Page 103 of Pioneer Summer

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

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

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

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

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

“Thank you,” breathed Volodya.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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