Page 30 of Pioneer Summer
“Exactly!” Volodya looked up from his papers and smiled, his glasses glinting. “Oh—no, wait ... The next sentence talks about the enemy, and that one has to stay like that.”
“Why? Here, let me look at it.” Yurka plopped down on the merry-go-round next to him and grabbed the notebook and papers.
Volodya moved over to him and peered down at the pages. He got out his pencil and was about to point at something in the text with it, but Yurka unthinkingly kicked off at just that moment and the merry-go-round started turning. Volodya lurched and fell down on Yurka so hard that the bill of Yurka’s baseball cap rammed into Volodya’s forehead.
Individual pages slid slowly off the merry-go-round onto the ground, where the gentle breeze sent them scudding in all directions. Both boys turned their heads, following the pages as they fluttered gracefully away. It mesmerized them both. After some time, Volodya looked back down—and blushed. “Oops,” he whispered. Then Yurka noticed it too: Volodya had been holding on to Yurka’s knee. Volodya quickly let go.
“Sor—sorry,” Yurka stammered. He also felt awkward for some reason. He cleared his throat, abashed. Then, pretending to do it casually, for no special reason, he turned his cap around so the bill was in the back.
“That’s a strange way to wear it.” The comment sounded stupid, as did Volodya’s artificially perky tone.
“But I don’t wear it that way. I mean, just now I had to ... well, so you ... it hit you, and I don’t want it to ... I mean ...” He trailed off. Then he changed the subject abruptly: “What, don’t you like it?”
“No, no, it looks good on you. Your bangs stick out so funny. It’s really a cool cap! And your jeans are really cool, and your polo shirt. I remember how you got dressed up for the dance ... that you didn’t even end up going to ...”
“Well, of course, it’s all imported.” Yurka was very pleased with himself. He’d never doubted the fact that he had great threads.
“Where’d you get all this bounty?”
“I have relatives in East Germany; they bring it from there. But this cap isn’t German, though. It’s American, actually.”
“Cool!” exclaimed Volodya.
Flattered and gratified, Yurka launched into a detailed narrative of how he got all his prized imported clothes. Although he didn’t specify that his jeans weren’t actually all that great, since they were made in India, not America.
“You know, over there in Germany, it’s not just the clothes that are awesome.”
“I know, their technology is, too, and their cars. Once in a magazine I saw this one motorcycle—whew!” Volodya widened his eyes for emphasis.
“In a magazine ... Yeah, they’ve got the kind of magazines there that the USSR’ll never have.”
“Check him out! I’m talking about motorcycles here but he’s all about the magazines. That’s not like you.”
“It’s just that you haven’t seen them, so you don’t know what you’re talking about. If you’d seen what I’ve seen ...” Yurka raised and lowered his eyebrows conspiratorially.
“What? What is it?”
“I’m not telling.”
“Yura! Are we in the toddler room at day care or something? Tell me.”
“Okay, I’ll tell you, but it’s a secret, okay?”
“On my honor as a Komsomol member.”
Yurka stared at Volodya, eyes narrowed: “Silent as the grave?”
“As the grave.”
“This spring my uncle came to visit and brought us all kinds of stuff: clothes, of course, and makeup for my mom, and magazines and other things for my dad. They were regular magazines, just in German, with clothes and housewares and whatnot. So, yeah ... that night they sent me off to bed but they stayed in the kitchen with the door closed. Pretty soon, my mom left, so my dad and uncle were in there just the two of them. My room happens to be the one closest to the kitchen, so you can hear kitchen conversations pretty well there ... So the two of them were getting good and boozed up and they’d started talking really loud, so I could hear every word. I just lay there listening, basically. Turns out that my uncle had brought my dad some, ahem, other magazines too. And later when I was at home alone I went and found them.”
“What was in them? Was it something anti-Soviet? If it was, then it’s dangerous to have magazines like that at home!”
“No, not that! I don’t know German well enough yet to read it easily. And there was hardly any text anyway. It was all pictures. Photos.” Yurka leaned so close to Volodya that his lips almost touched his ear and lowered his voice to a whisper. “Of women!”
“Ooh ... Um ... Well, sure, I know magazines like that exist.” Volodya shifted an arm’s length away from Yurka, but to no avail: Yurka all but plastered himself to Volodya and whispered hoarsely, directly into his ear, “They were with men ... You know what I mean? They were with guys ... They were ...”
“Enough, Yur. I get it.” Volodya slid away again.
