The Charm School (22 page)

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Authors: NELSON DEMILLE

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BOOK: The Charm School
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“Why?”
“It kills the sense of smell.”
“It kills the pain too,” Lisa said. “It numbs the mind and the body, and eventually it kills
them.
Would we be any different if we were born in this village?”
Hollis looked around at the flat, brown faces, the misshapen bodies, blank eyes, and earthy hands. “I don’t know. I do know that something is terribly wrong here. I’ve seen Asian peasants who lived and looked better.”
Lisa nodded. “These people, like their ancestors, have been ill-used by their masters. And you always have to remember the Russian winter. It takes its toll on the mind and body.”
Hollis nodded. “That it does.” The Russian peasant, he thought. Subject of literature, folklore, and college professors. But no one understood their inner lives.
Lisa looked around the room and met each pair of eyes. She said spontaneously, “I am happy to be here.”
Forty faces smiled back. The man beside her asked, “Where did you get your Russian?”
Lisa replied, “My grandmother.”
“Ah,” said a man across the table. “You are Russian.”
That seemed to call for a toast, and another round was poured and drunk.
A man sitting behind Hollis slapped him on the back. “And you? Where did you learn that bad Russian?”
Everyone laughed.
Hollis raised a liter of heather-honey vodka. “From this bottle.”
Again everyone laughed.
The impromptu party went on. Hollis surveyed the hot, smoky room and the people in it. They seemed to blend into the brown wood walls, he thought; their smell, their color, their very being was of the wood and the black earth. He looked at Lisa, joking with a young man across from her, and thought he had not seen her so lively and animated all day. Something about her total acceptance of these people and her affinity with them appealed to him, and he knew at last that he liked her very much.
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.

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