Chapter One #2
Masha Sidorova was also standing nearby, looking baffled as she searched the crowd.
Yura had known her for four years now.
She had it in for Polina, Ulyana, and Ksyusha, and she was condescending, and she always talked down to Yurka.
But last summer she’d gotten along really well with Anyuta.
And Anyuta was awesome.
Yurka really liked her.
He was friends with her and had even asked her to dance—twice.
And the best part was that she had! Both times! Yura liked her pealing cascades of laughter.
And also Anyuta was one of the only ones who hadn’t turned away from him last year, after—
Yurka clamped down on that thought.
He had no desire to recall what had happened then and how he’d had to apologize afterward.
He surveyed the athletic fields again, hoping Anyuta was here somewhere, but she was nowhere to be found.
He hadn’t seen her at assembly, either.
And judging from the way Masha was looking around, baffled, as she searched for her friend, it seemed unlikely that Anyuta was here.
Yurka asked Masha about Anya, who snapped: “Looks like she’s not coming.”
So he shoved his hands in his pockets, scowled, and wandered up the path, thinking about Anyuta.
Why hadn’t she come? It was too bad they’d become friends only as their camp session was ending.
Then they’d parted ways, and that was it.
That year, Anyuta had been his only happy memory from Camp Barn Swallow.
She’d said she really wanted to come to camp again but wasn’t sure she’d be able to.
Something about her father having some kind of problem with the Party, or maybe his job ...
Yurka wandered over to the power shed.
He kicked the lower branches of a thick cluster of lilacs growing there.
He was annoyed at it.
He didn’t like the smell; it was cloying and clung to the nose.
But, for lack of anything better to do, he stopped to look for flowers with five petals.
Once his mother had told him that if you find one, you should make a wish and eat it, and then your wish will come true.
As if he had anything to wish for, though.
A year or so ago, he’d had both dreams and plans ...
but now ...
“Konev!”
The stern voice of Irina, Yurka’s troop leader, rang out behind him. Yurka gritted his teeth and glanced over his shoulder. A pair of bright green eyes drilled suspiciously into him. “What are you doing walking around here by yourself?”
Irina had been his troop leader for three years now. The short brunette, tough but fair, was one of the few people at Camp Barn Swallow who Yurka got along with.
Yurka ducked his head. “Aw, MarIvanna ... ,”
he began pleadingly, without turning around.
“ What did you say?”
His little joke of calling her Marya Ivanovna, the archetypal stern schoolteacher name, had backfired. With a small crack Yurka broke off the lilac branch that had the biggest, most luxurious bunch of flowers. He turned around and held it out to the troop leader with a flourish: “I’m enjoying the flowers. Here, Ira Petrovna, this is for you!”
“Konev!”
Ira turned red and was obviously taken aback, but made her voice even stricter. “You are disturbing the public order! Good thing I’m the one who saw you over here. What if it’d been one of the senior staff?!”
Yurka knew his troop leader wouldn’t tell on him to anyone. First of all, because she felt sorry for him, for some reason, and so she was indulgent even in her strictness, and second of all because the troop leaders themselves could get reprimanded when their charges got out of line, so they tried to resolve things without getting the administration involved.
Ira sighed and put her hands on her hips.
“Well then, as long as you’re over here goofing off, I have an important public duty for you. Go find Alyosha Matveyev, in Troop Three, the redhead with freckles. Take him and go get two ladders from the facilities manager and bring them to the outdoor stage. Once you’re there, I’ll give you some strings of lights to hang for tonight’s dance. Got it?”
Yurka was more than a little disappointed: he’d been planning on going to the river, but now he had to try not to fall off a ladder instead. But he nodded. Grudgingly. Still, Irina narrowed her eyes at him: “Are you sure you’ve got it?”
“Yes, Marya Iva—dang it! Yes, ma’am, Ira Petrovna, ma’am!”
Yurka drew himself up and clicked the heels of his nonexistent boots together. He was the only one who addressed her formally, using her patronymic as well as her first name, utterly clueless that doing this really hurt her feelings.
“Konev, you’re on thin ice here! I was already tired of your little jokes last session!”
“I’m sorry, Ira Petrovna. Understood, Ira Petrovna. Consider it done, Ira Petrovna!”
“Go on, you troublemaker. Hop to it!”
Alyosha Matveyev turned out to be not only redheaded and freckled but jug-eared to boot.
He wasn’t a first-time camper, either, and babbled endlessly about past camp sessions.
He bounced chaotically from one topic to the next, tossing out names, occasionally asking, “Do you know so-and-so? What about so-and-so, remember him?”
And Alyosha’s red curls and ears weren’t the only things that stuck out: his teeth did, too, especially when he smiled, which was all the time.
Alyosha, funny and sunny, literally radiated energy and a thirst for life.
And he was devastatingly industrious—“devastatingly”
because five minutes of his help was worse than an hour of anyone else’s hindrance.
As a result, Yurka quickly came to learn why everyone at camp thought long and hard before giving him even the smallest assignment.
Hanging the strings of lights wasn’t hard.
It only took them an hour to wrap several of the surrounding trees in lights and stretch the best strings of lights above the stage.
The only thing left was to put up some lights on the apple tree.
Yurka appraised the tree with a professional eye and got on the ladder.
He wanted to make his beloved apple tree not only the prettiest tree there but also the most accessible one, so that when he was climbing it later he wouldn’t get tangled in the lights.
Holding one of the bulbs in one hand, he firmly grasped a tree branch with the other.
Then he stepped off the ladder up onto a limb so he could set the string of lights as high as possible.
There was a dry crack.
Alyosha shouted, and then something scratched Yurka’s cheek hard and the world went blurry for a couple of seconds, and then pain shot through his back and backside.
Everything briefly went black.
“Oh my goodness! Konev! Yurka! Yur, are you hurt? Are you alive?”
Ira was bent over him, both hands over her mouth.
“I’m alive ... ,”
he croaked, sitting up and holding his back. “I landed hard ... It hurts ...”
“What hurts? Where does it hurt?! Your arm? Your leg? What?! There?!”
“Ahhh, I broke it!”
“What did you break?! Yura, what’s broken?!”
“I broke the string of lights, that’s what ...”
“Who cares about that?! The main thing is—”
Yurka got to his feet.
All twenty-odd people who’d been decorating the main square for the celebration had surrounded the victim and were gazing at him expectantly.
Rubbing his scraped, bruised palm, Yurka grinned, trying to hide the pain behind a smile.
He was deeply afraid of losing his reputation as a brave, unflappable guy.
The last thing he needed to do now was complain about his boo-boo and look like a crybaby.
It’d be fine if it were just his hand and his back that hurt, but his damn tailbone was aching, too.
No way he could admit that, though, since everyone would just make fun of him: Konev busted his butt!
“What’s that you said? ‘Who cares about that’?”
interjected Olga Leonidovna, the educational specialist. She was tough as nails and had been out to get Yurka for two years now.
“What’s that supposed to mean, Irina?! That string of lights is camp property! Who’s going to pay for it? Me? Or maybe you? Or you , Konev?!”
“What am I supposed to do if your ladders are rickety?”
“Oh, so the ladders are rickety! Is that it?! Or is it your own fault, you good-for-nothing! Just look at yourself!”
She jabbed her finger sternly in Yurka’s chest. “A Pioneer’s neckerchief is one of his most valued possessions, but yours is dirty and torn, and the knot is crooked! You should be ashamed, walking around camp looking like that ... attending assembly like that!”
Yurka hastily plucked up one of the ends of his swatch of red fabric and examined it. It was dirty, actually. But how’d that happen? Was it from falling out of the apple tree? He defended himself: “It was straight when I was at assembly! It got crooked because I fell!”
“Because you’re a parasite and a vandal!”
Olga Leonidovna’s spit was flying. Yurka was flabbergasted. Unable to think of anything to say in reply, he stood listening mutely as she belittled him. “You outgrew the Pioneers two years ago! But here you are, a great big sixteen-year-old lug, and you’re not even thinking about joining the Komsomol! Or is it that they won’t take you? Is that it, Konev? You haven’t earned it? You don’t do any public service work, your grades are abysmal—of course they won’t take you! The Komsomol doesn’t take hooligans!”
Yurka would’ve been gleeful—at last, he’d gotten the senior specialist to show her true colors, and in front of everyone!—but that last bit made him too mad.
“I’m not a hooligan! It’s your fault that everything in this camp of yours is all flimsy, all creaky, but you—you—”
He was about to let loose and tell her exactly what he thought of her. Yurka leaped to his feet, took a lungful of air, got ready to yell, and—abruptly choked it all back when somebody poked him right in his aching spine, hard. It was Ira. She widened her eyes at him and hissed: “Quiet!”
“What did you stop for, Yura?”
the educational specialist said, narrowing her eyes. “Keep going. We’re all listening to you very attentively. And after this, I’ll call your parents, and I’ll write you up a character reference that’ll keep you from ever seeing the Komsomol, much less the Party!”
The very skinny, very tall Olga Leonidovna towered over him, furrowing her eyebrows and emitting sparks of fury from her eyes. She was showing zero signs of subsiding. “You’re going to end up sweeping floors your whole life! You should be ashamed of yourself for disgracing your name!”
Yura flushed; it wasn’t his fault he had the same last name as the great general Ivan Konev.
“But, Olga Leonidovna ... you told us yourself never to shout at a child ... ,”
Ira ventured reproachfully.
There had already been a large group around them from Yurka’s fall, but more people gathered when they heard the shouting. The educational specialist was chewing out not only Yurka but a troop leader, too, in front of all of them.
“It’s the only thing he understands!”
the tall woman countered, then continued her accusations: “Earlier today you went on a rampage in the mess hall, and now you’re breaking our lights!”
“That was an accident! I didn’t mean to!”
Yurka truly hadn’t meant to cause a fuss, and certainly not in the mess hall.
But while he was clearing his plate at lunch, he’d accidentally smashed half the camp’s dishes.
He’d dropped his plate on a wobbly stack of other people’s dirty dishes, and it slid off and crashed into other dishes, which then also slid and crashed into more dishes, and finally everything spilled to the floor and smashed to pieces, making a huge racket.
Of course, everyone noticed.
Half the camp had come running at the noise.
But he just stood there, open-mouthed and red-faced.
Yura never wanted any attention, to the point that back home he even went to the store in the next village over, not the closest one, just to avoid seeing people he knew.
And now this: he’d fallen out of a tree and was getting a tongue-lashing over some lights while everybody watched.
“Olga Leonidovna, please go easy on him,”
Ira intervened again. “Yura’s a good kid. He’s grown up since last year, he’s gotten better, right, Yur? It wasn’t his fault, the ladder was rickety. He should go to the first aid station—”
“Irina! Now that’s too much! You should be ashamed of yourself, lying right to my face—and me a thirty-year member of the Communist Party!”
“No—I didn’t—”
“I saw Konev step off that ladder onto the tree limb with my own two eyes. I’m officially issuing you a severe reprimand, Irina! That’ll teach you to cover for sabotage!”
“What are you talking about, Olga Leonidovna?! What sabotage?”
“One reprimand’s not enough? You want a matched set on your record?!”
“No. Of course not. It’s just that Yura—he’s still a child, after all, and he has a lot of energy. He needs to direct that energy into the proper channel ...”
“Some child! He’s almost two meters tall!”
She was exaggerating his height, of course. One meter seventy-five centimeters, they’d announced at his last checkup, and not a centimeter more. Yurka hoped to god he’d eventually hit two meters. Although there was no god in the USSR.
“He’s a creative boy, he needs a club that’s a little more active.”
Ira Petrovna wouldn’t let it go. “We have an athletics group, right, Yura? Or else we have a drama club that just started, and Volodya does need more boys. Please, Olga Leonidovna, give him a chance! I’ll take full responsibility.”
“You’ll take full responsibility?”
the educational specialist said, showing her teeth in a sneer.
Yurka was sure this was the end, but all of a sudden Olga Leonidovna scoffed.
“Fine. I’m holding you personally responsible. And no more warnings.”
She glanced at Yurka. “Konev, if a single thing goes wrong, you’ll both answer for it. That’s right, you heard me: Irina will be punished for your mistakes. Maybe that’ll keep you in line.”
Then she barked, “Volodya!”
Volodya had been hauling the music equipment out of the movie theater to set it up for the dance.
When he heard his name, he stopped, blanching and blinking nervously.
But then his darting glance shifted to Yurka, and in a flash Volodya changed completely: the color came back to his face, he squared his shoulders, and he marched boldly over to the instructor.
“Yes, Olga Leonidovna?”
“You’re getting a new actor.
And to make sure he doesn’t sit around twiddling his thumbs when you need help with your drama club, we’re going to broaden the scope of Konev’s responsibilities.
I want daily reports on his progress.”
“Yes, Olga Leonidovna.
Konev ...
it’s Yura, right? Rehearsal’s in the movie theater right after snack.
Don’t be tardy, please.”
Taaaaardy , Yurka laughed to himself, mocking Volodya’s pretentious Moscow accent with its long, drawn-out a ’s.
But Volodya actually had a nice voice.
It was a little deeper than the standard baritone, silky and pleasant, yet not at all singsongy or trained.
Up close, the troop leader didn’t look scared anymore.
Quite the opposite.
As Volodya walked up to Yurka and looked closely at him, Volodya seemed a completely different person, calmly taking hold of his glasses by both arms and resettling them on the bridge of his nose, then lifting his chin and looking down at Yurka a trifle superciliously.
Yurka—who came up to Volodya’s nose, as it happened—leaned back on his heels and confirmed, “Understood.
I’ll be on time.”
Volodya nodded and looked away, his gaze landing on some kids poking around the speaker cables.
He ran over to them, sternly shouting: “Hey, what are you doing? Those cables are for the light and sound equipment!”
Yurka turned away.
The dance floor was humming like a disturbed beehive.
The Pioneers were getting back to business, each with a different task: hanging things, fixing things, painting, washing, sweeping ...
and behind Yurka, in the band shell, he heard the creak of stretching cord.
The kids were getting ready to hang up the big cloth banner that was spread out flat on the stage.
San Sanych, the facilities manager, thundered, “Pull!”
The cord twanged taut and the broad, bright red length of cloth with snow-white letters snapped into the air right over Yurka’s head.
Yurka scoffed, picked at the considerably frayed edge of his own Pioneer neckerchief, and scornfully chanted the ubiquitous Pioneer poem: “Pioneer, remember to treat your scarf well, and honor the story of duty it tells ...”