Page 119 of Pioneer Summer

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 whatexactly 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 magazineBurda 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 programOutlookevery 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 letterwin 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 togo 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 sawLittle Veraat 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?!

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