The Charm School

by Nelson DeMille

  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.”

  “Warm… yes.” He put his mouth over hers as he entered more deeply and felt her hips draw back into the soft feather bed, then she thrust upward with surprising force. She moaned into his mouth as her hips moved more quickly, then slowed to a rhythmic rising and falling.

  Lisa pushed the covers off with her feet and entwined her legs around his back, then cupped his buttocks in her hands and pulled him deeper into her as she came.

  Hollis came, and they lay closely embraced. Lisa put her head on his chest.

  Hollis ran his fingers through her hair.

  She said, “I hear your heart.”

  “That’s good news. I feel your breath.”

  She kissed his chest. “Now I lay me down to sleep.”

  “Amen.” Hollis lay awake, his eyes open, staring at the blackness and listening to the silence. He smelled a cigarette from the next room, and someone coughed. The window rattled, and dried leaves blew against the panes, then silence again until a rat or mouse scampered over the rafter above.

  An hour later he heard the sound of a Chaika’s engine on the lane, followed by the clanking of a tracked vehicle, probably a troop carrier.

  He waited for the crunch of boots in the frozen garden, the smashing of the front door, then the footsteps across the wood floor.

  He waited, but the engines droned off, and quiet returned. Hollis wondered if they were looking for him and Lisa, or for Jack Dodson, or all three. There were precious few citizens in this country whose whereabouts weren’t accounted for, and three foreigners on the loose was a major malfunction in the system, an intolerable situation.

  Hollis closed his eyes and let himself drift. He vaguely heard Lisa mumbling in her sleep, then heard her say distinctly, “The car is stuck,” followed by, “I’m duty officer,” then, “He’s your friend too, Seth.”

  Hollis always thought it bad manners to listen to the sleep
talk of people he slept with, but this was the first woman he’d slept with who dreamed in Russian.

  Hollis fell into a light, troubled sleep and had dreams of his own.

  12

  Lisa was awakened by a sound in the back garden. She shook Hollis. “There’s someone outside.”

  Hollis opened his eyes and heard the creak of a door. “The bathroom is outside.”

  “Oh.”

  There were noises coming from the kitchen, and a rooster’s crowing cut through the dawn. Lisa said, “I can see my breath.” She exhaled. “See?”

  “Very nice.” Through the window, Hollis saw Zina, Pavel and Ida’s daughter, coming from the outhouse. She passed by the curtainless window but kept her head and eyes straight ahead.

  Lisa said, “It’s Sunday morning, Sam, and the church bells are silent all over Russia.”

  Hollis nodded. “I’d like to hear a church bell again.”

  They sat in silence awhile, listening to the morning birds, then Lisa said softly, “Do you like it in the morning?”

  “What? Oh… .”

  “I’d hate to think I was a one-night stand, so let’s do it again.”

  “All right.”

  They made love again, then lay back under the quilts, watching their breath as the dawn lit up the window. Lisa said, “This is called smoking in bed.”

  She put her arm around him and rubbed her toes over his foot. After a while she said, “Turn over.”

  Hollis lay on his stomach, and she pulled the quilts down. In the weak light she saw the white and purple scars that started at his neck and continued down to his buttocks. “I guess you did get banged up. Does that hurt?”

  “No.”

  “Were you burned?”

  “Hot shrapnel.”

  “The plane exploded?”

  “Well, not by itself. A surface-to-air missile went up its ass.”

  “Go on.”

  Hollis rolled onto his back. “Okay. December twenty-nine, 1972. Ironically it turned out to be the last American mission over North Vietnam. The Christmas bombings. Remember that?”

  “No.”

  “Anyway, I was over Haiphong, released the bombs, and turned back toward South Vietnam. Then my radar officer, Ernie Simms, in the backseat says coolly, ‘Missile coming up.’ And he gives me some evasive-action instructions. But the SAM was onto us, and I couldn’t shake it. The last thing Ernie said was ‘Oh, no.’ The next thing I knew, there was an explosion, the instrument panel went black, and the aircraft was out of control. There was blood spurting all over the place, and the canopy was covered with it. I thought it was mine, but it was Ernie Simms’. The F-4 was in a tight roll, wing over wing and streaking straight into the South China Sea. I jettisoned the canopy, and Simms and I blew out of the cockpit. Our parachutes opened, and we came down into the water. I floated around awhile watching enemy gunboats converging on me and contemplating life in a POW camp.”

  Hollis sat up and stared out the window. He said, “I saw Simms in his flotation seat, about a hundred meters away. He’d gotten a compress bandage on his neck and seemed alert. I called to him and he answered. One of the gunboats was bearing down on him. He yelled out to me, ‘Sam, they’ve got me.’ I swam toward him, but he waved me away. There wasn’t much I could do anyway. I saw the Viets pull him aboard. Then they came for me. But by that time the Marine air-sea rescue choppers had come in with guns and rockets blazing away at the gunboats. A chopper plucked me up. I saw the boat that Simms was on, cutting a course back toward the North Viet shore batteries, and our choppers broke off the pursuit… . They flew me to a hospital ship.”

  Lisa didn’t say anything.

  Hollis said, “I found out afterwards that I was the last pilot shot down over North Vietnam. I saw my name mentioned in a history book once. Very dubious honor. Simms has the equally dubious distinction of being the last MIA.”

  “My lord… what an experience.” She added tentatively, “Do you think… Simms… I mean, he never turned up?”

  “No. MIA.”

  “And… did you think… does it bother you to talk about it?”

  Hollis answered her unasked question. “I don’t know what I could have done for him. But he was my copilot and my responsibility. Maybe… maybe I don’t have the sequence of events right, the distance between me and him, the time when our choppers came in… I think I was out of it. I don’t know what I could have done for him. Except to swim to him and see to his wound and join him in captivity. Maybe that’s what I should have done as the commander of the aircraft.”

  “But you were wounded.”

  “I didn’t even know that.”

  “Then you were in shock.”

  Hollis shrugged. “It’s done. It’s finished.”

  She put her hand on his shoulder.

  A few minutes passed in silence, then Hollis said, “So, to come full circle, Ernie Simms was never on any North Viet list of KIAs, or POWs, so he’s still officially missing. Yet I saw them take him aboard alive. And now with this Dodson business I’m starting to wonder again about all of that. All the guys whose chutes were seen opening and who were never heard of again. Now I’m wondering if Ernie Simms and a thousand other guys didn’t wind up in Russia.”

  “In Russia…?” Lisa found her jacket under the quilts and got a cigarette out of the pocket. She lit it and took a long pull. “Want one?”

  “Maybe later.”

  “This is a mindblower, Sam.”

  Hollis looked at her. “A mindblower… yes.” He said, “Look, we should get moving.” Hollis swung his legs out of the bed, then walked to the trunk where his clothes lay.

  Lisa whistled. “Nice body.”

  “Cut it out.” He looked at her standing naked by the electric heater gathering her clothes from between the quilts. “You don’t have fat thighs, but your feet are big.”

  They dressed and went through the second bedroom into the kitchen, where Ida greeted them and gave them a washbowl of hot water, a towel, and a bar of soap. They washed at the side table that still had a tub of dirty dishes on it. Lisa excused herself and went out back. Hollis went out into the cold air and walked to the dirt road. The Chaika had not left any tread marks on the frozen mud, but the vehicle with it, a half-track, had left its tread marks. Why they hadn’t stopped and searched the village was anyone’s guess. “Luck.” He added, “Laziness.” Though maybe someone was looking out for them.

  Hollis walked on the mud path beside Pavel’s izba, entered the dead garden, and passed Lisa on her way back to the house. She said, “Isn’t this fun?”

  Hollis assured her it wasn’t and kept walking. When he got back to the kitchen, he found Pavel sitting at the kitchen table with Lisa. Also at the table were Pavel’s children, Mikhail and Zina. They were sharing a math textbook and doing homework, though it was Sunday. Hollis sat and Ida served him a boiled egg, kasha, and tea. The Russian tea was, as always, excellent. There was a stack of brown bread and a bowl of butter on the table. Hollis spoke to the two teenagers about school, then asked, “What is your favorite subject?”

  The boy smiled and answered in English, “English.”

  Hollis smiled in return. He continued in Russian, “I know all the students in Moscow take English, but I didn’t know they taught it in the country.”

  The girl replied in halting English, “Everyone in school learn English. We speak it sometimes between we.”

  Lisa said in English, “Who is your favorite American author?”

  Mikhail replied, “We know a few now we are reading. Jack London and James Baldwin.” He asked, “Does The Fire Next Time be printed in America?”

  “Oh, yes. I’ve read it,” Lisa answered.

  “They put him in jail?” Zina asked.

  “No. They gave him a big royalty check. Komissiya.”

  Mikhail said, “Our teacher say they put him in jail.”

  “No.”

  Zina said to her brother in Russian, “You see? Last year an inst
ructor told us he was arrested after the book was published. This year another instructor told us he wasn’t allowed to publish the book and fled to France.”

  Hollis cracked his boiled egg. He wondered why the government made English so available to school children. A paranoid would say, “So that they can run America someday.” But there had to be more to it than that. He’d actually heard Moscow school children speaking English to one another. Whatever the government’s reasoning was, the students considered it the height of chic. Maybe, just maybe, he thought, there is hope.

  Zina asked in English, “Americans learn Russian?”

  “No,” Lisa replied. “Not many.”

  “You speak Russian very good. But what region is your accent?”

  “Maybe a little bit Kazan, Volga region. A little Moscow. My grandmother’s Russian was old-fashioned, and maybe I still use her accent.”

  “A very nice accent,” Zina said. “Kulturny.”

  Hollis noticed that Pavel and Ida beamed every time one of their children used English. Hollis opened his briefcase to see if his staff had packed any reading material as was customary whenever anyone had to travel in the USSR. He found a Time magazine and put it in front of Mikhail and Zina. “This may help you with your English.” He added, “Don’t let it come to the attention of the authorities.”

  They both looked at him with an expression that he’d seen before in these situations. There was first a suppressed excitement, then a sort of affected indifference, as though the contraband literature meant nothing to them. Then there was a look almost of shame, a quiet acknowledgment that their government controlled them. It was humiliating, Hollis thought.

  Mikhail and Zina examined the magazine right down to the staples holding it together. They opened it at random and spread out a two-page color ad for Buick. The next page had an ad for Lincoln. In fact, the magazine was packed with ads for the new car models. There were sexually suggestive ads for perfumes, lingerie, and designer jeans that seemed to hold Mikhail’s interest. Pavel leaned over to get a better look, and Ida stopped what she was doing and stood behind her children.