Lisa said to Hollis in English, “Maybe this wasn’t a good idea. Want to leave?”
“Too late.” He said to the man, “You must let us pay you for our lodgings.”
The man shook his head. “No, no. But I will sell you some butter and lettuce, and you can make a nice profit on that in Moscow.”
“Thank you.” Hollis added, “I’ll put the car where it won’t block the road.” He said to Lisa, “Get acquainted.” Hollis got in the car and backed it down the lane until he came to a hayrick he’d seen. He pulled the Zhiguli out of sight of the road, took his briefcase, and got out. He walked back, where he found Lisa involved in a ten-way conversation. Lisa said to Hollis in English, “Our host is named Pavel Pedorovich, and this is his wife Ida Agaryova. Everyone is very impressed with our Russian.”
“Did you tell them you are Countess Putyatova and you might own them?”
“Don’t be an ass, Sam.”
“Okay.”
“Also I’ve learned that this place is called Yablonya — apple tree — and is a hamlet of the large collective farm named Krasnya Plamenny — Red Flame. The collective’s administrative center is about five kilometers further west. No one lives there, but there is a telephone in the tractor storage shed. Mechanics will be there in the morning and will let us use the telephone.”
“Very good. I’m promoting you to captain.” Hollis introduced himself as Joe Smith. “Call me Iosif.”
Pavel introduced each of the twenty or so families in the village, including his own son Mikhail, a boy of about sixteen, and his daughter Zina, who was a year or so older. They all smiled as they were introduced, and some of the old ones even removed their hats in a low sweeping bow, the ancient Russian peasant gesture of respect. Hollis wanted to get off the road in the event a black Chaika happened by. He said to Pavel, “My wife is tired.”
“Yes, yes. Follow me.” He led Hollis and Lisa toward his izba, and Hollis noted that neither Pavel nor his wife inquired about luggage. This could mean they knew he and Lisa were on the run, or perhaps they thought his briefcase was luggage.
They entered the front room of the izba, which was the kitchen. There was a wood stove for heating and cooking, around which were a half dozen pairs of felt boots. A pine table and chairs sat in the corner, and utensils hung on the log walls. Against the far wall leaned two muddy bicycles. Incongruously there was a refrigerator plugged into an overhead socket from which dangled a single bare lightbulb. On a second table between the stove and the refrigerator sat a washtub filled with dirty dishes. Hollis noticed an open barrel of kasha — buckwheat — on the floor and remembered a peasant rhyme:
Shci da kasha;
Pishcha nasha.
— Cabbage soup and gruel are our food.
Pavel pulled two chairs out. “Sit. Sit.”
Hollis and Lisa sat.
Pavel barked at his wife, “Vodka. Cups.”
The door opened, and a man and woman entered with a teenage girl and a younger boy. The woman set a bowl of cut cucumbers on the table and backed away with the children. The man sat very close to Hollis and smiled. Another family entered, and the scene was repeated. Soon the walls were lined with women, their heavy arms folded across their chests like Siamese servants ready to snap to if anyone called. The children sat on the floor at the women’s feet. Ida gave some of the children kisel—a thick drink made with pear juice and potato flour. The men, about fifteen of them now, sat around or 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.”