Salt the Snow

by Carrie Callaghan

  He turned to his right. “Natalia! You have an Evgeni Konstantinov?”

  Milly pinched her eyes closed. The air around her stunk of wet wool and human sweat, but every time she started to complain to herself, she remembered Zhenya. Who was probably freezing or starving or maybe even hurt. She took a deep breath. She wouldn’t cry in front of this man.

  “Evgeni Konstantinov,” he repeated. Milly opened her eyes, and he was writing something on the package. “You’re lucky Natalia had the new records. Now, let’s see what we have here.”

  He untied the string, folded back the brown paper, and lifted the lid from the box. One by one he removed the loaf of bread, chocolate bar, extra sweater, cooked chicken breast, wrapped pouch of coffee, boots, and pair of wool socks.

  “I didn’t know …” Milly began, but her tongue tripped on the rest of the Russian words. Know what? What to pack for her husband in jail, or that he was going to be arrested? That he could be punished for knowing her? The tears welled up again, and she looked at the floor.

  “I should have packed more,” she managed.

  The man gave a small nod, and she couldn’t tell if he agreed or was dismissing the comment. He repacked the box and wrapped everything up again. He handed her a receipt with each item listed.

  “I don’t have any more information,” the clerk said. “Come back in three or four days. Then they’ll have his case files.”

  Milly wanted to give a sharp retort, but again, her Russian failed. She nodded. For now, she’d be the obedient little wife, if that’s what would save Zhenya.

  She took a deep breath of the humid, onion-scented air of the office, nodded, and walked back through the biting cold to Zhenya’s apartment. When she opened the door, Olga’s face lit up, only to fall in disappointment when she saw Milly was alone.

  “I was sure you would get him out,” Olga said. Milly had to curb her irritation; Olga’s ignorance was frustrating, but it wasn’t the old woman’s fault. She hardly left the house, and had no one to talk with except Luba, Victor Pavilovich when he visited, and whomever else was registered to the apartment at the time. Olga stood from the chair in their makeshift kitchen space and went to light the single-burner primus stove. “Soon though, yes? Until then, some tea.”

  Milly nodded, then pulled off her boots. Exhaustion hung on her back like a load of firewood, begging to be burned, but she had nothing to do with it but collapse. She sat in the other chair by the small table and waited until Olga delivered the steaming black tea to her cold hands.

  “No one has asked to search my belongings,” Milly said.

  Olga frowned. “Why would they?”

  “Zhenya was arrested because of something I’ve done. It must be. A story I wrote, or something I said. I can’t think of any other explanation.”

  “Millichka, if you were the problem, you’d be arrested. Or have your permission revoked.” Olga clucked and sipped her tea.

  “You mean you think Zhenya actually did something wrong? Had guns?”

  Olga placed her tea glass on the table.

  “We both know he had no guns. But as for what else he did … Did you watch him every moment?”

  There was no answering that. Milly and Zhenya hadn’t looked for a partnership that bound them tightly—that wasn’t what they sought in each other. Or, that’s not what they ended up with. Milly took a large swallow of the scalding drink.

  A knock banged on the door, and they both leapt to their feet. Olga opened the door, but it was only Victor, returning to share their vigil.

  Olga poured him hot water from her tarnished samovar, then added the concentrated tea, and they waited, Victor leaning against the wall while the two women sat. Behind the wall the pipes clanked and moaned in the cold. Milly looked at Victor, and she wondered.

  4

  BEFORE

  APRIL 4, 1931

  IT WAS FOOLISH, but Moscow was colder than she had expected. At Anna Louise’s kitchen table, Milly took her teaspoon and tapped it against the ice that had formed over the pail of milk until the layer splintered and bobbed in the creamy white.

  “What a girl has to do to make a decent cup of coffee around here,” she said.

  Anna Louise Strong, the newspaperwoman who had hired her and with whom she’d been living for a month now, glanced up from the notebook in which she was writing.

  “Stop complaining,” Anna Louise said. Her handsome face frowned. “The proletariat have no coffee.”

  Dasha, Anna Louise’s maid, shrugged and continued kneading the dough for pelmeni. Flour caked the woman’s forearms, and Milly’s stomach grumbled, even as she shivered.

  “They ever turn the heat on two days in a row here?”

  “No,” Anna Louise said without looking up. She had a pencil tucked behind her ear and another twirling in her fingers, and her lips were pursed with humming some unending, tuneless song. She was about ten years older than Milly, and, Milly thought, about ten times louder. Which was saying something. But still, Milly was grateful for the place to stay, even if it was frigid, and she was more than grateful for the food to eat. Elsewhere in Moscow people were sleeping under staircases or in hallways, so cramped was the city with newcomers fleeing the countryside. And elsewhere people had to line up for hours to get what little food they could find. Anna Louise, at least, had a prized foodbook, entitling her to access to the class store for journalists and writers. There, they could buy milk deliveries. Even if the milk froze overnight.

  “Don’t you have work to do?” Anna Louise said, her large, deep-set eyes fixed on her notebook. Without waiting for an answer, she resumed her humming.

  Milly harrumphed and finished her coffee as slowly as she could. The last three sips were cold. Anna Louise continued to scratch away at her notebook, and the midmorning winter sky outside the small kitchen window was still dark. Milly dug her elbows into her ribs as she hugged herself, watching Anna Louise write. She wished she could write about herself with the ease Anna Louise did. The woman had a handful of books already to her name and was publishing two more this year alone. Milly had a heart full of ambition and a closet full of news stories—about other people.

  “I’ll get to it, then,” she said in a low voice. Anna Louise didn’t seem to hear.

  In the cruel cold, the ten-minute walk to the office on Petrovsky Pereulok felt three times as long. Moscow Daily News occupied most of a sprawling nineteenth-century mansion that Mikhail Borodin, their chief, had somehow managed to find. One side of the building held the printing presses and the workers’ lunch counter, converted from a once-regal bathroom, and there Milly could at least be guaranteed a lunch.

  Inside, Milly walked up the perpetually muddied white marble steps of the grand foyer and turned down the hallway until she came to the wide double doors leading to what used to be the mansion’s ballroom, once as wide-open as a meadow but these days crammed with reporters, translators, editors, and all their desks.

  Though it was quiet now, she knew that wouldn’t last. Fortunately. There was no place like a bustling newsroom. Men with their shirtsleeves rolled up smoked endless cigarettes, while women cursed like sailors and banged their fingers against the clattering typewriters. Often in Milly’s first month she had seen a young American or Brit or Canadian wander in, wide-eyed and hungry, hoping to land a job by dint of their native tongue and enthusiasm to see Bolshevism’s “great experiment.”

  She didn’t speak any Russian, though she was working on it, so she stuck to writing stories about the Americans who came to town. Meanwhile, she tried, and mostly failed, to ingratiate herself with the foreign press corps. Those chummy boys who hired drivers to take them from meeting to office to Russian mistress, and who looked down on the Moscow Daily News crowd for being too credulous. As if the rich newspaper owners like Mr. Hearst had ever looked beyond their fancy croquet lawns, tried to see why people suffered and if there might be a better way. Reflexively scorning Soviet efforts was its own form of credulity, she wanted to tell
the other newspapermen. But she still wanted to be invited to their parties.

  Today, she was in the rotation to stick around and make sure the paper went to bed without any problems. She pulled out the chair by her desk, sat down, then leaned back on the chair’s rear wooden legs and kicked her feet up on the desk. She hadn’t had her own desk in any of her previous gigs, unless she counted when she was running the paper in Shanghai out of her house for fear of discovery by the authorities. And she didn’t count that. Her desk here had her own typewriter, which she had already used to write dozens of letters to her friends back in San Francisco.

  “Milly.”

  Jack Chen, dear boy, stood at the entrance to the room she shared with a few other desks, now empty, and he frowned. His dark curly hair, the legacy of his deceased Guyanese mother, spilled over his forehead.

  “You’d better talk to the printer,” he said. “He won’t listen to me, and they’re about to start the press run.”

  “Again?” Milly craned her head back, so she could see the stains coloring the plaster ceiling, then stood. The team of printers, imported tough guys from Brooklyn, might have been as happy tossing block letters at the printing press as trying to arrange the stories in a reasonable fashion, and their haphazard approach was one of the reasons the foreign correspondents writing for the big papers back home looked down their noses at Moscow Daily News.

  “We’ll sort them out,” she told Jack as he led her down the hallway toward the print room.

  FIVE MINUTES LATER, Milly stormed out of the print room and, from the hallway, she tossed an angry curse at the stubborn printer over her shoulder.

  “I’ll call Axelrod!” he yelled back at her. Axelrod, the Russian editor in charge of the operation, could have Milly sent home in a blink.

  “Go ahead,” she muttered, though she didn’t mean it.

  Jack looked at her mournfully.

  “You tried,” he said.

  They walked back to the former ballroom, past at least a dozen disconnected porcelain sinks lining the dim hallway. Milly stepped aside to let one of the translators pass, and she bruised her shin on a porcelain rim.

  “Dammit. When’re they going to finally clean these?” she asked, rubbing her leg. The sinks had been there since she arrived, awaiting some deep clean that someone thought couldn’t be accomplished without removing the sinks from the bathrooms where they had been installed.

  Jack shrugged. He had been in Moscow a couple of years and didn’t seem to have her neophyte need to find an explanation for everything.

  Back in the ballroom, she started to walk toward her desk, then stopped at the coatrack.

  “Thank god Charlie Malamuth is tossing a party tonight,” she said, and exhaled, trying to shake off the nerves. “You going?”

  “Not my scene.” Jack ran his fingers through his hair. “Too many Americans and their Russian mistresses.”

  “I don’t have a Russian mistress yet, and I’m going.” Milly grabbed her coat from the rack and pulled on her heavy boots. The narrowed looks Jack’s dark face elicited from some of the white Americans probably had something to do with his reticence too, but Milly hoped he would come anyway. “Think about it, kid. I hear vodka’s tasty. Anyway, I need a walk. I’ll be back for the editorial meeting.”

  Outside the palace, Milly stepped carefully as she walked, avoiding dark patches of ice and frozen lumps of dog shit. A few blocks from the office, she slowed. The cold clawed through her terrible jacket, and her skin tightened as if to block the chill out, but she didn’t mind the shivering for a few minutes. She stood on the same block as a bathhouse, where Moscow’s many cramped residents fled once a week to try to scrub the stench and grime of communal living from their skins. Three old women with lined faces peeping out from their wrapped heads stood in front of the building, and when people turned toward the bathhouse’s double doors, the women would hold up their baskets. A broad-shouldered man with gray encrusting the fringe of his black beard approached one of the women. He pulled off his dirty glove and reached into her basket, from which he extracted, between his thumb and one finger, a sliver of soap. He sniffed it, then replaced it and fished out a second. That one he also sniffed, twice, before returning it. The old woman waited with her face blank, while the woman next to her extended her basket to a mother and her young son who approached. The man finally found a scrap of soap that met his satisfaction, grabbed a coarse wooden bath brush, and handed over his three rubles. About $1.50, Milly knew, enough for lunch back in San Francisco. All for a cake of soap that couldn’t sud. Milly’s teeth clattered with the cold, and she turned back to the office.

  A boy with a dog with matted brown fur stood at the corner. He wasn’t begging, exactly, but it was too cold for any child to spend time outside unless he was desperate. Milly shoved her hand into her pocket. She had only one fifty kopek coin, which she had planned to use to buy a cup of tea after work. She would have preferred beer, but she couldn’t afford that, and she wouldn’t get paid for two more days.

  She pinched the coin with her gloved fingers and handed it to the boy. He stuffed it into his pocket without looking at her, but mumbled his thanks, loud enough so she could hear, but quiet enough that no one passing by could accuse him of begging.

  She wanted to tell him to hold fast, to believe in the change his country was building. Someday his country would provide a new example to the world, and he and his mutt wouldn’t have to shiver on the street corner. Even now, he was better off than the beggars jumping off of bridges in San Francisco. But she didn’t have the Russian words, so instead, she gave him a bright smile and walked away, back to the office, where the smile lingered on her face.

  BY THE TIME the editorial meeting about the next issue was over and the printing well on its way to being completed, probably with the wrong stories on top, Milly was so tired she wanted to collapse into bed or drink her way into the arms of a charming man.

  “Come on, Jack,” Milly said as they wrapped themselves in scarves and mittens before leaving the office. “Come to Malamuth’s party, it’ll be swell.”

  Jack shook his head.

  “Don’t laugh, Milly.”

  “Me, laugh?” She buttoned up her coat and winked.

  “I have a study group. I’m going to tackle Marx, really get to understand it. You should come.”

  “Have you seen those books?” Milly smiled, then took in a deep breath of the office’s warm air. “You’re right. But I don’t usually do what I should. Instead I’m putting on my good hat and finding my way to Malamuth’s.” For the two years Milly had gone to college, she’d never been any good at keeping up with her homework. Not when dancing on the beach was an option. And now she needed a twirl around a dance floor.

  “I can hardly see how that’s more fun.” Jack held the office door open for her, and they walked down the hallway, past the sinks, and down the stairs. “Maybe once you’re ready, you’ll join our group. It’s like we’re learning to see right to the heart of the world.”

  Milly grasped his hand in her mittened one and shook it.

  “That sounds nice, Jack Chen. I hope I learn to see that too.”

  He laughed and withdrew his hand.

  “Have fun at the party tonight.” He turned to walk toward the streetcar he took back to the hotel where he and his sisters lived.

  “I shall!” Milly yelled to him, causing a few of the passing pedestrians to glance up from their feet as they hurried by.

  She wondered if he believed her.

  She wondered if she did.

  SHE WAS WEARING her best hat, a sharp black number cocked to the side, when she walked up the steps of the old palace where Charlie Malamuth lived.

  “This second husband to Jack London’s daughter does all right for himself,” Milly whispered to the man ascending the stairs next to her. He was a new international correspondent, if she had to guess, and he nodded. She smiled back. Maybe the new guy would be willing to socialize with her, even if she was
with the lowly Moscow Daily News. But he kept walking, outpacing her.

  Charlie stood at the top of the stairs with a tall woman on his arm and a dinner jacket as black as his slicked-over hair. He greeted first the man ascending the stairs ahead of her, then Milly.

  “This is Katya.” His companion nodded on cue. “She doesn’t speak much English, but isn’t she gorgeous? Anyway, come in, make yourself at home. I did!” He laughed, an ugly, proprietary laugh, but Milly loved the honesty of it, so she laughed too.

  Inside, the palace was almost as cold as outside, but she stripped her boots off, popped on her heeled shoes, her only nice party shoes, and placed the boots along the wall. A servant took her coat, and Milly shivered and rubbed the goose bumps on her bare arms. She hadn’t expected servants here in socialism, but apparently the diplomats and foreign press corps lived by different rules. She wanted to scorn them as cowards, and yet she stood by the coat check touching up her lipstick and hoping her stockings didn’t have a run in them. Somewhere in the mansion performers played a folk tune, while guests in the foyer clinked glasses beneath the sparkling French chandelier. She wished Jack had come, so she’d have at least one friendly face.

  She inhaled, plucked a brimming champagne coupe from the tray of a passing servant, and walked toward the sounds of the mandolin coming from down the hall. In the grand ballroom, lights glittered off the gilded mirror walls and winking crystals above. A correspondent she knew waved at her from across the crowd then threaded his way through the ballroom to her side.

  “This poor room,” Milly said after he’d kissed her cheek.

  “What do you mean?” The correspondent, an American named Joe Steinman, drew his thick eyebrows together in an expression that made Milly laugh.

  “A room this luscious deserves better than a snaggle of grubby newspapermen. What parties this room has seen.” She gave a theatrical spin, then took another sip. She hoped it looked like she was having fun. No one liked a lady who was a drag.