Page 8 of Pioneer Summer

“So can I be the costumer?” shrilled Ksyusha. “I’ll make such pretty dresses!”

“What kind of pretty dresses are there during a war?” asked Yurka indignantly.

“The show’s about war?” Ksyusha whined in disappointment. “Awww ...”

“Ha!” barked Yurka. “Obviously it’s about war—it’s about Portnova! Hmph ... signs up to do the show without even knowing what it’s about ... Volodya! Why am I the one who has to babysit?!”

“Vovchik, come on, let’s do something modern!” Polina wasn’t giving up. “Let’s doAthena and Venture!”

Yurka snorted. The spectacular, wildly popular Soviet Russian rock opera was a little bit out of their league.

“But who was just saying that doing a show was boring, Pol?! Who was that, hm?!” Masha, disheveled from rage, yanked down the hem of her cotton dress. “And what are you laughing at, Ulya? Like you weren’t egging her on!”

“What do you care! Afraid we’re going to steal him?” jeered Ulyana. “Volodya! Volodya! Volodya! Look at me! Is it my turn? Can I say something? Volodya!” The little kids were jumping up and down and grabbing the artistic director’s arm.

“We should have the metro in the show! I’ve been on the Moscow metro. It’s so beautiful,” bragged Sasha, a chubby boy little from Volodya’s troop.

“Now just hold on a minute. One at a time, children ... ,” the troop leader said, trying to calm them, but the room kept escalating.

“I stood on the very edge of the platform and the trains went by all shoom! fshoom! fshoom! Right on the very edge, like this ... and shoom!” said the pudgy show-off, spinning around to demonstrate speed.

“Sasha, get back from the edge of the stage! You’ll fall!”

“Shoom! Fshoom!”

“You miserable frump!”

“Can I say something?”

“That’s not fair!”

“I’ll do the costumes!”

“Good god, that’s enough!” Volodya’s roar reverberated through the theater, drowning out the hubbub.

It got quiet. So quiet Yura could hear the dust motes floating to the floor, and his heart beating (ba-bump), and Masha’s furious breathing. Everyone froze ... except the chubby show-off, who was spinning in circles on the very edge of the stage ... It was tall, at least a meter off the ground ...

... ba-bump ... ba-bump ... ba—

—and suddenly the boy’s ankle twisted, he awkwardly threw his arms wide, and he fell, slowly and heavily, off the stage. Yurka’s heart skipped a beat, Masha squeezed her eyes shut in horror, and Volodya’s glasses flashed—

—bump!

“Aaagh! My foot!!”

“Sasha!”

It hurt just to look at the show-off, but it hurt even more to look at Volodya and see how he ran in circles around the injured boy, how his hands shook, how he started cursing himself: “But this is something I could’ve stopped ... I could’ve stopped this ...” Even though Yurka was mad at Volodya, he still found himself the first one rushing forward to help.

“Let me through! My father’s a doctor!” Yurka yelled, quoting a line from a popular foreign film as he elbowed through the crowd of gaping actors that had immediately collected around Sasha and knelt beside the chubby little tyke. In a way, Yurka wasn’t kidding: his father had showed him a thousand times how to examine a patient. So now he examined the scraped ankle and skinned knee, then concluded with an air of expertise that the patient needed to be taken to the first aid station, and quickly, adding authoritatively that a stretcher wouldn’t be necessary.

Volodya grasped Sasha under the armpits and tried to heave him to his feet, but the victim burst into tears, categorically refusing to stand on his uninjured leg.

“Yur, help me. Get on his left. I can’t ... phew ... I can’t do it myself ...” panted Volodya. It was bad enough that the squirming, sobbing Sashka weighed as much as Volodya himself, but his panicked flailing was making things worse.

“Mommy! Mooommmyyyy!” Sasha groaned.

“Okay, take his arm: one, two, three, up!” said Yurka brusquely, doggedly acting like nothing hurt and he hadn’t gotten all banged up earlier that day falling out of the apple tree. Although even just bending over hurt.

---