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no one can ever tear you away,
and yet when i embrace you again
i feel overcome by terrible pain
as if you were being stolen from me
voznesensky, “nostalgia for the present”, 1976
May came hot and windless. Air cooled overnight lingered reluctantly in the shade, but by noon it warmed through completely — dry, leaden and volatile. It settled in the lungs as a sluggish heat.
No one wanted to study. The stale classroom air rippled with a whispering hum that usually lived in the back rows but had now crept nearly to the front. The teachers, fanning themselves with notebooks and lesson plans, looked like szlachta matrons — flushed, authoritative. The kind who would begin the day by ordering the servants flogged — back benches, silence! — in the same voice once used to bark at a peasant who’d paused too long atop a haystack.
Restless children’s attention, barely held together all year by fear — of failing grades and ruined holidays — finally scattered, like beads spilled across young grass. Some students yawned through lessons, staring longingly out the windows at the lush, carnival-bright world outside, already counting how many June days they’d lose making things up. Others, who had scraped together the last scraps of torn graph paper for one final push, exhaled in anticipation. Summer was already breathing down their backs — sun-warmed skin, hair burned copper, shy freckles blooming on tanned cheeks.
They burst out of the school in a noisy, whistling flock, gilding the quiet streets — dismissed early. The history teacher, who had been wiping his shiny, damp forehead as if trying to scrub the last hairs from his crown, took pity. Fly, finches, he said. Next week it’ll be storm after storm — you won’t get to run then. Bags were packed hastily, clumsily; notebooks and pencil cases dropped, borrowed pencils returned. Voices stayed half-muted — out of solidarity, so no one would be seen or heard before the doors.
Unfledged sparrows in shirts — white, gray, blue, striped and checked, with a paisley print? sleeves rode just above sharp, scraped elbows. Dusty sneakers and high-water pants. Everything bought to grow into, hemmed and cuffed, never let back out in time — mom kisses their foreheads at night, and by morning can barely reach to peck a soft, still hairless cheek goodbye. They run off until dark, until anxious desk lamps glow in windows, until untouched mugs of tea cool on tables, until dinner goes cold. They refuse to miss a single second of their thoughtless, blinding childhood on the way to intoxicating adulthood. And one day, running full speed, they’ll collide with someone — cling — and stay. They’ll grow up, raise their own, and one day lean in to kiss a cheek. Their own goodbye.
Of course, no one was thinking about that.
The bubbling stream of children’s voices splits apart — some home, some to the subway — leaving just the two of them in a bubble of sticky May air. They fall behind without a word, as always. Even their silence matches.
Danya adjusts the backpack on his shoulder – soft, round, well-stuffed. Inside are his school binder and gym clothes, a lunchbox with sandwiches his mother carefully packed that morning, slipping it in almost furtively, wrapping her care in crinkly foil, tucking it between slices of crusty bread. Their football practice is right after class and there’s only enough time for the commute. They could have at least eaten on the go.
Danya slumps onto a step. His shoelaces came undone — no time for them, what with the frantic scramble to stuff their simple school gear into backpacks and satchels, the dash down the hallway, a mix of laughter and hushed shhh’s. He crumples them without a second thought, shoves them to the side, tucks them under the tongue of his sneaker like into a secret hideout.
Mom used to iron the shoelaces — for some reason, carefully, almost lovingly smoothing out every coarse crease. Then she stopped. The boys got filthy ten times a day; a puddle here, the thick, clinging mud of a pathless wasteland there — and how did they even manage to find that in the city centre! She just closed her eyes again, turned away from their senseless, boyish mischief. They’ll figure it out themselves.
Valya, leaning against the railing, absently pulls a blade of grass from between the paving stones. He ties a knot — first in the middle, then one in each half. Then again, dividing each piece like a musical measure. Danya watches, unblinking. Whole. Half. Quarter. Sixteenth. Graduation from the lyceum coincided with graduation from music school. Harmonic minor, cadences and modulations. Handel, Shostakovich, Bach — sight-read four measures written three centuries ago by a deaf composer, finished by candlelight with bloodied hands in love with the five-line staff.
Blasphemy.
Danya snaps the elastic band around his wrist. He’s worn it since spring — supposedly for hair. Pulls it back, aims at the blade of grass. Valya is too focused on weaving meter out of it. Naturally, Danya misses. The band snaps Valya’s shoulder and bounces onto the hot dust. Danya catches the flash of surprise at the corners of Valya’s brightened eyes.
The air shifts instantly — both already know where the hand will go. The laces. Always the laces. The weakest point. Danya catches Valya’s wrist near his hip, looking up at him with a sly squint. A curl falls over his right eye, trembling in the hot, fully summer wind.
“Wanna skip the practice?”
Every one of Valya’s nos — his mother’s scolding, the coach’s sharp remarks, his teammates’ shouts — melts in Danya’s gaze like ice cream on sun-baked asphalt. Light dances on his dark lashes like sparks from a campfire, and in the afternoon sun his eyes look almost enchanted.
Valya smiles back — a smile that was already Danya’s — catching his hand and pulling him up.
“Let’s skip.”
There’s one bike between them, like almost everything else — the computer, the guitar, the cello, the old piano, the room, the faces. Danya mercilessly bunches Valya’s shirt at the waist as Valya, laughing loudly, bounces over the bumps without slowing — hey, you’ve got a passenger! Wind slams into their faces, clean and river-cool. The road runs along the Rusanka river.
They drop the bike onto the grass beneath the bridge. Cool dampness rises from the water. Valya pulls out cigarettes. Smoking in this heat feels like a waste. The air already moves through the lungs like hot syrup. The throat stings, but near the river it’s fresher. Valya nudges the water with his sneaker.
“They’ve probably started warming up.”
Danya shrugs.
“Let them.”
Somewhere out there a ball rolls over scorched grass. Someone squints into the sun. Someone wants to go home.
And they’re here. Under the bridge.
They pocket the cigarette butts — Valya always does, so his mom won’t notice later. He stretches out on the grass, squinting happily, arms wide. Danya grimaces. You’ll get filthy. He sits beside him instead, legs folded, looking down.
“Heard Katya’s applying to med school.”
“With her grades? Foolish.”
“Foolish,” Valya agrees. “She should get her own head checked first.”
They laugh — short, easy, summer-light. Valya opens his eyes. A lock of Danya’s hair sticks to his temple, clinging to sweat-damp skin like a fine crack in glazed porcelain. Without thinking, Valya reaches to fix it — the way he would his own. Danya doesn’t notice. He was about to do the same. Who reached first — who knew. Even they sometimes mixed it up.
Valya falls back onto the grass, prickly, like a freshly shaved nape. Even his own mop of hair is no help.
“Toss me the backpack.”
“Just sit up like a normal person already.”
The backpack sails neatly into his face – say what you will about Danya, but his aim is true. Valya barely snatches it from the air right in front of his nose. He tucks it under his head – an almost passable makeshift pillow. He could laze like this till evening, but something hard and alien is digging into his neck. He squirms, crumpling the binder, rustling the covers, but the hard thing won’t budge.
Beside him, Danya is already scribbling lines in his catch-all notebook, humming something under his breath. Valya yanks the zipper open with an irritable rustle and rummages inside without looking. His fingers bump into something — cool, sleek plastic. A beveled edge, a round lid.
Valya props himself up on an elbow. Resting in his palm is a scratched, bright-yellow Nikon.
Toss it here, will you? Asya asked. They were strolling along the embankment on Sunday — just the three of them, because the only money they had between them was enough to buy her some cotton candy and a ride on the roller coaster at Hydropark. Asya kept squinting and tucking back her honey-colored hair, glowing in the sunset light, flying in every direction with each gust of wind. Otherwise I’ll look like an idiot, no pockets, no bag. Just don’t forget to give it back later!
He forgot.
He’s remembered that Nikon since he was ten — always in Asya’s hands. She photographed everything: friends, landscapes, the bright evening city. Film fractured the light, and streetlamps in her photos glowed like stars drawn by a child — too straight, too perfect, almost unreal.
The power button is sharp and oval, like a dried crumb, and clicks the same way beneath his finger. The screen stays dark. A soft mechanical whirr. A click as the lens slides into place.
Danya is immediately framed by the lens.
“Whoa,” Danya nods at the point-and-shoot. “That Asya’s?”
“Hers. She left it with me on Sunday.”
“So… we didn’t give it back?”
“We forgot.”
Danya takes the camera carefully, turns it over in his hands.
“Our whole childhood’s on this thing,” he says. “Even you sitting in that puddle up to your waist.”
“That wasn’t me,” Valya mutters, “it was you”, tugging the camera back as Danya snorts.
“Take a picture of me.”
“Yeah.”
“Just make it fine.”
Valya frames Danya’s profile. He aims the way you aim at a wild robin — careful not to spook it with a careless sound. The wind tosses the strand Valya had tucked behind Danya’s ear back into his face.
“You’re always fine.”
The shutter clicks.
Danya in three-quarter profile. A slight turn of the head. An almost-smile. Sunlight tangled in his lashes.
***
“…fine?”
Danya blinks. The wave recedes.
It hits him all at once.
Valya watches him, expectant and worried, with an uncertainty that’s unlike him — as if afraid Danya might fling the photo away like a rotten, dead piece of their shared past. The picture is saturated with sun, with summer, with hot dust and greenery. It burns his fingers. Like frantically shoving frost-numbed hands under the hot tap after rushing in from outside, just after peeling off snow-soaked trousers, racing each other to the bathroom to thaw.
That warmth ached.
“Yeah,” Danya says. “It’s fine. Just zoned out.”
The photograph has aged. It had been printed back then on cheap matte paper. A deep crease cuts it in half lengthwise, right down the middle. Like a strike-through.
Danya smiles. A crooked, pained smile, just as broken and worn, just as faded as the photograph that’s lost its color over the years. His papery skin skin crumples into folds at his cheekbones.
“Good,” Valya exhales — with relief. He smiles, thinking it’s in response, relaxed now, almost animated, mistaking agony for thaw. “I’m… I’m glad. Keep it. As a keepsake.”
Danya looks down at the photo again.
“Thanks.”
Maybe Valya thought it would be sweet. Gentle nostalgia. A way back to their shared language — the one Valya had forgotten first. For Danya it feels like pressing down on a fracture that never healed — accidentally, clumsily, unaware that beneath the thin skin something still grinds and aches monstrously.
The dust of that hot May sticks to his tongue. He can taste it now, dry and bitter. And that wind, and the laughter, and the way Valya looked at him back then. Just the same way Danya did. The eyes are the same, but now they hold different people, different thoughts, different dreams.
And Valya is different now. Closely cropped, in a clean jacket, smelling not of river dampness, but of laundry detergent — hypoallergenic, suitable for a baby — of floral perfume, distinctly feminine, and of a home to which Danya no longer has any connection.
At the door Valya turns back sharply, as if suddenly remembering something he hasn’t said. His gaze lands on the photograph first, then flicks to Danya’s face. He tilts his head, almost imperceptibly, as if agreeing with himself. Hesitates for a second — awkward, unsure what to do with his hands.
“Well,” he says. “See you. Next cover, then.”
He steps into the hallway, looks back once more — quickly now, not at the photograph but past it, over Danya, as if checking whether it’s okay to leave like this. Without waiting for an answer, he pulls the door shut.
The silence after he leaves drops onto his back like a heavy blanket. It presses down, biting painfully into his shoulders, and wraps him up inside itself. Danya slips the elastic from his overgrown hair and ties the tail at the back of his head, pulling it tight until the skin at the roots begins to ache — a sharp and familiar pain, grounding.
He sets the photograph on the dresser, on top of a stack of scribbled sheet music — grief on grief. Dust floats in the slanted light from the window. Everything is where it should be: piles of paper, the glowing indicator on the speaker, the black shell of the synthesizer.
Only the photograph doesn’t belong. It juts out of the space like a shard carried in from another dimension.
Like a syncopation.
The room feels as if it’s missing a beat. Danya doesn’t immediately know which one — strong or weak — only that if he clapped his hands or took a step now, it would land wrong.
He glances around automatically, then gets angry at himself for it. The door to the hallway isn’t fully closed. The doormat near the threshold is kicked askew, as if caught by a toe.
The room is wrong. Something never returned to its place — and maybe never will.
A strip of sunlight slides slowly down the wall, brushes the edge of the dresser, catches on the matte surface of the photograph — and stops there, as if unwilling to go any farther. Dust in the air becomes more visible. Danya watches the day break apart into particles, settling on keys, on strings, on his own hands.
The light is too direct. Too honest. Like standing naked with no way to cover yourself.
He reaches for the synthesizer, runs his hand along its casing, presses a single key. The sound is dull, almost lost. In half-light it would sound different — fuller, deeper, without that glassy daytime edge.
Danya frowns, as if the instrument doesn’t understand him. Turning toward the window, he bumps the stool with his knee, stumbles, catches himself with his hand. Cold upholstery under his fingers — rough faux leather, scratched in places. Outside the glass: an ordinary courtyard. People. Movement. Someone else’s life.
The familiar gesture — draw the curtains, shut it out. One pull to the right and one to the left. The light disappears, leaving behind a soft, sorrowful dimness. Only now does the room feel fit for music.
Danya sits at the synthesizer, touching the keys without pressing, laying his hands flat. His fingers spread, clinging to the plastic. He leans forward, resting his forehead against the back of his hand, cheek pressed awkwardly to the edge of the manual. It digs in, uncomfortable — but he doesn’t move.
He presses after all — accidentally. Several notes spill out at once. Crooked. Ugly. Out of tune. Danya freezes, as if startled by his own breath. The last note trembles, clinging to the silence — and fades.
Before, there would have been a comment here. About key. About tempo. About stop messing around.
Now no one speaks.
Danya stays where he is, hands unmoving, listening as the instrument slowly returns to silence.