Salt the Snow

by Carrie Callaghan

  “There’s more than newspapermen here, you know. And we’re not all grubby.” Joe gave a defensive tug to the hem of his dinner jacket. “Over there’s the first secretary of the British embassy, and then the fellow in the gray jacket, he’s a theater director, and—”

  “Cut it out, Joe, I was kidding.” Milly placed her empty glass on another servant’s tray. The band rolled from its folk tune into a semblance of a waltz, and Milly hauled Joe out onto the dance floor, where he danced better than she’d expected from his thick fingers and big feet, though he was too short for her to want to partner with for long. He’d give her a backache before the party was halfway over.

  When the song finished, they went to stand by a few other correspondents, and Charlie Malamuth himself came by with a tray of drinks, but without his curly haired Russian beauty. Milly took one of the small glasses and sniffed it. Clean, with a spark of fruit, almost cherry.

  “Vodka,” Joe said, holding his own glass. “Haven’t you read my book? The drink’s not for ladies, it’s—”

  She poured the bright liquid down her throat.

  “Now, that’s fine,” Milly said, forcing a smile. “How about another dance, Joe?” The new warmth in her stomach felt like it was sparking a fire. That was an improvement.

  He frowned, and there, on the uncertainty marking his plain face and the hesitation in his response, Milly saw her loneliness. Her hours hoping for more affection than Anna Louise’s rants about some new injustice; her cold walks through this closed-up city that bristled with impenetrable defenses; her afternoons writing letters that no one seemed to receive, or care enough to reply to. Even a grubby newspaperman didn’t want to dance with an obviously lonely woman.

  The performers switched back to a mournful Russian tune, and Joe shrugged. Milly shrugged too, trying to look indifferent.

  Another press man, Tom Uplands, sauntered over and shook both of their hands. He was very drunk.

  “Now, this is better than Warsaw,” he said as he snatched a glass from a passing servant. Milly replaced her empty one with a full one, but she didn’t drink it yet.

  “Moscow’s a bed of cockroaches, one fat bed of cockroaches,” Tom continued. “But at least Charlie knows how to toss a party. He must be making good money writing for those fancy magazines.”

  “I wouldn’t know about fancy magazines,” Milly said, then regretted her bitterness. She shouldn’t care that the American papers didn’t want her writing; what mattered was that the foreign workers here did. The workers here needed her English-language news more than the gentlemen sipping coffee at their breakfast tables in New York.

  Tom seemed to ignore her.

  “I’ve got a story for you,” he said, his eyes bright. Milly glanced at Joe, who shrugged. “That ugly man there, the one with the whiskers and the bottle in his hand, he’s the kind of revolutionary you’d be interested in. Imprisoned in an American jail for being an abortionist! So now he’s a hero over here.”

  Milly tightened her grip on her glass and took a sip. It was two years since she’d had the abortion that had hurt her heart and her womb, far more than she’d expected. Not that she regretted what she’d done, and not that she blamed the doctors, but she wasn’t going to champion them either. The room was still cold. Around them swirled laughing couples and plumes of smoke from the cigarettes dangling from elegant fingers.

  “Maybe this is the revolutionary story right here,” she said. “The revolution that feeds the capitalist bellies of American newspapermen while Russian peasants try to hold their pants up with string, sacrificing to build something better.”

  “Oh hell.” Tom nudged her shoulder. “Don’t get serious on us, Moscow Daily News.”

  “Why not?”

  He looked at her trying to figure out if she was serious, and she wondered too. She meant what she’d said, but she didn’t want to alienate the few American journalists who would talk to her. She rolled her eyes, then gave him a sweet smile in hopes of making up for her outburst.

  “I’d better get some fresh air,” she said.

  Out in the hallway she leaned against the papered wall and rubbed her eyes to ease the sting from the smoke. She had once known how to have fun at a party, hadn’t she? Certainly in Hawaii, staying up until dawn drinking and swinging her hips to the music and the surf. Even in San Francisco, at the gin joint. Before Fred told her he and Ann were moving away. Leaving her alone with her scars.

  She walked into the billiards room, which was crowded with people talking and no one playing. A smattering of billiard balls lay scattered over the table as if abandoned in the middle of a game. Maybe she could find someone to teach her how to play.

  “Have you read my book on Lenin? The second one,” a thin man was saying to a blonde woman obviously trying to escape him.

  Milly shook her head. Some things never changed.

  Joe and Tom had wandered into the room. Milly sighed, and with no one else to talk to, she rejoined them. From the ballroom came the strains of guitar and mandolin, and a mournful voice swinging through the cadence of the song.

  “Isn’t Gypsy music prohibited?” Milly asked. Maybe they would forgive her the earlier outburst.

  “Yes,” Joe said. “It creates thoughts.” He waggled his eyebrows, and Milly laughed.

  “The Party is against Gypsy music, yes,” said a man behind her in accented English. Milly turned. A tall Russian man with a lean face and broad shoulders was leaning on the marble mantle. In his loose Tolstoy blouse, he looked like a sculpture of Russian youth. “But the words, you know, are Pushkin.” His eyes brightened, and he raised a hand to almost touch his chest. “‘In farewell, bind my shawl around me, weave the ends together, as we have been together and now must part. For who can foretell my fate?’”

  He gave a flourish with his hand and a small bow.

  “Bravo!” Milly clapped. She tried to think of something to say, something about Pushkin or music to ask him about, but he quirked his luscious mouth upward then walked away to join a young man with brown hair.

  “I’m starving,” Tom said, scanning the room. He beckoned at a servant holding a plate of small sandwiches.

  But as she ate, Milly felt the Russian man’s gaze on her. Her midsection warmed even more pleasantly than after she’d had the vodka. She took another glass.

  There was a piano in the corner of the room, and the Russian began to play. She watched while Joe and Tom compared stories about filthy Moscow hotel rooms and frozen pipes bursting. The Russian sang to his own accompaniment, with a voice that was thin but sweet. Milly sighed, her shoulders sagging from the liquor, the late hour, and her aching feet, and she went to sit in a chair near the piano. There, he couldn’t see her while he played. The music, at least, was reason enough for having come to this party.

  When he finished, he turned to look at her.

  “Americans are not supposed to be unhappy,” he said with a half-smile. He had cropped blond hair with loose, handsome waves at the top, and a square chin below his curved lips. His accent rounded out the words, but he was easy to understand.

  “And all Americans are supposed to live in New York. Isn’t that true too?”

  “I only hope all Americans have beautiful parties like this.” He swept his arm around.

  “I thought building socialism meant ditching brawls like this.” She raised an eyebrow, wondering if he would find her provocative, but he smiled again.

  “No. This is the life I want. I study and work in the theater so someday I’ll live this life. Maybe I’ll be a star, like my friend Vera Yergenovna.” He pointed at a short, buxom woman standing on the other side of the room.

  “You do have a nice voice,” Milly said. He did, and she found herself wanting to praise him, to bring the warmth of his gray eyes back to her.

  “Do you like music?” He leaned toward her.

  “Sure I do. I miss it. The music is the best reason to come to these parties.” She blushed at her unexpected honesty, but her compa
nion didn’t seem to notice. Instead, he was fishing through the pocket of his dinner jacket.

  “My name is Evgeni Konstantinov.” He handed her a card. “I will get you a ticket to see the Mussorgsky performance at the end of the month. I’m a super, how do you say it, supernumerary.” He pronounced the syllables slowly. “I have always wanted an American friend.”

  “I’d love to go.”

  Milly took the card, and when her fingers brushed his, she smiled.

  5

  NOW

  MARCH 3, 1934

  IT WAS STILL dark out as Milly stood in line outside the OGPU building, this time closer to the front. Her feet had numbed inside her boots and layers of stockings, and her efforts to cover her face with her scarf only brought ice crystals to her lips. Her throat burned with cold. She watched the other women, and the few men, and imagined she was doing an article about the lines. She would introduce herself, ask about their feet, offer a slice of sausage. Eventually she’d ask for whom they were carrying twine-wrapped parcels. She glanced over her shoulder at the hunched woman behind her, the woman’s black knit cap pulled down to her auburn eyebrows, her eyes dull as she stared at the pavement. Milly grimaced. No one here would talk to a newspaperwoman. And this newspaperwoman was too afraid to write such a yarn anyway; a stunt like that would get her kicked out of the country. Now, more than ever, she needed to stay. No matter what had gotten Zhenya into prison, Milly would certainly be his best advocate for getting out. His Russian friends could do even less.

  The sun coughed its way through the heavy clouds, and the line finally began to move.

  She had brought some bread and a cold roasted potato, and she ate as the line shuffled forward. No one spoke to her, not even to ask for some of the food, which she would have shared. A streetcar stopped to pick up a crowd of people, and before the mass had finished slithering into the trolley’s small mouth, a woman in house slippers with her hair wrapped in curlers came running down the street, shouting at her no-good, cheating, son-of-a-bitch husband. A man with a hat pulled down low pushed onto the trolley, and the doors closed before the woman could reach the car. Someone near Milly gave a small grunt of laughter, but no one else reacted. Milly could understand why. The woman was lucky to have a husband to run after and curse. Still, she found herself grinning. No matter what troubles she and Zhenya had had, no one would find her running down the street with her hair in curlers. Nor was Zhenya the cheating kind, not really. Not like that. Milly kicked a pebble across the sidewalk and into the icy street.

  The line’s movement stalled once Milly made it inside the building, and she was waiting so long in the cramped hallway she began to sweat under her coat. She took it off and mumbled an apology to the old woman she nearly punched in the process. The woman didn’t reply. Once again, Milly wondered what the rules were. After three damn years in the country she still couldn’t figure out how to interact with Russians, who seemed both boorish and refined, stoic and dissolute.

  Then it was her turn. The clerk frowned and searched three card boxes before finding Zhenya’s record.

  “I want to see him today,” Milly said in Russian. “Three days ago, they told me I could see him today.” That wasn’t exactly true, but close.

  The man with a curly beard behind the window shrugged.

  “It is not permitted.”

  “When can I see him?”

  “Come back in four days.”

  Milly cursed, though she had the presence of mind to do it under her breath and in English. The clerk remained impassive, working with his tongue inside his mouth, probably trying to pry food from his teeth.

  “There’s been a mistake,” Milly said. “I write for the Moscow Daily News. I’m here in good standing. Let me explain to someone, anyone, about my husband’s case.”

  The clerk began to write. Milly sucked in a hopeful breath and leaned over to read his note. But he was merely filling out the office’s address on an empty card, awaiting the next record, the next crime against the state.

  “I want to deliver these to Zhenya,” she said. She held the parcel up to the window.

  “Down the hall.” The clerk pointed with his pen.

  Milly pressed her glasses down against her nose, then walked away.

  That afternoon, the packages handed over, she returned to the newsroom, where she was overseeing half the large translation team. After correcting one translation’s many spelling errors, she threw her pen down and went into Borodin’s office. His office was a spacious, wood-paneled room, probably formerly a small library or study, adjacent to the ballroom. It had a window onto Petrovsky Pereulok, from which he could see the gorgeous redbrick theater across the street. She shut the door behind her, and he looked up from his typewriter with one bushy eyebrow raised.

  “I’m petitioning the Glavlit about the story they brutalized last week,” he said. “Striking out sentences, demanding we publish that cauterized mess of a story. They misunderstood. They can’t even read English, and I hate to think they’ll start worrying we’re counterrevolutionary.

  He had dark circles under his light brown eyes, and Milly noted gray hair in his mustache. She had known and admired Mikhail Borodin since they had met in Hankow in 1927, where they were both supporting Sun Yat-sen. Milly had thought then that nothing could be more thrilling than running a newspaper during China’s civil war.

  “I’m still mad about that swell funny story of mine they threw out,” Milly said. She collapsed into the chair facing his desk.

  “Which one? You’ve got a ‘swell funny story’ every month, Milly, and I swear half of them are removed for good reason.”

  Milly shrugged and winked. A dot of moisture licked her cheek, and she raised her fingertips to her face, where some snow from her hat was melting. Still, she kept the hat on. It was flattering, much better than her wild hair.

  “The coldest winter since Lenin died,” Borodin said sadly. Milly looked up, and he was staring out the window at the gusts of wind swirling old snow. Maybe he already knew about Zhenya’s arrest. That would save her the pain of telling him, but if he already knew, that meant someone had told him, that people were talking. Or making inquiries.

  “We should do a spring series, Borodin.” She placed her hands on his desk. “Some pretty feature stories, you’d like that, wouldn’t you? The return of the birds. There must be some old lady who feeds the birds.”

  “That’s cheerful for your tastes, Milly. Why not the starving children this time? What are you up to?”

  She looked at her fingers, red and chewed.

  “Zhenya’s been arrested.”

  “What?” He sat up straight.

  “By the OGPU.” She wanted to vomit, saying it out loud.

  “Zhenya? But he’s not in the Party, not involved in politics. Unless—secretly?”

  Milly pulled her glasses from her face and pinched her nose. “I don’t know why he was arrested. Maybe it’s me. That’s partly why I wanted to tell you. In case they think I did something.”

  “Oh hell.” He jumped out of his chair and began pacing. She was relieved he didn’t already seem to suspect her, but she worried too. He could ban her from going to the OGPU offices, or even transfer her to Leningrad. They had been talking about opening a bureau there, one that she would lead. She had wanted to, but only if Zhenya would come. She wouldn’t start over again with no friends, no lovers.

  “You haven’t done anything. Have you?” He stopped.

  “Of course not. Do you think I’d be here relaxing in your office if I were guilty of some sort of counterrevolutionary plot? You know me.”

  “I do. And you’re a firecracker, Milly. I never know what kind of trouble you’ll get me in.”

  Milly flared her nostrils but let the comment pass. After all, Borodin was scared. She had seen his appearance before the Party last fall, in what they called a cleansing. He had nearly lost his job as the Party threatened to make him pay for sins some five years old, from when they were in Chi
na.

  “What’s Zhenya charged with?”

  He paused at the edge of his desk and fingered the rim of the clean glass ashtray sitting there.

  “They won’t tell me.” Milly’s voice trembled.

  “How can we be sure it’s safe?”

  “What’s safe?” Behind her, in the newsroom, someone yelped in pain and then cursed at one of the couriers for spilling coffee.

  “For you to be associated. For us.” Borodin’s forehead was shining with a fresh sheen of sweat.

  “Dammit, Borodin. How is this about us? Zhenya has practically vanished!”

  “I have to be careful.” He paused. “Would you go into exile with your husband? If that’s an option.”

  “What?” Milly looked at him. Perhaps he was joking.

  “If he’s exiled,” he clarified. “Sent to the camps in Siberia.”

  “People who aren’t locked up can go too? What sense does that make?”

  Borodin shook his head, disappointed.

  “Even under the tsar, women followed their husbands. Cooked, kept them company.”

  Milly laughed, to relieve the tension. “You’ve never had my cooking.” She hadn’t thought that she and Zhenya could both, in a sense, be arrested together. She looked down at her fingers and imagined them entwined with his, while behind her in the newsroom, one of the typists gave a twinkling laugh in response to a man’s joke. She didn’t want to leave her life, she didn’t want to leave her husband. She didn’t want that choice at all.

  But Borodin continued to frown and turned to look out the smudged window.

  “Young people. No loyalty, no sense of the romantic.”

  “It’s not about following him. It’s about getting him out.”

  Milly stood. He wasn’t going to give her carte blanche to do what she needed to find out what had happened to Zhenya, that much was clear.

  “Maybe I’ll write a story on midnight arrests,” she said, placing her glasses back on her face. “Smuggle it out for one of the London papers. Who do you think I should interview?”