The Charm School

here. My job.” She smiled for the first time.
    “Thank you. But I’m sure I can make Moscow before dark.”
    She shrugged and pushed the paperwork toward him.
    “Spasibo.”
Fisher stuffed it in his shoulder satchel.
“Da svedahnya,”
Greg Fisher said with a wave.
    “Drive safely,” she replied, adding, “Be cautious, Mr. Fisher.”
    Fisher walked out into the cool air of Smolensk, considering that last cryptic remark. He took a deep breath and approached a crowd of people surrounding his car. He sidled through the throng. “Excuse me, folks… .” He unlocked the door of his metallic blue Pontiac Trans Am, smiled, gave a V-sign, slipped inside the car, and closed the door. He started the engine and drove slowly through the parting crowd. “
Da svedahnya,
Smolenskers.”
    He proceeded slowly through the center of Smolensk, referring to the map on the seat beside him. Within ten minutes he was back on the Minsk–Moscow highway, heading east toward the Soviet capitol. He saw farm vehicles, trucks, and buses but not a single automobile. It was a windy day, with grey clouds scudding past a weak sun.
    Fisher saw that the farther east he drove, the more advanced the autumn became. In contrast to the bustling agricultural activity he’d seen in East Germany and Poland at the same latitudes, the wheat here had been harvested on both sides of the highway, and the occasional fruit orchards were bare.
    Greg Fisher thought about things as the landscape rolled by. The restrictions and procedures were not only annoying, he concluded, but a little scary. Yet, he’d been treated well by the Soviet citizens he’d met. He’d written home on a postcard to his parents, “Ironically this is one of the last places where they still like Americans.” And he rather liked them and liked how his car literally stopped traffic and turned heads wherever he went.
    The Trans Am had Connecticut plates, had cast aluminum wheels, a rear deck spoiler, and custom pin-striping; the quintessential American muscle car, and he thought that nothing like it had ever been seen on the road to Moscow.
    From the backseat of the car came the aroma of fruits and vegetables given him by villagers and peasants wherever he’d stopped. He in turn had given out felt-tip pens, American calendars, disposable razors, and other small luxuries he’d been advised to bring. Greg Fisher felt like an ambassador of goodwill, and he was having a marvelous time.
    A stone kilometer post informed him that he was 290 K from Moscow. He looked at the digital dashboard clock: 2:16 P . M .
    In his rearview mirror he saw a Red Army convoy gaining on him. The lead vehicle, a dull green staff car, pulled up to his bumper. “Hey,” Fisher mumbled, “that’s called tailgating.”
    The car flashed its headlights, but Fisher could see no place to pull off the two-lane road bordered by a drainage ditch. Fisher speeded up. The 5-liter, V-8 engine had tuned-port fuel injection, but the local fuel didn’t seem to agree with it, and the engine knocked and backfired. “Damn it.”
    The staff car was still on his tail. Fisher looked at his speedometer, which showed 110 kph, twenty over the limit.
    Suddenly the staff car swung out and pulled alongside him. The driver sounded his horn. The rear window lowered, and an officer in gold braid stared at him. Fisher managed a grin as he eased off the gas pedal. The long convoy of trucks, troop carriers, and cars passed him, soldiers waving and giving him the traditional Red Army “Ooo-rah!”
    The convoy disappeared ahead, and Greg Fisher drew a breath. “What the hell am I doing here?” That was what his parents wanted to know. They’d given him the car and the vacation as a graduation gift after completing his MBA at Yale. He’d had the car shipped to Le Havre and spent the summer touring Western Europe. Heading into the East Bloc had been his own idea. Unfortunately the visa and auto permits had taken longer than expected, and like Napoleon and Hitler before him, he reflected, his Russian incursion was running about a month too late into the bad season.
    The landscape, Fisher noticed, had a well-deserved reputation for being monotonous and infinite. And the sky seemed to be a reflection of the terrain: grey and rolling, an unbroken expanse of monotony for the last eight days. He could swear the weather changed from sunshine to gloom at the Polish border.
    The excitement of being a tourist in the Soviet Union, he decided,