The Charm School (22 page)

The women and older children were drinking tea, and Hollis watched them, then studied the men. The Russian peasant, he thought again. They were considered second-class citizens by both the state and the city dwellers and until recently were not even issued internal passports, effectively binding them to their villages as surely as if they were still serfs on an estate. And even with the passports, Hollis knew, they were not going anywhere. And there were one hundred million of them—the Dark People, as they were called in czarist Russia, as Lisa’s grandmother undoubtedly referred to them. And they carried the weight of the state and the world on their bent backs and got damned little in return. They’d been beaten by landlords and commissars, herded into collectives, and had their harvests seized, leaving them to die of starvation. And to complete the process of killing their souls, they’d been denied their church and its sacraments. But when Russia needed massive armies, these poor bastards were sent to the front by the millions and died by the millions without protest. For Mother Russia. Hollis said aloud, “God help them.”

Lisa looked at him and seemed to understand. “God help them,” she repeated.

Hollis and Lisa ate and drank. As they expected, the questions about America began, tentatively at first, then they came in a flood, and Hollis and Lisa found themselves answering two or three people at once. Hollis noticed that the questions were all asked by the men, and the women continued to stand silently. Hollis commented to Lisa, “Why don’t you stand over there with the women?”

“Why don’t you go fuck yourself ?”

Hollis laughed.

A man asked, “Is it true that the banks can take a man’s farm if he does not pay his debts?”

Hollis replied, “Yes.”

“What does the man do then?”

“He . . . finds a job in town.”

“What if he cannot find a job?”

“He receives . . .” Hollis looked at Lisa and asked, “Welfare?”

“
Blago,
I think.
Gosstrakh.
”

Everyone nodded. Another man asked, “What is the penalty for withholding produce?”

Lisa answered, “A farmer owns all his produce. He can sell it whenever and wherever he can get the best price.”

The men looked at one another, a touch of disbelief in their eyes. One asked, “But what if he can’t sell it?”

Someone else asked, “I’ve read that they kill their livestock rather than sell it for nothing.”

“What if the crops fail? How does his family eat?”

“What if his pigs or cows all die of disease? Will he get help from the state?”

Hollis and Lisa tried to answer the questions, explaining they were not that familiar with farm problems. But even as he spoke, Hollis realized that the farm questions were partly metaphor. What the average Russian feared, above all else, was
besporyadok
—chaos, a world without order, a state without a powerful
vozhd,
without a Stalin, a czar-father to look after them. The ancestral memory of such times of disorder, famine, civil war, and social disintegration was strong. They were willing to swap freedom for security. The next step was believing what the government implied: Slavery was freedom.

Hollis commented to Lisa, “If we were talking to Martian capitalists we’d have more points of common reference.”

“We’re doing fine. Just stay honest.”

“When do we tell them to revolt?”

“After the vodka is gone or after we convince them American farmers all own two cars.”

A girl of about fifteen sitting on the floor suddenly stood and asked, “Miss, how old are you?”

Lisa smiled at the girl. “Almost thirty.”

“Why do you look so young?”

Lisa shrugged.

“My mother”—she pointed to a woman behind her who could have been fifty—“is thirty-two. Why do
you
look so young?”

Lisa felt uncomfortable. She said, “Your mother looks my age.”

One of the men shouted, “Go home, Lidiya.”

The girl started for the door but took a deep breath and walked directly to Lisa. Lisa stood. The girl looked at Lisa closely, then touched her hand. Lisa took the girl’s hand in hers, bent down, and whispered in her ear, “There is too much we don’t know about each other, Lidiya. Perhaps tomorrow, if there is time.”

Lidiya squeezed Lisa’s hand, smiled, and ran out the door.

Hollis looked at his watch and noticed it was near midnight. He wouldn’t have minded letting this go on until dawn, but that black Chaika prowling the dark roads was on his mind. He said to Pavel, “My wife is pregnant and needs sleep.” Hollis stood. “We’ve kept you all up long enough. Thank you for your hospitality and especially for the vodka.”

Everyone laughed. The people filed out as they had arrived, in family groups, and each man shook hands with Hollis and mumbled a good-night to Lisa. The women left without formalities.

Pavel and Ida led Lisa and Hollis through an opening in the kitchen wall curtained off with a quilt blanket. They passed directly into a bedroom, and Hollis realized there was no sitting room. The bedroom held two single cots piled high with quilts, but Pavel motioned them toward a rough pine door, and they entered the second bedroom through the first. This was the end room in the three-room log cabin, and Hollis guessed it was the master bedroom. The middle room was for the son and daughter, who would probably sleep in the kitchen tonight.

Pavel said, “Here is your bed.”

The room was lit, as the kitchen had been, by a single bulb hanging on a cord from an exposed log rafter. Heat came from a single-bar electric heater beside the bed. The double bed and two wooden trunks nearly filled the room, and a rag rug covered the plank floor. Hollis noticed spikes driven into the log walls as clothing hooks, and a pair of muddy trousers hung from one of them. There was one window in the short wall that looked into the back garden. Hollis saw there was no furniture other than the bed, though he had noticed in the children’s room a chest of drawers, night table, and a reading lamp. He saw that the partition wall dividing the bedrooms was made of rough-hewn pine boards with knotholes stuffed with newspaper. The thought occurred to Hollis that the minister of agriculture might want to spend a winter month here to fully appreciate the great strides made in the Russian peasants’ standard of living since the czars.

Lisa said to Pavel and Ida, “This is wonderful. Thank you for showing us the real Russia.” She added with a smile, “I’m sick to death of the Muscovites.”

Pavel smiled in return and addressed Hollis, “I don’t think you are tourists, but whoever you are, you are honest people and you can sleep well here.”

Hollis replied, “There will be no trouble if the people in Yablonya don’t speak to outsiders.”

“Whom do we speak to after the harvest? We are dead to them until the spring planting.”

Ida handed Lisa a roll of toilet paper that crinkled. “If you must go out back. My bladder was always giving me trouble when I was pregnant.
Spokoiny nochi.
”

The woman and her husband left.

Lisa felt the bed. “A real
perina
—feather mattress.”

“I’m allergic to feathers.” Hollis put his hands in his pockets. “I might have preferred a tractor shed.”

“Stop griping.”

He went to the bed and picked up a corner of the quilt and examined the seam, looking for bedbugs.

Lisa asked, “What are you looking for?”

“Looking for my chocolate mint on the pillow.”

She laughed.

Hollis pulled down the triple quilt to examine the sheets, but there weren’t any. There was only the stained mattress ticking with feather quills sticking out.
The things we take for granted.
He suddenly felt a sharp anger at Katherine for all her petty whining and bitching about embassy life.

Lisa seemed not to notice the dirty mattress and began looking around the room.

Hollis moved to the curtainless window and examined it. It was a swing-out type, factory-made, but was some inches shorter than the log opening and had to be set in mortar, which was now cracking. He felt a cold draft and saw his breath. Hollis tried the latch handle and satisfied himself the window would open if it became necessary to leave that way.

Lisa came up beside him and looked out the window. “That’s their private plot. Each peasant family is allowed exactly one acre. These plots comprise less than one percent of the agricultural lands but account for nearly thirty percent of the value of Soviet farm output.”

“I suppose there’s a lesson there for Moscow if Moscow cared.”

Lisa seemed lost in thought, then said, “This is like my grandmother described. This is the rural past that the intellectuals in Moscow and Leningrad are always romanticizing. The Russian purity of the land. It’s still here. Why don’t they come out and see it?”

“Because there’s no indoor plumbing.” Hollis moved away from the window and added sharply, “And it’s
not
here, Lisa. Not anymore. This is a rural slum, and the peasants don’t give a damn. Can’t you see that? Don’t you see how ramshackle everything is? Every man, woman, and child in this village wants only one thing: a one-way ticket to a city.”

She sat on the bed and stared at her feet, then nodded slowly.

“And while this might not be a sterile state farm,” he added, “it’s still a state-owned collective. The only thing these people own are their dirty clothes and greasy cooking utensils. As for these cabins and their so-called private plots, the government doesn’t care a damn about them. The plan is to wipe out the villages and put everyone in the state farms where they can be twice as inefficient and nonproductive in a true communist setting. If that shithead Burov came here with a piece of paper signed in Moscow, he could take these people to the Forty Years of October Sovkhoz and plow Yablonya into the ground. Once you understand that, you take the first step toward understanding this society.”

She didn’t respond for some time, then said, “You’re right of course. The people are alienated from the land, and the land is an orphan. The past is dead. The peasant culture is dead. The villages are dead. The bastards in Moscow won.”

He said in a more soothing tone, “Well, it’s too late to talk politics and philosophy.”

“Yes, it is.”

“I hope you’re right about these peasants, and we’re not awakened by the infamous three
A
.
M
. KGB knock on the door.”

“I think I was right.”

It occurred to Hollis that Lisa shared Alevy’s annoying and dangerous practice of dragging the Russians into things that it wasn’t fair to involve them in. With Alevy it was the Jews, with Lisa now, the peasants. And the Jews or the peasants might stick their necks out for a Westerner, but the Westerner was rarely around when the ax fell.

He doubted that these poor wretches of Yablonya even knew that it was against the law for a Soviet citizen to talk to foreigners, much less feed them and put them up. Hollis glanced at Lisa. She pulled off her boots and socks and wiggled her toes.

There was an awkward silence as Hollis considered what he was supposed to do or say.

Lisa said, “It’s very cold in here.” Fully dressed, she lay on the bottom quilt and pulled the two top quilts up to her chin. “Very cold.” She yawned.

Hollis took off his leather jacket and hung it on a nail, then stuck his knife in the log beside the bed. He sat on a trunk and pulled off his boots. He became aware that his heart was beating a bit faster than normal, and he was suddenly at a loss for words. He said finally, “Would you be more comfortable if I slept on the floor?”

“No. Would you?”

Hollis hesitated a moment, then took off his pullover and jeans and threw them over the trunk. He pulled the light chain, then slid into bed beside Lisa, wearing his T-shirt and shorts. He cleared his throat and said, “I didn’t mean to burst your bubble about rural Russia, peasants, and all that. I know you have some emotional involvement in the subject, and I think it’s good that you can see the bright side of things. I like that. The exuberance of youth.”

“Do you snore?”

“Sometimes. Do you?”

“Depends on who you ask. Am I on your side of the bed?”

“I don’t have a side.”

“You’re easy to sleep with. Why do you wear blue shorts? Air force?”

Hollis rolled away from her and looked out the window. “
Spokoiny nochi.
”

“Are you tired?”

“I should be,” he replied.

“I’m sort of hyper. What a day.”

“You’re welcome.”

“Do you want to talk?”

“I’ve said enough.”

“Are you angry about something? You sound angry.”

“I’m just tired. I think I angered you.”

“Are you annoyed because I have my clothes on?”

“They’re your clothes. If you want to wrinkle them, that’s your business.”

She said, “Before I was stationed here, I had three long-term relationships, three short-term ones, an affair with a married man, and two one-night stands. When I got here, I became involved with a man who has since left. Then there was Seth, and—”

“Slow down,” Hollis said. “I’m running out of fingers and toes.”

She leaned over him and put her hand on his shoulder.

He turned toward her and stared at her by the dim light of the window.

She said, “You shot two armed KGB men and never flinched, but now you’re shaking.”

“It’s cold.”

“I’m nervous too. But I want you.” She added, “There may not be any tomorrow for us.”

“Sounds like my fighter pilot line. But if there is a tomorrow?”

“We’ll take it a step at a time.”

“Right. And Seth? How will he take it?”

She didn’t reply.

Hollis felt her bare foot touch his, and he took her head in his hands and kissed her.

They undressed beneath the quilts and side by side wrapped themselves in each other’s arms.

She ran her hands over his back, and her fingers came into contact with smooth, unresilient knots.

“Scars,” he said.

“Oh.”

Hollis rolled on top of her and felt himself slip into her easily.

“Sam . . . that’s nice . . . warm.”