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aarghhaaaarrrghhh · 2 months ago

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A Summer in a Pioneer's Neckerchief/Лето в пионерском галстуке - Chapter Twenty

Master post here

Chapter Twenty - In Search of One Lost

Volodya’s telegramme sent Yurka into shock. Why should he not write? What had happened? He was thrown from extreme to extreme: Volodya’s parents read the last letter, realised who I was to him, and now they’re blaming me for messing with his treatment? Or maybe Volodya himself wants to get rid of me, like a distraction? It is me he’s dreaming of, I’m leading him astray. Does he not need me?

Fear for Volodya and a sense of guilt prevented Yurka from disobeying him and writing to ask what had happened. Logic reminded him that, whatever may be the case, Volodya was already too grown-up for his parents to punish him for someone else’s words. Fear whispered to him, Volodya has a business together with his father, which means he’s still dependent on him. In the most unbearable moments, he was stung with hurt: Volodya found a way of breaking off our relationship, I gave him the means myself. He really doesn’t need me. And he never did. Memory suggested, He’s in a state of paranoia again, it’s already happened more than once.

Whatever may have been the case, Yurka waited for that ‘after’ to come and for Volodya to write to him. But there were no letters at all. Yura, tormented by doubts and tossing and turning, could find no satisfaction. Apathy affected everything: he slept poorly and ate poorly; he became sullen and withdrew into himself. Indifferent to everything, even losing interest in music, he endured that unendingly long winter, while in the spring, he was pulled out of his stupor by good news from the embassy. Shining with genuine happiness, his mum, still in her outdoor clothes, came running into the kitchen, crying out:

“It’s been approved!”

“I’m leaving! I’m leaving!” Yura was happy for the first time in a long time.

But his glee quickly came to nought - he was leaving! But what about Volodya?

In May, the time for their departure and a few details became known. They did not have long to wait, and, despite Volodya’s request not to write, Yura sent him a short one: “We’re leaving in July. At first, we’re being sent to a distribution centre, and then from there, we’ll be transferred to a permanent place of residence. I don’t yet know the address, but I will soon.”

May came to a close, but Yura was still waiting for any news from Volodya. Each time he approached the letterbox, his heart beat like crazy - what if there were a letter? He startled from every ring of the doorbell - what if there was a telegramme? But he did not receive a reply. He no longer received a single word from Volodya. And once June had come, Yura had no other choice than to borrow a whole bunch of money from his contacts and go to Moscow.

As soon as he stepped off the train, he was plunged into chaos. He very much disliked Moscow. Like a boiling kettle, it was too aggressive, too noisy, and too dirty. Posters were plastered from the asphalt up to the sky itself with pictures of Yelstin, Zhirinovksy and other politicians - the candidates for the presidency of the RSFSR were campaigning in advance of the election. In every other park and square demonstrations and meetings were taking place, but, even if one were to pay them no mind, Moscow would not become cleaner, nor quieter. It looked to Yura like a bazaar of a city, where people haggled, if not for their rights and freedom, then for rags. Second-hand dealers were everywhere: in the squares, on the metro, and simply on the pavements of busy streets, elbow-to-elbow with the beggars and the queues for food. Around the city, adverts for the play M. Butterfly, the first play on the topic of homosexuality, were hung above the propaganda posters. And all of this in the context of the endless hustle and bustle of people.

Until then, Yura had never been in the capital. He had dreamed that as soon as he found himself there, he would go round the mausoleum, but upon his arrival, he did not even remember that; he set off right away for Begovaya station.

Having just about figured out the map and focussed on the goal of his itinerary, Yura paid no attention to either the beauty or the ugliness of Volodya’s metro station. So that was what Volodya’s home was like - yellow, four-storey Stalinist apartment block with stone balconies, picturesquely entwined with ivy. So that was what Volodya’s yard was like - shadowy and quiet, with a statue of a pioneer bent over a book. So that was what his entryway was like. He only came to his senses and began to notice anything around him once he had found himself by the door to his apartment.

He rang the doorbell - no-one opened the door. He pressed his ear to the door - it was quiet.

Yura waited. He remembered that Volodya’s mum did not go to work; most likely, she had popped out quickly and would be back soon. The time drew towards four o’clock. He hoped that within a couple more hours somebody would arrive home. He flinched from each rustle in the hopes that one of the inhabitants of his desired apartment was coming up the stairs. But nobody came up to the top floor, the fourth, nor approached Volodya’s door. There was just one old woman of some sort who, grumbling, stomped by Yura and looked him up and down, but, without saying anything, disappeared behind the neighbouring door.

When an hour had gone by, the old woman peered out from behind the chain on the door at the stairwell and called harshly at Yura:

“Who are you? Why are you sitting there?”

“I’m waiting for-” he mumbled and turned away, then, remembering himself, jumped up to his feet: “I’m a friend of Volodya Davydov, he lives here. You don’t happen to know when someone will be back home, do you?”

“They’re probably not coming back.”

“Why’s that?”

“The whole family up and left about half a year ago,” replied the old woman as she continued to bore into Yura with her gaze. “At New Year’s.”

Yura’s throat constricted and he choked out:

“But why?”

“How should I know? They didn’t say,” replied the old woman in a definitive tone, but she did not hurry to close the door.

“Did the other neighbours say anything?” asked Yura, encouraging her to tell him rumours at the very least.

In the end, she’s an old woman, and they’re all the same no matter where you go in the USSR - inquisitive. She’s hardly likely to be an exception, Yura thought and guessed right.

“They say so much, but what should you believe?” The old woman frowned, but, after half a minute’s silence, told me him anyway: “Lev Nikolayevich was in contact with some gangsters, he owed them money and couldn’t pay it. He reregistered the apartment and fled with his family.”

“Lev Nikolayevich? But what about Volodya? Are you sure it’s not about him?”

“I saw myself a few times, a car would stop by the entryway, Lev Nikolayevich would get in and then back out again. Then the gangsters started to come right to the apartment. Right in the middle of the night, they’d bang on the door. I called the police, but by the time they arrived, they were gone without a trace.”

The first thing Yura felt as he listened was relief - for so long he had blamed himself on account of his premonition of which he was so afraid, that, having outed Volodya to his parents, he was the cause of his disappearance. But now it turned out that Yura had nothing to do with it. Only, the real cause - a genuine flight, not just a simple disappearance - was even scarier. Pursuit. Yura could not help but believe the old woman - in those times, businessmen had to get by without credit as a matter of course, and money was concentrated solely in the hands of gangsters. There was a grand total of two paths to staying afloat: either become a gangster oneself, or become one of their debtors. The sudden growth of Volodya’s family’s revenue was a confirmation - it was impossible to start from nought on such a long-term business as construction and manage to bring so much revenue inside of a year.

“But how’s Volodya?” croaked Yura hoarsely. “Did he leave with his parents? He’s an adult, he’s studying.”

“You tell me, you said yourself that you’re his friend.”

“I haven’t seen him in a very long time, I don’t-”

“I don’t really get what’s going on with that Volodya,” interrupted the old woman. “He was a good boy, he always said hello and helped me with my bags. But lately he became a bit twitchy. Always looking over his shoulder. He stopped saying hello.”

Yura began to feverishly calculate what to do next and how to find him.

“You don’t happen to know where they might be, do you?”

The old woman shrugged, making the chain tinkle.

“What about extended family, or friends?” Yura suddenly recollected. “Cousin! He has a cousin, they have the exact same name! Where do his friends or family leave?”

“There’s someone in Tver, perhaps,” replied the old woman. “Go on, get going from here. Still, don’t hold your breath.”

Yura asked a couple of new questions, the answers to which the old woman did not know. After asking about the university, “He was studying, could he have dropped out?”, the conversation came to a close.

Yura plopped down onto the staircase like a rag doll. As he flexed his fingers, gone wooden from shock, he stared at the grey floor and, with difficulty, sorted through the excerpts of thoughts spinning around his head: They fled. Gangsters. Into hiding. If they’re in hiding, then they won’t be findable. Tver. Is Tver far? The University. I need to drop by his university. I need to get a grip. The chance to find him is now and now alone. Afterwards, that’s it.

After forcing himself to gather all his strength, Yura stood up. His gaze switched between the concrete floor and the door upholstered in leatherette, and his heart twinged. Yura knew that never, not once in his life would he be in that apartment, he would never see Volodya’s room. It was a stranger’s place now, they would not let him in. He did not care: let them stop him from staying, but they might have at least let him take a look inside the apartment! Even without going inside, even just from the threshold, as long as he saw past that damned door. Even if there was nothing left of Volodya’s, even if the bed on which he slept was no longer there, nor the nightstand upon which he laid his glasses, nor the table at which he sat, at the very least, the window out of which Volodya looked when he wrote his letters would remain. Yura ached to look through it; he felt that it would bring them closer. To see even just the traces of the furniture on the floor. They were proof that Volodya really had existed, that Yura had not just imagined him.

I will find him, I will! His legs moving involuntarily, he forced himself to leave that place and descend the staircase.

In the hopes of finding letters from the friends and family of the Davydovs, Yura threw open the door of the letterbox. Blood pounded in his temples - there were, in fact, two letters laying in the letterbox! But his hands dropped again right away - they were his own letters. The second-to-last, wherein Yura confessed his love, and the last, where he said that he would be moving in July.

Despite the situation being so hopeless, Yura felt a little easier. At least he was not the cause of Volodya’s last telegramme with the request to no longer write. At least there was still hope that Volodya loved and needed him in the same way. But it turned out that he did not even know that Yura would be leaving soon.

From his home, Yura went to the university, where he found out, not immediately, that Volodya had collected his documents. Also at New Year’s.

The whole way to Kursky station, Yura was deciding whether or not to go to Tver: It’s not far, but I don’t have much money left. No, if I don’t at least try, I’ll never forgive myself. Never.

The metro train rumbled and on the seat opposite, a young man placed his jacket over his girlfriend’s lap and cautiously gave her hand a squeeze. Exactly like in Volodya’s dream, except this couple did not have to hide their hands.

It’s a sign, thought Yura and he left the carriage. He got on a different branch and headed for Leningradksy station.

In Tver, he went to a post office, bought a telephone directory and began to ring every Davydov he found in turn. He called more than half the numbers, but nobody knew any Vladimir Davydov. His heart skipped a beat when some girl finally replied that Vladimir was home, and called for him. The seconds of anticipation dragged on, turning into minutes and hours. Yura was as though lost in space and time; he did not know how long he truly waited for. But he was patient enough. Vladimir answered, and Yurka’s heart dropped - he turned out to be an old man.

Trying not to slip into despair ahead of time, Yura led his finger down the lines of the directory. His finger trembled ata the name of Davydov, Vladimir Leonidovich.

As he stood in the telephone box with the receiver to his ear for half an hour, Yura swore through his teeth - he could not get through, the line was busy. Night was approaching, and the short beeps continued to sound from the phone. Yura decided to go to that comrade right away.

The hallway of the old Khrushchev-era building smelt like cats. Yura pressed the doorbell. Without opening the door, a girl answered, listening to Yura and called for Vova. A young man’s voice responded. The lock clicked, the door swung open and on the threshold stood a tall, broad-shouldered man, about thirty years old.

“I’m looking for Volodya Davydov.”

“And? Speaking.”

“It’s not you, it’s probably your cousin. He lived in Moscow, wore glasses; he has dark hair. I was with him at camp,” rambled Yura as he rummaged about in his pocket for the only picture he had of Volodya - the one where he was with the fifth troop. “In ‘86, he was a counsellor there. It’s the pioneer camp Lastochka, in Kharkiv Oblast. I… I have a photo with me, give me a minute.”

“I don’t know anyone like that,” Vova cut him off.

��Just a second, the photo… Here,” Yura stuck the photograph in Vova’s face, but he did not even look down at it.

“I don’t know anyone like that,” he declared and slammed the door. The photo was caught in the space between the door and the frame.

Yura pulled the crumpled photograph out, straightened it back out again, and with misery discovered that the corner had been torn off.

That was it. That was the final point. But Yura could not believe it. It felt like he still had a chance, he just would not find it there. It felt as though if he had even just a little bit more time, he would find him.

The only thing that Yura had left as he returned to Kharkiv was to rely on other people. He did not have the chance to meet the new residents of his apartment, if there even would be any. The Konev’s apartment was municipal, which meant that they could not sell it. Yura asked his remaining neighbours - alcoholics with whom his parents were at loggerheads - to pass a note to any new residents asking them not to throw away any letters addressed to him, but rather to send them on to Germany. In a post-scriptum, Yura said that in a short while, he would send another letter with his new permanent address in Germany.

He asked the same of his friends from the block: if new residents were to move in, then go to the apartment, tell them everything and also take a look in the letterbox to see if a letter from Volodya had arrived.

And that was it.

The packing and preparations for their departure seemed to pass Yura by. The airport, the flight, and the transfer too.

Then he was there. In Germany. He had done nothing to accomplish it, while Volodya had worked for his whole conscious life to get to America.

Did he manage it? He has to make it, otherwise that would be too unfair! thought Yura. Perhaps he’s already there?

And if he had known the answer, it would still have been unimportant, because now Yura was there, in Germany.

For a long time in Germany, he felt absolutely foreign. Ashamed of his accent, the repulsive, humiliating word ‘emigrant’ made him wince. A Russian emigrant, at that. That was how the Germans spoke of him, despite the fact that the whole world was following the dissolution of the USSR; everybody knew that Russia, Ukraine and Belarus were different countries. And Yura was not Russian. But who could he be there? A quarter German, a quarter Jewish, half-Ukrainian, he knew the language and history of German and was passionately interested in its culture. But knowledge of a language, of a culture and a history do not change a mindset, it does not reconfigure your head - no matter how much Yura was embarrassed, he was an emigrant, and in actual fact, something even worse - practically a refugee. He hated himself for the disdain, more than once repeating mentally, It’s even more humiliating and cowardly to be ashamed of your own nature rather than just being somebody.

Yura lived through his first month in Germany by convincing himself every day that he simply needed to forget Volodya. But it felt to him like he was surviving more so than living.

August 1991 began excellently - Yura got into a conservatory on his first try. But towards the middle, on the eighteenth, a blow was laying in wait for him.

He was sitting in his room, testing out his new piano, a gift from his uncle, when he was startled by a wild thump on his door. It was his mum. She shouted so loudly that for a moment, it overpowered the music:

“Yura! Come quickly. There’s tanks in Moscow, Yura! Gorbachev’s been overthrown! Lord, what’s it coming to - tanks!”

Not believing his ears, Yura, overcoming the monstrous resistance of the suddenly thickened air, slowly went into the living room. He fell onto the sofa in front of the television and sat there until the depths of the night. In the morning and for the whole following day, frames kept flashing before his eyes: Yeltsin on a tank, the crowd around the White House and on Red Square. Later - the GKChP’s press conference, Yanayev, whose hands were shaking so badly that he could not hold his paper. Yura was trembling too. He began to panic. Like never before. Like how Volodya must have suffered when he dipped his hands in boiling water when he was not in the frame of mind to cope with himself.

But what if he never left anywhere? Not to America, nor to Tver. What if he’s in Moscow? What if he’s there, at the White House? What if those gangsters were connected with a politician? What if Volodya’s connected with them and with the revolt, since he was going to meetings of some kind?

It got even worse in the evening. The storming of the White House began and tanks were going along the Garden Ring. When Yurka saw people begin to throw themselves at them and somebody was killed, he shook even worse than ever. In the darkness of the night, it was hard to see who specifically had been killed - it was a man, brunet, without glasses, but terribly similar-looking to Volodya.

What if it was him? What if his glasses were broken? resounded around his head, but in the depths of his soul, Yura understood that it was just hysteria, that in Moscow, a city of millions, there were hundreds of thousands of young people of an age, build and hair colour with Volodya. But still, he was afraid. Before long, he sought confirmation that the slain person really was not Volodya.

Yura wrote to his friends from the block, asking them to go to his old apartment and find out whether any letters had arrived for him. If they had, then they should collect them and send them on to Germany. A reply came after a month. His friend wrote that the apartment was still empty and that there were no letters in the letterbox. He shared some news about what was going on in the country, but Yura had nothing to say to that except to ask him once again to take a look in the letterbox every now and then.

In December 1991, the USSR ceased to exist. On the television, Yura watched the Soviet flag be lowered from the Kremlin and the Russian flag be raised instead. A curtain seemed to fall on his old life along with the flag of the USSR, and the curtain of his new one raise along with the tricolour. And then Yura knew that the time of his childhood had definitively passed. It had gifted him love and friendship and left, taking everything with it. In front of him, a new, different time awaited, and a completely different life. And it was time for Yura to, as Volodya had once written, to stop looking back at him and begin to live a normal life.

He found out soon enough that in his city, as in all of Germany, there were a lot of Russians. They did not form an official society, but held fast to each other. Besides the television, it was from them that Yura’s family found out about what was happening in Russia and Ukraine.

Yura adapted to his new life with difficulty. In the first days, he made friends for the most part with other emigrants like himself. When the school year began, he tried to speak with the Germans as much as he could, even though they seemed like a people cut from a completely different cloth, not in a single strand alike to people from the USSR. There was no point even thinking about getting into a relationship with somebody. For the time being, Yura was not even interested in the life of sexual minorities in Germany. Feeling lost, unneeded by anyone, superfluous and powerless, he tried to adapt to the people around him, to resemble his German classmates, and to lose his accent. But still, he stood out, even when he kept silent - he thought about Volodya; he still remembered how strongly he loved him. And he stayed the same in not being attracted to women.

True, Yura soon found out that in Berlin, the attitude to homosexuals was completely different than in the USSR.

The sandy path went around a sharp corner down to the river. In places he slipped and fell down. So it was in 1992, too - life carried him forward by itself. Yura continued to study diligently; he did nothing but study, but everything around him still kept changing. And it changed to the point of unrecognition.

That of which Volodya had been afraid came to pass - other guys began to catch Yura’s gaze. He did not make any attempts to find a boyfriend, or even just get to know people from ‘his’ circle. But completely by happenstance, an openly gay man, a member of Berlin Pride, came to one of his university parties. Yura was not attracted to him sexually, while he liked Yura, but that did not prevent them from making friends. A little while later, Mick told him about the community and invited him to an area where the Berlin gays hung out.

The next weekend, Yura went to Nollendorfplatz. He exited the metro and headed from the plaza to Motzstraße, and no sooner had he got there than he stopped dead, at a loss. What he saw could not have been a dream or a vision, because Yura could not even imagine anything like it. It was a parallel world, noisy, busy, bright and free. Yura seemed to have found himself on some incredible other planet where a party atmosphere reigned, where Yura was not an other, and where, it seemed, they were even expecting him. Dozens of songs rang out simultaneously from dozens of clubs, and hundreds of people were walking around. Some, like Yura, were walking alone, trying to pick people out of the motley crowd with a glance. But the majority of the crowd was composed of same-sex couples. They behaved uninhibitedly and freely, almost to the point of vulgarness: they walked hand-in-hand, kissing each other right there in the streets, in front of everybody, and nothing happened to them because of it! No judgemental looks, no rude words - nothing! Yura could not believe in the reality of what was happening. Frozen in place, rubbing his eyes wide with surprise, he looked enviously at the couples and sighed, “If only Volodya could see this.” Mick confirmed that there, it was normal, that the war, of which Yura had not the slightest inkling, had already been won. But, having been raised in the USSR, Yura was sure that never in his life would he allow himself go about the streets like that, holding hands with a guy.

On the asphalt, wet after the rain, right beneath his feet, there lay a reflection from the electric sign of a bar with stripes of colour - the rainbow flag. Yura lowered his gaze, sighed jerkily and took a step, his foot squarely on the reflection on the ground. Having gathered his courage, he went right towards the rainbow into the bar, where he had agreed to meet Mick.

He took a seat discreetly at an empty table, ordered a beer and drank the whole glass in one go. A quarter of an hour had not gone by before a group of about a dozen people sat with him, of whom Yura soon came to think as none other than genuine family. There were men and women, and those Yura did not know whether to address as a ‘he’ or a ‘she’. Cheerful and energetic, they discussed how they were planning action under the codename Operation Civil Registry, which was supposed to make a lot of noise. The idea was that on the specified day, the nineteenth of August, a tonne of same-sex couples would make a declaration of their marriage registration at Civil Registry offices around the whole country at the same time. Of course, they would all receive written refusals, which they would then take to court. Drunk not on the beer, but on the atmosphere, Yura agreed in an instant to take part in Operation Civil Registry. A ‘husband’ was found for him immediately, whose name Yura only remembered when he read it in his declaration. The declaration was not a grounds for starting a relationship, and, though Yura fancied the guy - a tall, thin brunet with delicate facial features and grey eyes - they did not become a couple then. But everything was such a whirlwind then that it was only when Yura received the refusal to accept the marriage registration that he stopped and thought for the first time that he would have found himself in a very strange situation if it had been accepted.

In the heap of rejections from the Civil Registry office, there lay another letter for Yura, from one of his friends from the block in Kharkiv. This guy had long since moved to a different district, but he sometimes went back to his old one, Yura’s, to see his mother, about which he wrote. The letter left Yura dumbstruck.

“I went to go see my mother a little while back. She said that some guy was looking for you. I didn’t see him myself, but my mother said that he wore glasses. Could it be the one you were talking about?”

Yura sent a short, nervous reply: “What did he ask her and what did she say in reply? Did she give him my address and telephone number in Germany? Did he leave his contact information?”

And after another month, he received a response: “My mother didn’t give him your address or phone number, she just said that you had moved to Germany. He said nothing about himself.”

Yura asked: “Go to my old apartment and find out whether this guy went there and left his address? And definitely take any letters. If there still aren’t any, break the letterbox open.”

There was no reply for a long time - his friend had long since been living his own life, swallowed up by his own family and work. He was, of course, not going to hurry to and fro from one end of the city to the other each time Yura came calling. Therefore he replied later, only in the beginning of November:

“The guy came here. He didn’t leave his address, but he took his letters.”

Yura overflowed with anger: why had he not left his address, why had he taken his letters back? Could it be another part of his idiotic ‘you’d be better off without me’ thing? Anger grew into fury. If Volodya had been around, Yura would have hit him.

It was partially that news which pushed Yura to start a new relationship. Driven mad and offended, he went to Nollendorfplatz. He took a seat in the bar and knocked back glass after glass. Once he was already seeing double, an old acquaintance, Jonas, his unsuccessful ‘husband’ with whom he submitted the declaration at the Civil Registry back in August, came and sat with him. Yura was so drunk that in the morning he could remember how and why he found himself in the same bed with him.

Back in distant 1986, he had agreed with Volodya to meet in ten years’ time. But he did not go, because he simply forgot about it. He forgot about pretty much everything - his life was a whirlwind, his music had finally been recognised. He put on concerts and was already learning to conduct; Yura was now reaping the fruits of his labour. But the main thing that made him utterly forget about his agreement was not something, but someone - Jonas. Yura thought their relationship was true love, long-lived and mutual, but it only seemed that way.

Jonas was a gay rights activist and his work had to do with the social lives of the community. He tried to respect Yura’s affairs, but it soon became clear that Jonas either did not like Yura’s music, or piano music in general; he said that there was no point to it, just noise.

But they went to the theatre and the opera together. Once, when they were travelling around Latvia, Yura noticed a poster in Russian for M. Butterfly, the play by Roman Viktyuk, and despite the fact that Jonas did not understand a word of Russian, Yura insisted that they go together.

The performance had a two-fold impression. The play did not only alienate, it also attracted. He was put off by the nudity and the antics which turned it into a pantomime, but he was drawn to the ambiguity of the topic, the moral that love did not have a sex. And he was shocked by the fact that the play was based on true events which did not take place so long ago. But the main thing was the Russian speech - Yura heard it from the stage for the first time in the last several years.

M. Butterfly reminded Yura of what had been happening the first time he saw the poster - in ‘91, in Moscow. It reminded him of the person for whom Yura had gone there. And his dream - to write a composition full of meaning, perhaps the most important of his whole life - visited Yura once again. The image of the main character in a woman’s dress, and feeling themself free in it, haunted Yura for many years. To Jonas, the very idea of finding psychological freedom through wearing clothes seemed absurd, when it was factually self-humiliation, but Yura did not agree with him.

For him, a time of creative trials, errors and experiments began.

Yura and Jonas were too different and they understood this. But perhaps diametrically opposite characters, temperaments and interests attracted one another. A year after the beginning of their relationship, they moved in together. To begin with, they were still able to forgive each other’s inadequacies and show as much interest as was necessary in each other’s vocations, but the longer their relationship dragged on, the more difficult it became to make peace with the scorn each of them bore to the other’s goals and even to what they each thought was the meaning of life.

Jonas spent all his time and effort on organising gay get-togethers, gay parades and gay Olympics. He wanted to acquire equal rights to heterosexuals for homosexuals, but Yura thought that activism would not help there, that in order to achieve something substantial, Jonas should go into politics rather than activism. But he seemed not to listen to him and continued to talk about his own things.

Yura quickly grew tired of the constant, useless conversations about the discrimination faced by homosexuals and the struggle for same-sex marriage. In all the time he had spent in Germany, not once had he come up against discrimination in his professional life. No, Yura did not hide his orientation and did not even consider hiding Jonas, it was just that none of his colleagues ever asked him about his private life, while Yura was not going to go flaunting it just like that.

“Gays are forbidden from getting married - that’s discrimination,” said Joans. “Why are we banned from what’s allowed for heteros? We’re striving for equal rights with straight couples. We’re citizens just like them, and there’s a lot of us! And you also have to fight for your rights, nobody’s going to do it for you.”

Though it may have been discrimination, Yura did not need marriage.

Perhaps it was his Soviet upbringing, perhaps it was his temperament, but Yura found the provocative behaviour at the gay parades irritating.

The expansion of gay villages, which Jonas had been particularly actively focussed on in recent times, Yura considered not so much useless as harmful. He thought of gay villages as a comfortable place for getting to know people and passing time, but he could not stand their very essence:

“You’re literally herding gays into cages, creating reservations, Like how in America there’s areas for Whites and areas for Blacks, just for gays in this case. We need to get people out the reservation, not expand it.”

The only proposition for which Yura fully shared enthusiasm and supported was the Gay Olympics, because people from different countries could participate in them, including from those where homosexuality bore the death penalty.

“If you want to help people,” he repeated to Jonas for the hundredth time, “create a centre for psychological support in schools and universities. But the only right solution for achieving your goals is to get into politics. That’s the only way.”

After four years of fruitless attempts to learn to accept and love each other as they were, along with their interests, which Yura and Jonas perceived as defects, their relationship began to crumble.The love, which had at first been bright and maddening, paled and grew full, and inexorably went out. Their irritation with each other’s interests spread to everything else. Jonas’ appearance, which had simply floored Yura at their first meeting, ceased to seem special. His defects, such as the moles on his temples, which Yura had stubbornly ignored before, now caught his eye and aroused disgust. Yura even began to be irritated by his gait, his habits, his gestures, what he wore and the way he was. And he also noticed from the way Jonas looked at him that he liked him less and less.

But if Yura did not always express the correct or proper opinion, then Jonas began to demonstratively ignore music. He tried not to be home when Yura was learning a new piece, he never asked Yura to play him something and not once did he turn up to his performances at the concert hall.

More and more often, they found it more comfortable to remain silent in each other’s company. Then the silence became a habit, and soon enough, even the sound of the other’s voice began to irritate each of them. Almost every conversation about music or the community ended in a scandal. Then they stopped putting the energy into even their arguments. Then, the sex, and soon after, Yura asked Jonas to gather his things and go. Thus did something that Yura had once thought would be eternal come to an end.

Outside, it was the 31st of July 1998. Yura had forgotten about the meeting beneath the willow; he was two years late for it. On the whole, he had forgotten about, and sacrificed, a lot when he plunged headfirst right into a relationship and then tried in vain to save it. He stopped speaking with his Russian friends, he did not participate in the community and he sacrificed his career as musician, something in which he needed to invest as much time and effort as possible if he wanted to achieve anything significant. But the most important thing was that Yura ruined his relationship with his parents. They could not accept his orientation, and after several attempts to explain it to them and find some understanding, he gave up. Yura visited them on holidays, but it more resembled the traditional, obligatory visits one makes to distant relatives than a son to his parents. His mum spoke coldly to him, and if occasionally her former warmth shone in her eyes, then all the more often it was regret. His father did not speak to him at all.

After the breakup, it was like he returned to the Earth from the clouds and remembered that, besides Jonas and music, there was a lot else in life. But more than anything, he thought about his unfulfilled promise.

If in ‘91 there had not been any chance of finding a person while knowing only his name and surname, then by that point in time, with the appearance of the internet, it had become at least hypothetically possible. Yura knew - he did not believe, he did not suppose, he knew - that Volodya must have turned up at Lastochka, and that his first task was to find it. The second was to go there, even if his time had already gone by.

Yura had forgotten the way to Lastochka. To tell the truth, he had never known it - the pioneers were always brought there by bus. Yura remembered the bus route 410 and that a village, Goretovka, had been nearby. He had no luck finding this one and only village out of the hundreds of thousands of villages in the vast territory of the former Soviet Union. Yura started threads on each Russian internet forum he found with the question whether anyone happened to know where this village was and what was up with it now. He did not receive many replies, and those he did get turned out to be useless. People knew a village with that name, only it was in Moscow Oblast. Nobody knew anything about a Goretovka in Kharkiv Oblast.

Yura bought a map and looked over it with an eagle eye - the village was not on it. Tired of the constants ‘no’s and ‘I don’t know’s, he asked himself the question, had the village existed at all? Perhaps, over so many years, he had forgotten its real name and distorted it to the point of unrecognisability in his mind?

He asked his mother whether her former colleagues from the factory remembered where the camp was - they either did not remember, or never knew. He searched on the internet for pictures of a ticket to Lastochka and could not find any. He researched the bus route 410 and found similar - 41, 10, 710, 70 and others, but those that currently existed went nowhere near anywhere remotely useful to Yura.

After his unsuccessful attempts to find Lastochka, he switched to searching for people: the PUK girls, Vanka and Mikha, Pcholkin, Olezhka, anyone, anyone, anyone, as long as they could remember, even Anechka and Vishnevsky. Maybe they did not have computers or internet access, or maybe they went online using stupid internet cafe usernames, but in ‘98, Yura did not manage to find anyone. He wrote to the guys from the block, asking them to find the telephone number for the eighteenth school and find the PUK girls that way. But the money spent on international calls went to waste. Each time he asked himself what he had not yet done to find him, what else he had not tried, Yura thought up new ways. And having tried them, he could not believe that they too came to nought: It can’t be possible that no-one can find anyone! It could.

Judging by everything, it appeared that the only option left was to take a trip to his Motherland. There, he could access archives, find people in telephone directories, and speak with workers at the factory. Not wanting to give up, Yura was in the middle of planning to take holiday and go to Kharkiv, but his plans were undercut by a phone call from home. For the first time in four years, his father spoke with him and told him about bad news. His mother had fallen ill; it might have been incurable. The long years in dangerous work conditions had made themselves known.

For the next two years, Yura forgot about his plans and his desire to find Lastochka. His mum slowly faded away, the disease progressed and the treatment did not give the hoped-for results.

The only thing that saved him from the grim atmosphere which reigned at home was music; it became an anchor for Yura, helping him to make peace with the inescapable loss.

He completed his conducting training and, at the suggestion of the rector, he took up a place as one of the piano teachers at the conservatory. By day, Yura taught music and played for students, and sometimes in the evenings, as he arrived at his parents’ house, he played for his mum.

She died in the spring of 2000. The illness and death of his wife hit Yura’s father hard. Before, he had never been particularly talkative or open, but now he retreated utterly into himself; he became more and more silent and began to give himself up to the bottle. And as Yura looked at him, he understood with bitterness that the only close person who remained to him would not, even after so many years and a shared loss, accept or forgive his son for his nature.

Time marched on implacably. After recovering from his sorrow and remembering his dream, Yura began to put concerts on again and to compose music. Relationships came and went just as quickly, but none so firm or long-lasting as with Jonas. Sometimes he met old friends whom he had been calling ‘family’ for several years by then and saw Jonas.

He did not want to go back to him, but, fed up with loneliness, he caught himself thinking that he wanted his home to be as noisy as before, for guests to come by often, for it to smell of tasty food and to feel someone’s back against him when he fell asleep. Though he had often argued with that back, he would tread the long and hard path to making peace, if only it meant not feeling so lonely. When Yura crossed the border of his thirties, his loneliness became almost tangible, a constant companion from whom short relationships and one-night-stands could not help him escape.

The whole time, Yura had been watching from afar, as though what Jonas did with his life did not concern him at all. He very much wanted to believe it was his words which he had said during their final argument that moved Jonas to an important and useful step: joining the Lesbian and Gay Federation in Germany, and later, the Social Democratic Party. But Yura understood that he was hardly likely to have had any bearing on him then.

In the end of 2000, Jonas and his colleagues achieved their main goal: two parties out of four voted for the introduction of same-sex unions on a federal level in the country. The two other parties were opposed, but the law still passed.

In 2001, it came into effect. But it was not marriage, it was the right to partnership - for the time being, gays and lesbians were only allowed a minimal collection of rights. But little by little, the law expanded. And not at all that long later, in January 2005, a new expansion was passed: now homosexuals had the right to enter into civil partnerships with citizens of other states. The news about this expansion just sounded funny to pathologically lonely people such as Yura. But he could not help but be proud of Jonas - he had accomplished so much.

2005 also meant a new stage in Yura’s career: planning began for his first big tour around Russia and the CIS, which would include Kharkiv. He did not get to go there in previous years, but the knowledge that he would return to Ukraine prompted him to try and find Lastochka again.

Without hope of success, he began anew to do research on Russian forums, start threads and find nostalgia sites. On one of them he finally found a scan of a ticket for Lastochka! He found out from the person who had published it that there really had been a village called Goretovka there at some point. True, the person did not remember the exact address, but they explained in broad strokes which highway to use and which exit to take. It was then just a matter of preparing his route and finding it. Yura could not do that from Germany: Goretovka was not to be found on a single map. By 2006, having found himself in Kharkiv Oblast, he set off to search for it independently. And he found it.

Yura arrived in Kharkiv with a completed dream - he had written the composition of his lifetime, about which he had once written to Volodya. As a symphony, it was not just beautiful, but charged with meaning. It was about freedom - Yura allowed himself to be old-fashioned and indulge in pathos. The symphony began with complete silence, through which a quiet, overburdened male voice on the cusp of breaking sounded. With each second, the voice grew stronger, became louder and more courageous, then the choir entered, but not to cover him up, to support him. After the choir came the strings, with piano accompaniment, and in the very end, with pathos and pomposity, the brass battered the listeners. Yura might himself be set free by directing all of this, although it was not him at the centre of it all, not the conductor, or even the composer, it was the tenor with the broken, strangled voice.

Before, Yura had thought that he had been inspired by M. Butterfly to write the symphony. But on that day, as he returned to Lastochka and remembered the past, he understood that the muse for the most significant composition of his life was not the unknown hero of the play, it was a completely different person, someone who had once been close.

The end of the path was lost amongst the overgrown bushes. Yura stepped onto the sand of the beach and was hit in the face by the stench from the river. Before, especially after rain, it had smelt unbelievably delicious there - of summer freshness and the dampness of mushrooms. Now, by contrast, the forest had significantly thinned out and grown bare; withered leaves, beginning to yellow, had grown damp and heavy, while the smell of stagnant, standing water wafted from the river. As he passed by the gate to the boat station, Yura frowned: in the clear spaces between the rare trees, a pile of old planks and rubbish was distinctly visible - all that remained of the station. There was no longer time to turn aside there and take a look at the remains of the location of his first real kiss. Yura walked onwards.

As he arrived there on that day, he had been afraid that he would not be able to ford the river to get to the willow, but all doubt disappeared as soon as he passed through the rusty chain-link gate which used to separate the beach from the forest. There was no river anymore. All that remained of this once deep and swift tributary of the Siverskyi Donets was a bog - stagnant, grown over with duckweed and green. In this context, the old Soviet information board by the entrance to the beach looked very funny: an illustration of swimmers in waves with the caption Beware the Strong Current!

How and why the river had run dry, Yura did not know, but he suspected that it had to do with the construction unfolding on the opposite bank. Perhaps the river was getting in the way, so they stopped it up, built a dam? The Devil only knew, Yura had other things to worry about.

He turned to the left, hoping against hope that there was still the possibility of getting to the ford. The path, which he used not to consider passable, was no longer even there, and he had to pick his way through the vegetation. As he reached the path over the bluff, he paused. The sandy wall had crumbled and settled, but passing by it was nevertheless possible. Yura approached the very edge and looked down: ten metres of sand, and further on, the same duckweed and standing water. He remembered the backwater where he had once gone swimming with Volodya and sighed heavily - their lilies would have died, since the shallow backwater where they grew, like the river, had shrunk and turned to swamp.

Yura looked at the other bank. From his higher ground, he could see not only the roofs and the walls which surrounded the village of cottages, but also part of the houses. Many of them were still under construction, but a few were finished and clearly inhabited. A billboard which faced the entrance of the community read: For Sale: Elite Cottages and Townhouses. The Swallow’s Nest is Your Cosy Future. LVDevelopment LLC.” Yura smiled - whoever had come up with the name of the community probably knew that Lastochka had once been nearby. Below the telephone number of the construction company, there were a few photographs of houses in a rather strange style: the façades of the outward-facing halves looked like those typical of homes in American suburbia, while the other half, the part hidden from the street and looking out onto the ample garden and forest, looked typically Scandinavian - floor to ceiling windows.

Having reached the ford, Yura paused in reflection. The water had completely disappeared from this spot, which was unsurprising - it had always been shallow there, but he was a little afraid that the sodden, slimy soil would not support his weight and he would sink in it. But he had no choice, he needed to reach the willow - otherwise, would the whole trip not be in vain?

Although, who knows, maybe it really was in vain. In the end, so many years had gone by that maybe there was no longer anything beneath the willow, no capsule. Why had he come there, why had he set off in search of something that had long since been lost to time? But he had to return at some point. Even if it was too late by then for ‘them’, still, nothing was over for Yura. He had returned to clear his conscience, to put a full stop to it, to be honest with himself above all else, and to know that he had done everything possible in order to find Volodya. Of course, he was late - not by a day, not by a year, but by a whole decade, and a summer to boot. And the only trail leading to Volodya should have been preserved beneath the willow. As long as it had not been dug up.

His worries were not supported - it was still there, and had even grown larger and more beautiful. It bent down to the ground beneath the weight of its cap of leaves, beginning to yellow. Holding his breath in trepidation, Yura went down to it. He parted the branches with his hands, stepped beneath the canopy and trembled internally - everything there was exactly the same as it had been back then! With one difference - it was colder and quieter without the splash of the river. But, just like it had done back in those days, the willow canopy kept Yura hidden from the whole world.

#translation #russian #лето в пионерском галстуке #ya #lgbt #my translations #gay

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