Page 94 of Pioneer Summer

“I don’t know. There’s no way she’s brave enough to tell the director, and if she did, I wouldn’t be here right now. What worries me is this: she and Irina left together afterward.”

“Do you think she told Irina?”

The door creaked open, revealing a red-eyed Masha in the doorway. Without answering Yurka’s question, Volodya got up and went onstage. But Yurka understood even without words: she may well have.

Masha tortured the Moonlight Sonata for a while, then went and helped Ksyusha with the costumes until the end of the day. Volodya was with the actors, rehearsing scenes and working on individual lines right up until dark. Yurka played, then finished painting the stage decorations and preparing the props. He forced himself to switch into robot mode again; it helped that there was a ton of work to do, making it easy to find something to keep himself busy.

That night it drizzled. Yurka couldn’t sleep. The calming effect of the tincture of motherwort had already worn off by lunch, and now, at night, as soon as Yurka got in bed, the worry he’d worked so hard to suppress seized him again, making him feel even worse than he had during the day. Had Masha told Ira?

Somehow Mitka, the radio announcer, had managed to make his way into the Troop One boys’ room. He and the rest of the boys were all sitting on their beds, getting ready to go toothpaste the girls and warming their tubes of toothpaste in their armpits. Yurka chatted with them to try to distract himself. They tried to get Yurka to go, too, but he refused.

“That’s your loss! You’re going to miss something really fun!” Mitka made one last attempt to convince him.

“Trying not to laugh while you finger paint? What’s fun about that? It’s way more fun to look at the results. As long as you use Pomorin, of course.” The Bulgarian brand was a favorite for toothpasting because its formula left a particularly nasty rash.

“We don’t have any Pomorin. Irina confiscated it. Ah, it’s too bad ...” lamented Pasha.

“Get a load of you!” Yurka, shaking his head, started digging around in his suitcase. “Where’s the joy in toothpasting with regular old toothpaste? But you’re in luck, because I’ve got some of the best toothpaste in the world right here!”

To everyone’s glee, Yurka stood up and brandished two whole tubes of Pomorin.

“Yurets! I owe you for life!” Flushed with joy, Mitka pressed his hand to his heart.

Yurka sent them off with a little advice. “Choose your victim carefully,” he warned, guessing who Mitka wanted to toothpaste. The boy’s crush on Ulyana was common knowledge. “The show is tomorrow, and a certain someone will blow her top if she has to perform with a rash covering half her face.”

“I’ll comfort her,” said Mitka with a wink.

“Comfort her, my foot. You’ve gotta learn how to talk in front of her first!”

Mitka lost the gift of speech anytime he even glimpsed Ulyana. But of course he assured all the boys that everything was moving along just as he intended.

“Draw something on Masha for me,” Yurka whispered to Mitka as the boys left. Mitka winked conspiratorially again in reply and disappeared out the door. The rest of the toothpasters tiptoed after him.

Yurka fell back on his bed. He listened intently to the hollow plunks of water droplets falling onto the roof. He looked up at the dark ceiling. The boys who hadn’t gone on the toothpasting expedition were keeping him awake, snoring and grinding their teeth in their sleep. The grinding was incredibly irritating. Yurka completely failed at trying to make himself ignore it. He plumped up his thin pillow, and tossed and turned, and fought off the thoughts that kept stubbornly creeping into his head, but each passing minute saw him more mired in wakefulness.

How long has it been since we’ve seen each other? And how much longer will it be? Tomorrow’s the last day of the session ... tomorrow’s the end! No, to hell with all this thinking. Just listening to Vatyutov’s teeth grinding is better than this...

Vatyutov moaned, rolled over, and finally went quiet. The rain kept changing, first petering out, then coming down harder.

As long as the rain stops by morning, thought Yurka.The bonfire’s tomorrow. The whole camp will be there. Maybe we can slip away from the crowd and talk? At least just say goodbye? This is so stupid, avoiding each other because of that idiot! I hope someday she suffers, too, from the same kind of stupid, mean, jealous ...

A rhythmic noise cut through the chaos of sound. Yurka froze. He listened. Then it vanished.

The head of his bed was right against the windowsill. Yurka sat up and turned his left ear toward the window. Had he imagined it? He hadn’t. Someone really was drumming on the windowpane. He looked out the window and saw a figure standing there, holding a flashlight whose dirty yellow light barely diluted the darkness. The person was dressed like a ninja, all in black: pants, jacket, cap ... and glasses. Volodya! As soon as he saw Yurka, Volodya’s shoulders sagged with relief.

Yurka, barely able to keep from jumping for joy, pressed his nose to the glass. He brought up his hand to open the window, but Volodya furiously shook his head no. He reached into his pocket and took out a piece of paper. He pressed it to the windowpane and lit it from the side with his watch. “Unfinished barracks. Now!” read Yurka, and nodded. Volodya mouthed the words, “I’ll wait for you there,” then dove back into the bushes.

Yurka got dressed the way his father had taught him: like a soldier, in the time it takes a lit match to burn out. He was also in a hurry because Mitkaand the boys would be coming back any minute and Yurka didn’t want any awkward questions. He was in such a rush that he pulled on the first things that came to hand—a warm sweater and a pair of shorts—but not so much that he forgot the main thing: to dress like a spy himself in a dark jacket with a hood.

Like a spy, he looked into the window of the girls’ room and confirmed that Masha was being toothpasted, and then, again like a spy, he kept checking all around him the whole time he trotted to the unfinished barracks, dreading that he’d see her over in the bushes somewhere. He was gripped by panic, even though he knew for a fact that Masha was asleep back in the cabin.

The path to the unfinished barracks started at almost the very beginning of the Avenue of Pioneer Heroes. It was well-defined, but very narrow, and it went off into the woods and looped around between the trees. Yurka had taken neither umbrella nor flashlight with him, so it was hard for him to make it to the fence around the new building; he kept either sinking into huge puddles or tripping over clods of earth.

In the moonless, rainy night, the empty four-story building looked like a gigantic gray spider with a dozen empty window-frame eye sockets. Out here the lamps worked until midnight, but it was long past midnight now and not a single ray of light fell on the construction debris littering the site: lengths of rebar, spools of cable, and strange pipes that looked in the dark like crooked spiders’ legs.

The tall gate wasn’t locked. It creaked open, but as Yurka crossed the deserted courtyard, he doubted himself: Had he understood this correctly? Were they really meeting here now? This didn’t seem like Volodya.

The narrow door of the main entrance opened easily. But instead of the warm air of a functional residential building, Yurka was met with a stream of damp and cold. The darkness was complete, total, even palpable. Yurka walked forward through it slowly, with effort, as though he were walking through water. Something rustled underfoot, and he looked down. It took him a moment for his eyes to get used to the dark, but then he saw that on the floor a narrow pale gray strip was becoming visible, like a photograph developing. It glowed against the black background, regular in some places, in others getting narrow or spreading out wide. At some points it curvedaround for no reason, and occasionally it got brighter, but at other points there were yawning black gaps. Yurka had to crouch down and examine it to figure out what it actually was. It turned out to be nothing supernatural: somebody had spread newspapers across the floor. Yurka’s eyes landed on one of the headlines of an issue ofPravdafrom May: “In and Around the Station: A Report from Our Special Correspondents on the Region of the Chernobyl Atomic Power Station.”

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