Page 120 of Pioneer Summer

Yurka replied that Volodya was just having a panic attack and that he needed to calm down and stop taking responsibility for all the world’s problems. He wrote that the disease didn’t just pop up out of nowhere, and that he knew Volodya knew it perfectly well himself; that the disease was a virus,and a virus kills without choosing its victims because it’s inanimate, it doesn’t care. But Volodya wouldn’t budge. His fear of getting it grew so strong that it imprinted itself in his mind and his mentions of his own “disease” became more and more frequent: “It’s the cause of all my problems. I have to go to the doctor for treatment. And it’s high time you got a girlfriend. Otherwise, who knows ...”

Yurka ignored the comments about a girlfriend and “who knows.” He knew that with letters alone he’d be unable to calm Volodya down; they needed to see each other, or at least talk. Yurka begged Volodya time and time again to find a person with a home telephone whom Yurka could call from a phone booth, but Volodya always refused.

Yurka, worn out as he was by Volodya’s panic, didn’t spare a thought for himself. Desperation flowed from every single line of Volodya’s letters, and even though Yurka knew it was temporary, and that Volodya would eventually calm down, his fear was weighing down Yurka’s heart like a millstone. Yurka would’ve done anything to make Volodya feel even a tiny bit better. He would’ve accepted and forgiven him anything—except “treatment.”

Sometimes Yurka succumbed to Volodya’s panic, too. Then he would go get the picture of the group in the theater and look for a long time at him and Volodya: weary, overworked, and sleep-deprived, but beaming, because they were together. They were at each other’s sides. That photo was a genuine, delicate treasure in black and white, the most important thing in the world. When Yurka looked at it, and remembered what had happened in the past, and imagined how he and Volodya would meet in the future, he calmed down. They had been afraid of a lot back then, too, but they’d still been together and been happy. And if they’d been happy once, it meant they’d be happy again!

As Volodya’s panic continued, Yurka gradually realized, with a sickening sense of helplessness, that he was indeed going to have to give Volodya the world’s best calming remedy: the picture of the theater group. Copies had been passed out at Yurka’s mom’s factory, since that was the easiest way to get the pictures to the kids, but Yurka knew that Volodya didn’t get one, since, like some of the other camp employees, he had no connection to the factory that sponsored the camp and was from a different city. Hoping that once Volodya saw them together and remembered, he would come back tohis senses, at least a little, Yurka took the photo out of the frame and, with heavy heart, mailed it to Volodya. Yurka didn’t comment on this act at all, continuing to write about the same thing in different ways:

On TV they said AIDS is transmitted through blood. And my father says that to avoid getting it, you have to keep from getting cut, and you have to stay away from other people’s cuts—that is, from their blood. And you have to use only your own needles, and bring your own scalpels to operations. My mom says you have to bring all your own scissors and clippers when you go to the salon. But none of those things apply to you, do they? No! So everything is okay, you don’t need to do anything. Just take a sedative and get some sleep.

What Yurka really wanted to ask Volodya about was sex. Was Volodya having it with anyone? And if so, was he using a condom? But he was embarrassed to write that kind of thing. So instead of questions, he sent Volodya a few booklets his dad had brought home from the hospital. Every single one of them had “AIDS is sexually transmitted” written on it in giant letters.

On top of everything else, Yurka was starving for information. If the Elista outbreak really had been caused by one of “them,” then what did they do with the guy? Had they tried to cure him—not of AIDS, which was obviously incurable, but of “that disease”? And if so, how? And what even was it, anyway?

It was useless to ask Volodya, but Yurka had to feed that hunger for information somehow. So he took a desperate measure: he asked his father.

“It’s a mental disorder,” replied his father tersely, hiding his face behind the newspaper.

“Genetic or acquired?” Yurka demanded.

“I don’t know.”

“But you’re a doctor! And you talk to other doctors!”

“I’m a surgeon.” His father suddenly put down the paper and studied Yurka’s face with his stern, doctor-examining-a-patient look: “Why are you even asking?”

Yurka sighed heavily and dropped his gaze to the floor. Telling the truth about Volodya would be a betrayal. But as far as he was concerned—no,despite his love for Volodya, Yurka still couldn’t describe himself that way to himself, much less to his parents.

“I’m just curious,” he scoffed. “It’s true, though: Look how many of them there are!” He nodded at the radio, which was playing a song by the deliberately shocking Valery Leontiev.

A disgusted expression similar to Yurka’s own distorted his father’s face. His father hid behind the newspaper again and muttered, “It’s abnormal, in any case, and you’d be best keeping your distance from people like that. They could start to affect you psychologically and make you get off track.”

“How do you treat it?”

His father lowered the newspaper again to look at him and frowned.

“Yura, I’m a surgeon!” For the first time in a month his father raised his voice. “They used to treat it in special clinics, but I don’t know exactly how. And I know even less about what they do about it now, or whether they even do anything at all. Everything has been turned topsy-turvy. Those blues should be isolated from normal people, but instead they’re performing onstage. Have you seen that Leontiev?”

It was a rhetorical question. Yurka was still just as information-starved, but now, after this conversation, he felt almost dirty. He left the conversation empty-handed. On the radio, Leontiev—the flamboyant performer his father hated so much—was finishing up his song about Afghanistan. It wasn’t topical anymore: the war in Afghanistan had ended, and the USSR had removed its troops that spring.

The hysteria over the AIDS outbreak in Elista made people forget, temporarily, what else was happening in their country. The shortage of food products was getting worse. Stockpiled cases of canned fish were stacked in the corners of Yurka’s family’s kitchen. His mother pickled every single vegetable from his grandma’s garden and got on his nerves by constantly repeating the rumors that soon the salaries at the factory where she worked would be paid in what the factory manufactured: ball bearings. His father got into the habit of reading the crime news. He’d hide his face behind the newspaper without saying much, and more and more often he just smoked his dwindling supply of cigarettes in complete silence. Yurka quit smoking, but he, too, read about the constant shoot-outs, the arson, and people beingtortured with irons. When the words “racket” and “racketeering” became commonplace, when even regular people found themselves having to deal with the mafia, that was when the entire Konev family first started seriously considering emigrating to East Germany. But in 1988 it was still too hard.

The concrete paver of 1989, all shot through with cracks and overgrown with weeds, crunched under Yura’s boot. That year had been overflowing with anxiety because Volodya had calmed down far too abruptly and quickly, and also because Yurka had taken and failed the conservatory entrance exams, and because of his family’s search for ways to leave the USSR. The Iron Curtain had fallen and all paths were open to Yurka, but the past didn’t want to let him leave, while the future didn’t want to let him in. That whole endlessly long year, as he waited for something different, Yurka was tormented by a premonition:You think it’s bad now, but just you wait. It’s going to get worse.

The smell of vinegar would permeate the apartment for weeks on end. Every day, Yurka’s mother would watch the dubbed Brazilian soapIsaura: Slave Girlwhile boiling either jam or jeans (doing a homemade acid wash). Commercials appeared on TV for the first time. More and more new TV programs kept appearing. Yurka watched his father’s beloved600 SecondsandFifth Wheelout of the corner of his eye.

The airwaves were also filled with something fundamentally new, something even more strange and suspicious: performances by the faith healer Allan Chumak and the hypnotist Anatoly Kashpirovsky. Of the latter, who had been popularly nicknamed “Koshmarovsky”—“Nightmare-ovsky”—Volodya wrote, “Hypnosis is a charlatan’s trick, it doesn’t actually work ...”

To which Yurka replied by asking, “In the unfinished barracks you were saying hypnosis was what would help you, so how are you coming to this conclusion now?”

But Volodya responded evasively: “A friend of mine went to one. He had another problem, not like mine: he can’t sleep. And since it couldn’t solve his problem, there’s no way it’ll solve mine.”

Yurka started to suspect that Volodya didn’t have any such friend and that he’d tried it himself. On the one hand, Yurka knew hypnosis wasn’t as dangerous as other “cures,” like getting shots to induce nausea, so he relaxedsomewhat. But then he got panicky all over again: if Volodya had gone to that kind of doctor, he might go to another kind of doctor, too. So he began to focus on convincing Volodya to wait before going to a psychiatrist.

In the midst of these negotiations, as tense as trade talks, he forgot how angry he’d been at himself for failing the conservatory entrance exams. What would’ve once been a huge blow to his self-esteem before was unimportant now. Yurka knew he’d try again next year, and that if he failed then, he’d try again, and eventually he’d get in. Trying to get in and not making it—that wasn’t a failure. Quitting his studies was the failure. But an even worse failure would be letting Volodya mess himself up.

Not even a month went by before Yurka’s fears began to be substantiated. Volodya’s letters were different. His handwriting had changed! Whereas Yurka used to be able to recognize Volodya’s mood from the way he wrote, now Yurka was haunted by the distinct sensation that the letters were being written by someone else entirely. Volodya’s handwriting was now looser and bigger. But what was even scarier was that he’d started making basic spelling and punctuation mistakes, which would have been completely impossible for the Volodya Yurka knew. But before asking Volodya directly whether he’d gone in for treatment, Yurka reread all Volodya’s letters several times to catch anything he’d missed before. Yurka was trying to pinpoint when exactly Volodya had changed, to guess what had caused the change—because despite what Volodya had seemed to think, the AIDS outbreak in Elista had nothing to do with either of them, and in his heart of hearts Yurka thought this reason was so stupid that it couldn’t possibly be the cause. But no matter how many times he sat down to reread the whole heap of Volodya’s letters, no matter how carefully he read, he was unable to discern a cause or even a date when Volodya had suddenly changed. Eventually he began to doubt whether there had ever even been a reason, and whether Volodya had actually changed at all ...

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