Page 125 of Pioneer Summer

What if he never went anywhere? Neither to America nor to Tver? What if he’s in Moscow? What if he’s there, at the White House? What if those bandits hounding his family were mixed up in politics? What if Volodya’s involved with them, with the coup? He used to go to some kind of demonstrations ...

That night, things got even worse. The White House was attacked and there were tanks driving along the Garden Ring. When Yura saw people throwing themselves at the tanks and someone was killed, his whole body shook. In the dark of night it was hard to make out who exactly had been killed. It was a young man, with brown hair, no glasses, but he still looked a lot like Volodya.

What if it’s him? What if his glasses got broken and that’s him?Yurka heard himself thinking, but knew he was just being hysterical. He knew that in the multimillion metropolis of Moscow, there were hundreds of thousands of young men whose build and hair color were similar to Volodya’s. But he was scared anyway until the man’s identity was confirmed.

Yura wrote to his friends from his building and asked them again to go to his old apartment and see whether any letters had arrived there for him. If they had, he asked them to send the letters on to Germany. He got hisanswer a month later. His friend wrote that the apartment was still vacant and there were no letters in the mailbox. He also shared the news of what was going on in the country, but Yura had no response to that. He just asked the friend again to make sure and check the mailbox every once in a while.

In December of 1991 the USSR ceased to exist. Yura watched on TV as the Soviet flag over the Kremlin was lowered and the Russian flag raised in its place. Along with the flag of the USSR, a curtain seemed to come down, signaling the end of his old life, and it was like a new curtain lifted up along with the Russian tricolor to reveal a new scene. And that’s when Yura realized that not only was his childhood good and truly over but the place it had occurred was gone, too. It had given him the gifts of love and friendship and then left, taking everything with it. Before him lay a different time, a new time. And a completely different life. Just like Volodya himself had written once, it was time for Yura to stop looking back at Volodya and learn to live a normal life.

It didn’t take Yura long to find out that in his new town, just like in all of Germany, there were a lot of Russian speakers. Although they had no official organizations, they supported each other. It was from them, as much as from the TV, that Yura’s family found out what was happening in Russia and Ukraine.

It was hard for Yura to adapt to his new life. Once the academic year started, he began associating with Germans as much as possible, even though they seemed like people cast from a completely different mold, with no similarity whatsoever to people from the former USSR. And entering into a relationship with anybody wasn’t in the realm of possibility. He felt lost, like nobody needed him, like he was extraneous and powerless. He tried to fit in with everyone around him, to be like the Germans in his classes, to lose his accent. But he still stuck out, even if he didn’t open his mouth. He still thought about Volodya. He still remembered how much he loved Volodya. And he still didn’t like women.

However, it didn’t take Yura long to find out that the attitude toward homosexuals in Berlin was totally different from what it had been in the USSR.

Now, back at Camp Barn Swallow, the sandy path cut down steeply from the cliff to the river. At times Yurka slipped and slid down the sandy slope. That was how 1992 had been, too: life carried him forward of its ownaccord. Yura continued to be a model student and didn’t do anything but study, but everything around him changed. It changed so much it became unrecognizable.

That was the year that the thing Volodya had been so afraid of happened: Yura started checking out other guys. He didn’t set out to find a partner or even to meet somebody who was like him. But one evening an openly gay man, a member of Berlin Pride, came to a college party. He liked Yura, and although Yura didn’t find the guy sexually attractive, that didn’t keep them from becoming friends. A little while later, Mick told him about the gay community and invited him to the district where their people hung out and partied in Berlin.

The next weekend Yura went to Nollendorfplatz. He came out of the metro, walked along the square, and started walking down Motzstrasse, but before he’d taken more than a few steps he stopped short, flustered. What he saw was nothing he’d ever wished for or dreamed of, simply because he had never been capable of even imagining anything like it. It was a parallel world, one that was noisy, crowded, bright, and free. It was as though Yura had landed on an amazing new planet where there was a permanent celebration, where he was not a stranger, where it felt like they’d even been expecting him. Dozens of songs played in dozens of clubs. Hundreds of people were strolling all around him. Some of them, like Yura, were walking by themselves, looking around for someone in the colorful crowd. But the majority of people were in same-sex pairs. They were free and uninhibited, almost to a point that felt vulgar. They walked around holding hands, and they kissed right out in the open, in front of everyone, and nothing happened to them! No disapproving glances, no curses, nothing! Yura couldn’t believe this was really happening. He froze, eyes wide in amazement. All he could do was blink, look enviously at the strolling pairs, and sigh, “If only Volodya could see this.” Later, Mick would confirm that this was normal here, that this was a place where the war Yura didn’t even know was being fought had already been won. Still, as someone born and raised in the USSR, Yura was sure that as long as he lived, he’d never be able to make himself walk openly down the street like that, holding hands with a guy.

The asphalt was wet and gleaming from a recent rain. At his feet lay bright stripes: the reflection of a bar’s neon sign. A rainbow flag. Yura lowered hisgaze to stare at them, then he released a shuddering sigh and stepped onto the reflection on the ground. He gathered his courage and walked along the rainbow, following it into the bar where he’d arranged to meet Mick.

He slipped inconspicuously to a seat at an empty table, ordered a beer, and drank it down in a single go. Not fifteen minutes had gone by before he was surrounded by a group of a dozen-odd people whom Yurka would soon come to think of as nothing other than his real family. The group included women, and men, and people Yurka didn’t know how to refer to. They were excited, full of joking and laughter, as a few of them described their plan for staging an action code-named Operation Civil Registry that was going to make a lot of noise. The gist of it was that on a specific day, August 19, 1992, a whole bunch of same-sex couples were going to apply for marriage licenses at the same time all over the country. All their applications would get written rejections, of course, and then the couples would sue. Drunk not on beer but on the atmosphere, Yura immediately agreed to participate. A “husband” was found for him on the spot, whose name Yura only remembered once he read it in his marriage license application. Everything happened so fast that it wasn’t until Yura got the official written refusal to accept his application that he realized for the first time what a strange position he’d have been in if his application had been approved.

The pile of mail containing the refusal from the civil registry office held another letter for Yura as well, from his friend from his building back in Kharkiv. The guy had moved to another neighborhood a long time ago, but he sometimes came back to the neighborhood where he and Yura grew up, to visit his mother. This is what he was writing about. His letter shocked Yura.

“I went to visit my mother recently. She said that some guy had been looking for you. I didn’t see him myself, but my mother said he had glasses. Is that the guy you were expecting?”

Yura sent a brief response: “What did he ask? What did she tell him? Did she give him my address and phone number in Germany? Did the guy leave his contact information?”

Another month went by before he got his response: “My mother did not give out your address or telephone number. She just said you’d gone away to Germany. He didn’t say anything about himself.”

Yura put in a request: “Go to my old apartment and find out whether that guy went to see them and whether he left his address with them. And make sure you take any letters! If there’s still nobody there, break into the mailbox.”

There was no answer for a long time. His friend was living his own life, wrapped up in family and work. He wasn’t about to run around from one end of the city to the other at Yura’s beck and call, of course. And he didn’t answer until later, the beginning of November: “The guy went to see them. He didn’t leave his own address but he took back his own letters.”

Volodya had sent more letters! But irritation pulsed through Yura: Why hadn’t Volodya left his address? Why had he taken the letters back? Had that “You’ll be better off without me” nonsense kicked in again? Yura’s irritation grew into fury. If Volodya had been there, Yura would’ve hit him.

Enraged and hurt, he fled to Nollendorfplatz. He hunkered down in a bar, tossing back drink after drink. By the time he was seeing double, an old acquaintance came up to him: Jonas, his erstwhile “fiancé,” his partner in submitting the marriage license application. Yura was so drunk that the next morning he couldn’t remember how he’d ended up in bed with Jonas. But it didn’t keep their fling from turning into a relationship. And neither did the memory of Volodya.

Way back in ’86, he and Volodya had agreed to meet at Camp Barn Swallow ten years later. But he didn’t show up, because life got busy and he finally started getting some recognition for his music. Playing at concerts and continuing his studies—but now as a conductor as well as a pianist—Yura was reaping the fruits of his labor. But it was Jonas who made him finally forget their agreement.

Jonas was a gay rights activist. He promoted and supported the gay community’s civic life. He tried to respect what Yura was doing with his life, but it became clear pretty quickly that either he didn’t like Yura’s music specifically, or he didn’t like piano music in general. He said it didn’t do anything. It was just noise.

But they still went to the theater and the opera together. Once, while they were traveling in Latvia, Yura saw a poster in Russian advertising Roman Viktyuk’s Russian-language production ofM. Butterfly, and even though Jonas didn’t speak a word of Russian, Yura insisted they go see it together.

The production made a double-edged impression. The nudity was off-putting, as well as the way the acting descended into affectation, and the fact that it was based on real events—and fairly recent ones at that—was shocking. But the story’s ambiguity was appealing, and so was its moral that love has no gender. Above all, though, was the simple fact that it was in Russian. Yura was hearing the language onstage for the first time since he’d left.

M. Butterflyreminded him of what had been happening the first time he saw the posters for the show, back in ’91 in Moscow. It reminded him of the person Yura had gone to Moscow for. And after seeing that show, Yura’s dream of writing a composition full of meaning returned to him. The image of the main character who puts on women’s clothing and feels free was one that followed Yura for many years. Jonas thought the whole idea of it was just self-mockery, absurd. But Yura disagreed.

For him this was the beginning of a period of creative inquiries, experiments, and mistakes.

Yura and Jonas were too different, and they both knew it from the beginning. But maybe it was just this diametric opposition of their personalities, temperaments, and interests that attracted them to each other. A year after their relationship began, they moved in together. At first they were still able to forgive each other’s flaws and make room for each other’s interests, but the longer their relationship dragged on, the harder it got for each of them to accept the other’s disdain for the thing that gave his life meaning.

Jonas spent all his time and energy organizing gay events, gay parades, and gay trivia contests. He wanted gay people to have the same rights as heterosexuals. But Yura couldn’t see how activism would help much: to accomplish something meaningful, he was sure that Jonas needed to be a politician. What’s more, he didn’t understand the constant discussions of discrimination. The whole time he’d lived in Germany, he hadn’t encountered discrimination in his professional life. Not once. And no, Yura didn’t hide his orientation, and it never even occurred to him to hide Jonas. It was just that none of his colleagues ever asked about his personal life, and Yura wasn’t about to advertise it for no reason.

“Gays can’t get married. That is discrimination,” Jonas would say. “Why are we forbidden to do what’s allowed for straight people? We’re fighting forrights equal to what hetero couples have. We’re citizens, too, just like them! You should be out there fighting for your rights too. Nobody’s going to do it for you.”

---