Page 9 of Pioneer Summer

“Masha, you’re in charge,” said Volodya.

Masha glared triumphantly at her rivals.

“Can I be the costumer?” the pesky Ksyusha butted in.

“All right, fine!” replied Volodya irritably. He took a moment; then, calmer, he instructed: “Read the play out loud until I get back, and—good god, Sasha! I know it hurts, but quit yelling your head off!”

Their journey to the first aid station was long and slow, accompanied the whole way by the victim’s wails. But anybody with eyes could tell Sasha was screeching not from pain but from fear, and also to be the center of attention. Yurka was silent, focused on his own tailbone, while Volodya urged Sasha on: “Come on, Sanya, you can do it, hang on, just a little more ...”

The nurse came out when she heard the wailing and immediately set to fussing and clucking like a mother hen over the pitiful creature. She rudely shoved Yurka aside and shot a stern, even threatening look at the troop leader. Yurka shrugged and didn’t bother going into the first aid station. What if Larisa Sergeyevna inquired whether the ointment she gave him earlier had helped? Then Volodya would find out about Yurka’s injury. Not a major concern, but still annoying. At any rate, Yurka decided to wait for Volodya, who had followed the nurse and her patient inside. Yurka wanted to find out whether he’d correctly diagnosed the patient as suffering from boneheadedness and a few bruises, not strains and sprains.

A comfy little bench nestled under an overgrown wild rose in full bloom by the porch. Yurka lay down on the bench, gazed up at the sky, and took in a lungful of fresh, flower-scented air, appreciating how stuffy it had been in the movie theater and how good he felt now.

Volodya came out after ten minutes or so. He pushed Yurka’s feet away and plopped down on the bench in exhaustion. He heaved a heavy sigh.

“How is the victim? Will he live?” Yurka asked lazily, still luxuriating in the air: it was so good, so pure and cool, you could all but drink it.

“Ah, it’s just a scratched knee and a couple of bruises, nothing serious. So what’d he scream bloody murder like that for?”

“What for?” Yurka repeated, raising his head off the bench but holding off from sitting up all the way. “You had auditions today, right? Well, now he stands out from the rest. Clearly he wanted to demonstrate all his many talents at once. You should make a note of it. There’s gotta be a way to use a voice like that!”

Volodya smiled. On his tired face, the smile looked so genuine that Yurka was taken aback: Had he really been the cause of it? That felt good; he was glad. But Volodya’s smile vanished as quickly as it had appeared.

“I’m so sick of all this!” Volodya said, rubbing his temples.

“What are you sick of? Being in charge?” Yurka stretched, then put his hands behind his head and looked up at the sky. The blue was so bright he had to squint.

“It’s only the first day of the session and I’m already sick of it! Running around taking care of the small fry, justifying every little thing I do to the senior staff, and then they chew me out for every little thing anyway. And then they saddled me with this club ... and now, to top it all off, a kid’s been injured ...”

“So why are you doing it? Didn’t you know it’d be hard?”

“I knew it’d be hard; I just didn’t know it’d be this hard. When I was at Pioneer camp, it looked easy: just taking care of little kids. Nothing to it! And I thought it’d be useful, too: you get paid for it, and you get to relax out in nature, and it’s great for your character reference, which is really handy for the Komsomol or maybe even for the Party, if you’re lucky. But the reality of it is completely different.” Volodya shifted down the bench toward Yurka and bent closer to him. “They foisted off the youngest troop on me, telling me it’s easier to work with the little ones. But it’s just the opposite. I count them three times an hour because they keep running off with other troop leaders and they don’t do anything I say. What am I supposed to do, scream at them for real?”

“Why not? Even the educational specialist does! Hmph ... call that ‘educating’ ... she can just go and ...” Yurka pouted.

“She shouldn’t have done that, of course,” Volodya said. “She taught us not to raise our voice at a child, but that if we do have to bawl someone out,then to focus on the action, not the child. And, most importantly, not to do it in front of other people.”

“She said that?” Yurka gave a derisive snort. “No kidding.”

“Yes, she did. But that was before we got a surprise inspection yesterday, before you all got here, that uncovered a lot of violations. Now she’s stressed. We get inspections every session now. And guess whose fault that is?”

“Oh, come on! Like that’s all because of me!” Yurka didn’t believe it, but it did ruin his good mood.

“Who had the bright idea of getting into a fistfight at Pioneer camp? You should be grateful the police weren’t called in.” Volodya’s eyes flashed dangerously, but his attempt at teaching Yurka some sense ended when he glanced over at the little green hut of the first aid station. The troop leader suddenly wilted, turning from a model educator into a regular guy. He sighed. Clearly, even just being reminded of the injured Sashka sucked him right back into a whirlpool of misgivings. When Volodya spoke again, his voice was hoarse and lifeless: “I have to take Troop Five to the river tomorrow. Not by myself, of course; Lena, the other troop leader, is coming, and she’s more experienced. And the athletic director’s coming, too; he’ll also help me keep an eye on the kids. And we’ve already roped off a shallow zone for them. Everything by the book. But I’m still absolutely terrified. And Lena’s also terrified. She told me a troop leader she knows was prosecuted last year when one of her girls drowned in the river ... in the middle of the day, in front of all the troop leaders ... We didn’t make it to the river today. By the time we got everybody out here and got all set up, it was already lunchtime. But tomorrow there’s no way out, we have to take them to the beach. If I had my way, we wouldn’t even let them get near the water!”

Yurka shifted uncomfortably. Camp Barn Swallow had actually had its share of accidents, too; he’d heard things.

“Well ... don’t let it get you down,” he said. Volodya had now become even more dejected, so Yurka decided to cheer him up. “It’s just the beginning of the session; there’s still a lot of time left. You’ll find your rhythm, you’ll get used to it. I mean, look at Ira Petrovna—this isn’t her first time being a troop leader, so there’s got to be something good about all this, right?”

“The only good thing I see so far is the pay and the good character reference, to get into the Party later ...”

“Why are you so fixated on the Party?!” Yurka burst out. “This is the second time you’ve brought it up!”

It irritated him when people tried to just live by inertia, going wherever they were led, uninterested in stepping off the beaten path sometimes to do something differently from how they’d been taught.

Volodya just shrugged. “Of course I’m fixated on it! Yura, you know full well that without a Party membership you can’t get a good job—I mean a really good job—and that you can’t travel anywhere, either. Sure, it’s not an ideal political system—in some ways it’s outdated, in other ways it’s over the top—but it works, after all ...”

“What do you mean?” Yurka’s eyebrow shot up in surprise. He’d never expected to hear something like this from Volodya, a prime example of somebody who, to all appearances, was a zealous follower of that “working” system’s orders.

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