The Charm School

stood. Lisa said, “Where are we going for lunch?”
    “The Prague.”
    “Then we can walk up Arbat Street. I have to make a stop.”
    They turned right and walked along the wide boulevard. Lisa said, “The sun is shining, for a change.”
    “I see.”
    “Do you go to the Prague often?”
    “No.”
    “Read any good books lately?”
    “Can’t think of any.”
    “Someone told me you were shot down over North Vietnam.”
    “That’s right.”
    “But you weren’t a POW.”
    “No, I was rescued at sea.”
    “This Major Dodson business has special meaning for you.”
    “Perhaps.”
    “You’re not into complex sentence structures, are you?”
    “Depends on the subject.”
    “Sorry.”
    They walked in silence awhile, then crossed Tchaikovsky Street and turned up Arbat Street where it began at the massive Foreign Ministry building, another Stalinist skyscraper of pinnacles and spires. Lisa asked, “Have you ever been in there?”
    “A few times.”
    “What’s it like?”
    “Have you ever been to the State Department building?”
    “Yes.”
    “Well, that’s what the Soviet Foreign Ministry is like, except the twaddle and bunkum is in Russian.”
    They walked up Arbat, an old Moscow street that had recently been made into the Soviet Union’s first and only pedestrian shopping street. There were hundreds of people out on this promising Saturday, every one of them carrying a big bag. The street had been repaved with brick, and young trees struggled to take hold in concrete planters. There were benches, decorative streetlamps, and flower boxes running the length of the kilometer-long street that wound through the old Arbat district.
    The Arbat was sometimes compared to the Left Bank or Georgetown, Greenwich Village, or Soho. But Hollis thought the Arbat was the Arbat, a unique glimpse of a vanished world that had not been well-known or chronicled even when it existed. For some reason the present regime was trying to preserve the Arbat’s heritage, rehabilitating the handsome buildings and restoring the facades of once chic shops. Though in a society that placed no value on chicness, gentility, tourism, or consumerism, Hollis could not comprehend what the government’s purpose was. It might be nothing more than creeping bourgeois sentimentality, though Hollis found that hard to believe. He said to Lisa, “Do you like this?”
    “Sort of. But it’s a bit sanitized, if you know what I mean.”
    “Have you seen the unsanitized parts of the Arbat?”
    “Oh, yes. I know every block of what’s left of old Moscow.”
    “Do you?”
    “I’m doing a photographic essay.”
    “Interesting. Hobby?”
    “Sort of. I’m going to get it published.”
    “Good luck.” He asked, “Are you a Russophile?”
    She smiled with a touch of embarrassment. “Sort of. Yes. I like… the people… the language… old Russia.”
    “No need to be defensive. I won’t have you arrested.”
    “You make a joke of it, but on this job you have to be careful what you say publicly or privately.”
    “I know.”
    Lisa and Hollis strolled from one side of the street to the other, looking in shop windows. The shops were mostly of the basic variety, a
svet
—lighting fixture store, an
apteka
—apothecary, and so on. There were a number of snack bars and ice cream kiosks and what the Russians called health food stores that sold mostly processed dairy products. Hollis noticed a long line outside one of them, women, young children, and babies in strollers, which meant, he knew, that fresh milk was available. Lisa stopped at an outdoor stand and bought a bunch of mums from one of the traditionally white-aproned old ladies. Lisa said, “For a utilitarian people, the Russians spend a lot of money on hothouse flowers.”
    “Maybe they eat them.”
    “No, they put them in their drab apartments and dingy offices. Flowers are Russian soul food.”
    “The Russians are a paradox—are they not? I can’t figure them out,” Hollis said. “They talk a lot about their Russian souls, but they never much mention their hearts.”
    “Perhaps—”
    “Instead of saying ‘a heart-to-heart talk,’ for instance, they say ‘
dusha—dushe
’—soul-to-soul. I get weary of all the soul talk.”
    “It may be a matter of semantics—”
    “Sometimes I think their problem is purely genetic.”
    “Actually I have Russian blood.”
    “Oh, do you? I’ve put my foot in my mouth.”
    She took his arm as they walked. “I’ll forgive