The Charm School

in the Northeast. It was a Saturday afternoon, and the man of the house was stacking firewood, and his wife, still rather preppy despite her years, was brewing coffee. Through the bay window of the breakfast nook, their son could be seen playing among the pine trees.
Illusions.
    Jane Landis took his hand and said, “So the bastards kidnapped you both?”
    Hollis smiled at her. For a moment he felt like hugging her. “Yes, the bastards kidnapped us.”
    “What for? Ah, they don’t need a fucking reason. Sit down. Have some coffee.” She banged four mugs on the table that extended into the bay window area and busied herself with sugar and cream. “So, what does your presence bode for us? Are we saved, or are we doomed?”
    “Neither, I think,” Hollis answered as he sat. He jerked his thumb at the ceiling in a gesture he thought she’d understand immediately.
    “Oh,” Jane Landis said, “I don’t think that after fifteen years they care what we say anymore. We don’t know anything they don’t know. But maybe with you two here, they’ll start listening again. So answer me another time.” She poured four cups of coffee. “It’s not American, it’s Ethiopian. Every time they grab another country, they ship out arms to it and get some crap in return. Starting to get bananas from Nicaragua now. The only thing they get from Afghanistan is body bags.”
    Landis sat across from Hollis and said to him, “I told you she was anti-Red. She’s going to get into trouble one of these days. Right, Jane?”
    “Fuck them. I hope they’re listening.” She said to Lisa, “I spent two years in the Kandalaksha Camp in the Murmansk region, up near the Arctic Circle. And for what? For writing a letter to that pig Brezhnev protesting the use of Soviet troops in Poland to put down the riots there. That was December of 1970. I have a husband and two daughters. They were notified that I died in Kandalaksha. I’ll never see them again.”
    “I’m sorry.”
    “Yeah. We’re all sorry. I’m sorry I came here. If I’d stayed in Kandalaksha, I’d be dead now. It turns my stomach to think I’m still working for them. The Americans here, Tim included, hate them, but they hate in an American way—part-time and with idiotic gallows humor. They don’t understand how a Russian can hate them.”
    Lisa replied in Russian, “My grandmother was Russian. I think I understand.”
    Jane’s eyes lit up. “Ah,” she replied in English, “we’re going to be friends.”
    Hollis said in English, “Lisa has aristocratic blood.”
    Jane made a face. “Well, I’ll forgive that.”
    They all smiled. Hollis always marveled at how even the anti-Soviet Russians had been conditioned to hate the Romanovs and the old aristocracy. That was perhaps the one solid success the Soviets had in creating the new Soviet citizen. And without a past that they wanted to return to and with their innate fear of the future, the Russian was controllable. No one seemed to have any idea of who or what should replace the communists. It was a country of failed imagination.
    Tim Landis said to Lisa, “You shouldn’t speak Russian. That’s a serious offense.”
    “That’s rather ironic,” Lisa replied.
    Jane Landis said, “I’m not allowed to teach Tim Russian. That’s one of the ways they keep the Border Guards isolated from the Americans. They fear Western contamination.”
    Lisa asked, “But do they trust the students?”
    Jane replied, “They have to, up to a point. And they must have a way of controlling them in the States.” She added, “I understand that they polygraph the hell out of these guys before they ever leave here. If they see one glitch, the student gets washed out.”
    Tim Landis tapped the table and pointed at the ceiling.
    Jane Landis shrugged. “Screw them.”
    They drank coffee in silence awhile, then Lisa asked, “This house… is it just for you, or do they use it as a training… what would you call it?”
    Jane Landis replied, “Yes, that’s it. It’s for training. Not just for our comfort. We have two boarders at the moment. We’re supposed to call them boarders. Two young swine who live here. We get them a few months before they ship out, so we don’t have people here all the time, thank God. But when we have them, I’m a bitch to live with. Right, Tim?”
    “Right.”
    Hollis asked, “And you housebreak them?”
    She smiled. “That’s it. Teach them how to use a flush toilet.” She laughed.
    Tim Landis