‘Thank you.’ I could feel myself losing control. My little girls were already sitting down, elbowing the boys aside – they were a little bit wary of the older girls – and I was still standing there like a fool, attracting knowing glances.
‘You’re a great swimmer,’ Igor said with a smile.
Aha!
So he had found time to look around on the beach after all.
‘Thank you,’ I said again. What was wrong with me? I was petrified, like some naïve, inexperienced girl, I didn’t even need to pretend.
My anger at myself immediately gave me strength. I sat down on the grass between Olechka and Natasha. My own private little guard, the spy and the adviser. But they had no interest in me right now, they were too excited by the prospect of the campfire.
‘Okay Alyoshka, begin!’ Igor said in a jolly voice and threw a box of matches to a thickset boy with blond hair. The boy caught it deftly, then crawled up to the campfire on all fours and sat down with his legs crossed. It was like the preparations for some sacred ritual.
The boy took a match out of the box with meticulous precision, cupped his hands like an inveterate smoker and struck it. He leaned over towards the fire. It didn’t look as if there was any paper there to start the blaze, just pine needles and small chips of wood. Everybody held their breath.
In other words, it was a ridiculous performance.
But even so, I was curious to see if the little pyromaniac would manage to light the campfire with one match or not.
He did. The first tongue of flame flickered in the gathering gloom. It was greeted with universal howling and squealing, as if the campfire were surrounded by a tribe of primordial humans who were freezing in bitterly cold weather.
‘Well done!’ Igor reached out and shook the boy’s hand and ruffled his hair with a smile. ‘You’ll be our campfire monitor.’
Alyoshka’s face expressed immense pride.
Five minutes later the campfire was already blazing and the children had settled down a bit. All around they were chattering, laughing and whispering, running away from the fire and then back again, throwing on little branches and pine cones, trying to roast pieces of sausage threaded onto twigs. In short, the rejoicing was unconfined. Igor sat in state in the middle of the children, punctuating the conversation with phrases that sent everyone into peals of laughter, or tasting the half-burnt food, or calling back children who were getting too close to the fire. The life and soul … Galina was besieged by her charges too. I was the only one sitting there like a total fool in the middle of the happy crowd, giving irrelevant answers to the girls’ questions, laughing belatedly when they did and turning my eyes away the moment Igor looked in my direction.
Fool! What a fool I am! The last thing I need is to fall in love for real with a human being.
I failed to look away in time yet again and Igor smiled at me. He reached out and picked up a guitar off the grass. The silence spread out from him in a wave – the children nudged each other, stopped talking and prepared to listen with a strange, affected sort of attention.
I suddenly wished desperately that he would sing some kind of stupid nonsense. Maybe some old-time young pioneer song about potatoes roasted in the fire, the sea, the pioneer camp, firm friendship and the kids’ readiness to enjoy themselves and to study. Anything that would dispel this idiotic enchantment, anything to stop me inventing all sorts of nonsense and seeing imaginary virtues in that handsome physical shell!
When Igor started to play, I realised I was done for. He could play. The melody wasn’t all that complicated, but it was beautiful, and he didn’t hit any wrong notes.
And then he began to sing:
This wasn’t a song for children. Of course, they listened to it quite attentively, but at that moment you could have sung them a maths textbook set to guitar music – anything would have been good enough. A campfire in the evening, with your favourite camp leader and his guitar – in a situation like that children will like anything.
But I realised Igor was singing for me. Even if he was looking into the flames all the time, even if the song wasn’t about love, even if we’d barely spoken two words to each other. It was as if he had sensed my expectations – and decided to refute them. Maybe that was what it was, I thought – many people possess strong powers of intuition, even if they’re not Others.
He looked at me and smiled. His fingers ran quietly across the strings again and he repeated quietly:
The kids started making a racket.
They actually seemed to like the song, though I couldn’t imagine what they could have understood in it. Maybe they were amused by the phrase about ‘right and wrong’, or maybe in their little minds they imagined a real adventure – climbing into an attic that an angel had flown into … But I thought the song fitted the Others – Dark Ones and Light Ones.
It was a good song. Just not quite right about one thing. The boy who would later join our side would have put on the wings. Or at least tried them on.
Because for us the idea of ‘right and wrong’ doesn’t exist.
‘That’s a good song. But it’s very serious,’ said Galina. ‘Did you write it?’
Igor laughed and shook his head:
‘No, afraid not. It’s by Yulii Burkin. Not a very well-known singer, unfortunately.’
‘Igor, could you play … one of our songs?’ Galina was flirting with him for all she was worth. The stupid fool …
‘Sure!’ Igor agreed.
He strummed the strings, striking up a jolly rhythm and started singing simple-minded nonsense about ‘the very, very best camp of songs and friends in all the world’.
That was what they wanted. From the second couplet everybody started joining in, because it was easy to guess what the next word would be. When they sang about the sea, and how you had to go running into it with your camp leader, because he loved ‘the splashing water and the sand’ too, they all howled together in inspired voices. Everybody was pleased, even Galina and her girls. At one point Igor sang about ‘a stone with a hole inside it’ that was found on the seashore … as if anyone could imagine a stone with a hole outside it. I noticed that lots of the kids reached for the stones dangling round their necks.