The Charm School

thought occurred to Hollis that the minister of agriculture might want to spend a winter month here to fully appreciate the great strides made in the Russian peasants’ standard of living since the czars.
    Lisa said to Pavel and Ida, “This is wonderful. Thank you for showing us the real Russia.” She added with a smile, “I’m sick to death of the Muscovites.”
    Pavel smiled in return and addressed Hollis, “I don’t think you are tourists, but whoever you are, you are honest people and you can sleep well here.”
    Hollis replied, “There will be no trouble if the people in Yablonya don’t speak to outsiders.”
    “Whom do we speak to after the harvest? We are dead to them until the spring planting.”
    Ida handed Lisa a roll of toilet paper that crinkled. “If you must go out back. My bladder was always giving me trouble when I was pregnant.
Spokoiny nochi.
”
    The woman and her husband left.
    Lisa felt the bed. “A real
perina
—feather mattress.”
    “I’m allergic to feathers.” Hollis put his hands in his pockets. “I might have preferred a tractor shed.”
    “Stop griping.”
    He went to the bed and picked up a corner of the quilt and examined the seam, looking for bedbugs.
    Lisa asked, “What are you looking for?”
    “Looking for my chocolate mint on the pillow.”
    She laughed.
    Hollis pulled down the triple quilt to examine the sheets, but there weren’t any. There was only the stained mattress ticking with feather quills sticking out.
The things we take for granted.
He suddenly felt a sharp anger at Katherine for all her petty whining and bitching about embassy life.
    Lisa seemed not to notice the dirty mattress and began looking around the room.
    Hollis moved to the curtainless window and examined it. It was a swing-out type, factory-made, but was some inches shorter than the log opening and had to be set in mortar, which was now cracking. He felt a cold draft and saw his breath. Hollis tried the latch handle and satisfied himself the window would open if it became necessary to leave that way.
    Lisa came up beside him and looked out the window. “That’s their private plot. Each peasant family is allowed exactly one acre. These plots comprise less than one percent of the agricultural lands but account for nearly thirty percent of the value of Soviet farm output.”
    “I suppose there’s a lesson there for Moscow if Moscow cared.”
    Lisa seemed lost in thought, then said, “This is like my grandmother described. This is the rural past that the intellectuals in Moscow and Leningrad are always romanticizing. The Russian purity of the land. It’s still here. Why don’t they come out and see it?”
    “Because there’s no indoor plumbing.” Hollis moved away from the window and added sharply, “And it’s
not
here, Lisa. Not anymore. This is a rural slum, and the peasants don’t give a damn. Can’t you see that? Don’t you see how ramshackle everything is? Every man, woman, and child in this village wants only one thing: a one-way ticket to a city.”
    She sat on the bed and stared at her feet, then nodded slowly.
    “And while this might not be a sterile state farm,” he added, “it’s still a state-owned collective. The only thing these people own are their dirty clothes and greasy cooking utensils. As for these cabins and their so-called private plots, the government doesn’t care a damn about them. The plan is to wipe out the villages and put everyone in the state farms where they can be twice as inefficient and nonproductive in a true communist setting. If that shithead Burov came here with a piece of paper signed in Moscow, he could take these people to the Forty Years of October Sovkhoz and plow Yablonya into the ground. Once you understand that, you take the first step toward understanding this society.”
    She didn’t respond for some time, then said, “You’re right of course. The people are alienated from the land, and the land is an orphan. The past is dead. The peasant culture is dead. The villages are dead. The bastards in Moscow won.”
    He said in a more soothing tone, “Well, it’s too late to talk politics and philosophy.”
    “Yes, it is.”
    “I hope you’re right about these peasants, and we’re not awakened by the infamous three A . M . KGB knock on the door.”
    “I think I was right.”
    It occurred to Hollis that Lisa shared Alevy’s annoying and dangerous practice of dragging the Russians into things that it wasn’t fair to involve