Page 72 of Pioneer Summer

Yurka, the Pukes, and Volodya all sat in the back row of the audience while the little kids warmed up for the scene with the Fascists. The Pukes weren’t saying anything, but their presence was bothering Yurka anyway. With them around, he had to act like nothing special had happened or was happening, although inside him the sirens had been blaring and the steam trains had been shrieking for an hour already, everything smoking and shaking: “Grab Volodya and get out of here!”

“Olga Leonidovna was right about some things,” the potential kidnap victim mused aloud. “The partisans were under constant suspicion. There were two thousand German soldiers in Obol, a whole convoy of executioners. Torture and death were assured for any partisan who fell into their hands ... and here we are depicting these heroes as though they didn’t even feel fear!”

“What she wants is professional actors!” said Yurka indignantly. “The moral of the show is to demonstrate that anyone can be a hero,” he said, repeating the educational specialist’s words. “You know what, though? Kids like us today wouldn’t be able to fight like those kids did during the war, much less win. But here she is, asking us to portray them.”

“Yikes, shut it, Konev. You’ll jinx us. We can do it ... ,” Ksyusha said gloomily.

“I told you we should’ve done something modern,” Ulyana protested, and in a soft, pleasant voice, started the poignant duet fromAthena and Venture: “You’ll wake with the dawn’s first ray ...”

Polina stared dully at the floor.

Volodya ignored the protest. He glanced at Yurka and shrugged. “Yes we would. It’s war. They’ll kill you anyway. Your only choice here is to either surrender or get revenge for the ones they already killed. But enough lyricism. Time to get to work.”

A tense atmosphere settled over the auditorium. Volodya already turned into a stereotypical demanding artistic director whenever he stepped inside the theater, but now he was utterly pitiless, ignoring everything around him to focus solely on rehearsal. He blew his top, and yelled at the actors, and scolded the little kids, even though they were already sitting as quiet as mice.

But Yurka didn’t hide his boredom. There was a long way to go until his scene as Krause, and it was by no means certain Volodya was even going to rehearse it. So what was he supposed to do with himself? Sit around languishing until rehearsal was over and then hope Volodya would be in the mood to talk? No way. Yurka was tired of all the waiting and hoping. The last three hours had felt like an eternity.

There was an incident with Ulyana during rehearsal. She was overacting badly, and after yet another repetition of her monologue, Volodya’s patience snapped. He cut her off in the middle of a word, shouting: “Can you really not hear yourself, how terrible you are?! Do you not understand you’re an Avenger? You’re a partisan, Ulya! Why are you reciting your lines in a singsong like a four-year-old at a preschool parents’ day?!”

Yurka cringed, squeezing his eyes shut: on top of the general tension and Olga Leonidovna’s criticism, Volodya had gone too far. It was no wonder that Ulyana burst into tears. And Volodya immediately regretted his words, of course, and rushed to console her. He put one arm around her awkwardly, and she seized the opportunity to bury her face in his shoulder, getting tears, snot, and mascara all over his sleeve.

“Ulyana, I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to ... What I said was stupid ... Come on, now ... don’t cry ...”

But Ulyana just sighed and pressed even closer to Volodya.

Yurka was boiling with rage and jealousy: here was another one, just like Masha, turning on the waterworks to make Volodya grovel. And it was working! Conscientious, kindhearted Volodya was there on the double with his apologies, demeaning himself in front of her.Well, aren’t you just so sympathetic!thought Yurka indignantly.Dancing with random Mashas because you feel sorry for them ... Did you feel sorry for me, too, and that’s why you wanted to kiss me?!

He stomped angrily to a far corner of the theater, then sat down in a seat at the end of a row that was obscured in the darkness of the closed curtain. Scowling, he fixed his eyes on the bust of Lenin gathering dust in a corner. He remembered how a couple of days ago Volodya had made him carry the incredibly heavy bust off the stage like he was some kind of porter. Yurka snorted and frowned even harder. He sneaked a look around and saw that nobody was paying the least attention to his travails. Only Vladimir Ilych gazed morosely at him with his blank plaster eyes.

“What are you looking at?” mumbled Yurka. Nobody heard him. Onstage, Ulyana was still convulsed with sobs and Volodya was still murmuring apologetically to her.

Lenin, obviously, didn’t answer Yurka’s question.

Yurka stood up and walked up to the bust. On its pedestal, it was about as tall as he was. “Nobody needs me,” Yurka complained. He reached out to Lenin’s forehead and ran his hand over the rough plaster of the leader’s bald head. He heaved a sigh. “You and me, we’re the same, huh? Nobody needs you either, you’re standing over here in the corner too, gathering dust ... Eh, Vladimir Ilych, you’re the only one who understands me.” He grasped the head of the plaster statue in both hands, leaned forward, and kissed Lenin right on the forehead. “Thank you for listening to me ... I actually feel better now ...”

“Yura!” hissed Volodya behind him. “What on earth are you doing?!” Judging by his tone, he was furious.

Yurka turned around and looked at the artistic director. Indeed, Volodya was furious, no doubt about it: his eyes flashed lightning.

“What? I’m rehearsing!” protested Yurka, and began reading his lines, whispering them into Lenin’s ear: “My brave Fräulein, deep in the heart ofthis small mechanism”—he stuck out two fingers to make a pistol and poked it into Lenin’s temple—“lies one single solitary round. It is not large. But it is deadly. All my finger has to do is twitch, completely by accident, and there will no longer be any need for long, drawn-out conversations. Ponder this, my brave Fräulein. Your life is priceless, but it would be so easy to simply end it with one careless move ...”

“Yura, what’s with the anti-Soviet antics?!”

Yurka turned around and looked at him, nonplussed.

Volodya closed the distance between them and said right in Yurka’s ear, “You do get how that looks from the outside, right? You’re insulting the memory of the leader of the revolution.”

Yurka scoffed. “Oh, to hell with that revolution! To hell with Leonidovna and her partisans and Fascists! That’s all she and Palych ever do: paint some people as all evil and some people as all good ...”

“What? You’re complaining because they’re callingFascismevil?! Have you lost your mind? Have you gotten so into your part that Fascism isn’t automatically evil now?”

“I’m not saying that! But what about the opposite? Maybe Communism isn’t automatically good. Think about it! Volodya, have you really never wondered why they only ever talk about the same things when it comes to Fascist Germany? The war, the annihilation, the concentration camps ... But what about the social structure, the political system? Why don’t we get anything about them? Could it be because at that time in the USSR everything was exactly the same way? Just instead of Jews in the camps, it was dissenters, and instead of Aryans, it was Party members? The Germans even had their own version of Pioneers!”

Volodya frowned. “What are you getting at?”

Yurka didn’t know. There he went again, talking utter nonsense just so people would pay attention to him, like a little kid. Yurka didn’t like it. He disgusted himself. But he couldn’t stop. He couldn’t let Volodya go back to Ulyana.

“I’m saying that Germans are people too, like us. They’re not all scum.”

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