Pioneer Summer

Chapter One Coming Back To Camp Barn Swallow

Yes, there was a shovel in his trunk. Why shouldn’t there be? After all, it was a perfectly natural place for someone who grew up in the USSR to keep one. What if it was winter out? Deep snow? But even in September, there could still be lots of reasons: he could get stuck in the mud, or in a pothole. Would they get worked up about the rubber boots, too? What about the windshield washer fluid?

As he met the traffic cops’ questioning gazes, Yura couldn’t tell whether they were pulling his leg or not. Come on, they were local guys—how did they not get the need for a shovel?

After listening to his explanation, the Ukrainian traffic cops nodded in unison, but they didn’t let him go. They could tell from his German driver’s license that he was a foreigner, so the conversation took a predictable turn. There was a sign right there showing the speed limit, right? Right, agreed Yura. And the speed limit shown on the sign was exceeded, right? Right, agreed Yura. So the infraction of the law was self-evident, right? Right, agreed Yura. But Yura didn’t want any, ahem, extra hassle because of it, right? Right, agreed Yura again. And therefore ... ?

This is what finally made Yura mad. How could he have avoided an infraction, with the sign at the very bottom of a steep downhill and covered by a big feathery poplar branch?

“You should be cutting down that branch, not putting radar traps at the bottom of the hill,”

Yura said. “Because if the speed limit’s lower there, it must be for a reason. It must be a dangerous stretch of road!”

The traffic cops, evidently indifferent to matters of traffic safety, were less than enthusiastic about his observation. Cutting down tree branches wasn’t their job, and telling them what to do wasn’t his.

The taller cop turned Yura’s driver’s license over in his hands a few times. “Okay. Looks like it’ll be an infraction, then,”

he sighed. “Of course, you could also just pay the fine now ... unless you want the extra hassle?”

Inside Yura, a battle was raging between a principled European stance—he’d lived half his life in Germany, after all—and common sense. Insist on justice, demanding they cut down the branch and drop the charge against him? Or hand over the “fine”—a bribe—and save time? The battle was brief. Common sense prevailed. Yura did not, in fact, want the extra hassle.

“How much?”

The men exchanged a crafty look: “Five hundred hryvnias!”

Half a month’s salary in Ukraine. They obviously took him for a fool.

Yura started digging out his wallet. Seeing this, the stalwart traffic cops softened. All smiles now, they inquired as to where he was headed, eagerly offering to show him the way so “Herr Foreigner”

wouldn’t accidentally get lost out here in the back end of beyond.

“How do I get to the village of Horetivka? The village is on the map, but the road isn’t. I remember it, but I can’t find it.”

“Horetivka?”

the tall one asked. “That hasn’t been a village for a long time. It’s a fancy cottage community now.”

“Okay, so it’s not a village, but there’s still a way to get there, right?”

“You can get there all right, but you probably can’t get in. It’s a gated community with a guardhouse. They don’t let in just anybody.”

Yura gave it some thought. Before the conversation with the traffic cops, he’d had a clear plan for finding the special spot that was the goal of his trip: get to Horetivka and walk through the fields of the former collective farm down to the river. But now, if he couldn’t get into the village ... maybe he should give it a chance anyway? He could make a deal with one of the guards? Yura shook his head. No, he’d lose too much time if it didn’t work out. His only remaining option was to get there through the camp. “Okay. Then how do I get to Camp Barn Swallow?”

“To what?”

“The Zina Portnova Barn Swallow Pioneer Camp. It was around here somewhere back in Soviet times.”

The shorter cop brightened.

“Oh, yeah, that camp. Yeah, it was here ...”

The taller one eyed Yura: “But what do you want to go there for?”

“I was born in the USSR, you know. I went to that camp. I spent my childhood there. Das Heimweh, Nostalgie ...”

He caught himself. “Homesickness, nostalgia!”

“Ah, right, we get it.”

The cops exchanged a look. “Where’s your map?”

Yura handed it over and watched attentively as one of the men traced a finger across it.

“You need to go along R-295 until the sign for the village Richne. About twenty meters after that, there’ll be a turn off to the right. Take that and follow it to the end.”

“Thank you.”

Yura got his map back, got a “Have a good one”

in exchange for his cash, and set out.

“I knew it! I knew I’d get stopped at least once!”

he groused, stepping on the gas.

He recognized absolutely nothing in the area and had to depend completely on the map to know where he was.

Twenty years ago this area along the road had been lined with dense, dark undergrowth interspersed with sunflower fields, but now the town was creeping this way, step by long, slow step.

The woods were being cut down, the fields were being leveled, and several plots of land had been fenced off.

In the loud construction sites behind the fences he glimpsed cranes, tractors, and backhoes.

The horizon, which Yura remembered being clear and incredibly distant, now seemed dismal and cramped, and the entire landscape stretching along it bristled with upscale summer homes—dachas—and gated communities everywhere he looked.

After the sign for the village of Richne he turned, just like they’d said.

The paved road ended as abruptly as though it’d broken off.

The car jolted.

The shovel in the trunk clanked loudly, like it was alive and reminding him of its presence.

He had absolutely no recollection of how to get to the camp.

The last time Yura had seen Camp Barn Swallow was twenty years ago, and even then he’d never driven there himself; he’d always been bused in.

It had been so much fun that first summer, riding in a column of identical, iconic Likinsky Bus Plant buses, white with their red stripe and decked out with flags and traditional signs indicating there were children on board.

It had been especially fun riding in the very first bus, right behind the official traffic police car, where he could see everything spread out before him, both road and sky ...

and listening to the blaring siren, and singing children’s songs with everyone ...

but then there were later years, looking out the window, bored, because he’d outgrown the silly songs ...

Yura remembered his last camp session, when he just listened instead of singing: “We ride along with flags and songs, we sing and clap and stamp! This is how our fearless troop goes to Pioneer camp ...”

Now, twenty years later, all he heard was the jangling of the shovel bouncing around in the trunk.

He cursed through gritted teeth at the ruts and potholes.

Praying he wouldn’t get stuck somewhere, he peered up, not at blue sky but at gray storm clouds: “Just don’t drench me, now!”

His plan of action had been thoroughly weighed and considered.

He’d left during the day, figuring he’d make it to the village while it was still light but would then wait until late at night to get into the camp itself and from there to his special spot.

He’d thought everything through: it was September, so the last camp session of the season would be over and there wouldn’t be any kids there, and there would probably be just one watchman, whom Yura could easily sneak past—the woods at night were pitch-black.

And even if he did get caught, he’d think of something.

The watchman, who’d be an old man, might initially be scared of this random guy sneaking around in the bushes with a shovel over his shoulder, but he’d come around eventually, see that Yura was a normal guy, not some alcoholic or bum.

Of course they’d come to an agreement.

The Pioneers ...

the Vladimir Lenin All-Union Pioneer Organization ...

red neckerchiefs, calisthenics, assemblies, swimming, campfires ...

how long ago that had all been.

Everything must be completely different now: it was Ukraine, not the USSR ...

a different country, different anthems, different slogans and songs ...

The kids wouldn’t have the neckerchiefs and pins anymore, but kids are kids and camp is camp.

And soon, very soon, Yura would be back there, and he would remember the most important time, the most important person, of his whole life.

Maybe Yura would even find out what happened to him.

Which meant that maybe Yura would even see him again, that person who had been his one true friend.

But when he pulled up to the familiar sign, it was hanging by a thread and so faded he could barely make out the letters.

Yura saw what he’d dreaded most: there was almost nothing left of the chain-link fence that used to run the entire perimeter of the camp.

Only the metal fence posts were still there.

The handsome double-door gate was broken.

One red and yellow door was somehow still hanging on its rusted, mangled hinges, but the other door was flat on the ground and had been that way, judging by the weeds surrounding it, for quite a few years.

The guardhouse was now dilapidated; the original painted patterns of blue and green had come off long ago, the wooden walls had rotted in the rain, and the roof had fallen in.

Yura heaved a heavy sigh.

So the devastation had reached all the way out here, too.

Deep in his subconscious he’d suspected it, given what happened in Ukraine after the collapse of the Soviet Union; he lived in Germany, after all, not under a rock.

He knew that factories had been shut down left and right.

And, like all the Pioneer camps, this one had been affiliated with one of those same factories, the one where his mom had been an engineer.

But Yura hadn’t wanted to think about the same sad fate befalling Camp Barn Swallow: it was the brightest spot of his whole childhood, a searing solar flare of memory.

This was where he’d left more than half of himself behind ...

but now Yura could feel that memory fading, as though it were the paint on the guardhouse, damp flakes of it sloughing off into the tall weeds.

The inspiration he’d felt during the drive drained away, leaving him sad and wistful, his mood matching the dreary weather and the fine drizzle misting down from the sky.

When he got back to his car, Yura changed into his boots, got the shovel from the trunk, and swung it onto his shoulder.

He stepped over the rusty metal panels that had once been a gate and entered the camp: the Pioneer Hero Zina Portnova Barn Swallow Pioneer Camp.

His forward steps took him backward in time, moving in reverse to his half-forgotten past, to those happy days when he’d been in love.

The big square concrete pavers were cracked and dark under his feet, while the trees, disturbed by rain, were rustling all around him, but dappled sunlight glimmered in his mind’s eye, flickering faster and faster down the old camp’s main avenue, pulling him into the last summer of his childhood.

He stopped at the intersection where the path to the mess hall went off to the left, the trail he remembered leading to the unfinished barracks—had they ever been finished?—went off to the right, and the once-broad Avenue of Pioneer Heroes led straight ahead to the main square in the center of camp.

Most of the pavers were broken and huddled in random piles, but there was a tiny spot by the flower bed at the intersection that had remained intact.

“This is where it was! Yes, it was right here!”

Yura smiled, remembering how late one night, when the whole camp was asleep, he’d sneaked out here with some chalk and drawn the most beautiful letter in the world: V .

Then the following morning, as they were going to breakfast, all the kids had tried to guess the shape drawn around the letter V .

Rylkin from Troop Two, the second-oldest troop at camp, had been sure he’d figured it out: “It’s an apple, guys!”

“But what type of apple starts with V ?”

asked his troopmate Vasya Petlitsyn.

It hadn’t occurred to a single one of them that the shape traced around the letter V wasn’t supposed to be an apple but a heart. The shape had gone wonky because, while Yurka was drawing it, he’d suddenly heard those cherished footsteps through the rest of the general nocturnal rustling, and he’d been so overcome with shyness that his hand started trembling. So that’s what he’d ended up with: an apple.

Yura nudged a broken hunk of paver with the toe of his boot and looked around.

Time had spared neither avenue nor flower bed.

Scattered over the ground were twisted, rusting lengths of metal—the remnants of the frame around the gate—as well as rotten boards and slivers of wood and broken bricks ...

broken bricks! He picked up the pointiest piece and crouched down.

In one sure movement he drew a big, beautiful V with decorative flourishes.

Then he enclosed it in a heart, one that was crooked and lopsided, again, but still his .

Yurka’s.

The cynical, grown-up Yura suppressed his skepticism and mentally nodded to his younger self: that which should be preserved in this place was now restored.

His memories drew him farther along the Avenue of Pioneer Heroes.

In the distance he saw the three broad steps leading up to the camp’s main square.

Along the way, moss-covered pedestals and statues stuck up randomly out of the undergrowth, just like headstones.

It sure felt like he was wandering through a cemetery—an old, abandoned one.

Once there had been seven statues of Pioneer Heroes here, glaring fiercely westward, and once Yura, like thousands of other Pioneers, had known not only their names but their accomplishments.

He’d also done his best to be like those seven heroic children and follow their example.

There was Lyonya Golikov, a sixteen-year-old Soviet Russian who had joined the partisans—the bands of organized, armed resistance fighters hiding in the countryside—and killed something like eighty German soldiers before they got him;

there was Marat Kazey, a Soviet Belorussian spy and scout who, at fourteen years old, blew himself up with a hand grenade rather than be captured by the Germans;

there was Soviet Ukrainian Valya Kotik, the youngest person to be made a Hero of the Soviet Union (albeit posthumously, like all the other Pioneer Heroes), who died just after his fourteenth birthday fighting the Germans in Volhynia in northwestern Ukraine; there was Tolya Shumov, a Soviet Russian who was seventeen when he fought alongside the partisans until he was captured, tortured, and killed; but the most heroic of them all was Zinaida Portnova from Leningrad, who was a member of a partisan band called the Young Avengers.

At the age of seventeen, Portnova had spied, distributed leaflets, sabotaged factories, and poisoned a whole enemy garrison.

The Germans eventually captured and interrogated her, but she got hold of her interrogator’s pistol and shot her way out, only to be recaptured, tortured, and executed ...

But now, some twenty-odd years later, Yura found himself grasping for all of these details.

He had forgotten everything he’d once known so well.

Yura walked farther along the crumbling avenue.

The only traces of the clean, smooth path that used to be here were the gray remnants of asphalt among the thick weeds.

Yura kept going, strolling past the crumbling pedestals and gazing with pity at the plaster arms, legs, and heads sticking up out of the undergrowth.

As his gaze lingered on some dingy, lifeless torsos with metal armatures poking out of them, he caught sight of their worn plaques.

There they were: Marat Kazey, Valya Kotik, Tolya Shumov ...

But there, right by the steps at the end of the avenue, the honor board had remained intact.

Back then the honor board had been in a rectangular glassed-in frame, but the only glass left now was a few sharp shards poking out of the corners.

Still, thanks to the frame’s shallow overhang, a few of the captions on the honor board were still fairly legible, and there were even three black-and-white photographs left.

“Session Three, August 1992: Achievements and Distinctions,”

Yura read at the very top of the board.

So that was the very last session.

Had the camp really gone on for just six more years after the last time he’d attended?

As he walked up the three steps leading to the main square, Yura’s heart almost burst in a surge of sad longing.

The awful thing wasn’t the old being replaced by the new; it was the old being forgotten and abandoned.

But this was much worse, because the one who’d forgotten and abandoned everything had been him, even though he’d earnestly sworn back then to remember the child heroes, and his fellow Pioneers, and especially V.

So why hadn’t he looked for this damned place before now? Why hadn’t he come back until now? To hell with Lenin’s maxims, the red banners, the oaths he’d been forced to take—to hell with all that! How had he allowed himself to break his word to V., his one true friend?

Yura tripped over a faded, broken-off section of a wooden sign reading OUR FUTURE IS brIGHT AND SPLEND—.

“It’s not all that bright, and it’s certainly not splendid,”

he grumbled, stepping up the last step.

The main square, the most important place in the whole camp, was just as decrepit as everything else.

It was littered with trash and fallen leaves.

Clumps of weeds pushed through holes in the asphalt, seeking the wan sun.

Smack in the middle, surrounded by broken concrete and rock, lay a beheaded statue: the monument to Zina Portnova, Pioneer Hero of the Soviet Union, after whom the camp had been named.

Yura recognized Zina and swore through gritted teeth.

Even though the girl was just plaster, he still felt sorry for her.

She’d accomplished genuine feats, after all, so what did people have to go and do that for? He wanted to try and stand her back up, but couldn’t, due to the rusty metal struts sticking out where her legs had been broken off at the shins.

Instead, he leaned the statue’s torso against its pedestal, set the head next to it, and turned around to consider the one thing on the whole square that had remained intact: the bare flagpole, stretching proudly to the sky, same as it had twenty years ago.

Yura had first gone to Barn Swallow Pioneer Camp when he was eleven.

He’d been so delighted by the camp that his parents started signing him up every year.

Yura had adored the place when he was little, but every year, when he came back for another camp session, he got less joy from it.

Nothing changed here.

From year to year it was the exact same well-worn paths, the exact same troop leaders with the exact same tasks, the exact same Pioneers following the exact same daily schedule.

The same old stuff.

The clubs: model airplanes, sewing, art, sports, and computer science.

The river where the water never went below twenty-two degrees Celsius.

The camp cook, Svetlana Viktorovna, and her Friday lunch of buckwheat soup.

Even the smash hits on the dance floor were repeats, the same songs year in and year out.

And his last camp session had also begun same as usual: with an assembly.

The children began gathering into their assigned troop locations on the main square.

Dust motes danced in sunlight and there was exultation in the air.

The Pioneers stood in their places, happy from new meetings with old friends.

The troop leaders issued orders to their charges and surveyed the square sternly, just the barest hint of glee in their eyes.

The camp director was swaggering and preening: that spring they’d managed to remodel four whole cabins and had even almost finished building a big new barracks.

And only Yurka was the odd one out, again; the only one who didn’t feel like joining in the fun and games; the only one who was sick to death of camp by now.

It was all almost offensive to him, somehow.

And there wasn’t anything to take his mind off it.

No, wait—there was something, after all.

A new troop leader was standing over to the right of the flagpole, in the middle of Troop Five.

He wore navy blue shorts, a white shirt, a red neckerchief, a red flight cap, and glasses.

A college student, maybe even a first-year; certainly the youngest and tensest of all the troop leaders.

The breeze smoothed the unruly locks escaping from his scarlet cap; freshly scratched mosquito bites glowed red on his pale legs; his focused gaze moved along the backs of children’s heads as he counted them off, his lips moving reflexively: “...

eleven ...

twelve ...

thir ...

thirteen.”

He must’ve been the one named Volodya, Yurka reasoned; he had heard something to that effect back by the bus.

The bugle sounded, hands flew up in the Pioneer salute, and the camp administration took the stage.

The air reverberated with words of welcome and shook with the same thunderous, passionate speeches about Pioneers, patriotism, and Communist ideals that had been repeated a thousand times.

Yurka knew them so well he could’ve recited them verbatim.

He tried to keep himself from scowling, but couldn’t.

He didn’t believe the educational specialist’s smile, or her burning eyes, or her fiery speeches.

Yurka could tell there wasn’t anything real in them, or even in Olga Leonidovna herself; otherwise why repeat the same thing over and over? Sincerity would have been able to find new words.

It felt like everyone in the whole country was living by inertia, reciting slogans and swearing oaths out of old habit without really feeling it.

That’s certainly what Olga Leonidovna was doing; officially, her job at the camp was to ensure that camp was educational, so that all campers learned how to be good Soviet citizens, but he knew she just liked ruining people’s fun.

All this passion felt like it was just for show.

He felt like he, Yurka, was real, but everyone else was a robot.

Especially that Volodya.

Because come on, could somebody like that, somebody who looked like a film still, really be a living, breathing person? So perfectly perfect, such a model member of the Komsomol—the Communist Youth League ...

like he had been cultivated in a greenhouse under a bell jar! He could have stepped out of a Communist Party poster: tall, trim, self-possessed, dimples in his cheeks, skin glowing in the sun ...

“The only little hitch here’s the hair color,”

Yurka scoffed spitefully.

“He’s not blond.”

Even so, his hair was perfect, not a strand out of place.

The same couldn’t be said for tousle-headed Yurka.

“There’s a robot for you,” Yura rationalized, abashedly smoothing down his own mop of hair.

“Normal people’s hair gets messed up in the wind, but get a load of this guy: his hair just gets better.”

Yurka was so lost in thought, so dissolved in his contemplation of Volodya, that he almost missed the most important part of the morning: the flag-raising ceremony.

Good thing the girl next to him nudged him.

He, too, looked at the flag and sang the Pioneer anthem, as required, with its evocation of blazing campfires, midnight blue skies, and workers’ children marching and singing happily.

Except that after the last words—“always be prepared!”—he fixed his eyes on Volodya again and stood still as a post.

Eventually, Troop Five started falling out.

The leader of Troop Five was poking at the bridge of his nose as they did, attempting to push up his glasses, as he counted to himself: “Twelve ...

oh! Thirteen ...”

Then he followed the children away.

Yura shook his head morosely, surveying the square again.

Time spares nothing and no one; even this square, full of deep meaning for him as the place where he’d first seen his V., was getting overgrown with trees.

Give it ten more years and it’d be impossible to push through the bushy, bright-leafed maple branches, and the Pioneers’ plaster body parts peeking out of the underbrush would scare random explorers half to death.

Or worse: the new development would reach all the way out here, and his beloved camp would be bulldozed and replaced by an elite cottage community.

Yura wandered over to the western corner of the square, to the path along which the junior troop leaders led their charges back to the junior cabins after assembly.

The path went on down to the river, but he stood where he was and looked around for the trail hidden in the grass.

Relying more on his memory than on what his eyes told him, he spied the fork he was looking for: to the left he could make out the outlines of the athletic fields and courts, while to the right, a little farther off, he could see the remains of the junior cabins.

But Yura turned back to the square and walked across it in the other direction, toward the outdoor stage and the movie theater.

He strolled slowly, looking up at the tall trees, feeling like he was in some kind of weird dream.

He was pretty sure he recognized this area: the power shed was over there on that little rise, and if he kept going, he’d wind up at the storage shed.

As he recalled those old scenes in his mind, he experienced that poignant ache again, warm and familiar despite the bitter strangeness of what this place had become.

He quickly made it to the outdoor stage, the place where his story—their story—had begun.

The dance floor and stage, partially covered by a band shell, was enclosed by a low railing that was now falling apart.

The area had once been decorated by red flags and colorful posters reading glory to the communist party of the soviet union and we are young leninists that had already been old back when Yura was a camper.

A long, dirty-orange banner with poetry on it lay ripped and faded on the ground.

Yura looked down at the torn rag underfoot and read the part he could see: pioneer, remember to treat your scarf well ...

He turned away.

A copy of the day’s schedule had traditionally hung to the right of the stage.

Now its single remaining line informed him that at four thirty it was time to do civic duty work.

To the left, at the very edge of the dance floor, Yurka’s old observation point, a magnificent triple-trunked apple tree, still stood.

At one time it had been adorned by heavy, plump fruit and strings of lights, but now it was desiccated, bent, and cracked.

No one could’ve climbed it now, it’d break.

Although Yurka had already fallen out of it, twenty years ago, when his troop leader assigned him to hang strings of multicolored lights on it.

That had been his first task, assigned right at the beginning of the session.

Yurka never even knew what hit him.

After the opening assembly he got moved into his cabin; then—in body, but not in spirit—he attended the troop council, where delegates from each troop met to plan the upcoming camp session.

After lunch he made a beeline for the athletic fields to meet the new kids and find the people he knew from past camp sessions.

The loudspeakers blared out a welcome to all the new arrivals, informing them that meteorologists did not foresee any heavy precipitation over the next week and exhorting them to have an active and beneficial stay and to bask in the sun.

Yurka immediately recognized the sonorous voice of Mitka, a good singer and guitarist who’d been the announcer last year, too.

He caught sight of some familiar faces scattered among the new campers.

Polina, Ulyana, and Ksyusha were chattering by the tennis court.

Yurka had already seen them at the assembly.

He’d been in the same troop as them for five years in a row.

For some reason Yurka and the girls had disliked each other from the get-go.

He remembered them as snot-nosed ten-year-olds; now they had grown up and blossomed into actual young women.

Even so, Yurka still couldn’t bring himself to feel friendly toward them, stubbornly continuing his animosity toward the trio of gabby gossips.

Vanka and Mikha, also Yurka’s longtime troopmates, waved at him in unison.

Yurka nodded in response but didn’t go over to them.

They’d start pestering him with questions about how his year had gone, and Yurka had no interest in answering, “Not that great, as usual,”

then having to explain why.

He’d known the pair of them since he was little, too, just like the trio of girls.

But these two were the only ones he talked to, when he talked to anyone at all.

Vanka and Mikha were nerds, meek and pimply, but funny.

They weren’t exactly girl magnets, but they did respect Yurka.

He bought their respect with the cigarettes he shared sometimes during quiet hour when they sneaked out and hid behind the camp fence.