The Charm School

She opened the rear door of the Zhiguli, threw the crate in, and piled in after it. The Zhiguli’s rear dropped. Hollis looked at Lisa, smiled, and shrugged. He asked, “
Gde?
”
    “There, there. Turn over there. Where are you from?”
    Hollis turned down a narrow street and saw the train station, a covered concrete platform. “From Estonia.”
    “Yes? Do the police let you drive with dented fenders in Estonia? You must get that fixed here.”
    “Yes, Mother.”
    “Where are your hats and gloves? Do you want to get pneumonia?”
    “No.” Hollis pulled up to a small empty parking area beside the concrete platform. He got out and helped the old woman up the platform steps. Lisa followed with his briefcase, and they made their way through the crowd to the wooden ticket shed on the platform. Hollis and Lisa consulted the posted schedule and saw that the next Moscow train would be along in twenty minutes. Hollis knocked on the ticket window, and a wooden panel slid back, revealing a middle-aged woman wearing a grey railroad coat. A fire blazed in an old potbellied stove behind her. Hollis said, “Two one-way tickets to Moscow.”
    She looked at him.
    Hollis knew she was supposed to ask for an internal passport, but ticket agents rarely did. In his case, however, she might make an exception. Hollis said, “Is it possible to be ticketed on to Leningrad, then to Tallinn?”
    “No. You are Estonian?”
    “Yes.”
    The woman craned her neck to get a look at Lisa, then turned to Hollis. “You must be ticketed in Moscow for Leningrad and Tallinn. Twenty-two and seventy-five.”
    Hollis gave her twenty-five rubles and took the tickets and change. “
Spasibo.
”
    As they moved away from the ticket booth, Lisa glanced back. “I wonder if she’s going to call the militia.”
    Hollis moved around to the rear of the wooden ticket shed, looked around, drew his knife, and severed the telephone line. “No. But if she leaves the ticket booth, we’re back in the Zhiguli.”
    Lisa took his arm. “Somehow I feel you’ll get us out of this.” She added, “You got us into it.”
    Hollis made no reply.
    She asked, “What would you have done if she asked us for passports or identity cards?”
    “Are you asking out of curiosity, or are you trying to learn the business?”
    “Both.”
    “Well, then, I would have… you tell me.”
    Lisa thought a moment, then said, “I’d pretend I couldn’t find my ID, leave, and pay a peasant to buy two tickets.”
    Hollis nodded. “Not bad.”
    Lisa and Hollis walked down the cold, grey concrete platform, which looked like a scene out of
Doctor Zhivago
, crowded with black-coated and black-scarved humanity. Old peasants, men and women, with teenage boys to help them, lugged crates, boxes, and suitcases filled with dairy products and the last fresh produce of the year. They were all headed for one place: Moscow, the Center, where eight million mouths had to be fed and could not be fed properly through the government’s distribution system. Some of the peasants would go to the markets, the government’s grudging concession to capitalism, and some of the peasants would get no farther than a side street near the railroad terminal. Hollis had heard from some of the wives in the embassy that by November broccoli and cauliflower could sell for the equivalent of two dollars a pound, tomatoes for twice that, and lettuce was sold by the gram. By December the fresh produce disappeared until May.
    The peasant women sat like men, Hollis noticed, their legs spread and their hands dangling in their laps. Not a single man was shaven, and there was not one decent article of clothing among the two hundred or so people. The women wore rubber boots and galoshes, and though the men’s shoes and boots were leather, they were raw and cracked from long, hard use. The few young girls wore plastic boots of garish colors: red, yellow, pale blue. Hollis said softly to Lisa, “You might as well powder your nose again. Everyone’s staring at you anyway.”
    “My word, look at that. That man has dead rabbits in that sack.”
    The Byelorussian Express came lumbering down the track, and everyone stood and moved their wares to the edge of the platform, forming a veritable wall of boxes and crates. The train stopped, the doors opened, and Hollis vaulted inside followed by Lisa. They took two empty seats by the attendant’s tea cubicle.
    Within ten minutes every nook and cranny of the car was packed with