From Carrie Callaghan, author of the critically acclaimed A Light of Her Own, comes a story of the trailblazing and liberated Milly Bennett, based on the life of one of the first female war correspondents whose work has been all but lost to history.
American journalist Milly Bennett has covered murders in San Francisco, fires in Hawaii, and a civil war in China, but 1930s Moscow presents her greatest challenge yet. When her young Russian husband is suddenly arrested by the secret police, Milly tries to get him released. But his arrest reveals both painful secrets about her marriage and hard truths about the Soviet state she has been working to serve. Disillusioned, and pulled toward the front lines of a captivating new conflict, Milly must find a way to do the right thing for her husband, her conscience, and her heart.
Amberjack Publishing
An imprint of Chicago Review Press Incorporated
814 North Franklin Street
Chicago, Illinois 60610
This is a work of historical fiction. The historical characters, events, places, and dialogue portrayed herein are either the product of the author’s imagination, based on what may have happened, or have been drawn from historical records, but artistic license has been utilized for a better reader experience.
Copyright © 2020 by Carrie Callaghan
Printed in the United States of America. All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book, in part or in whole, in any form whatsoever without the prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical reviews and certain other noncommercial uses permitted by copyright law.
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Book design by Aubrey Khan, Neuwirth & Associates
Publisher’s Cataloging-in-Publication data available upon request
ISBN: 978-1-948705-64-6
E-ISBN: 978-1-948705-65-3
For my parents
PART ONE
I wouldn’t have been born a hundred years ago for a hatful of gardenias. Would you?
—MILLY BENNETT
1
NOW
FEBRUARY 27, 1934
CRAMMED INTO THE back seat with two other reporters, Milly wished the chauffeur would drive faster.
Instead, the automobile slowed as it turned onto Pushechnaya Street. Outside, only a few lights blurred past, their glow amplified by the white snow piled high on the sidewalks. Inside the chauffeured Ford, the raucous voices seemed to get louder.
“Pipe down, you drunkards,” Milly said. She wasn’t nearly as tight as the rest of the group, though sure, she’d had a few dishes of vodka. “You’ll wake up the block.” If she was lucky, Zhenya would still be awake, waiting for her in the small room he shared with his mother. Not that she had any real hopes of getting a tumble out of him.
Seema, who was sitting between Milly and another American newspaperman who’d been at the party, reached over to ruffle the black frizz of Milly’s hair.
“All that glorious hair.” Seema giggled. Her own black hair was straightened and pulled into loose finger waves, prettier even than Josephine Baker’s.
“Old ladies like me have to have something to keep our spirits afloat.” Milly hoped she sounded more witty than self-pitying. It didn’t bother her to be thirty-seven; she just liked making cracks about it.
The chauffer pulled the Ford over to the curb.
“You’re lucky I put up with you rotten louts,” Milly said, then opened the door. The brutal Russian cold flooded into the car. She swung her legs carefully onto the icy street, stood, and snapped the door shut. Before she could tap a farewell on the window, the automobile rolled off.
She had her boots on, so she stepped right through a dip in the snowbank and onto the sidewalk. The cold burned her nose and made her glasses fog up, and yet there was still something beautiful about a Moscow night. As soon as the weather warmed, she and Zhenya would have to go for one of their nighttime walks again. It had been so long since they had, and by springtime he would have fewer opera rehearsals to occupy him. She cleared her glasses with the wool of her gloved fingertips.
There, parked a little way down from where she stood, was a black automobile. Milly’s breath caught. None of Zhenya’s neighbors owned a car—no ordinary Russian did. The Soviet Union was still learning how to make cars, and there weren’t enough imports to go around for anyone except the government. The light of the single streetlamp caressed the smooth curves of the Ford. A shiver even colder than the winter air drilled through her.
She hurried inside the building’s unlocked exterior door and shook the snow from her boots while the snoring of one of the first-floor residents droned down the hallway. Then she hurried up the flight of stairs to Zhenya’s floor. By the top, she was taking the steps a wobbly two at a time.
Then, when she reached the top, she froze. The door to the apartment containing Zhenya’s room was open, and light spilled out into the dark hallway.
The building was quiet.
Milly walked slowly inside. From the front room, filled with the cot and belongings of Luba, a Ukrainian student assigned to the subdivided apartment, Milly could see inside Zhenya’s room, but she couldn’t see him. A man in a brown uniform with a peaked cap stood by Zhenya’s open door. Inside, Zhenya’s mother, Olga Ivanova, sat on the edge of her couch, her chin in her hand and her eyes on something to her left.
“What’s going on?” Milly asked in Russian as soon as she entered the small bedroom. Zhenya stood in the corner, his fine skin smudged with weariness.
A second uniformed man was on his knees, peering into Zhenya’s wardrobe. He stood.
“Who is this?” he said to Zhenya, next to him. Luba and Victor Pavilovich, Zhenya’s closest friend and fellow actor in the opera, sat solemnly on the bed, Luba’s flaxen-haired head resting on Victor’s slim shoulders. Milly had never seen the room so crowded.
“My wife,” Zhenya said. “She doesn’t live here though.”
Milly’s legs felt weak.
“What does this mean?” she asked Zhenya in English.
“An OGPU search.” He answered like the scene was just as confusing to him. His gray eyes were wide, and his blond hair was still slicked back with the pomade he used for the stage. He looked both devastatingly handsome and fragile. Milly reached for him without moving closer, but he kept his arms hugged around his chest.
“Search? What for?” Milly let her hand fall and looked around the small room again. A photograph of Zhenya and her at the dacha was pinned above the bedside table. She hadn’t minded that photo as much as she usually did with pictures. In this one, her jutting chin and overbearing front teeth were muted, and she looked happy. Happy to feel Zhenya’s arm around her waist and the warm sun on her hair. The paper curled up at its scalloped edges.
The officer had gotten back down on his knees to search under the wardrobe, and he scowled up at her.
“Don’t speak in any foreign languages. Speak in Russian.”
“Her Russian isn’t very good,” Zhenya said, and Milly glared at him. That wasn’t true; she could get by fine.
“Then she doesn’t have to speak,” the officer concluded. He pulled out a pair of shoes and shook them upside down.
“Has he got a warrant?” Milly didn’t bother to speak quietly, or in Russian.
“Yes. He has a warrant for me.” Zhenya’s fingers tapped at his chest.
That didn’t make any sense. “You’ve seen it?”
“Yes.”
Milly turned to the officer and flung the wardrobe door wide open, narrowly missing his head.
“What are you looking for?” she asked in her accented Russian.
He pressed his hands against a shelf and stood, then brushed his palms together.
“Guns.” H
e smiled.
Milly almost laughed. Surely he was joking. Zhenya, her gentle opera supernumerary, with his eager smiles and graceful fingers, stockpiling guns? But the cold lead snaking through her gut reminded her that the secret police were no joke. Especially not when they came after midnight.
The officer closed the wardrobe door quietly, then turned toward the large green trunk wedged under the window. He lifted the latch.
“That’s mine.” Milly almost reached out to grab his hand, but she restrained herself. She was nervous, she knew, and when she got nervous, she grew uncontrollable. She needed to be careful.
He looked at her and smiled again, and this time she noticed the sizable gap between his front teeth.
“I have a warrant.”
“But that trunk’s mine! You can’t search my things.”
His eyes narrowed. “You are his wife. It counts.”
She had nothing to hide, no guns certainly, but still, it wasn’t right that this ham-handed officer with hair curling up from the top of his shirt collar could rummage through her underwear.
“Don’t tear those stockings,” she muttered. “I only have three pair.”
He gave her a sideways look but otherwise continued uninterrupted. To his credit, each item he removed he replaced as carefully folded, or more so, as he left it. But he seemed to be inventorying her items with more attention than he paid to Zhenya’s clothes. The hairs at the back of her neck prickled.
Milly glanced back and forth between Victor, slender and hunched like a willow, and Luba, stocky and straight, who sat together silently on the bed, while Zhenya stood staring out the window as if he were admiring the snowfall. The guard by the door peered into the room, but he looked bored.
“See? Nothing!” she said when the officer closed the trunk. Victor looked up, as if surprised at her conclusion, but otherwise no one else paid her any attention. She wondered if they were scared or simply resigned.
The officer likewise ignored her, and next turned to the cabinet they had once used to store what little food the three of them could accumulate, before they had decided to store things in the apartment’s small kitchen. Milly didn’t sleep in this room, not usually, but she had meals with Zhenya and his mother when she could. Olga, whose arthritic hands kept her from working, couldn’t qualify for her own meal ticket book, so it was easier for Zhenya to feed her if Milly pitched in. Plus, Milly enjoyed the older woman’s calm determination.
“Look out,” Milly said to the officer, who reached his hand into the cabinet. “There’s been a mouse in there for a while.”
“I’m not afraid of mice.”
“Oh, no. I was thinking of the mouse.”
The officer turned to face Zhenya.
“Why is your wife so rude? I’m being very quiet about the whole business.”
Zhenya shook his head. His lips, Milly saw, had turned pale, and he didn’t speak.
“I’m not rude,” Milly said, though she knew she had been, and she wished she could stop. “I’m not the one going through people’s underwear.”
“Look at the other citizens.” He gestured at the three seated figures. “They don’t complain.”
“They’re Russian. I’m American.” And she’d had a few swallows of vodka, but that probably didn’t matter.
He blew out a puff of air, shook his head, then closed the old cabinet. He turned next to the pile of books on the floor, all of which were Milly’s, and he picked up each one, gave it a shake, then replaced it. On top he put Penguin Island by Anatole France upside down. That seemed fitting, so she left it.
He got down on his hands and knees again and peered under the bed. He pulled out a box.
Inside were fistfuls of worthless tsarist rubles. Olga gave a little chirp, then tucked her gray-blond hair back under her kerchief.
“Necessary to burn these, little mother,” he said.
She stood, without a word, and took the box from him. Then she sat again, with the box on her lap under her veined hands.
The officer shook his head but turned away from her and resumed his search.
“When did they come?” Milly asked Zhenya in hushed English.
“Before you.”
She wanted to ask him why he thought this was happening, and what he—or she—had done to deserve it. But he turned away to look out the window again. As if she embarrassed him.
The officer ran his finger down the spines of Milly’s notebooks, resting on a table near the bed, and she wondered if the secret police had meant to come while she was out, to catch her unawares. She still had her American passport, and they probably wouldn’t have been able to obtain a search warrant for her. But they could access her belongings, the ones here at least, through Zhenya. She tried to remember through the haze of the night’s vodka if any of the stories she had written recently, for either Moscow Daily News or one of the wire services, had been inflammatory. She didn’t think so, but maybe her carbon copies of her stories would prove differently.
“Have you been to the New Moscow Hotel too?” She’d been staying there since November.
The officer ignored her and continued to page through the notebooks, filled with her scribbles from Russian lessons with Luba. Verb conjugation, sentence construction, vocabulary for going to the market. She let out a quick exhalation.
“No need to study,” Milly said. “I’m sure you learned all this long ago.”
He turned the next page even more slowly.
“Truthfully, there’s nothing there. Just my last six months of lessons. See how badly I learned?” Her accent flattened the Russian words into uniformity, and she knew she often mangled verb tenses.
He continued to ignore her. Every few pages, he would suck a hiss of air through his teeth, though whether it was in recognition of something subversive or disappointment at her abuse of his language she couldn’t say.
She stepped over to Zhenya and slipped her hand into his. As usual, he lifted her fingers to his lips to kiss them and then dropped her grip. He had dark shadows peering through the fair skin under his eyes. She wanted to kiss his angled nose.
The officer began to flip the pages of her Russian lessons more quickly, but he frowned as he did so, as if disappointed not to find what he was looking for. Milly’s neck felt constricted, and she realized she still wore her heavy coat, though the heat inside was stifling. She rushed to peel the garment off. She threw the coat on the bed, behind Victor, who flinched, then looked at her again with some inscrutable question. The officer tossed her notebook back onto the pile, then reached down to straighten it.
“I’m in room 512 of the New Moscow Hotel,” Milly said. “Most of my papers are there. Many more papers to look at than here.”
She didn’t want the filthy secret police to go pawing through all her letters, all the carbon copies she’d been keeping for the past three years so she could use them to write her novel someday. But if the police were going to harass Zhenya only because he was married to an American newspaperwoman, let them bother her, she could take it. She hoped.
“Are you inviting me?” The officer stood up from his crouch. “As a guest?”
“No, not like …”
“Don’t say things you don’t mean.” He turned and picked up the New Yorker from last December, which was lying on the side table.
“It’s a humor magazine. Like your Krokodil, but on better paper.”
He glared at her, then flipped slowly through the pages he surely couldn’t understand. He replaced it exactly from where he had taken it.
The search continued. Milly’s legs trembled from nerves and exhaustion, so she sat on the small couch with Olga and took the other woman’s hand in her own. Olga was probably around sixty, but she looked older, with her narrow shoulders slumped. Olga’s free hand continued to clutch her box full of worthless rubles. They had never spoken of it, but Milly assumed Olga dreamed that someday everything would be restored to her: her tsar, her bourgeois wealth, the large home Zhenya claim
ed they had once lived in. Maybe she would settle for receiving this entire apartment back. At least Zhenya’s dreams were reasonable: he had a chance of singing tenor at the Bolshoi. More chance than his poor mother did of spending those rubles.
It was past three a.m. when the officer finished his search, and by then Milly was bleary and sagging. The buzz of the dinner party and the vodka she’d drank had long ago fizzed away, leaving only her drooping stockings and eyelids. Through it all, Zhenya stood.
The officer pulled a paper from a folder the other officer held, then sat down at the desk to write. Milly wanted to make a quip about writing a letter to his granny about his good work, but she was too tired to muster the Russian words. They all watched in silence as his pen scratched its way to fill an entire page.
“Excuse me,” he said, then took the page and left the room, then stepped out of the apartment. With the door open, he picked up the shared phone in the hallway, rattled off the six numbers to the operator, and had a hushed conversation. No one else in the room moved, and the Russians all kept their eyes to the ground. Milly darted her gaze back and forth among them, hoping that someone would look at her and, in that way, explain what was happening. In the apartment above, something fell and thudded on the floor, and Olga startled. Still, no one spoke.
The officer walked back in. He sat down at the desk again, wrote a few more lines, then called Zhenya over.
“Nothing is out of order in this room, correct?” The officer waved a hand around. “Evgeni Ivanovich, you have no complaints, correct?” He held up the paper and jabbed his finger at it. It must be a record of the search.
“It’s all fine,” Zhenya said in his gentle way, as if it were the officer who needed reassuring.
Without realizing she had decided to do so, Milly stood.
“Evgeni Ivanovich Konstantinov, you are under arrest.” The officer turned and handed Milly the handwritten record. Her mouth gaped, and she almost let the paper fall to the floor but remembered to grasp it in time. Everyone else in the room was still and silent, like mice hiding from a raptor circling overhead.
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