The Charm School

you.” She said, “My paternal grandparents were named Putyatov. They owned a large estate and a big brick house outside of Kazan on the Volga. I have an old picture of the house.”
    “Is it still there?”
    “I don’t know. When my grandmother, Evelina Vasileva, last saw it on the day she fled, it was still intact. My grandfather had five hundred peasants on the estate. I’d try to find it, but I can’t get permission from the Foreign Ministry.” She stayed silent awhile, then added bitterly, “What’s it to them if I spend a weekend out in the country looking for my roots?”
    “Did you tell them you were an aristocrat and heir to five hundred peasants?”
    “Of course not.” She laughed, then said thoughtfully, “I’ll bet the Putyatov name is still remembered there.”
    “Fondly?”
    “Who knows? This is not like Western Europe where you can go back and trace your ancestry. There’s been a complete break here, whole families wiped out, two world wars, revolution, civil war, purges, plagues, forced collectivization… what would I do if I found the house or found a Putyatov?”
    “I don’t know. But
you’d
know what to do. You have a Russian soul.”
    She smiled but said nothing and led him toward a shop whose gilded wooden letters spelled
antikvar.
She said, “This is the best of Moscow’s three antique shops. The other two are mostly secondhand-junk shops.”
    They went inside, and the chicly dressed proprietress, an attractive young woman, greeted Lisa cordially, and Lisa gave the woman the mums. Lisa said in Russian, “Anna, this is my friend Sam.”
    Hollis said in Russian, “Good afternoon.”
    She appraised him a moment, then asked in Russian, “Are you with the embassy?”
    “Sometimes.”
    “Then you must know my good friend Seth Alevy.”
    “I’ve heard of him.”
    “Give him my regards, if you see him.”
    “I will, if I see him.”
    “Please”—she waved her arm—“look around.”
    Hollis watched as Lisa browsed through the shop, crowded mostly with furniture, rugs, and lamps, none of which looked antique. There were, however, tables covered with interesting smaller items: silver pieces, ivory, troika bells, ceramics, gilded picture frames, jasper, porphyry, and other objects of semiprecious Ural stone—bits and pieces of a vanished world. Hollis wondered if Lisa was looking for the Putyatovs here.
    Hollis noted there were no crosses or icons and in fact nothing of a religious nature, though religious art had been the predominant art form in pre-Revolution Russia. However there were things here that one would never find in a Moscow store, though nothing of true artistic value. Most of the good pieces had long since been appropriated by the government for museums or for the houses of the Soviet elite. The rest had made its way out of Russia long ago or had been destroyed in the initial frenzy of the Revolution. Now and then something significant surfaced in the West—a previously unknown Fabergé egg, a Rublyev icon, and recently a Levitan landscape had been auctioned at Sotheby’s for an anonymous client who was thought to be a Soviet defector. But for the most part, the evidence that Imperial Russia and Holy Russia had once existed could be seen only in Soviet museums between the hours of ten and six, closed Mondays.
    Hollis picked up an inkwell made of Lithuanian amber. Embedded in the amber was an insect that he could not identify. He studied the inkwell as he thought about Seth Alevy, Lisa Rhodes, and the antique-shop woman who knew too much.
    Lisa called out, “Do you like this?” She held up a round lacquer box.
    Hollis walked over to her and took the small black box. On the lid was an uncommonly lithe Russian milkmaid, carrying a yoke with two milk buckets hanging from it. The black lacquer was deep and lustrous, and the girl’s clothing, bright and vibrant. On the bottom of the box was a four-hundred-ruble price sticker.
    She said, “I think it’s a real Palekh box. Maybe pre-Revolution. Can you tell?”
    Hollis’ limited knowledge of Palekh boxes told him that it was difficult to tell the old ones from the ones still made in the village of Palekh. The quality was consistently high, and the style unchanged, despite the Revolution or the fact that the craftsmen were now all state employees. Therefore, age had no meaning with Palekh boxes. Size counted. This one could be bought in a Beriozka for about a hundred rubles. He said, “I don’t think