Page 121 of Pioneer Summer

There was no help for it. Yurka started asking to come visit and inviting Volodya to visit him. But Volodya refused to either come visit or let Yurka visit him. Yurka even threatened to come anyway, but the threats had no effect. Apparently, Volodya had guessed that Yurka simply didn’t have enough money for tickets, and so he replied in broad, sweeping handwriting: “Yura,do you remember our agreement? I won’t come see you or invite you to see me until you get into conservatory.”

Yurka was dumbfounded. The conservatory?! In his last paragraph, he scrawled, “Did you mean that about the conservatory? I’ll still have so long to wait! Volod, I miss you, I really want to see you. What’s going on? Because I can tell something’s off. Be honest: Did you go to treatment?”

Volodya’s response was some time in coming. Yurka had grown tired of waiting and was about to write Volodya again when he saw the familiar colored-in corner of a letter in his mailbox. He opened the envelope with trembling hands and took out the letter. In the last paragraphs he read, “I wanted to lie to you, but I realized I can’t. You don’t deserve lies. But I was in no hurry to talk, either, until I’d made up my mind for sure.

Yes, Yura, I did confess to my parents. I would’ve had to do it at some point anyway, but what happened at Elista made me do it now. It was scary to talk and hard to begin. The thing I was most afraid of was that they wouldn’t take the news seriously, like the way Irina didn’t believe Masha that time. But they believed me. They were in shock, of course. I really disappointed them. But the main thing is that they understood: it’s as much a problem for them as it is for me. It took my father a long time to find a doctor who’d give me treatments unofficially so my records wouldn’t show I’d been to a psychiatric clinic. And also because he’d started his own business and made a name for himself in certain circles, so there was his reputation, too ... You get it.

The doctor and I talk for a long time at our sessions. He prescribed me some pills and said that if I have people I’m close to, people I can be open with, I should both tell them about the disease and let them know I’m in treatment for it, in case I need their moral support. He also told me to start looking at the pretty girls around me. Just look at them for now, not meet anyone or go on dates. This is so I learn to see their beauty. It’s funny, Yur, but I see it perfectly well already,and in fact I think a lot of girls are pretty, but ... not a single one of them attracts me. But that’s just right now, I hope ... not permanently ...

Yurka read the letter and felt the hair raising on the back of his neck. He was scared, both for Volodya and for himself. Inside him, his hurt shouted,He wants to cure himself of me! Of his love for me! He wants to forget everything! After all the times I asked him not to go, he still went, he still did everything his way! He betrayed me!

But once his emotions calmed a little, other thoughts occurred to Yurka. Volodya hadn’t betrayed him. He had told him the truth. He was still thinking about Yurka. He needed him! Volodya’s letter was a cry for help, after all. He needed support. Yurka realized that Volodya had it even harder now: the fact that Volodya’s parents knew, and were even paying for his treatment, made it Volodya’s responsibility to ensure the treatment was a success. But what if it wasn’t, or what if it took a long time? If Yurka, his single, solitary real friend, didn’t support him, then he’d be the one betraying Volodya. However much it hurt him—however much he doubted that Volodya even needed treatment—he had to help.

Yurka spent a long time composing his reply to Volodya’s letter. He wasn’t satisfied until the fourth version:

Volodya, you know perfectly well that you’re my only close friend. I asked you not to go. I won’t lie, I’m not happy you did it, but I trust you. If you decided it was your only choice, that you’d only feel better by going to a doctor, then I support you. But I’m also even more worried about you now. Tell me how everything’s going. Are you sure it’s not causing you harm? What kind of pills are you taking? Do they help? How?

I’ll say it again, and I’ll keep saying it over and over: you are my only friend, my best friend, my dearest friend. You can be honest with me about everything. Absolutely everything, always. Don’t feel awkward about any of it, okay?

I’m really looking forward to your reply. I want to know everything about you. If I can help in any way, just tell me, and I will.

This time the letter from Volodya took two days longer to arrive than usual, leaving Yurka plenty of time to wear himself out worrying.

We just talk. The doctor asks me about everything. It was hard for me to open up to him. It’s too personal, after all. But he’s a psychiatrist: I can trust him with what has been tormenting and terrifying me for so long. And these conversations really are making me feel better. The pills are just sedatives. Thanks to them, I’ve stopped having panic attacks and I’ve stopped washing my hands in burning-hot water—remember that old habit? Looks like this treatment really is helping me!

And no matter how much these letters scared Yurka, no matter how much they made him feel like Volodya was growing more and more distant from him, Yurka was glad for his friend. If Volodya was feeling better, if it was helping Volodya, then all Yurka could do was support him. And he did, that whole year.

That autumn, the international news hit like a thunderclap: the Berlin Wall had fallen.

The physical boundary between East Germany and West Germany no longer existed. Officially, the two countries weren’t planning on reunifying for a long time, but Yurka’s uncle heard from his friends in the government of East Germany that unification was going to happen, and not in the distant future but soon. He wrote Yurka’s mom that the whole family had to pull it together and get to the East German consulate first, because immigrating to Germany would be even harder once the countries united. His mother went.

Listening to her, Yurka was astonished at how difficult it was. For the time being, the only way they could immigrate was as a Jewish family. For that to happen, then at least his mother, if not all of them, had to have the word “Jew” showing in her passport as her designated ethnicity, and she had to be a member of a Jewish religious community. But the ethnicity listed in his mother’s passport was Russian. And despite all of Yurka’s grandma’s efforts, Yurka’s mother had stubbornly refused to join any Jewish organization. The only thing she’d agree to do was let Yurka be circumcised. Yurka’s grandma had changed both her first and last names back at the beginning of the war, and on top of that all her German documents, including her marriagecertificate, had been destroyed. His grandpa’s life had come to an end in Dachau, which meant that Yurka’s mother and Yurka were legally eligible to be treated as victims of the Holocaust, but they still had to prove they were related to him. The only relative they had in Germany, the uncle on his grandfather’s side, was his mother’s cousin, and Yurka’s cousin twice removed, so it wasn’t clear whether this relationship would be of any help to the Konevs. The one thing that was crystal clear, however, was that they’d have to track down and replace a great many identification documents. In spite of everything, though, none of them—not Yurka, not his parents, not the uncle—lost faith in their return to their historical motherland.

Meanwhile, a terrible time of shortages began in the USSR. The stores ran out of everything, even soap and laundry powder. Staples like macaroni and buckwheat kasha were nowhere to be found. Yurka’s family, like all the rest, began getting ration tickets for sugar. Yurka’s father began to work longer and longer hours; sometimes he was stuck at work for whole days at a time. His mother was bedridden from a long bout of pneumonia. Yurka, already used to standing in hours-long lines, stood even longer now in lines of enraged citizens, reading his German textbook while freezing and listening to people talking about the coal miners’ strike: half a million people beating their helmets on the pavement.

In Kharkiv, everything was more or less calm, but Volodya wrote that in Moscow it wasn’t just the coal miners but all the rest of the Soviet citizenry, too, tired of always being half-starved, that was going out to demonstrate. And Volodya, always with his keen interest in political events, went right out with them.

As he stepped onto the next square concrete paver, Yura looked at its blank surface, wet and glistening, and for some reason felt like any minute now an ant would run out onto it from the grass, and then another one, and then more and more of them, until the entire paver was crisscrossed with long lines of ants, the way the entire year of 1990 had been crisscrossed with lines. There had been lines everywhere, for everything you could imagine: vodka, cigarettes, food ... They stretched out from stores and kiosks; they stood unmoving in front of the conservatory’s administrative offices; they swelled to kilometer-long columns at embassies.

The whole country was in a fever. In every news program Yurka saw the same thing—he could’ve recited it from memory: “Alcoholism and crime rates have grown to epic proportions,” “Profiteers are getting fat,” and “Refugees from Nagorno-Karabakh are hiding everywhere.” The programs spoke about how the cigarette shortage made the populace run riot: they went on strike and stopped production lines, they burned and looted stores, and they overturned bigwigs’ cars. People started referring to the Soviet Union contemptuously as sovok, “dustpan.”

But Yurka felt that the TV news reports must be exaggerating things. Yes, all that did exist, but life didn’t seem quite that doom-and-gloomy to him. In some ways it was just the opposite, blooming with vibrant color: now there were uncensored, nongovernmental radio stations that played so much new music that it seemed like Yurka never heard the same song twice. At dance clubs he knew that people were dancing the lambada, although he didn’t go out dancing himself or look up girls’ miniskirts; he just sat at home, working hard on his German and continuing to prepare for his conservatory entrance exams. Now he was practicing on his own: his family couldn’t pay the tutor anymore since his mother had been cut to part-time and his father hadn’t gotten his pay in several months. But Yurka worked hard, putting in as much time as he could at the piano. He mentally prepared himself for another failure. This time, though, this time—he got in!

“I did it!” Yurka wrote in his next letter.

I thought they’d fail me again, but I finally did it, Volodya! Just like I promised you! And now that I’ve made it, everything’s different in my mind. I used to dream about becoming a pianist, but now it’s not a dream anymore, it’s a goal. And what I really want now is something else: not to play music, but to write it. My dream is to become a composer. I dream of writing something special, something that doesn’t just sound good but is full of meaning.

And in the last paragraph of his letter, Yurka reminded Volodya of their agreement:

I remember you promised we’d meet as soon as I made it into conservatory. So there you go!

For days there was no reply, but Yurka chalked it up to issues with the postal service. When the answer did come a week later, Volodya was so happy for him that Yurka smiled as he read. But Volodya wouldn’t agree to meet, saying that he had absolutely no time since he’d failed one of his exams and the retake was scheduled in September. He had to study for that, plus he had to help his dad with the business, and also it wasn’t a good time to be in Moscow, what with all the demonstrations and riots and strikes.

“And another thing,” wrote Volodya. “I want to ask you to hold off on our meeting for a while, since I’m afraid it might have a negative effect on my treatment. Because, Yur, I remember you ...

I’m learning how to control myself. For example, at the last session the psychiatrist brought in some pictures of ... well, pictures he thought I’d like. Then he started asking me to say what I could possibly like about them, how I could even like them, but get this: of the twenty pictures he showed me, only one caught my eye! And even that was probably just because it really reminded me of our last night at camp. Then he gave me other pictures, of women this time. And this time he also asked me to look at them closely and talk about what specifically I liked about this one or that one, and what I didn’t like at all. And he gave me some homework.

You asked me to be very honest. It’s a little hard to do, but I’ll try. Because we’re grown-ups, after all, and even though this is something people don’t talk about in polite company, it’s different for us—we can understand each other. So anyway ... he gave me some pictures to take home, pictures that are the kind I’m supposed to like later after we’ve cured my disease. He said that sometime when I’m by myself I should try to relax and take a good long look at the prettiest ones, so that ... Well, you get it ... so I learn how to get real physical pleasure from looking at them and imagining things ... AndYur—! What a relief! I did it! I thought only about what I saw in the picture, and I was able to! I was able to do it!

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