The Charm School

about a thousand people. Hollis became aware of the smell of strong incense, which competed for his olfactory attention with the smell of unwashed bodies. He could see, even in the dark, that whatever exterior cosmetics had been done in 1980 had not been carried through inside. The place was in bad repair, the water-stained stucco crumbling, and the heating had either failed or was nonexistent. Yet there was still a magnificence about the place, he thought. The gold on the altar gleamed, the iconostasis—the tiered altar screen made of individual icons—was mesmerizing, and the ruined architecture was somehow more impressive and appropriate than the fussily kept cathedrals of Western Europe. Lisa took his hand, and they made their way forward, finally meeting a solid block of bodies about midway through the nave.
    Long-bearded priests in gilded vestments swung censers and passed a jeweled Bible from one to the other. The litany began, repetitious and melancholy, lasting perhaps a quarter hour.
    Immediately after the litany ended, from somewhere behind the iconostasis, a hidden choir began an unharmonized and unaccompanied chant that struck Hollis as more primitive than ecclesiastic but nonetheless powerful. Hollis looked around at the faces of the people, and it struck him that he had never seen such Russian faces in the two years he’d lived in Moscow. These were serene faces, faces with clear eyes and unknit brows, as if, he thought, the others really
were
soul dead and these were the last living beings in Moscow. He whispered to Lisa, “I am… awed… thank you.”
    “I’ll save your spy’s soul yet.”
    Hollis listened to the ancient Russian coming from the altar, and though he had difficulty following it, the rhythm and cadence had a beauty and power of its own, and he felt himself, for the first time in many years, overwhelmed by a religious service. His own Protestantism was a religion of simplicity and individual conscience. This orthodox service was Byzantine Imperial pomp and Eastern mysticism, as far removed from his early memories of white clapboard churches as the Soviet “marriage palaces” were removed from the Church of the Assumption. Yet here, in these magnificent ruins, these medieval-looking priests spoke the same message that the grey-suited ministers had spoken from the wooden pulpits of his youth: God loves you.
    Hollis noticed that the worshipers crossed themselves and bowed low from the waist whenever the mood seemed to strike them, with no discernible signal from the altar. From time to time, people would manage to prostrate themselves on the crowded floor and kiss the stone. He saw, too, that the murky icons around the walls were now illuminated by the thin candles that were being stuck into the gilded casings that framed the icons. People were congregating around what he presumed to be the icons of their patron saints, kissing them, then moving back to let someone else through.
    For all the ritual on the altar, Hollis thought, the worship in the nave was something of a free-for-all, quite different from the mainstream Protestant churches he’d once attended, where the opposite was sometimes true.
    Suddenly the chanting stopped, and the censers ceased swinging. A priest in resplendent robes moved to the edge of the raised altar and spread his arms.
    Hollis looked closely at the full-bearded man and saw by his eyes that he was young, no more than thirty perhaps.
    The priest began talking without a microphone, and Hollis listened in the now-quiet church where nothing could be heard but the young priest’s voice and the crackling of the tallow candles. The priest delivered a brief sermon, speaking of conscience and good deeds. Hollis found it rather unoriginal and uninspiring, though he realized that the congregation did not hear this sort of thing often.
    Lisa, as if knowing what was on his mind, whispered, “The KGB are recording every word. There are hidden messages in the sermon, words and concepts that the clergy and congregation understand, but which the KGB cannot begin to comprehend. It’s a start anyway, a spark.”
    Hollis nodded. It was odd that she used that word: spark—
iskra
in Russian. It was the word Lenin often used and what he named his first underground newspaper—
Iskra
. The concept then, as now, was that Russia was a tinderbox, awaiting a spark to set the nation ablaze.
    Hollis heard the young priest say, “It is not always convenient to let others know