The Charm School

jurisdiction. I may fly to the States and file or something. But I can’t figure out what state I live in. Probably Siberia, if I don’t watch my step.”
    “So you’re in the process of divorce.”
    “Yes. But what married couple isn’t?”
    “Do you want to know about Seth?”
    “Not while you’re gnawing on eight inches of sausage.”
    She put the sausage on the breakfast bar. “Do you want to see my photographs?”
    “Sure.”
    Lisa went to the cabinet beneath the bookshelves and retrieved two albums. She put one on the coffee table, sat beside Hollis, and opened the one in her lap. “This is the first picture I took the day I got to Moscow. Those are the last of the wooden houses that used to line the road to Sheremetyevo Airport. They’re gone now.” She flipped through the pages, and Hollis saw that all the photos had typed captions below them. Most of the pictures were black and white, but there were some color shots taken in the spring and summer. Hollis looked at churches and cathedrals with their dates of destruction noted, and in some cases, pictures of the actual wrecking crew followed by a photograph of the new building on the site. Hollis was no architectural romantic, but the photography made the point jarringly well.
    In nearly all the photos of old wooden homes, there were people about, leaning out windows, hanging laundry in the yards, or talking over picket fences. The people seemed weathered like the unpainted wood, and like their homes they seemed to fit in well, to belong to the narrow streets, the tangle of Russian olive trees, and the giant sunflowers hugging the fences. There were dogs and cats in the pictures, though Hollis couldn’t recall ever seeing a dog or cat in his two years in Moscow. Surprisingly, he didn’t recognize any of the locales, and if he hadn’t known it was Moscow, he would have guessed it was some small provincial town out on the steppe. It was as if there were another city lurking among the concrete behemoths that Moscow had become. “This is very good, Lisa. Incredible shots.”
    “Thank you.”
    “Where are these places?”
    “They’re all within the Outer Ring Road, since I can’t get out of the city. Some of these places were villages that are now within the city. Some are old districts in the central city that haven’t been torn down yet, hidden between apartment projects.”
    Hollis observed, “Many American cities are undergoing the same sort of ugly growth.”
    “Yes,” she replied, “but that’s a debate between aesthetics and profit. Here the goal is to get everyone into apartment blocks where they can be
watched
. And it’s not just the cities; the countryside will one day look like that
sovkhoz
we saw.”
    Hollis replied, “It’s not our problem.”
    “You probably think I’m obsessed, and maybe I am. But I don’t see what right these bureaucrats have to destroy other people’s homes or cultural and religious monuments that in some ways belong to the world. Look at these shots. The Maly Theater next to the Bolshoi, Stanislavsky’s Moscow Art Theater, St. Nicholas’ Cathedral. They were all slated for destruction, but some Moscow artists and writers got wind of it and actually made a protest. Same with the Arbat district. The wrecking crews are on hold, but no one is really able to stop this onslaught on the past. They’d rip down the Kremlin if they thought they could get away with it.”
    “Maybe they could sell it to an American businessman who would make a theme park out of it.” Hollis turned a page of the album and saw a picture of Lisa standing on the veranda of what could have been her own Victorian house in Sea Cliff, except that there was a very Russian-looking family standing around, and the adults were drinking Moskovaya beer from bottles. Also in the picture, his hand for some reason on Lisa’s head, was Seth Alevy, wearing a rare smile. The typed caption read:
Seth and I, house hunting with real estate brokers in Tatarovo.
    She said, “Silly,” and flipped the page. She went through the remaining photographs, but Hollis was no longer paying attention. She seemed to sense this and put the book on the coffee table. After a minute or so of silence, she said, “That was a Jewish family. Dissidents.”
    Hollis got up and made himself another drink.
    Lisa said, “So, do you think a New York publisher would be interested in the theme?”
    “Maybe. The pictures are very good. You have a good