Pioneer Summer

Chapter Four Good Night, Boys and Girls!

CHAPTER FOUR GOOD NIGHT, BOYS AND GIRLS!

Yura, lost in reminiscence, came back to himself and erased the sad smile from his face. Nostalgia and a painful, sad longing had pierced him to the depths of his soul, especially here inside these walls. He’d wanted so badly to come back here, but to the “here” of twenty years ago, where he could once more hear music, and children’s laughter, and Volodya’s stern voice. But Yura had to keep going, to find what he’d come to Camp Barn Swallow today to get.

He got up from the squeaky seat, brushed the dust off his trousers, surveyed the stage one last time, and went to the theater exit.

By some miracle, the paved path to the junior cabins had remained intact. The cabins had once been pretty, painted in bright colors and decorated with patterns so they looked like little huts from Russian fairy tales. But now they looked pitiful. The majority had collapsed into heaps of wet, rotten boards that still had traces of old paint on them. Only two of the little cabins—Yura couldn’t remember their troop numbers anymore—were more or less intact. In one of them, the roof and the left-hand wall had fallen in, while the other one was almost sound, except that it had settled over time and gone crooked. But it was definitely not worth peeking inside: the porch had sunk more than the rest of the cabin, creating a gap, and the front door had fallen out, leaving a dark, scary, gaping chasm instead of an entrance. The junior troops had always been housed in these cabins, far from the dance floor and movie theater. Yura had lived here in one of his first camp sessions.

As he walked past the playground, Yura winced at a mournful metallic screeching sound. The wind was moving the rusty merry-go-round. It seemed as though the slowly turning disk was still waiting, after all this time, for the little kids to come back so it could bring them joy. But there hadn’t been any children here for a long time, and the playground was overgrown by tall weeds.

Yura used to adore this place. The flat lawn around the merry-go-round had been covered by a thick carpet of dandelions that would start out yellow and green, then go pure white, then turn into a fluffy cloud of fuzzy dandelion heads. You could rip up a whole armful of them and run around camp blowing dandelion fuzz into the girls’ hair, and they’d get so hilariously mad, and shout at you, and chase after you to get even.

But the dandelions had withered now, with only a few bald little stem ends sticking up here and there from the weeds. Yura bent over to pick one that still had a few little fuzzy parachutes on it. He scoffed bitterly and blew on it, but only a few of the parachutes came off. Unwilling and unwieldy, heavy with damp, they flew all of half a meter before coming to rest on the dark pavement.

Yura tossed the flower to the ground and walked through the thick, wet clusters of weeds to the merry-go-round. Although in disrepair, it was still sturdy. Without understanding why he did it, without even asking himself that question, Yura sat on one of the merry-go-round’s seats and pushed off lightly with his feet. It creaked as it started rotating, exactly the same way it had back then, and the sound dragged him down into a whirlpool of memories.

The dandelions that had gone to seed spread over the playground in a thick white blanket. Fuzzy little seeds came off and floated around in the air, tickling his nose. Yurka breathed in a lungful of fresh evening air and turned onto the path to the junior cabins.

It was quiet all around. The children were already asleep, lights-out for them having been a little while ago, but no light was coming from the windows of the troop leaders’ rooms, either. Yurka pondered: Volodya wouldn’t be asleep yet, and troop leaders could stay up even past that if they wanted to—but where would he have gotten off to? Had Volodya really gone to the dance all by himself? Baffled, Yurka looked around, listening to the nighttime silence broken only by the whispering wind and chirring crickets. “If Volodya goes there without me, will that count as me keeping my end of the bargain?” he mused. “Will I get my kiss?”

Suddenly, quick steps sounded among the night’s quiet rustlings. Then the porch creaked. Yurka turned toward the cabin and saw a small, tiptoeing figure in pajamas with rockets on them. The stout little boy coming down the stairs of the Troop Five cabin tripped, gasped, and wobbled precariously before catching himself. Yurka recognized the rule breaker as Sasha, the squirming victim he and Volodya had carried to the first aid station the day before.

Yurka flattened himself against the wall of a neighboring cabin. Hiding in the shadows, he cut a wide circle around the little boy, then in two steps came up right behind him. With one hand Yurka touched the boy’s shoulder while with the other he covered the boy’s mouth, cutting off his yelp of fright.

“What’s up with this wandering around after lights-out, huh?” Yurka hissed menacingly into the boy’s ear.

Sasha ducked his head and squeaked something, getting spit all over Yurka’s palm. Yurka frowned and said, “Promise you won’t yell if I let you go. Otherwise I’ll drag you into the forest and throw you into a nest of black vipers!”

Sasha nodded, and Yurka removed his hand from Sasha’s drooly mouth.

“I just—I just wanted some currants,” stammered the little boy. “I saw two currant bushes by the first aid station, so ...”

“Sheesh, Sashka!” Yurka was barely able to keep from laughing. He made his voice stern and said, “How can you want currants in June? Right now, the only berries by the first aid station are on the daphnes, but they’re poisonous!”

Sasha scowled: obviously he didn’t believe it. Yurka hemmed, musing, then asked, “Why did you go after the currants at night, anyway?”

“Because!” pronounced Sasha firmly. “What am I supposed to do, show everybody where I found the currants? Just you wait, they’ll take them all for themselves!”

“Grandpa Lenin did tell us all to share, Sash!”

Sasha pouted and refused to reply, glowering sullenly.

“How’d you get out of the cabin?” Yurka asked. “Don’t they lock the door?”

“Volodya can’t get us to sleep. I left while he was trying to convince Kolka to stay in bed.”

“Why, you little ...” Yurka imagined the utter panic that would seize Volodya the instant he saw the empty bed, then increase with each passing minute. “We’re heading back. Get going.”

He took hold of the squealing Sasha by the ear and dragged him into the cabin, heedless of his complaints.

As soon as Yurka eased open the door to the boys’ room, he saw Volodya standing in the light of a dimmed flashlight above an empty bed and staring blindly ahead, eyes perfectly round in horror. He was surrounded by whispering children who obviously had no intention of going to sleep.

“Did you lose this?” asked Yurka softly, dragging Sasha into the room.

Volodya turned around, nonplussed, but his face lit up as soon as he saw the escapee. “I was sure I was done for,” he sighed in relief. Then he hissed at Sasha: “Get in bed, you! Right now! What were you trying to do, run away?”

Without a word, Sasha slid under his blanket and rolled onto his side with his back to them.

“He wanted some currants,” said Yurka, betraying Sasha. “Listen, what are you doing here so late? Junior lights-out was ages ago.”

“I can’t get these knuckleheads to go to bed! The girls fell asleep quick as a wink—they’re well away to slumberland by now—but these guys ... it’s like somebody spiked their dinner with caffeine.”

Yurka swiveled his head, surveying the even rows of beds. The boys weren’t whispering anymore. Everyone was listening with rapt trepidation not to the adults but to tousle-headed, r-mangling Olezhka, who was intoning in a voice from beyond the grave: “In a dawk, dawk town, in a dawk, dawk house, lived a dawk, dawk—”

“Kitten!” shouted Yurka. The boys convulsed with laughter. “If you’re gonna tell scary stories, pick one that’s actually scary.”

“I know the one with the floating gwavestone, too. That one’s the scawy stowy to beat all scawy stowies!”

“Nah, that one’s not scary, either. What, can’t Volodya tell you stories that are scary for real?”

“No, no. You got it backwawds: he yells at us because we listen to scawy stowies instead of sleeping. But to tell the twuth, we keep telling them anyway ...”

The troop leader gave a little laugh: “You think I don’t know that?” He took a breath to continue but stopped short and frowned as he caught sight of the jokester Pcholkin furtively tucking something under his blanket. In a whisper, Olezhka launched into the tired old story about the toenails in the meat pie.

Yurka listened to Olezhka with half an ear, thinking to himself that he had to extricate Volodya and that, no matter what, he and Volodya had to show up at today’s dance. First of all, because Ksyusha’d have to pay her bet: fair’s fair! Secondly, because he was looking pretty fair himself, actually, since he’d put on his best—also his only—pair of jeans and his favorite brown polo, the one from East Germany that his uncle had brought him that spring.

His thoughts were interrupted by Volodya suddenly ripping Pcholkin’s blanket off and grabbing something small and wooden out from under it. Volodya shouted triumphantly: “Aha! A slingshot! So that’s who took out the ceiling light!”

Yurka’s thoughts returned to the issue at hand: What do I do to get Volodya out of here? Make these squirts go to sleep. How do I make these squirts go to sleep?

It took less than a minute for the answer to come to him.

“So do you all know why Volodya doesn’t tell you scary stories? So you sleep better. And he’s right. Because Volodya, of all people, knows what happens to anyone who doesn’t go to sleep at lights-out ...”

“What happens?” said Sasha, eyes wide.

“Is it bad?” asked another little boy with curly hair who’d frozen where he sat.

Olezhka quaked. “Is it scawy?”

“I won’t use my slingshot anymore. Please don’t take it,” Pcholkin begged.

Just then, from behind the door into the main hallway, they all heard a rush of movement and a girl’s stifled giggle.

Volodya bolted for the door to catch the little truant and take her back to the girls’ room. From the way Pcholkin groaned, Yurka could tell that the strict troop leader had taken the little boy’s slingshot with him.

Yurka took a spot on a free bed and assumed a very serious demeanor: “I’m going to share a big secret with you now. But don’t breathe a word to anyone: it’s categorically forbidden to tell Little Octoberists about this, since you’re supposedly too young for it. So I’ll get my you-know-what handed back to me on a platter if anyone finds out ...”

He was interrupted by a cacophony of voices ardently swearing never to betray him. Yurka cleared his throat and, in a scary voice, began his story: “At night the camp is haunted by a genuine ghost! A long time ago, back before the Great October Revolution, there was a nobleman’s estate not far from here where a young count lived with his countess. They were happy together, even though theirs was an arranged marriage—”

“What is that, Yuwka? What kind of mawwiage is that?”

“Don’t interrupt, Olezha,” Yurka said, and explained as best he could. “An arranged marriage is when two sets of parents agree to have their children marry, and the kids might not only be very young still, they might not even know each other. People did it that way for money.”

Volodya came back into the boys’ room so pleased, his eyes all but sparkled. He sat down next to Yurka, who continued: “So. The count and the countess really did love each other. They had a large manor, and about a hundred peasants, and a whole lot of friends: counts and countesses, and princes and princesses, and even a grand prince—one of the tsar’s relatives—who was like a sort of comrade to the count. But then the Russo-Japanese War started, and the grand prince called on the count to serve in the navy with him. And the count couldn’t refuse. So he gave his countess a gorgeous diamond brooch to remember him by and went off to fight. But he never, ever came back ...”

The little boys had gone silent. As one, they all huddled under their blankets and stared at Yurka, goggle-eyed and bursting from suspense. Volodya was cleaning his glasses with the corner of his shirt while, squinting, he surveyed the boys sternly. Yurka, satisfied with the results he’d produced—the kids were interested—continued in a sibilant whisper: “They say the cruiser he served on was sunk by the Japanese. The countess was informed that her husband had been killed, but she loved him so much that she couldn’t believe or accept it. The countess had no children and waited for him, all alone, for many, many years. She never wore her pretty dresses or jewelry again, and she went around dressed all in black. But the one thing she always kept with her—the one thing she always had pinned to her chest or fastened in her hair—was the diamond brooch. The last gift her husband ever gave her. Time passed. The countess was very sad and soon grew sick. She didn’t want to see anybody, not even the doctor, and a year later she was dead. They say she was buried in that same black widow’s dress, but that the diamond brooch wasn’t on her when she went to her grave. The diamond brooch was lost! And ever since, there have been some kind of mysterious goings-on in the manor house. First the furniture would move all by itself ... then the doors would open and close ... and then, after the Bolsheviks came to power and made the place into a sanatorium, people who stayed in the old manor house started dying!”

Someone stifled a gasp in the shadowed darkness, and in the nearby bed there was a sudden motion as Sasha pulled the covers up over his head. Volodya elbowed Yurka in the ribs, whispering almost inaudibly directly into his ear: “Yurka, take it easy, they’re never going to fall asleep now!”

But Yurka was already letting it rip: “Every night it’d be calm in the mansion. Well, maybe a few dresser drawers would open and close by themselves, but there was no crashing or banging or noise. Yet every morning—uh-oh! Somebody’d end up dead! And this happened every single morning: a person lying dead in their bed. It was terrible: their eyes were all bugged out, and their mouths were frozen wide in a scream, and their tongues were sticking out, and their necks were black-and-blue! Everyone searched and searched for the perpetrator. But whoever did it was never found. And so that sanatorium was abandoned. The villagers who lived nearby, in Horetivka, stole everything out of the manor and stripped it down, not leaving even a single brick. They carried everything away to build their own homes. And now there’s nothing there to remind anyone that a count’s mansion once stood on that spot, except for this: to this day, hidden deep in a bird cherry thicket, you can find a bas-relief with the countess’s profile carved into it. And on her dress is pinned a diamond brooch.” Yurka lowered his voice even more. “And now I am going to reveal a big secret to you, but you can’t say a word about it to anybody, okay?”

“Okay! Okay! Okay!” came the whispered promise from all sides.

“Are you sure? Do you all swear on your honor as Little Octoberists?”

“Yes!” “We do!” “We swear!” “Just tell us alwedy, Yuwka!”

“Somebody died here, too. They found him right here, in the next cabin over! But only one person died, because after his death the Pioneers found his journal—he’d written about all the weird things that happened at night—and read it and found out everything. The guy who died had been a troop leader ... a very young one ... it had been his first year in the camp ...”

Volodya coughed and raised a skeptical brow.

Yurka shot him a crafty glance, as if to say, Yes, indeed, this is about you , and went on: “This is how it happened. The kids in his troop slept really badly. Their leader slept badly right along with them, since he was always walking around, checking everything, worrying ... and then one night, everyone else had finally fallen asleep, but the troop leader couldn’t. His sleep schedule had gotten completely off. He was sitting there with his notebook, writing down everything that had happened that day: where he and the kids had gone, how it had been, how the kids had behaved, that sort of thing. And then in the utter silence he heard a rustle, as though fabric was dragging across the floor. The troop leader grew wary, since it was such a very weird sound: he turned off the light, lay down in the darkness, and held still. At first he couldn’t see anything, but as soon as his eyes got used to the dark, as soon as he could discern the outlines of the wardrobe and nightstand, he saw the wardrobe door swing open! All by itself, quick and quiet, as though it hadn’t opened just that moment, but had been left open instead. The leader blinked—and suddenly the wardrobe door was closed again, the way it should be! He thought he might’ve imagined it, so he turned the light on and wrote everything down. The same thing happened the next night: again he heard the rustle of fabric along the floor, again everything got quiet, and again the furniture doors opened all by themselves. And his room was completely empty, with no shadows or sounds. But as soon as he blinked, there it was: the left-hand door of the wardrobe was open ... and the next time he blinked, the left-hand door was closed, and the right-hand door was open ... and all this was happening in dead silence ...”

The exact same kind of silence reigned in the room. The boys were listening so hard they were even breathing slower and quieter. Yurka heard the clacking of someone’s teeth chattering, and snorted: at least he wasn’t hearing the “pssss” of someone wetting the bed ...

“So then the troop leader went to Horetivka and talked to the old-timers there, and one old man told him the legend about the countess and the missing brooch. And he realized that the sound he was hearing at night was the swishing of her black dress. He wanted to find out why the wardrobe doors kept opening and closing. But he never did. Because the next morning he was found dead in his bed. Strangled. With bulging eyes—”

“And a bruised neck?” Sasha could barely choke out the words.

“And a bruised neck,” Yurka replied, nodding. “The police questioned all the inhabitants of the village. When it was that same old man’s turn, he told them the same thing he’d told the troop leader. The policemen thought he’d gone off his rocker and didn’t believe his ramblings about some countess ... about how she’d wandered around her own home first, but then, when it was destroyed, she roamed the camp ... about how she wanders to this day, looking for the brooch the count gave her ... and about how, when she doesn’t find it, she gets mad and strangles the first person she sees who’s awake. Because she thinks whoever’s awake is the thief who stole her brooch. After all, he’s the only one whose conscience is torturing him so badly, he can’t get to sleep.”

While Yurka took a breath, Volodya broke in: “And that, guys, is why you have to go to sleep after lights-out.”

“That’s right,” said Yurka. “You have to lie there and be quiet so both you and your troop leaders stay safe. Otherwise you’ll hear the rustling of the countess’s dress and see her opening cupboard and wardrobe doors, looking for her brooch. And that’s where she’ll get you! And your leaders, by the way, are also awake all night: they’re worrying about you, just like the one who died.”

The story made an enormous impression on the little boys, who screwed their eyes shut, pulled their covers up to their chins, and lay silent and motionless.

Volodya and Yurka exchanged a look. They both realized that leaving the children now would obviously be a bad idea, so they each sat down in a corner of the boys’ room, Volodya by the window and Yurka by the door. They sat in silence, bored.

With nothing better to do in the shadowy room, Yurka started studying Volodya’s profile: long, straight nose, high forehead, feathered bangs, sharp chin. Volodya’s actually handsome. The thought came unbidden to Yurka’s mind. If you take a good look at him ... if you think about it ... I mean, probably ...

When he’d seen Volodya for the first time, back at the opening assembly, Yurka had thought, objectively, that if it weren’t for the glasses, you could even call Volodya classically handsome. That was true without a doubt, Yurka admitted, even feeling a twinge of envy—as well he should, given the way girls melted just looking at Volodya! But now, after peering at Volodya in the dark room, Yurka realized something else: he thought Volodya was handsome subjectively, too. In fact, Yurka felt a strange sense of gratitude. The strange part was that he didn’t exactly know who he felt grateful to : fate or Volodya’s parents. But he did know exactly what he was grateful for : the chance to appreciate beauty and experience joy. Because the contemplation of beauty always brings joy. If only Volodya didn’t have those glasses, though!

A muffled whisper broke the silence: “Yuwka?”

“What?”

“Awe thewe any doows opening next to you?”

“No.”

“And you, Volodya? Any doows opening ovew thewe?”

“No. Everything’s fine. Go to sleep.”

Everything was quiet for five minutes. Then that same voice, or rather whisper, repeated: “Yuwka? Volodya?”

“What is it?”

“Go to bed. Or the countess will come again and catch you sitting thewe.”

“Are you sure you won’t talk?” asked Volodya, in what Yurka thought was an overly stern tone.

Very convincing responses rained down from all corners of the room: “We’re sure!” “We’re sleeping!” “Yes!” “Octobewists’ honow!”

Volodya got up and nodded to Yurka, signaling him to follow. As they headed to the door, Sasha reached his hand out from under his blanket and caught Volodya’s shorts: “Volodya, can Yura come and tell us scary stories again?”

“I don’t see why not, but you’d be better off asking him.”

“Yur?”

“On one condition. If you fall asleep this very minute, and if nobody gets up and goes anywhere tonight, then tomorrow I’ll come and tell you another one. But if anybody makes as much as a single peep, no dice and no story: you’ll have to just sit here staring at your navy blue curtains.”

The little boys mumbled their promises and assurances, each in his own way, while Sasha nodded joyfully and wrapped himself in his blanket all the way up to his eyebrows.

“You think they’ll go to sleep?” asked Yurka after they walked down the cabin’s front steps.

But Volodya didn’t respond. He headed briskly to the merry-go-round resting on that same dandelion field directly in front of the cabin. Carefully, so the merry-go-round didn’t squeak, he sat down on it and started running the toe of his sneaker along the ground, raising flurries of white fluff. Yura settled down next to him, then asked: “Why are you being so quiet?”

“I asked you not to overdo it, didn’t I?” said Volodya accusingly.

“So where do you think I overdid it?”

“What kind of question is that?” With one forefinger, Volodya angrily shoved his glasses back up. “Everywhere, Yura. Now they’re so scared, they not only won’t go to sleep, they’ll probably also wet their beds!”

“Oh, come on! What are they—little guys that can’t make it to the toilet?”

“Of course they’re little guys! How are they supposed to go to the bathroom when you literally forbade them to open their eyes?”

“Don’t exaggerate. I think they’re just pretending. Even Sasha is lying there nice and quiet, and he’s the most sensitive one of all. But even if I did scare them, so what? There’s no drawbacks to peace and quiet!”

“We’ll see what drawbacks come up tomorrow morning.”

“But what drawbacks? There aren’t any! And they liked it, since they asked for another one tomorrow.”

Music was playing on the stage in the distance, but the wind was blowing in the wrong direction, garbling the sound, so Yurka couldn’t tell what song it was. The alluring sound of happy voices was mixed in with the music.

Giving in to an old habit acquired back when he was still in music school, Yurka started loosening his fingers by tugging on each one in turn and popping his knuckles. Impatience seized him: if only they could just get to the dance already! He’d managed to extract Volodya from his troop cabin; another five minutes and they could be at the dance, where Ksyusha was. But Volodya didn’t look like he was going anywhere. Yurka couldn’t restrain himself and tried to hurry Volodya along. “So? What are we sitting around for? Let’s go to the dance!”

“No,” Volodya refused categorically. He nodded at the cabin’s dark windows. “I let Lena go to the dance and I’m not going anywhere until she gets back. I can’t leave the children here by themselves.”

“Ouch, denied! Too bad,” said Yurka slowly, disappointed.

“Why is it too bad? Why ‘denied’?” asked Volodya, perking up. “What, were you counting on me or something? But we didn’t agree on it beforehand, and you know I don’t even like dances, anyway. Wait, hold on ...” Volodya furrowed his brow, then straightened suddenly as he remembered something. “Somebody already invited me today. Ulyana. Yes, that’s right, it was Ulyana first, and now you. Tell me what you’re up to!”

“Nothing. It’s just that the girls were begging and pleading with me to bring you. They just want to, you know, dance with you ... and everything ...”

“Wait, what kind of ‘everything’?” chuckled Volodya. “What other things would I be doing with them?”

“You know very well what other things,” said Yurka with a wink. “What is it? Don’t you like them? Not any of them? Not even a little bit? Or are you already going out with someone? Is it Masha?”

“Where’d you come up with that? No, that’s got nothing to do with it! I’m a troop leader, and they’re Pioneers. So there’s your ‘other things’ for you. Look, why are you sitting here? Nothing’s keeping you here. You could go, have fun.”

True , Yurka thought, mentally nodding to himself: the music would go on, even without Volodya. For most of the Pioneers, the nightly dances were the most anticipated event of the summer. They were for Yurka, too—usually. But now he was suddenly doubt-stricken. What would he do there? Watch the girls dance with each other as he sat off to the side, too afraid, despite all his outward daring, to ask anyone to dance? And who would he even ask? Last session there’d been Anechka, but this session there was neither her nor anyone else who was even slightly appealing. He’d been planning on getting the promised kiss from Ksyusha, but without his end of the bargain—Volodya—there’d be no deal. So what was there to do at the dance if he wasn’t going to dance? Sit over at the edge of the dance floor with Vanka and Mikha, having boring conversations about boring things? Or repeatedly crisscross the dance floor with his buddies? They were fun, sure, but he was tired of them ...

It turned out there was nothing, and nobody, for Yurka to even go to the dance for. He could’ve kept trying to convince Volodya, but, to tell the truth, Yurka didn’t feel like going to a dance anymore. He’d deliver his part of the bargain some other day. Today he felt just fine right here, under a clear night sky, where not a single cloud hid the stars’ bright light or the moon’s thin sliver.

“Won’t it be a little depressing for you to sit here all by yourself?” he had the inspiration to ask, so as not to sit in silence.

“I was going to read the script, but there’s not much light.” Volodya patted his shorts pocket and nodded at the single source of light, a dim bulb over the porch. “So yes, it probably won’t be much fun.”

“Then I’ll sit here with you for a while.”

“Sure, go ahead,” Volodya said indifferently.

“You don’t sound very glad about it, even though you were just saying it’ll be boring ...”

“I am glad. I’m glad, of course.” Volodya’s words were affirmative, but Yurka thought he seemed ill at ease.

The wind changed, bringing the music with it—a wildly popular duet between Alla Pugachova and Vladimir Kuzmin about the night sky in spring and two falling stars. Although it was summer now, not spring, they still got it right: there were falling stars. Yurka noticed several of them, but he didn’t make a wish. He wasn’t superstitious, first of all, and secondly, he knew they weren’t even stars; they were meteors. There was a whole twinkling vista of real stars, a whole Milky Way of them. As he gazed at the sky, Yurka pondered the paradox of Volodya, who said he was glad but was glad in total silence, without a single emotion on his face. Yet being silent with him wasn’t boring, and neither was talking with him.

Volodya sighed, then softly sang a few words of the song, mockingly but perfectly in tune with the music. He broke off and asked, “So, hey, Yur, is that estate far from here?”

“What esta—oh, that estate. There actually isn’t any estate.” In the dim light it was hard to tell at first, but then Yurka saw how Volodya’s face had fallen and asked in surprise: “You actually believed that?”

“You made it all up? All that about the grand prince and the Russo-Japanese War? So many details ... Neatly done! You’re actually not such a knucklehead after all, are you?”

“A knucklehead? Who? Me? Are you saying I’m a knucklehead?!”

“No. That’s what I’m saying, is that you’re not.”

“But then what’s with the ‘aaaaactuallyyyy’?” Yurka affectedly drew out the word in an imitation of Volodya’s Moscow accent. It sounded just like him. “There really is a bas-relief of a woman, though. Down the river, in some wild apple trees.”

“Is it far?”

“Half an hour or so by boat. So what about this knucklehead thing?”

“Come on, give it up.”

“Is that why you were being all high-and-mighty before? You think I’m an idiot?”

“I wasn’t ... Fine!” Volodya gave in. “Look, people don’t normally expect much from good-for-nothings, right?”

“Now I’m a good-for-nothing, too?!” Yurka feigned outrage. For some reason he felt giddy and happy. He decided to play along, wouldn’t leave Volodya alone until he apologized. But an apology was the last thing on Volodya’s mind.

“It’s your own fault you’ve got such a reputation.”

“It has nothing to do with me! It’s just that those stupid troop leaders don’t have anything better to do than show up at the worst possible moment, and then they draw their own conclusions without even listening to me. Have you heard about the roof, for instance?”

Volodya’s reply was guarded: “Hmm ... Somebody said something about last year—”

Yurka interrupted him in a squeaky voice, parodying Olga Leonidovna: “‘Konev has gotten out of hand! He’s jumping around on the roof, breaking tiles, damaging government property, and putting his own health and safety at risk—along with our reputation as educators, comrades! That Konev’s a nasty piece of work! A vandal! Riffraff!’ And you think so, too, don’t you?!”

“Where’d you get that? I never draw hasty conclusions.”

“Yeah, right. You went along with ‘knucklehead’ quick enough.” Yurka gave a little laugh. “But it wasn’t like that at all, actually. What I was actually doing was helping get a girl’s Frisbee for her. I was walking along and I see Anechka—” Yurka broke off at the thought that he was saying the name too tenderly. “Anyway, I see this girl from my troop sitting there crying. So I asked why. Her Frisbee had landed up on the roof and she’d been asking the facilities manager for two days to get it down for her, but he couldn’t care less. The Frisbee was a gift from her father, and there was only a day until the end of the whole session! No way in hell she was going to get it back.”

“Don’t curse,” Volodya ordered, more from habit than as an actual reprimand.

Yurka ignored him. “So I went up onto the roof. It wasn’t high at all, I just reached up and pulled myself up. No sweat. But that’s the exact moment they appeared.”

“Didn’t the girl explain what was going on?”

“She explained it, but who’s going to listen to her? ‘You should’ve asked the facilities manager.’ But she already had ...”

“So what happened?”

“I got her Frisbee down for her, that’s what. Anechka’s all happy, beaming, thanking me, but Konev—no, Konev’s still just a troublemaker, riffraff.”

“Okay, that time you were in the right. But what were you doing sneaking through that hole in the fence?”

“Getting my smokes.” Yurka blurted out the truth before stopping to think.

“You smoke, too?!” cried Volodya, aghast.

“Who, me? No! No, I just—I’m just experimenting. I won’t do it anymore!” he fibbed, then changed the topic, just to be safe. “But who told you about the hole? I thought nobody knew about it!”

“Everybody knows about it. Not only do they know about it, they’ve fixed it.”

Yurka snorted. “Fine. It’s not like I don’t know other ways to get out of camp.”

Volodya sat up, alert: “There are other holes? Where?”

“I’m not telling.”

“Please, tell me! Yur, what if my little trouble magnets find out? They’ll run away!”

“They won’t find out, much less run away. It’s too far for them, and also they can’t use it because they’re so short,” Yurka assured him. But Volodya continued to huff nervously, so to quell his anxiety, Yurka added, “I guarantee they won’t run away!”

“Yura, if anything happens, the senior staff will come down on me like a ton of bricks!”

Yurka picked distractedly at a mosquito bite on his elbow. “Just don’t tell anybody, okay? About the hole. Or about the smokes, either.”

“I won’t tell as long as you show me this other hole. I have to be sure the kids can’t get through it. And that it’s safe.”

Yurka stopped resisting. “It’s not a hole in the fence, actually. It’s a shallow place in the river. No need to panic. They’re not crazy: they’re not going to cross a river where the water’s up to their necks.” Volodya grunted dubiously. Then Yurka remembered: “Tell me this: What story should I tell tomorrow? To the kids? I did promise ...”

“Come up with something. You were so quick on the draw with the one you just told; another one won’t be hard.”

“Easy for you to say! There was an inspiration for the brooch story, but that’s it. The tank’s empty now. What else can I come up with ... maybe a story about a serial killer?”

“A serial killer?! How’d there be a serial killer way out here?” snorted Volodya.

“I don’t know! It’s all made-up, anyway.” Yurka shrugged.

“No. It has to be more realistic, and there has to be a moral to the story. Maybe we could expand on the topic of the estate instead ... We could talk about ... a hidden treasure? That’s it! Let’s do a hidden treasure.”

“Hmm,” said Yurka, scratching his chin. “That’s an idea. Do you have anything to write on?”

Volodya explored his pockets. From the left pocket he pulled the slingshot, but shoved it back and dug into his right pocket. He extracted a notebook rolled up into a tube, along with a pen.

“Isn’t it too dark to write?” he asked as he handed them to Yurka.

“It’s fine. I have big handwriting.”

“Then go on, maestro, begin!”

“Okay. So the count and the countess were very wealthy. Before he left for the war, the count took a large portion of his fortune, hid it in a chest, and buried it somewhere ...”

“But what did the countess live on?”

“I said ‘a large portion’; he left the rest with her! Where was I ... And under cover of darkness, on the night of the new moon, he carried the chest out and buried it, marking the location on a map. But even the map wouldn’t help find the treasure if you hadn’t solved a series of riddles ... No ... Wait! The valuables were hidden not by a count but by partisans! Yeah! A cache of weapons!”

Yurka never did make it to the dance that night. For hours past lights-out, he and Volodya sat together on the merry-go-round, dreaming up scary stories for the little kids, completely heedless of time racing on.