Page 7 of Pioneer Summer

“Or else you’ll get yourself kicked out of camp if you cause trouble again!” Volodya raised his voice, a note of anger sounding in it. “I’m serious. Do you have any idea how much trouble Irina got in today because of those lights? Oh, and on that note, Olga Leonidovna asked me to remind you that that was your final warning.”

Yurka had nothing to say in reply. He jumped to his feet and started walking in little circles. Then he stopped, lost in thought. Was camp boring? Yeah, of course. But did he want to leave? Not really, no. To tell the truth, Yurka couldn’t figure out what he wanted, but to be kicked out in disgrace ... Well, he didn’t care that much, even if it was in disgrace, but what about Ira Petrovna? What if she got a reprimand in her personal file and a terrible character reference? What a great guy he was: not only had he hidden behind his troop leader’s skirts, he’d also let her down. No, this was definitely not what he’d had in mind.

“So you vouched for me and now you’re blackmailing me?” he huffed, though it wasn’t clear who he was angry at, Ira and Volodya or himself.

“Nobody’s blackmailing you, much less trying to get you kicked out. Just be on your best behavior, do what your troop leaders say, and be helpful.”

“Do what they say?” spat Yurka.

He’d been backed into a corner. It felt like everyone had banded together against him and now they were looking for an opportunity to rub it in, finding ways to harass him, suffocate him ... He’d just arrived and they were already attacking him, accusing him, yelling at him, lecturing him. It wasn’t fair!

It was like Yura turned into a wild beast, with no awareness of what he was saying. He needed to unleash his suppressed rage, to smash and crush everything in his path.

“But who are you, anyway, that I should do what you say? Ha! I’ll show you! You want a performance? Fine! I’ll give you a performance—one you won’t forget!”

“Aaaaand here come the threats,” chuckled Volodya, as though Yurka’s tirade hadn’t moved him in the slightest. “Go ahead, give your performance. You’ll get kicked out, and that’ll be the last we hear of you. Just know who’ll get the blame for it. You. Not me. Like you don’t already know the way you stick in the administration’s craw.”

“But I didn’t do anything bad!” Yurka shot back. Then he sighed, dejected. “It just ... it all just happened, the plates, and the lights ... I didn’t mean to! And I didn’t mean for Ira to get involved, either ...”

“It’s obvious you didn’t mean to,” said Volodya, so sincerely that Yurka gaped in astonishment.

“Come again?”

“I believe you,” Volodya said. “Other people would, too, if Yura Konev didn’t have such a bad reputation. Ever since you almost got thrown out after your fight last year, we’ve been getting a ton of inspections, one after the other. You give Leonidovna the least opportunity and she’ll throw you out. So here’s the thing, Yura ... be a man. Irina vouched for you, and now I’m answering for you, too. Don’t let us down.”

There was an upright piano on the right side of the stage. In center stage stood a bust of Lenin on a pedestal. Yura was so frustrated he felt like hurling the leader of the proletariat to the floor and shattering the sculpture into a million pieces, but he tried to calm down and steady his breathing. He walked up to the bust, propped his elbows on the pedestal, and rested his forehead on Ilych’s cold balding pate. With his forehead still pressed to the statue, he swiveled his head to look sadly at Volodya.

“Since you’re being so honest and all, tell me this: Are you not giving me a part so that nobody’ll see my ugly mug and I won’t embarrass the camp?”

“What kind of nonsense is that? There’s no part for you because I haven’t thought of one yet. Our boy actors are all little. You’d look like a giant in the land of the Lilliputians out there with them, but there aren’t any giants in the script.” He smiled. “Look, is there something else you can do? Can you sing? Dance? Play an instrument?”

Yurka glanced at the piano, an Elegy, a typical Soviet upright model. His chest constricted painfully. He scowled and fixed his gaze on the floor.

“I can’t do anything and I don’t want to do anything,” he lied, knowing full well that right now he wasn’t lying to Volodya as much as to himself.

“I see. In that case we’ll go back to where we started: you’ll be my helper, and at the same time you’ll work on your own discipline and restore your reputation.”

Their conversation ground to a halt. The silence grew. With his left eye Yurka focused on Vladimir Ilych’s nose. Then he blew a speck of dust off it. Then Volodya, the other Vladimir in the room—the one who was the leader of Troop Five, not of the world proletariat—buried himself in his notebook again.

Meanwhile, the snack break Yurka had left early was ending and the actors started trickling into the movie theater. The first one to arrive was Masha Sidorova. Smiling at Volodya and ignoring Yurka, her hips swung breezily in her circle skirt as she walked over to the piano and sat down. Yurka looked hard at her: in the intervening year she’d changed completely. She’d gotten taller and thinner. Her hair now hung down to her waist, and she’d learned to flirt, just like a grown woman. Now she was sitting all proud and pretty, her back straight and her legs long and tan.

“Ludwig van Beethoven,” she announced quietly. “Piano Sonata No. 14 in C-sharp Minor, Opus 27.” She flipped her hair back and touched her fingers to the keys.

Yurka winced. The Moonlight Sonata! Couldn’t she have thought of something a little more original? The sonata was already painfully familiar. Everybody and their dog could play it. But Yurka was a tiny bit jealous, despite his grumbling, because it was Volodya, not him, who Masha sought with her timid yet tender gaze, and it was for Volodya, not for him, that she played.

When Masha finished the sonata, she immediately began a new piece, clearly trying to keep Volodya standing right there next to her a little longer, gazing approvingly at her, smiling at her ... But Mashka’s efforts were all for naught, because a swarm of young actors burst into the theater, slamming the door the way good-for-nothing Yurka had wanted to earlier. The group seized both Volodya’s attention and Volodya himself: he was trapped inside a circle of yelling children, each of whom simply had to tell the artistic director something of the utmost importance.

Volodya tried to calm their agitation, but a moment later he was the one who was agitated: the trinity had come to the theater! No fathers, sons, or holy ghosts here, of course—although, speaking of things celestial, it did smell to high heaven from their perfume. It was Polina, Ulyana, and Ksyusha. Yurka privately called them the Pukes, after the first letters of their names. These three girls were the living embodiment of the three “See no evil, hear no evil, speak no evil” monkeys but in reverse: “See everything, hear everything, and blab everything.” Even now they eagerly surveyed the theater as they fluttered grandly up to the stage. All dressed up, even overdressed, and each with the exact same lipstick and the exact same smell: the Polish perfume Byc Moze, “Perhaps.” Yurka knew the scent well, since half the country used it.

At first he thought Volodya had made up the “I’m the only grown-up in drama club” stuff, but as soon as Yurka looked over at the nervously sweating artistic director, he realized that Volodya himself was surprised at the club’s newfound popularity. And Polina was making matters worse, grabbing Volodya’s elbow and enthusing: “Volodya, let’s put on a modern play! There’s this one really interesting play about love, and actually I could even play the role of—”

“Girls! You do know that clubs have already been assigned?!” interrupted Masha, pale with rage. Apparently she’d realized it was the club leader, not the club, that had gotten so popular. “Go away. You’re too late.”

“N-no, it’s okay,” Volodya said, disconcerted, his cheeks burning. Small wonder: so many beautiful girls around, and all of them gazing at him ... Yurka would be disconcerted too! “There were a lot of girls in the Young Avengers, not just Zina Portnova. We’ll find parts for you. We need someone to play Fruza Zenkova, for example ...”

“So that’s how it is! You’ll find parts for them, but I have to babysit?!” Yurka raged.

His protest went unheeded. The shouting of the older teens joined the chorus of shrieking children. A straight-up clown show ensued.

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