’s not true! Talk about whatever you want!”

“Yeah. Right.” Yurka turned away and started drinking his water.

“What’s up with you? I ... you know what, Yur?” Volodya drew his hand along the chain-link fence and it rattled softly. “I’ve seen magazines like that too, you know.”

“Oh, really? And where’d you get them?” Yurka turned around and fixed Volodya with a mistrustful gaze.

“I’m a student at MGIMO, the Moscow State Institute of International Relations. There are some guys there whose parents are diplomats; sometimes they can scrounge up things like—”

“Wait—where?” Yurka actually shouted. “Where do you go? The Moscow State Institute of—where diplomats are trained?!” Ah, so that was how Volodya had known how to get him out of quiet hour!

“Shh. Yes. Just please don’t tell anyone about the magazine! Yura, this is serious. If there’s even the most absurd little rumor about something like that, I’ll get kicked out.”

“No way. They wouldn’t do that!”

“They absolutely would. They got a guy in my year who had that kind of magazine on him. He was gone less than a month later.”

“But if it’s so easy to get the boot, how’d you even get in? Family connections?”

“Gee, thanks! You think I couldn’t do well enough to get in on my own?”

“It’s not about how smart you are, it’s just that it’s practically impossible to get in. The competition’s fierce, and you have to be ideologically impeccable, and you have to collect all those approvals from your high school’s Komsomol Council and from your regional Komsomol Council and from your regional Party Committee, and you have to go to all the meetings ...”

Volodya nodded in affirmation as he listened to Yurka, who kept counting off on his fingers all the things you had to do, and what you had to be a member of, and what you had to participate in—and how, and how often—and where you had to go ... Suddenly Yurka realized: Who else but Volodya would be able to get in to a place as prestigious as MGIMO?

“Well ... I barely got in, to be honest,” said Volodya modestly, smiling, once Yurka deigned to finish counting. “I failed the medical evaluation, if you can believe that. Because of my vision. I fought it tooth and nail. I passed my army physical—I’m fit for military service—but then they wouldn’t let me into college ... Anyway, it’s a long, boring story.”

“What’s it like to go there? Is it hard?”

“I wouldn’t call it easy. The main thing is it’s interesting. The guys in the dorms have really fun get-togethers. I live at home, of course, but I stop by the dorms almost every day.”

“Polite little get-togethers with tea and cookies, right?” Yurka joked, momentarily forgetting that he was mad at Volodya. “Come on, tell me. Are they depraved?”

“Of course not! Come on, we’re Komsomol members!” Volodya gave him a stern look but then smiled and whispered, “Just kidding. We have it all: cards, girls, port, samizdat ...”

“Wait, what? Port? You have alcohol, too?” Yurka was also whispering now. “Where do you get it? When our neighbor got married, they couldn’t even get a bottle of vodka for the wedding, they drank ethanol. My dad’s a doctor, he got it from work.”

“Well, I just call it port,” explained Volodya. “My classmate Mishka brings it. He lives way outside Moscow, in a little village where they make excellent moonshine. The taste of it reminds some people of brandy, but it reminds me of port. I’m scared for Mishka, though—it’s a big risk to bring it in.”

Yurka’s hurt feelings vanished during this conversation. He forgot them so fast, it was as though they had never existed—not the feelings, or the falling-out, or even the reason they’d argued in the first place. It was like they were talking about what they always talked about, as frankly as they always did, like their behavior and outward appearance was the same as usual: Yurka was tousled and engaged; Volodya was calm and cool and a little bit condescending. There was just one difference: the tall, seemingly sky-high chain-link fence standing taut between them.

“Yur, let’s go to rehearsal, huh? Afterward I’ll tell you whatever you want,” offered Volodya. His face had cleared; the lines on his forehead had vanished. “Just tell Irina that you’re leaving with me.”

Yurka nodded. He ran over to Ira and got her permission to leave, glancing as he did so at the handsome phys ed instructor, Zhenya, who was busy nearby. Yurka put his racquet on a bench and left the court.

“So you just abandoned everybody and came out here looking for me?” he inquired as they turned off the main square and walked toward the dance floor.

“I left Masha in charge. She does a good job, of course, but she can’t run a rehearsal, and we have to work hard today because we can’t work tomorrow.”

“That’s right—Summer Lightning’s tomorrow,” said Yurka, disappointed. This meant that after rehearsal today, because they had to get ready for the big mock battle, they wouldn’t be able to spend any time together. Like everyone else, Yurka would be busy sewing his fabric shoulder boards onto his uniform shirt. It would take a while, since he wasn’t all that great with a needle and thread, but if they were too loose, they’d be too easy for enemy fighters to tear off during “battle.” Everyone wore them: one torn-off shoulder board meant you were wounded, two meant you were dead. And after he was done with that, Troop One had planned an evening of parading in formation and singing. And tomorrow all the staff and campers would be completely immersed in the mass game from early morning until late at night.

Yurka should’ve gone to be a scout for Central Command after all.