Page 126 of Pioneer Summer

Maybe it was his Soviet upbringing, or maybe it was just his temperament, but Yura didn’t think he needed marriage. What’s more, the provocative nature of gay parades irritated Yura. And Jonas’s most active project, the creation of gay neighborhoods, was something that Yura thought of as actively harmful. He didn’t mind that gay neighborhoods existed—they were nice places to make friends and hang out—but he also thought that making more of them was exactly the wrong thing to do.

“You’re literally fencing gays off, putting them in ghettos. Like in America, where they have white neighborhoods and black neighborhoods, just here it’s gay neighborhoods. You shouldn’t be expanding the ghettos, you should be getting people out of them entirely.”

One thing Jonas did that Yura completely agreed with and supported was the gay trivia contests, because the contestants were originally from various countries, including ones where homosexuality was a capital offense. “If you really want to help people,” he told Jonas for the hundredth time, “create psychological resource centers in schools and universities. But if what you want is to accomplish these goals of yours, you have to go into politics. It’s the only way.”

After six years of fruitless attempts to learn to accept and love each other as they were, each of them with interests the other considered character flaws, their relationship started to fall apart. Their love, so bright and exciting at first, grew pale and feeble, then faded away completely. Their irritation at each other’s interests carried over into everything else. Jonas’s good looks, which had taken Yura’s breath away when they first met, were no big deal now. Flaws like the mole on his temple, which Yura had earlier stubbornly ignored, now caught his eye constantly, prompting his disgust. Yura even started being irritated by Jonas’s walk, his habits, his gestures, the way he dressed, even the way he ate. And Yura could see in the way Jonas looked at him that Jonas liked him less and less, too.

And maybe Yura did say things wrong and have the wrong opinion sometimes about what Jonas was doing, but Jonas blatantly ignored Yura’s music.He tried to be out whenever Yura was at home perfecting a new piece; he never asked Yura to play him something; and he never once went to the concert hall to see Yura perform.

With increasing frequency, the most relaxing thing for them to do together was to keep quiet. Then not talking became habitual. Soon even the sound of the other’s voice was irritating. Almost every conversation about music or the community ended with them making a scene. Then they stopped wasting energy on fighting. And then they stopped wasting it on sex. That’s when Yura asked Jonas to take his things and go. Thus ended that which Yura had once thought eternal.

It was June 30, 1998. Way back in ’86, he and Volodya had agreed to meet at Camp Barn Swallow ten years later. But Yura had forgotten about the meeting under the willow. He’d failed to show up for it two years ago. Indeed, he now realized, he’d forgotten about a lot of things, and given up a lot of things. He had ruined his relationship with his parents, who were unable to accept his orientation and treated him more like a distant relative than their own son: his mother was cold toward him, and his father avoided him entirely. He’d stopped hanging out with his Russian-speaking friends—at least, the ones who weren’t part of the gay community—and he’d sacrificed momentum in his musical career, in which he should’ve been investing a whole lot more time and energy. Now it was as though he’d come back down to earth from heaven and remembered that, apart from Jonas, there were other things in life. And more than anything else, he started thinking again about his unfulfilled promise.

Although back in 1991 there’d been no chance of finding Volodya once he had vanished, now, since the advent of the internet, it was at least hypothetically possible. Yura knew Volodya would have eventually gone back to Camp Barn Swallow. He didn’t believe it, he didn’t assume it—he knew it. So, aided by the internet, his first task was to find the camp. The second task was to go there, even though the meeting time had already passed.

Yura had forgotten the way to Camp Barn Swallow. To be precise, he had never known it in the first place: the Pioneers were always brought there by bus. Yura remembered the bus number—410—and that it was near the village Horetivka. But he was unable to find that one single village out of thehundreds of thousands of them all across the former Soviet Union. Yura went to all the Russian-language internet chat forums he could find and posted in them about the village, asking whether anyone knew where it was or what had happened to it. He didn’t get many replies, and even the ones he did get were useless. A few people knew of a similarly named village, but it was in Moscow oblast in Russia. Nobody knew anything about a Horetivka near Kharkiv in Ukraine.

Yura began to buy maps and study them closely. But the village wasn’t on them. Tired of the constant dead ends, he began to ask himself whether a village like that had ever existed at all. Maybe after so many years he’d forgotten its actual name and in his head he’d distorted it until it was unrecognizable?

Since his mother had worked in the factory that sponsored the camp, he asked her whether her former colleagues remembered where the camp was, but they either didn’t know or didn’t remember. He scoured the internet for images of a voucher for a session at Camp Barn Swallow. He didn’t find any. He researched the 410 bus, looking for similar numbers, like 41, 10, 710, 70, and so forth, just in case he’d misremembered. But the ones he found didn’t go anywhere that even remotely resembled the places Yura needed.

After his futile attempt to find the place, he started looking for people: the Pukes, Vanka and Mikha, Pcholkin, Olezhka, and anyone and everyone else he remembered, even Anechka and his nemesis Vishnevsky. But maybe they didn’t have computers or internet access, or maybe they connected to the internet with dumb usernames at internet cafés; at any rate, Yura failed to find them either. He wrote the guys from his building asking them to find out the phone number of Public School 18, then called it looking for the Pukes. But the money he spent on international phone calls was wasted. Every time he asked himself what he still hadn’t done to find what he needed, what he hadn’t tried yet, he came up with something else to do. And once he’d tried it, he couldn’t believe that it, too, had failed:It’s just not possible that I can’t find anybody!But it was.

In the end, it looked like the only thing left for him to try was actually going back to the Motherland. There he’d be able to dig around in archives and find people using telephone books and speak with people affiliated with the factory. So, unwilling to give up, Yura began planning to take somevacation time soon and travel to Kharkiv. But his plans were canceled by a phone call from his parents. His father spoke to him for the first time in four years. What he said was bad. Yura’s mother was sick and might not get well again. The many long years of employment in an unhealthy workplace were making themselves known.

For the next two years, Yura forgot about his plans and about his desire to find Camp Barn Swallow. His mom was slowly fading away as her disease progressed, and the treatment wasn’t having the expected results.

The only thing that saved him from the bleak atmosphere at his parents’ was music. It became Yura’s anchor, helping him accept the inevitability of the loss.

He finished his conducting degree and accepted the head of the conservatory’s offer of a position as one of its piano teachers. During the day Yura taught music and played for the students, while at night, sometimes, when he went to his parents’ place, he played for his mother.

She died in the spring of 2000. Yura’s father was devastated. Although he’d never exactly been open and sociable, now he withdrew far into himself, speaking less and less and applying himself to the bottle more and more. Yura, gazing at him, realized bitterly that even after so many years, after such a shared loss, the single family member who was close to him neither accepted nor forgave him, his son, for who he was.

Time moved ruthlessly on. Yura recovered from his sorrow. He began performing in concerts and writing music again. Relationships flickered in and out of his life, but none of them were as long or as strong as the one with Jonas. It was lonely. He caught himself thinking that he wished his home were as loud as it used to be, that people were always coming over again, that good smells came from the kitchen, and that he could feel someone’s back against his side when he was falling asleep. Never mind that he’d often fought with the owner of that back. As soon as Yura hit the thirty-year mark, his loneliness became almost physical; it was his constant companion, one that short dalliances or one-night stands were unable to rid him of.

All this time, Yura had watched Jonas from a distance, as though it had nothing to do with him, trying to track what his former lover was up to. Yura sometimes felt that it was those last words he’d said, during their last fight,that had prompted Jonas to take an important and useful step: he’d joined the Lesbian and Gay Federation in Germany. Next, Jonas had gone on to become a member of the Social Democratic Party of Germany. And then, at the end of 2000, Yurka saw that Jonas and his colleagues had achieved their main goal: two of four political parties voted to legalize same-sex unions at the federal level. The other two parties opposed it, but it became law all the same.

The law went into effect in 2001. It specified partnership, not marriage; for the time being, gays and lesbians only had access to a minimal series of rights. But little by little the law was expanded. And not long ago, in January of 2005, a new expansion had been enacted, allowing gay people the right to register partnerships with citizens of other countries. In some ways, the news of these expansions just felt like mockery to pathologically lonely people like Yura. Still, he couldn’t help being proud of Jonas and all he had achieved.

The next year, 2006, was a new stage in Yura’s career. He began planning his first big tour of Russia and the Commonwealth of Independent States, and it was going to end in Kharkiv. Although he’d previously lost hope, his knowledge that he’d be going back to Ukraine prompted him to try to find Camp Barn Swallow one more time.

He still didn’t have much hope of success, but he began his search all over again all the same, going through all the Russian forums again, writing in all the chat forums again, searching for nostalgic websites. And on one of them he finally found a scanned copy of a voucher for a session at Camp Barn Swallow! From the person who published it, he found out that the village of Horetivka really had existed. That person didn’t remember the exact location, but he did give a general explanation of what highway to take to get there. All that remained was to lay out a route and find it. Yura couldn’t do that in Germany, since Horetivka wasn’t on a single map. But once he found himself in Ukraine, in Kharkiv Oblast, he went out to find it himself. And he did.

Yura didn’t arrive in Kharkiv empty-handed; he brought with him a dream he’d fulfilled. He had composed his magnum opus, the one he’d written Volodya about so long ago. A symphony, one that wasn’t just beautiful, but full of meaning. It was about freedom. Yura had allowed himself to be dramatic and old-fashioned. The symphony began in complete silence, broken by a faint, stifled, cracking tenor. Moment by moment the singing intensified,becoming louder and more confident, until a choir joined in, but the choir didn’t drown out the man’s voice; it elevated it. After the choir came the strings, accompanied by piano, and at the very end, the dramatic, grandiose wind instruments came crashing down on the audience. When he first heard it onstage, Yura seemed to become free himself, although the center of the symphony was neither him as the conductor nor even him as the composer but the tenor, with his stifled, cracking voice.

For a long time Yura thought that his inspiration had beenM. Butterfly. But today, now that he’d come back to Camp Barn Swallow and remembered his past, he realized that the muse of his most important work wasn’t some character from a play, someone he didn’t actually know, but someone else entirely. Someone he’d once known very, very well.

The path ended when it hit a lot of overgrown bushes. Yura stepped onto the sand of the beach and got a faceful of a terrible stench from the river. Back then, especially after it rained, it had smelled unbelievably delicious here, of summer freshness and mushroomy dampness. But now the woods had grown thin and scrubby. On the trees, the yellowing, dried-up foliage was wet and heavy. The smell of putrid standing water was strong in the air. As Yura walked past the turn-off to the boathouse, he frowned: through the sparse trees he could clearly discern a heap of boards and debris. That was all that remained of the dock. Yura didn’t have time now to turn that way and examine the remains of the place where he’d had his first real kiss. He kept going.

As soon as he arrived today he’d begun fretting about whether he’d be able to get across the river to the willow, but all his doubts vanished as soon as he stepped through the rusted chain-link gate that used to separate the beach from the woods. The river wasn’t a river anymore. All that remained of that once deep and mighty tributary of the Donets River was a swamp, a little green stagnant swamp choked in duckweed. It made the old Soviet sign at the entrance to the beach—depicting swimmers in deep waves and the captionBEWARE OF STRONG CURRENT!—look like a mean joke.

Yura didn’t know how or why the river had dried up, but he suspected it was because of the construction on the far riverbank. Maybe the river had been in the way, so they’d filled in the bed? Or built a dam? To hell with it. Yura didn’t have time to think about it now.

He turned off to the left, hoping there was a chance he’d still be able to find the shallows. The little trail, which hadn’t been much even back in the day, was long gone by now. Yura had to make his way through the vegetation. He reached the path along the high riverbank and stopped. The sandy bank had eroded and crumbled, but he could still walk on it. Yura went up to the very edge and looked down: ten or so meters of sand, then nothing but that same duckweed and stagnant water. He remembered the still pool where he and Volodya had once swam together. He heaved a sigh. Their lilies were all dead, because the shallow pool where they’d grown had dried up and turned into stagnant muck, like the river itself.

Yura looked at the far bank. The bank he was standing on was higher, and from here he could see not only roofs and the wall around the cottage community; he could see some of the cottages themselves. Many of them were still under construction, but there were a few that were done—and clearly inhabited. The billboard near the entrance to the village proclaimed:SALES OF ELITE COTTAGES AND TOWNHOUSES. COMFORT AND CONVENIENCE AWAIT YOU AT THE BARN SWALLOW’S NEST. LVDEVELOPMENT LLC.

Yura made his way to the shallows and stopped, considering. The water had disappeared completely here, which was no surprise, considering that this was where the water had always been low. Still, he was wary, fearing that the wet sludge wouldn’t hold him up and he’d get stuck in it. But he had no choice. He had to get to the willow. Or had he come this whole way for nothing?

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