Page 98 of Pioneer Summer
Yurka interrupted him. “It’s too late to be afraid of that, because it’s already happened! With you! I’ve told you a thousand times, I don’t know what other words to use. Volodya, if it weren’t for you, I wouldn’t have started playing again! Music came back to me, thanks to none other than you! Goodness and meaning came back into my life because of you, so you can’t be bad. And today’s not an end at all, not if you don’t want it to be. Volodya, look, I’m notyour cousin. And it’ll be different with me. I understand you, and I—I love you. And now I know for real, not from books, how hard it is to become each other’s first love, how hard it is tobeeach other’s first love. But then staying that for each other is easy as pie. Let’s do what it takes to stay that way, okay? Because we’re friends, first and foremost, and I’m not going to betray you, and I’m not going to abandon you. I’ll write you and support you.”
The whole time Yurka was talking, Volodya stared at him without blinking, his eyes radiating his desperate desire to believe those words, to believe that everything would work out for them.
“I’ll write you, too,” Volodya said finally. He smiled. “I won’t skip a single letter. I’ll write twice a week, or even more, and I won’t even need a reason.”
“There, you see? Now we’re talking sense.”
“You got that right.” Volodya chuckled. “I’m a little less afraid I’ll lose my mind now ...”
Yurka realized, suddenly, that he was freezing. To warm up, he stretched out his goose bump–covered legs and started rubbing them with his hands.
“Oh!” he remembered. “Tchaikovsky didn’t write in his diary that sodomites should be exterminated, too, did he?”
“No,” Volodya scoffed. “He was one of them. They didn’t put you in prison for that back then. But he suffered from it, too. He called it ‘feeling Z’ and wrote about how—”
“There, see?” Yurka interrupted him, to keep Volodya from getting bogged down in a discourse on suffering and torment again. “He didn’t start any wars. Just the opposite! He was a genius.” Yurka wanted to shout the word “genius,” but his teeth were chattering from cold. He shivered.
Volodya, of course, noticed that Yurka was freezing and started taking of his own jacket, evidently planning to drape it over Yurka’s shoulders, but Yurka stopped him. “Better to warm my legs.” Volodya nodded and put his hands on Yurka’s ankles. His hands were so warm, as though it weren’t freezing! He started rubbing his hands briskly up and down Yurka’s legs. Yurka felt the warmth spreading through his body—not regular warmth, but that special warmth, Volodya’s warmth. He shut his eyes, luxuriating, and so didn’t see Volodya lean forward, but he felt the heat on his knee. It was so cold that Volodya’s lips on it felt burning hot.
Yurka stared at him, not daring to move a muscle. Volodya caught his eyes and smiled. He slowly breathed out another puff of heat onto Yurka’s skin, then leaned over to kiss the other knee.
Yurka couldn’t help it: he reached down and took hold of Volodya’s shoulders and tried to pull him toward his face. “Kiss me. The grown-up way. Like in the boat.”
“Yura, we shouldn’t ... Don’t stir ... that in me. Even without any kissing you’re too good at getting me excited, I can’t sleep for half the night afterward. I don’t want to get all handsy with you again and then regret it.”
“But I want you to! And you, you’re ... stirring me up, too; you’re over here kissing me on the knee!”
“I know, I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to ... God, I’m even seducing the most innocent, the most—”
“Stop blaming everything on yourself!” Yurka erupted. “You keep creating all this blame and guilt and then heaping it on yourself! Is what we’re doing really bad? Does it really hurt anyone?”
“No, but Masha might tell.”
“Tell what? She doesn’t even know where we are right now. She’s sacked out over in the cabin, fast asleep. Look, I don’t want to ruin our last day because of her. Volod, it’s our last day! What if we never see each other again? What if we really—”
“Masha or no Masha, we shouldn’t.” Volodya hugged Yurka’s head to his shoulder. “This can only lead to ... to something improper. And I’m responsible for you.”
“For cripes’ sake! Look, what if after this I go do something bad without telling you—some act of vandalism? Are you responsible for me then? No. Come on, Volodya, quit treating me like I’m a little kid.”
“Well, okay. But let’s not start up right this minute, okay? I barely got to sleep the night after the boat. We have to get up early tomorrow, and we’ve stayed up late enough as it is.”
“But tomorrow is already here,” said Yurka, smiling.
He was warmed up. But now Volodya went quiet. Evidently he was immersed again in yet more worries. But Yurka didn’t resist. He wanted only one thing: for Volodya to rest his head on Yurka’s chest and then lethim think about whatever he wanted as he listened to the beating of Yurka’s heart.
They held each other again. Yurka turned his desire to reality, pulling Volodya close and hugging his head to his chest. The nosepiece of Volodya’s glasses bit into him, so Yurka pulled them off Volodya’s nose without asking. Volodya didn’t offer a word of protest; he just put Yurka’s hand on his head the way he’d done that time under the willow, so Yurka would stroke his hair. And Yurka was unable to refuse him.
The rain slowed. Falling raindrops tinkled and plinked. Eventually, dawn began striping the sky in the gaps between gray rain clouds. It was time to leave, but ending their embrace, even just tearing away from each other for a few seconds, was too hard. It was all but impossible. As they said their goodbyes, their kisses were many and frequent: kisses on the lips, but not grown-up ones, not like the kisses in the boat.
They threw caution to the wind and left together. But once they reached the intersection of the path to the unfinished barracks and the Avenue of Pioneer Heroes, Volodya realized he’d forgotten to throw away the newspapers he’d spread in the barracks to cover up their tracks. He shook Yurka’s hand in parting and turned to head back.
Yurka was still a little angry at Volodya for not kissing him properly, and for not letting him touch his stomach, and for ... well, there was a lot he was mad at Volodya for. Easier to say that Yurka was just mad about everything.
As he trudged back to his own cabin, he remembered his final threat that he would perform some act of vandalism without telling Volodya. He stopped and looked around, checking that no one was nearby, and raced back to the intersection where he and Volodya had parted ways. He’d remembered that he still had a piece of chalk in his shorts pocket.
The intersection was freshly paved and formed a perfect square, as though it had been created specifically to be an artist’s canvas. Yurka thought about what he should write. Maybe the first letters of their first names and the year, like in the lovers’ bower? No, writing something like that would be too risky. Obviously theVcould be hiding Vitya, or Valya, or Valera, or any number of other names, while theYucould be Yulya, not Yura. But then the dwindling rain would hardly wash away the writingby the time the bugle played reveille. And if it didn’t, and if Masha did somehow find out about his and Volodya’s absence, then things would get ugly for them. No, writing their initials was off-limits. But what did he need both initials for? Yurka had never liked the first letter of his name; it was awkward and weird-looking. The letterV, though: now, that was a different story altogether ...
He got the chalk out of his pocket. He bent down and, with a flourish, started drawing the most gorgeous letter in the world,V, the first letter of his favorite name. He traced around it, making the lines thicker and then shading them, and then realized that just the one letter all by itself wasn’t enough. There had to be a meaning hidden in his “act of vandalism.” It had to conceal a feeling: the feeling he’d been afraid to call love, even to himself, up until that night. But love was precisely what it was. Yurka knew that now.
