“We take your bag home,” he said. “Then, a walk?”
“Only if it ends with a smooch,” she said. “I’m dying here.”
“Smooch?” He turned the corners of his mouth down as he considered the strange word. They reached the sidewalk outside the station, and a brisk breeze nearly blew Milly’s hat from her messy hair.
“That’s right. You’ll see.” She tapped her finger on his smooth chin. At least this man wasn’t rejecting her right after a kiss. Not that they had kissed. Yet.
He laughed, squeezed her arm tighter, and led her through the mass of people on the sidewalk.
MILLY MADE IT home in time to sleep hours of fretful dreams where she longed for hands that would never quite touch her. She awoke in a sweat. By her feet, the cat Anna Louise had adopted a few months ago lifted his head and gave her a reproachful look.
“I may as well join the Party if I’m this committed to mortifying my flesh,” she said to the cat. He regarded her with wary yellow eyes, then hopped off the bed.
“Even you don’t take me seriously,” she said.
At the office, she pulled her twenty-two typewritten pages of notes from her trip and sat down with Axelrod.
“I’ve got a good story in here,” she said. She tapped her finger on the pages. “There’s practically a little war down there, between the Russians and the Americans. Calling one another dogs and the sort. But they’re all sticking with it, you see? Building socialism in spite of the tensions.” She spread out the papers across his bare desk, her heart thumping with pride. This was the important sort of story she had come to Moscow to write—how reality was messy, but people still worked hard. No more fluff pieces about visiting movie stars. “What do you think?”
He lifted the glasses he kept hung around his neck and propped them on his nose while he glanced up and down the pages. His brown hair glittered with silver, and she could see where it was thinning into scalp.
“What sort of story?” He looked up and said the worlds slowly, as if with difficulty, though Milly had heard him yell with fluency enough.
“A regular yarn, a story about he said, the other fella said, you know. But ending with inspirational quotes from here.” She pulled out the last five pages of notes, where she had compiled the positive things. “Readers will love it.” This was her first chance to write something interesting, with real color, something that showed both the difficulty and the hope of industrialization. She nudged one of the pages toward him.
He turned his head down to the notes again, and Milly listened to the hum of the small desk fan blowing from an empty bookshelf behind him. She began to sweat.
“This part.” He jabbed a finger.
Milly leaned over. He was pointing to her interview with the vice president of the American company supervising the construction of the facility.
He lowered his glasses.
“These statements are counterrevolutionary. I want to use these notes. Give them to the stenographer to copy.”
“What?” The sweat now slicked down her ribs, and certainly through her cotton blouse.
“Emma, the stenographer.” He frowned at Milly, his lower lip sticking out in disgust.
She nodded, collected her papers, and stood. She left the newsroom before he could say another word, then rushed down the hall with the notes folded and tucked into her blouse.
She threw open the washroom door, then locked herself inside. The room was dark and smelled of urine. She fished out the interview with the company vice president, tore it to bits, and flushed it down the john with a few tugs of the toilet chain.
When she opened the door, she yelped.
“Lord, Ruth, you scared me. Standing so close.”
“I thought that was you in there.” Ruth’s blue eyes warmed as she smiled. She was just a few years older than Milly, and she had been in the Soviet Union for almost a decade. “Just listening for when you were done.”
“Did the boss send you to check on me? To sign me up for espionage?”
“What?” Ruth gave her a screwed-up look. “You’re out of your mind. Come on, I heard there were strawberries in the dining room today, and I wanted to give you a shot at them. Let’s see if there are any left.”
Ruth was one of the few female American writers on the staff, and Milly had sensed a camaraderie almost as soon as Milly joined the paper. But with all the bustle of newspaper life, they never seemed to find time to do more than roll their eyes at each other behind the bosses’ backs or laugh when one or the other wadded up a botched story and missed her throw into the wastebasket.
“Sounds swell.” Milly glanced toward the newsroom, where Axelrod was standing in the door watching. She waved a hand as if to beg for a delay, then followed the other woman down the stairs. Ruth had spent some eight years in a commune in Siberia, and both her Russian and her sense of irony were sharp.
When they got to the cafeteria, where grease dimmed the white bathroom tiles that lined the large room, the lunch lady behind the counter held up a hand, shooing them away.
“All the strawberries were bought up by earlier diners,” she explained, shrugging.
“Some community spirit,” Milly grumbled as they stared at the empty lunch counter.
“Those’re the shakes,” Ruth replied, shrugging. She took a bowl of cold soup from the lunch lady and led the way to a table in the dining room. Milly followed suit. Outside the tall windows, cars and crowds flowed past.
“You’re back from Nizhny?” Ruth said, a chunk of black bread in her mouth.
“That’s right.” Milly groaned. “Fat lot of good it’ll do me. Axelrod paid for all that travel for a story he now doesn’t want me to write. And now I’m hiding from him. But it’s a good story, I know it.”
“A Newspaper Enterprise Association fella, he put in an order for an Austin Company story with me. Isn’t that the company down there? But I haven’t been to the complex yet.” She raised a suggestive eyebrow.
Milly laughed. “That sweet face will get you anywhere, won’t it.”
Ruth smiled. “What do you say, Milly? We’ll split it even. Your notes, my NEA order.”
“Do I look like I can turn down free money?” Milly pointed at a frayed buttonhole at the top of her blouse. But it was more than the money. If Ruth could help her get this story out, then maybe the trip wasn’t a bust. Maybe the story would resonate, garner sympathy for the workers, and Axelrod would see he had been wrong to shackle her.
“A match made in heaven,” Ruth said with a smile. She raised her water glass, and they clinked.
“Perfect.” Milly drank. “But later, we’ll have to seal the deal with something stiffer.”
“I know a place.” Ruth took another long sip and winked.
THE NEXT MORNING, still nursing her head from the combined assault of the vodka and Anna Louise’s early morning yelling on the phone about some lost paperwork, Milly walked into the newsroom.
“Miss Bennett?” The young assistant to Axelrod stood with his hands clasped around a spiral notepad. “Those notes? From yesterday.” His English had a British accent layered over Russian, and he blushed as he spoke.
“I lost ’em,” Milly mumbled.
“You’re sure?”
“Yup.”
“I’ll have to tell the boss.”
“Are you sure?” she asked, but her voice was too low, and he was already gone.
She slunk away to her desk, where she picked up the translation she had to copyedit. It would be her luck to get kicked out of Moscow right when she was starting to make her way. She’d be seeing her opera actor soon, and maybe this idea of Ruth’s had wings. Milly pressed her pencil to scratch out a misspelling, and the lead broke. She slid her fingers under her glasses and rubbed her eyes.
7
NOW
MARCH 7, 1934
A STRING BAG weighed down with potatoes hung on Milly’s arm while she fumbled with the key to Zhenya’s apartment, trying to jam it one-handed into the d
oor.
The door opened, and Olga’s lined face lit up with hope then crashed in disappointment at recognizing Milly. Milly’s eyes tightened as she fought back tears.
“I’ve brought potatoes,” she said in Russian as she stood. Small recompense for a son’s absence, but she wanted to help.
“Come in. Luba was here, but you’ve missed her.” The older woman left the door hanging open as she walked past the curtain marking Luba’s private space, and she collapsed into one of the chairs at the shared table. Milly swung the door shut and tried to maneuver between Luba’s hanging sheet and the two stacks of boxes to her right. But, as usual, she smashed her knee into the wooden crate that held Zhenya’s father’s old books.
“For you,” Milly said as she laid the string bag of potatoes under the sink basin. A pile of wrinkled onions sat there too. “I’ll get the bag back from you later.”
Olga waved her hand toward the other chair, then stood up to boil some water on the primus stove.
“They arrested Victor Pavilovich today,” she said in a mournful voice. She reached into a cabinet hung above the sink and extracted two teacups. “And Sorokin too. You know him?”
Milly frowned and blinked in confusion.
“Victor? You’re sure?”
“Of course I’m sure,” Olga said, her voice sharp.
Zhenya’s friends shouldn’t be caught up in his troubles, not if his troubles were really because of his connection to Milly. Though, it had been over a week since Zhenya’s arrest, and no OGPU officer had been to interrogate her or search her room. Not that she knew.
“They’re both at the theater. I only know Sorokin a little. I haven’t seen Victor since the night Zhenya was … They’ve both been arrested?”
Olga poured the water into a cracked teapot, sprinkled in some tea leaves, and waited.
“I went to see Victor this morning, and the woman on the house committee for his building told me. Then Luba told me about Sorokin, whoever he is. Oh, Millichka.” Her voice caught, and she pinched her eyes tight before taking a deep breath and then turning her attention to pouring the hot water from the samovar into the tea. The scent of it was bracing, and when she placed Milly’s glass on the scratched wooden table, Milly let the steam curl up and over her eyelids. Her lenses fogged.
“I’m sorry,” she said.
Olga sat. “You are blaming yourself.”
“What else can I do? They never would have noticed him if he weren’t married to a newspaperwoman who’s written some … well, the censors haven’t always liked my stories.” Milly took her eyeglasses off and squeezed the bridge of her nose.
THE NEXT MORNING, Milly bundled herself up against the March cold and began the walk to the Lubyanka building, the massive OGPU headquarters down the street from Olga’s apartment. Milly hadn’t asked if Olga avoided walking past that block and its army of windows and faux columns molded into the yellow brick facade. She would, if she lived a block away.
A newspaper boy strutted past, hawking his broadsheet, and Milly bought one. Perhaps it would distract her if she had to wait. As she walked, she mouthed her way through reading the Russian headlines—she found she could understand things better if she at least pretended to say them out loud. But when she got to the story at the bottom of the sheet, she stopped. Her mouth hung open, until she read it again.
“Anti-Homosexuality Law Promulgated,” it read.
Milly balled the paper up and threw it against the stone wall.
8
BEFORE
OCTOBER 1931
MILLY DUCKED UNDER the building’s portico, just out of the autumn rain, and yanked one of the store’s large double doors open. Inside the Torgsin store, reserved solely for people paying in gold or foreign currency, Milly strutted to the back, where Torgsin stocked their simple wine selection. Tonight, after enduring the stern-faced inquiries of the Party’s Writers Union, she deserved a treat. She pointed to a bottle, asked the clerk the price, then took the proffered invoice to a cashier to pay. While she was waiting in line to hand over her precious dollars and then claim her wine, Milly spotted an associate editor from the newsroom. She waved to him.
“Charles! I got in!” She pulled out her Writers Union card and flashed it under his nose. Now, as a member, she would have her own foodbook and access to the subsidized stores. Her chest felt so effervescent with excitement she almost believed she would float away.
“Congratulations.” His thick black hair was brushed back from his forehead, and his dark eyes were still. Charles tapped the card with his fingertip. “A celebration is in order, then.”
“A celebration?” Milly raised an eyebrow and put one hand on her hip. She was willing to flirt with the stern-faced man, but she was pretty sure he wasn’t interested in her—or any dame, for that matter.
“A beef steak and soda pop. A proper soda pop.” He wasn’t smiling, but his voice was light.
She ran her tongue over her lips. “I haven’t had a soda pop in, lord, I don’t know how long. I’ll accept that challenge,” she said. “After I buy this bottle here to make up for what’s sure to be a doomed quest. Soda pop in this city …” She clicked a mocking disapproval, but Charles merely nodded, then inclined his head toward the waiting clerk behind the counter. Milly paid for her wine.
“You weren’t really going home to drink that alone, were you?” Charles said as they stepped out of the store and onto the dark, rainy street. A passing car sent up a spray that mottled Milly’s legs with water.
“You assume I have no friends, Charles? Come on.” She hoped he didn’t notice how her cheeks had flushed. He was close enough to the truth. But maybe, if he was willing to go out with her, her luck might be turning in more ways than earning a spot in the Writers Union.
“No, I don’t assume so,” he said. He flicked his eyes back and forth between the cars while they waited to cross.
“For your information, I was going to find Ruth.” There was at least one friend Milly had, or so she hoped. The women had succeeded in sneaking Milly’s story out, and they had big plans for more collaboration. So long as they didn’t get caught publishing prohibited yarns. “Going back to my room is a wash, anyway. Anna Louise is lending her other room to a minister, and he’s the worst air bag I’ve ever met. Makes my blood boil.”
They crossed, then Charles glanced down a side street, apparently looking for something specific. When he didn’t find it, he turned to her.
“Not the religious type?”
“Me? Well, no, but that’s not the problem. Do you want to hear what this guy is up to? He’s got some nerve.” She was talking too much, she realized, but the combination of nerves and excitement had left her mouth utterly off its leash.
Charles took her elbow and steered her down the next cross street. A frisson of attraction buzzed up her arm, into her throat, and she glanced at him. He was thin, like her ex-husband, with long lashes.
“The fellow’s gutless, I tell you,” she continued.
“Hold that thought, here’s the joint I was looking for. Let’s see if they have soda pop. Wait here, and I’ll check.”
Charles had been in Moscow for at least half a year longer than Milly, and his Russian was undoubtedly better. Still, Milly didn’t like being left behind. She tapped her foot on the damp pavement while Charles stood inside the glass door, talking with a frowning Russian man. At least the rain had lessened.
“No luck,” he said when he emerged, his hat pulled down to keep the scattered raindrops from his eyes. “But I’ve got another idea, two blocks from here. You still game?”
“Sure,” Milly said, though she wasn’t sure that she was. Charles seemed more interested in finding the meal than actually talking to her. She hugged her arms to herself and felt the rain sneak inside her collar and down her neck, while she gripped the wine bottle tightly.
“What about that preacher?” Charles asked.
Milly smiled.
“He’s staying with us, doing some sort
of research. We get word that a young American girl died while in Moscow. Hit by a car, and the poor thing died on the spot. Her parents were in London, and they came as soon as they could. All her family wants is a prayer for their sweet girl before they bury her body in foreign soil. The mother heard about our friend the preacher, so she came over.”
Charles again nudged her elbow around a corner, then pulled her to a stop as they waited for a streetcar to splash past. They crossed and headed toward a door with a single globed light reaching out above the entrance.
“The preacher told her no. Religion is banned here, so no. I’m standing right there, crying to hear this poor mother’s wish for her dead girl, and all he can do is wring his hands and tell her he won’t jeopardize his position. He can’t risk violating the ban on preaching, he can’t risk getting thrown out. Not with so much research left to do. And the mother is sobbing, begging him to say a prayer over her dead daughter’s body.”
Anger at the memory filled Milly again, and she clenched her teeth. What a coward. If she ever had to make a risky choice like that, going against the authorities, she’d sure as hell make the brave choice.
“Let me try this place,” Charles said, once they reached the illuminated door. “Restaurant,” read a painted sign in four different languages.
“I’m going too,” Milly said. He opened his mouth to protest, but Milly waved a hand. “How else am I going to learn this damned language, if I don’t get to hear people using it?”
He tilted his head, then held out the door for her.
Inside, the restaurant was dark and smelled of sautéed onions. A fat woman stood up from a table where she was knitting, then planted her hands on her hips. A few tables were occupied, but the room was hushed.
Charles asked something quickly, of which Milly understood “beef steak” and “soda pop.” The woman nodded and indicated for them to take a table.
“Did he, then?” he asked once they were seated in wooden chairs that creaked with every movement.
Salt the Snow Page 6