The Charm School (3 page)

1

“You are already staying in Smolensk two days, Mr. Fisher?” she asked.

Gregory Fisher was no longer confused or amused by the peculiar syntax and verb tenses of English as it was spoken in this part of the world. “Yes,” he replied, “I’ve been in Smolensk two days.”

“Why don’t I see you when you arrive?”

“You were out. So I saw the police—the militia.”

“Yes?” She leafed through his papers on her desk, a worried look on her face, then brightened. “Ah, yes. Good. You are staying here at Tsentralnaya Hotel.”

Fisher regarded the Intourist representative. She was about twenty-five years old, a few years older than he. Not too bad looking. But maybe he’d been on the road too long. “Yes, I stayed at the Tsentralnaya last night.”

She looked at his visa. “Tourism?”

“Right.
Tourizm.
”

She asked, “Occupation?”

Fisher had become impatient with these internal control measures. He felt as if he were making a major border crossing at each town in which he was obliged to stop. He said, “Ex-college student, currently unemployed.”

She nodded. “Yes? There is much unemployment in America. And homeless people.”

The Russians, Fisher had learned, were obsessed with America’s problems of unemployment, homeless people, crime, drugs, and race. “I’m voluntarily unemployed.”

“The Soviet constitution itself guarantees each citizen a job, a place to live, and a forty-hour work week. Your constitution does not guarantee this.”

Fisher thought of several responses but said only, “I’ll ask my congressman about that.”

“Yes?”

“Yes.” Fisher stood in the middle of the office with pale yellow walls.

The woman folded her hands and leaned forward. “You are enjoying your visit in Smolensk?”

“Super. Wish I could stay.”

She spread his travel itinerary over her desk, then energetically slapped a big red rubber stamp across the paperwork. “You visit our cultural park?”

“Shot a roll of film there.”

“Yes? Do you visit the Local History Museum on Lenin Street?”

Fisher didn’t want to push his credibility. “No. Missed that. Catch it on the way back.”

“Good.” She eyed him curiously for a few moments. Fisher thought she enjoyed the company. In fact, the whole Smolensk Intourist office had a somewhat forlorn look about it, like a Chamber of Commerce storefront in a small Midwestern town.

“We see not many Americans here.”

“Hard to believe.”

“Not many from the West. Buses from our Socialist brother countries.”

“I’ll spread the word around.”

“Yes?” She tapped her fingers on the desk, then said thoughtfully, “You may travel anywhere.”

“Excuse me?”

“An American is telling me this. Everyone is getting passport. Thirty bucks. Two, three, four weeks.”

“Could take longer. Can’t go to Vietnam, North Korea, Cuba, few other places.”

She nodded absently. After a few moments she inquired, “You are interested in socialism?”

Fisher replied, “I am interested in Russia.”

“I am interested in your country.”

“Come on over.”

“Yes. Someday.” She looked down at a printed form and read, “You have the required first aid kit and tool kit in your automobile?”

“Sure do. Same ones I had in Minsk.”

“Good.” She continued, “You must stay on the designated highways. There are no authorized overnight stops between here and Moscow. Night driving in the countryside is forbidden for foreign tourists. You must be within the city of Moscow by nightfall.”

“I know.”

“When you reach Moscow, you must report directly to the Intourist representative at the Hotel Rossiya where you are staying. Before you do this, you may stop only for petrol and to ask directions of the militia.”

“And to use the
tualet.
”

“Well, yes of course.” She glanced at his itinerary. “You are authorized one small detour to Borodino.”

“Yes, I know.”

“But I would advise against that.”

“Why?”

“It is late in the day, Mr. Fisher. You will be hurrying to Moscow before dark. I would advise you already to stay in Smolensk tonight.”

“I am already checking out of my hotel. Yes?”

She didn’t seem to notice his parody of her English and said, “I can arrange for another room here. My job.” She smiled for the first time.

“Thank you. But I’m sure I can make Moscow before dark.”

She shrugged and pushed the paperwork toward him.

“Spasibo.”
Fisher stuffed it in his shoulder satchel.
“Da svedahnya,”
Greg Fisher said with a wave.

“Drive safely,” she replied, adding, “Be cautious, Mr. Fisher.”

Fisher walked out into the cool air of Smolensk, considering that last cryptic remark. He took a deep breath and approached a crowd of people surrounding his car. He sidled through the throng. “Excuse me, folks. . . .” He unlocked the door of his metallic blue Pontiac Trans Am, smiled, gave a V-sign, slipped inside the car, and closed the door. He started the engine and drove slowly through the parting crowd. “
Da svedahnya,
Smolenskers.”

He proceeded slowly through the center of Smolensk, referring to the map on the seat beside him. Within ten minutes he was back on the Minsk–Moscow highway, heading east toward the Soviet capitol. He saw farm vehicles, trucks, and buses but not a single automobile. It was a windy day, with grey clouds scudding past a weak sun.

Fisher saw that the farther east he drove, the more advanced the autumn became. In contrast to the bustling agricultural activity he’d seen in East Germany and Poland at the same latitudes, the wheat here had been harvested on both sides of the highway, and the occasional fruit orchards were bare.

Greg Fisher thought about things as the landscape rolled by. The restrictions and procedures were not only annoying, he concluded, but a little scary. Yet, he’d been treated well by the Soviet citizens he’d met. He’d written home on a postcard to his parents, “Ironically this is one of the last places where they still like Americans.” And he rather liked them and liked how his car literally stopped traffic and turned heads wherever he went.

The Trans Am had Connecticut plates, had cast aluminum wheels, a rear deck spoiler, and custom pin-striping; the quintessential American muscle car, and he thought that nothing like it had ever been seen on the road to Moscow.

From the backseat of the car came the aroma of fruits and vegetables given him by villagers and peasants wherever he’d stopped. He in turn had given out felt-tip pens, American calendars, disposable razors, and other small luxuries he’d been advised to bring. Greg Fisher felt like an ambassador of goodwill, and he was having a marvelous time.

A stone kilometer post informed him that he was 290 K from Moscow. He looked at the digital dashboard clock: 2:16
P
.
M
.

In his rearview mirror he saw a Red Army convoy gaining on him. The lead vehicle, a dull green staff car, pulled up to his bumper. “Hey,” Fisher mumbled, “that’s called tailgating.”

The car flashed its headlights, but Fisher could see no place to pull off the two-lane road bordered by a drainage ditch. Fisher speeded up. The 5-liter, V-8 engine had tuned-port fuel injection, but the local fuel didn’t seem to agree with it, and the engine knocked and backfired. “Damn it.”

The staff car was still on his tail. Fisher looked at his speedometer, which showed 110 kph, twenty over the limit.

Suddenly the staff car swung out and pulled alongside him. The driver sounded his horn. The rear window lowered, and an officer in gold braid stared at him. Fisher managed a grin as he eased off the gas pedal. The long convoy of trucks, troop carriers, and cars passed him, soldiers waving and giving him the traditional Red Army “Ooo-rah!”

The convoy disappeared ahead, and Greg Fisher drew a breath. “What the hell am I doing here?” That was what his parents wanted to know. They’d given him the car and the vacation as a graduation gift after completing his MBA at Yale. He’d had the car shipped to Le Havre and spent the summer touring Western Europe. Heading into the East Bloc had been his own idea. Unfortunately the visa and auto permits had taken longer than expected, and like Napoleon and Hitler before him, he reflected, his Russian incursion was running about a month too late into the bad season.

The landscape, Fisher noticed, had a well-deserved reputation for being monotonous and infinite. And the sky seemed to be a reflection of the terrain: grey and rolling, an unbroken expanse of monotony for the last eight days. He could swear the weather changed from sunshine to gloom at the Polish border.

The excitement of being a tourist in the Soviet Union, he decided, had little to do with the land (dull), the people (drab), or the climate (awful). The excitement derived from being where relatively few Westerners went, from being in a country that didn’t encourage tourism, where xenophobia was a deep-rooted condition of the national psyche; a nation that was a police state. The ultimate vacation: a dangerous place.

* * *

Gregory Fisher turned on his car radio but couldn’t find the Voice of America or the BBC, both of which seemed to come in only at night. He listened for a while to a man talking in a stentorian voice to the accompaniment of martial music, and he could pick out the words “Amerikanets” and “agressiya” being repeated. He snapped off the radio.

The highway had become wider and smoother as he left Tumanovo, but there were no other indications that he was approaching the great metropolis of Moscow. In fact, he thought, there was a singular lack of any visible commercial activity that one would associate with the twentieth century. “I’m having a Big Mac attack.”

He put a Russian language tape in the deck, listened, and repeated, “
Ya-plo-kho-syebya-choo.
I feel ill.
Na-shto-zhaloo-yetyes?
What’s the matter with you?”

Fisher listened to the tape as the Trans Am rolled along the blacktop highway. In the fields women gleaned grain left by the reapers.

Ahead he saw the silhouette of a village that was not on his map. He’d seen villages such as this one strung along the highway, and he’d also seen clusters of more modern buildings set back at the end of wide lanes, which he took to be state farms. But no solitary farmhouses. And the villages weren’t exactly picture-postcard quality.

In contrast, throughout Western Europe, every village had been a delight, each turn in the road revealed a new vista of pastoral loveliness. Or so it seemed now. In some superficial ways, he realized, rural Russia was not unlike rural America; there was little that was quaint or historical in either heartland, no castles or chateaux, few messages from the past. What he saw here was a functional if inefficient agribusiness, whose headquarters was in Moscow. “I don’t like this,” he said.

Fisher was in the village now. It consisted mostly of log cabins,
izbas,
whose doors, window frames, and flower boxes were all of the same blue. “People’s Paint Factory Number Three is overfilling quota on blue paint number two. Yes?” The entire village stretched along both sides of the highway for a half kilometer or so, like some elongated Kozy Kabin motel in the Adirondacks. He saw a few elderly people and children digging root vegetables from their kitchen gardens in the small fenced-in front yards. An old man was forcing mortar into the chinks between two logs of an
izba
while a group of children were gleefully terrorizing a flock of chickens.

Everyone stopped, turned, and watched as the metallic blue Trans Am rolled by. Fisher gave a cursory wave and began accelerating as soon as he passed the last cabin. He glanced over his right shoulder and saw a glimpse of the sun hanging lower on the southwest horizon.