The Charm School

approached him. “How’s business?” Fisher handed him Intourist coupons for thirty-five liters of 93-octane. “Okay?”
    The man nodded. “Oo-kay.”
    Fisher went back to his car and began pumping gas. The man followed and looked over his shoulder at the meter. Fisher did not wonder why all petrol stations were self-service if the attendant stood there watching you. Fisher had stopped wondering about such things. He hit thirty-five liters, but the tank wasn’t full, so he squeezed in another four liters before he put the hose back. The attendant was peering inside the Pontiac now and didn’t seem to notice.
    Fisher got into his car, started the big engine, and raced the motor. He lowered the electric windows and handed the attendant a packet of postcards from New York City. “Everyone is being homeless there. Yes?”
    The attendant flipped slowly through the cards. Fisher put a Bruce Springsteen tape in the deck, popped the clutch, and left six feet of rubber on the white concrete. He made a tight, hard U-turn and accelerated up the road. “Surreal. Really.”
    He rolled up the windows and lost himself in the music.
    Fisher pressed on the gas pedal until he was well past the speed limit. “Haven’t
seen
a traffic cop in the last thousand miles. They never
heard
of radar here.”
    He thought about the Rossiya Hotel in Moscow. That would be his first decent accommodation since Warsaw. “I need a steak and scotch whiskey.” He wondered what he was going to do with the fruits and vegetables in the rear seat.
    Another thought popped into his mind. “Avoid sexual entanglements.” That was what the embassy man in Bonn had told him when he’d gone there to pick up his Soviet visa, and so far he’d avoided it, though not by much in Warsaw. Still, he had fifteen pairs of panty hose and a dozen tubes of lip gloss. “We’ll see what shakes out at the Rossiya.”
    Fisher kept looking for a sign directing him back to the main highway. “The sun has riz, and the sun has set, and here we is in Roosha yet.”
    Greg Fisher pulled off to the side of the deserted road. A stone kilometer post read 108 K, and an arrow pointed back to the main highway via a one-lane road with crumbling blacktop. An arrow to the left pointed toward a rising road in better condition. The sign was in Cyrillic, but he could make out the word “Borodino.” He looked at his dashboard clock: 4:38. Impulsively he accelerated, swinging onto the Borodino road, heading west into the setting sun.
    He didn’t know what he expected to see at Borodino, but something told him it was a not-to-be-missed opportunity. In June he had stood on the beach at Normandy and had been moved by what had happened there. Similarly, he thought, he would like to see the place where Napoleon and Kutuzov had faced off, where fifty years later Leo Tolstoy had stood and pondered his epic,
War and Peace.
Fisher thought perhaps he owed the Russians at least that before he entered Moscow.
    * * *
    The road curved gently and rose gradually. Poplars flanked either side, and Fisher found it pleasant. He drove slowly through a set of stone pillars with open iron gates. The road crested a small hill, and he saw spread before him Borodino Field, where Napoleon’s
Grande Armée
met the Russian army led by Field Marshal Kutuzov. The road led down to a small parking area beyond which was a white limestone building with a red-tiled roof and a neoclassical portico. On either side of the portico were wings in which were set arched French windows. Two old, muzzle-loading cannons flanked the entranceway. This building, Fisher knew from his Intourist booklet, was the Borodino museum. He rummaged through his tapes and found Tchaikovsky’s “1812 Overture.” He slid in the tape, turned up the volume, and got out of the car, leaving the door open. The overture reverberated over the quiet battlefield, and a flock of wild geese took to the air.
    Fisher mounted the steps of the museum and tried the doors, but they were locked. “Typical.” He turned and looked out at the grass-covered fields and hillocks where a quarter-million French and Russian soldiers met on a September day in 1812, the French intent on taking Moscow, the Russians on defending it. For fifteen hours, according to his guidebook, the two sides fired at each other, and in the evening the Russians withdrew toward Moscow, and the French were in possession of Borodino Field and the little village of the same name. A hundred