The Charm School

by Nelson DeMille

  “You’ve never even been in the countryside. How do you know the peasants are friendly?”

  “Instinct.”

  “Too many nineteenth-century Russian novels, I think.” He shrugged. “All right. I’ll trust you on this.” He added, “You get your wish to see a village sooner than we thought.”

  The road had gone from gravel to dirt and was deeply rutted by farm vehicles. They drove on in a westward direction and within fifteen minutes saw the silhouettes of utility poles against the horizon. They followed the poles and came to the first izba of a small hamlet. Hollis slowed the car on the dirt track that ran between two rows of log cabins. He said, “I don’t see any lights.”

  Lisa replied, “It’s past nine, Sam. They’re in bed. They’re peasants. This is not Moscow.”

  “True. In Moscow they turn in at ten.” Hollis stopped the car and looked out the window. “I think we turned left into the last century.” He shut off the engine, and they listened to the dead silence. Hollis got out of the car and scanned the narrow lane. Like most of rural Russia, this village boasted electricity, but Hollis saw no sign of telephone lines nor was there a vehicle in sight or a structure large enough to hold one. There was no evidence that the village even possessed a single horse. It was nicely isolated. Lisa came up beside him, and Hollis said, “They don’t show this place to the foreign dignitaries.”

  A light went on in the front window of an izba, then a few more lights came on. The door of a cabin opened, and a man stepped out onto a dirt path. Hollis said to Lisa, “You talk.”

  The man approached, and Hollis could see he was somewhere between forty and sixty, wore felt boot-liners, and had probably dressed hastily.

  Lisa said in Russian, “Greetings. We are American tourists.”

  The man didn’t reply. A few other doors opened, and more people came out into the dirt lane.

  Hollis looked around. There were about ten izbas on each side of the road, and behind them Hollis could see pigpens and chicken coops. Each kitchen garden was fenced in, and in the corner of each was an outhouse. Ten meters down the lane was a single well and next to it a hand pump. The whole place had a look of extreme neglect about it and made the villages outside of Moscow look prosperous by comparison.

  A crowd of about fifty people—men, women, and children—were standing around Hollis, Lisa, and the Zhiguli now. Hollis said to Lisa in English, “Tell them we come from Earth with a message of peace and to take us to their vozhd.”

  She gave him a look of both annoyance and anxiety, then said to the man who had come out first, “We have having car trouble. Can you put us up for the night?”

  The peasants looked from one to another, but amazingly, Hollis thought, there was no sound from them. Finally the peasant she addressed said, “You wish lodgings? Here?”

  “Yes.”

  “There is a state farm not far from here. They will have lodgings now that the harvest is done.”

  Hollis replied, “I don’t think the car will make it. Do you have a telephone or vehicle?”

  “No. But I can send a boy on a bicycle.”

  “Don’t go to that trouble,” Hollis said with a politeness that seemed to surprise the man. Hollis added, “My wife and I would rather stay with the people.” At the word narod—the common people, the masses—the man smiled.

  Hollis looked closely at the peasants around him. They were coarse people with leathery skin the color of the earth on which they stood. Their clothes were little more than rags, their quilted vatniks not so clean or tailored as Lisa’s. The men were unshaven, and the women had that unusual Russian combination of fat bodies and drawn faces. Half their teeth were black or missing, and from where Hollis stood, he could smell the sour clothes mixed with various flavored vodkas. My God, he thought, this can’t be.

  Lisa said to Hollis in English, “Maybe this wasn’t a good idea. Want to leave?”

  “Too late.” He said to the man, “You must let us pay you for our lodgings.”

  The man shook his head. “No, no. But I will sell you some butter and lettuce, and you can make a nice profit on that in Moscow.”

  “Thank you.” Hollis added, “I’ll put the car where it won’t block the road.” He said to Lisa, “Get acquainted.” Hollis got in the car and backed it down the lane until he came to a hayrick he’d seen. He pulled the Zhiguli out of sight of the road, took his briefcase, and got out. He walked back, where he found Lisa involved in a ten-way conversation. Lisa said to Hollis in English, “Our host is named Pavel Pedorovich, and this is his wife Ida Agaryova. Everyone is very impressed with our Russian.”

  “Did you tell them you are Countess Putyatova and you might own them?”

  “Don’t be an ass, Sam.”

  “Okay.”

  “Also I’ve learned that this place is called Yablonya—apple tree—and is a hamlet of the large collective farm named Krasnya Plamenny—Red Flame. The collective’s administrative center is about five kilometers further west. No one lives there, but there is a telephone in the tractor storage shed. Mechanics will be there in the morning and will let us use the telephone.”

  “Very good. I’m promoting you to captain.” Hollis introduced himself as Joe Smith. “Call me Iosif.”

  Pavel introduced each of the twenty or so families in the village, including his own son Mikhail, a boy of about sixteen, and his daughter Zina, who was a year or so older. They all smiled as they were introduced, and some of the old ones even removed their hats in a low sweeping bow, the ancient Russian peasant gesture of respect. Hollis wanted to get off the road in the event a black Chaika happened by. He said to Pavel, “My wife is tired.”

  “Yes, yes. Follow me.” He led Hollis and Lisa toward his izba, and Hollis noted that neither Pavel nor his wife inquired about luggage. This could mean they knew he and Lisa were on the run, or perhaps they thought his briefcase was luggage.

  They entered the front room of the izba, which was the kitchen. There was a wood stove for heating and cooking, around which were a half dozen pairs of felt boots. A pine table and chairs sat in the corner, and utensils hung on the log walls. Against the far wall leaned two muddy bicycles. Incongruously there was a refrigerator plugged into an overhead socket from which dangled a single bare lightbulb. On a second table between the stove and the refrigerator sat a washtub filled with dirty dishes. Hollis noticed an open barrel of kasha—buckwheat—on the floor and remembered a peasant rhyme:

  Shci da kasha;

  Pishcha nasha.

  —Cabbage soup and gruel are our food.

  Pavel pulled two chairs out. “Sit. Sit.”

  Hollis and Lisa sat.

  Pavel barked at his wife, “Vodka. Cups.”

  The door opened, and a man and woman entered with a teenage girl and a younger boy. The woman set a bowl of cut cucumbers on the table and backed away with the children. The man sat very close to Hollis and smiled. Another family entered, and the scene was repeated. Soon the walls were lined with women, their heavy arms folded across their chests like Siamese servants ready to snap to if anyone called. The children sat on the floor at the women’s feet. Ida gave some of the children kisel—a thick drink made with pear juice and potato flour. The men, about fifteen of them now, sat around or near the table on chairs that the children had carried in. Vodka was flowing, and someone produced an Armenian brandy. Everyone drank out of cracked and not-too-clean teacups. The table was now covered with zakuski—the Russian equivalent of cocktail food—mostly sliced vegetables, a bowl of boiled eggs, and salted fish. Hollis downed his second vodka and said to Lisa in English, “Does this mean we have to have them for cocktails?”

  Lisa looked at him and said with emotion, “I love this. This is an incredible experience.”

  Hollis thought a moment. “Indeed, it is.” He held out his cup, and it was immediately filled with pepper vodka. There was not much talking, Hollis noted, mostly requests to pass a bowl or a bottle of this or that. The stench of the people around him had
been overpowering, but with his fourth vodka he seemed not to notice or care. “That’s why they drink.”

  “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, an
d 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.