Page 118 of Pioneer Summer

“And I will love you ...”

The alarm on Volodya’s watch went off, tearing them away from their beautiful fantasy where they lived under the same roof, where every morning they woke up together, where they ate breakfast together, where they talked and watched TV and went out together. Where they were always together.

“What time is it?”

“We still have a little time,” said Volodya, resetting his alarm.

And indeed, they had just a little time left. They sat side by side in utter silence, completely still, simply enjoying their last moments together. No matter how much Yurka wanted “a little time” to last longer, it ticked away all too fast.

The watch alarm beeped loudly, a shock to their ears. And not only to their ears: to their hearts as well. Yurka knew that Volodya also felt it; otherwise he wouldn’t have had tears in his voice as he said, “Well. We came here to say goodbye.”

And he wouldn’t have stood up, and he wouldn’t have reached a hand down to Yurka.

Yurka didn’t want to take it, but he did. Volodya pulled him to his feet.

They stood facing each other, barefoot on the cold grass. Yurka was motionless, even limp, as though bereft of will, emotion, and thought. The river roared in their ears. With one hand, Volodya stroked his cheek; with the other, he squeezed Yurka’s fingers tight.

I wish I could see his eyes in this dark, Yurka thought. As though hearing his wish, the moon came out from behind a cloud. But it didn’t get any brighter. The glow of the thin crescent just highlighted the outline of that beloved face. Yurka tensed: he had to memorize everything, all the images, sounds, and smells, know them better than he knew his own name. They would be more important to him than his own name.

He folded Volodya in an embrace, pressed tightly against him, glued himself to him, grew into him. Volodya embraced him back.

“Goodbye, Yurochka ... until we meet again ... ,” he whispered, his lips warm.

The hours after that were meaningless and went by in a blur.

Yurka didn’t know or notice how much time passed, where he was, what he did. He had no awareness of what was happening around him. His thoughts had remained completely behind, there under the willow, there in that memorable last night, holding Volodya close, feeling his warmth, breathing him in.

But his last memory from that summer was nevertheless not the sound of Volodya’s voice, not the words of farewell, not the rustling of willow leaves. Rather, it was the picture he saw out the window of the bus: a wave of Volodya’s hand, and out past that the sun, and the summer, and the camp, and the fluttering red flags.

CHAPTER NINETEEN

PEN “PALS”

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 toCamp 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 hisbuilding, 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.

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