The Charm School

near the table on chairs that the children had carried in. Vodka was flowing, and someone produced an Armenian brandy. Everyone drank out of cracked and not-too-clean teacups. The table was now covered with
zakuski
—the Russian equivalent of cocktail food—mostly sliced vegetables, a bowl of boiled eggs, and salted fish. Hollis downed his second vodka and said to Lisa in English, “Does this mean we have to have them for cocktails?”
    Lisa looked at him and said with emotion, “I love this. This is an incredible experience.”
    Hollis thought a moment. “Indeed, it is.” He held out his cup, and it was immediately filled with pepper vodka. There was not much talking, Hollis noted, mostly requests to pass a bowl or a bottle of this or that. The stench of the people around him had been overpowering, but with his fourth vodka he seemed not to notice or care. “That’s why they drink.”
    “Why?”
    “It kills the sense of smell.”
    “It kills the pain too,” Lisa said. “It numbs the mind and the body, and eventually it kills
them.
Would we be any different if we were born in this village?”
    Hollis looked around at the flat, brown faces, the misshapen bodies, blank eyes, and earthy hands. “I don’t know. I do know that something is terribly wrong here. I’ve seen Asian peasants who lived and looked better.”
    Lisa nodded. “These people, like their ancestors, have been ill-used by their masters. And you always have to remember the Russian winter. It takes its toll on the mind and body.”
    Hollis nodded. “That it does.” The Russian peasant, he thought. Subject of literature, folklore, and college professors. But no one understood their inner lives.
    Lisa looked around the room and met each pair of eyes. She said spontaneously, “I am happy to be here.”
    Forty faces smiled back. The man beside her asked, “Where did you get your Russian?”
    Lisa replied, “My grandmother.”
    “Ah,” said a man across the table. “You are Russian.”
    That seemed to call for a toast, and another round was poured and drunk.
    A man sitting behind Hollis slapped him on the back. “And you? Where did you learn that bad Russian?”
    Everyone laughed.
    Hollis raised a liter of heather-honey vodka. “From this bottle.”
    Again everyone laughed.
    The impromptu party went on. Hollis surveyed the hot, smoky room and the people in it. They seemed to blend into the brown wood walls, he thought; their smell, their color, their very being was of the wood and the black earth. He looked at Lisa, joking with a young man across from her, and thought he had not seen her so lively and animated all day. Something about her total acceptance of these people and her affinity with them appealed to him, and he knew at last that he liked her very much.
    The women and older children were drinking tea, and Hollis watched them, then studied the men. The Russian peasant, he thought again. They were considered second-class citizens by both the state and the city dwellers and until recently were not even issued internal passports, effectively binding them to their villages as surely as if they were still serfs on an estate. And even with the passports, Hollis knew, they were not going anywhere. And there were one hundred million of them—the Dark People, as they were called in czarist Russia, as Lisa’s grandmother undoubtedly referred to them. And they carried the weight of the state and the world on their bent backs and got damned little in return. They’d been beaten by landlords and commissars, herded into collectives, and had their harvests seized, leaving them to die of starvation. And to complete the process of killing their souls, they’d been denied their church and its sacraments. But when Russia needed massive armies, these poor bastards were sent to the front by the millions and died by the millions without protest. For Mother Russia. Hollis said aloud, “God help them.”
    Lisa looked at him and seemed to understand. “God help them,” she repeated.
    Hollis and Lisa ate and drank. As they expected, the questions about America began, tentatively at first, then they came in a flood, and Hollis and Lisa found themselves answering two or three people at once. Hollis noticed that the questions were all asked by the men, and the women continued to stand silently. Hollis commented to Lisa, “Why don’t you stand over there with the women?”
    “Why don’t you go fuck yourself?”
    Hollis laughed.
    A man asked,