Salt the Snow

by Carrie Callaghan

  Rosonov nodded.

  “I appreciate your commentary,” he said. “But our agent at the Bolshoi has very clear information about Evgeni Konstantinov’s immoral behavior. We cannot disregard that behavior.” He flicked his thumbnail against the nail on his middle finger.

  “But what about his wife? Don’t you think I know a thing or two about his private behavior?” She wanted to growl and swat all his neat papers onto the floor.

  “Our agent has clear evidence. No woman can know everything,” he said with a half-smile.

  “Your agent?”

  “I cannot reveal our sources.”

  Milly placed her hands on the edge of the desk and dug her fingernails into the wood.

  “It’s Victor, isn’t it? Yes, I see it there on your face. It’s Victor, and he’s a jealous scheming pig. He claimed Zhenya did things? With him?”

  “I cannot comment.” Rosonov’s face burned red.

  “You can’t believe his word over mine. Do you want to hear about Zhenya’s behavior?” She paused, then glowered at him and reached into her bag. She tossed Lawrence’s novel across the desk.

  “Read that,” she said, trying to level her voice. “You want to know what my life with Zhenya was like? Read that. Then tell me that man deserves to be imprisoned for whatever you claim he did.”

  She was tempted to follow that with a scream of “who the hell cares anyway,” but she knew better than that, at least. What the Soviets had declared illegal was now permanently, incontrovertibly illegal. No matter how absurd the pronouncement was.

  “Citizen, have you finished your statement?” His voice was icy cold.

  She took a deep breath and wrinkled her nose.

  “I got carried away. Forgive me. But the point is true. He is my husband. My testimony should matter too.”

  Rosonov nodded and, to her surprise, picked up the book. He turned it over, but she could tell he could make little sense of the words. He extended her book toward her.

  “This is unnecessary. You may have it back.”

  She blushed and returned the novel to her purse. He held up a hand to silence her.

  “Your passion is understandable. I will review the evidence and send you notice of my decision.” He looked at the ceiling for a moment, then back at her. “If you are interested, you may also raise the case with Mikhail Kalinin. It could not hurt to write him a letter. I’m sure you have mutual connections you could mention.”

  Milly closed the flap of her pocketbook over the novel, though she had to jam the book back down into her messy purse in order to make the latch snap. She should slow down, rearrange her belongings, but she didn’t. Her breath coursed shallow.

  “Zhenya deserves better than the labor camp. He deserves better than me,” she said quietly. “He is an actor, not a bricklayer.”

  “None of us are above labor,” Rosonov said, his eyes narrowing. “But the state will only punish the guilty. I will review the evidence.”

  He stood.

  Milly did too. Her hands were shaking, and she had to bite back a crack about mailing his wife the Lawrence book. She knew better, so she merely nodded and walked out of the office.

  “You will receive a letter either way, Citizen,” he called from inside the room, as if he had forgotten his standard line.

  “Yeah, thanks,” Milly muttered in English.

  16

  BEFORE

  OCTOBER 1933

  MILLY PULLED HER coat tightly around her to ward off the brisk autumn wind. The season was so short here, and already she could feel winter nipping at her fingertips. This year she really would buy that beautiful embroidered reindeer coat she had her eye on. She’d at least have a fighting chance with that sort of coat, better than the flimsy dog fur.

  Brown leaves skittered across the sidewalk as she strode toward the hotel, and one swirled up and snagged on her silk stocking. She bent down to carefully pluck it out. Luba would want Milly to look spotless for the name day celebration; Luba’s actual celebration, not the one for Antonia.

  When Milly walked up the marble steps just inside the Metropol’s revolving door and could see the lobby bar, Zhenya was already there. He had been holding Luba’s delicate hand and nodding while she explained something, but when he saw Milly, he dropped Luba’s hand and strode over to greet her.

  “That dress,” he said, giving her an appreciative look up and down. He took her coat. “My Milly baby is the most beautiful woman in the room.”

  “Thank you.” She gave a twirl in the black dress and hoped he wouldn’t notice the tiny hole worn in the fabric near her rear. She hadn’t had time to mend it, so she wore black underwear in hopes of disguising the tear. She didn’t even have a slip.

  He gave her a kiss on the cheek.

  “What’s this? A spritz of perfume?”

  “Camellias, of course.” Milly winked.

  In the spring, she had moved out of his apartment, which had been too small to accommodate the three of them. Now she was in a dormitory where she had, finally, her own room. Over the summer Milly had hosted her friend Marjorie, who was visiting from Constantinople, and Marjorie’s presence seemed to clarify Zhenya’s relationship for both of them. With Marjorie around, they didn’t have sex—and since, had done so only twice. But Zhenya was still the best company, and he took pride in standing by Milly’s side or playing host to her friends. He showered her with kisses and held her warm against his body at night. For her part, she tried to take comfort in his pride, and she did what she could to take care of him. In all of Moscow, there was no one’s company she preferred over his.

  She tried not to wish for more.

  “Milly.” Luba held out her hand for a kiss.

  “Happy name day,” Milly said in Russian. “I should write a story about your party, Luba. Americans don’t know what name days are, and yours is better than most.”

  Luba’s brows drew together, and she cocked her head.

  “Your name means ‘love,’ right? So each year we celebrate you and love. It’s like having a birthday on Valentine’s Day, but better.”

  “You should write it,” Luba said, her wide eyes glowing. “I give you my permission.”

  Milly brushed her lips against her friend’s hand. “I was making a joke. This old lady is, as we say it in English, washed up. No one wants my stories. I’m thinking of picking up farming.”

  Zhenya laughed, and Luba looked between them as if she weren’t sure whom to believe. It was true that almost none of Milly’s pitches got picked up overseas, and all the editors she knew seemed to prefer the international stringers flitting through Moscow over her; no matter that she’d been here years to their months. But she kept trying. She didn’t know how to live if she didn’t write, and she needed the money. Maybe she would do a color piece on name days.

  “Milly, let me introduce my brother-in-law, Grisha,” Luba said, waving for a large man to approach. He had a mass of curly hair springing from his head, and his broad shoulders moved awkwardly in his suit jacket. “He’s visiting,” Luba added.

  Zhenya patted her hand and walked away to talk to a visiting cousin. When Grisha approached, Luba handed them both glasses of vodka she pulled from a nearby low table.

  “Milly is a writer,” Luba said. “Tell her about life outside the city.” Luba nodded, then turned to greet another guest.

  “Good evening,” Grisha said with an opaque accent that probably hailed from some remote village. He paused, then extended a thick-fingered hand. She shivered to feel how small her hand felt in his grasp.

  “Let’s sit and you can tell me about where you’re from.” Milly led him to a bench against the wall. It creaked as he lowered himself to squeeze behind a table and onto the bench, and Milly feared his worn suit would split at the thighs. Then again, maybe he, too, was wearing black underwear. She smiled, then sat down alongside him.

  “But you must tell me about the opera,” Grisha said. “I love Boris Godunov.” He clasped his hands together
at his knees. “I saw it once and at the end clapped until my hands hurt.”

  “That is such a good one. Our Zhenya was in it here, did you know?”

  “Luba said so. I wish I could have seen it.”

  They each took a sip of the bright vodka, and Milly relished the warmth in her throat and the tightening at her temples that the drink brought.

  Milly glanced at Zhenya, who was still talking to his cousin, but he turned to give an encouraging smile to Milly. He then raised his glass in a salute toward her and returned to his conversation. She took a long sip of the vodka and flinched at the strength of it. He could have been encouraging her flirtation with Grisha, or he could have been oblivious to it. She pinched her eyes shut.

  Grisha’s calloused fingers brushed against her arm.

  “Are you all right?”

  She opened her eyes and saw his brown ones crinkled with concern. His skin was thick and weathered, the legacy of a life spent in the sun.

  “Do you hunt?” she asked.

  “Yes,” he said, leaning back. He fixed his gaze on something across the noisy lobby. “Mostly I fish.”

  Fishing was nearly as sexy as hunting. She leaned forward. “Are you on a collectivized farm?”

  He shook his head, and she was ashamed to feel a little disappointed that he wouldn’t have a story she could write up. There was no end to editors’ appetites for stories about successful collective farmers. There didn’t seem to be many of them.

  “I work in a factory,” he said. “But any moment I can, I’m chopping wood and fishing.” He shrugged and looked at her, then lifted a hand to her chin. Heat flooded her core at his touch, and she sucked in a breath.

  They poured two more glasses as Milly’s head began to swim. She looked over at Zhenya again, who was listening and nodding as Luba spoke, and she nuzzled into Grisha’s shoulder. He laughed.

  They spent the night drinking and talking, with Milly’s ability to parse his burred accent fading as her enthusiasm for his warmth at her side rose.

  “You should take me home,” she whispered, quite a few drinks in, to Grisha, or at least she thought she did. She wanted his rough hands against her bare skin, pulling and pushing her soft flesh against his. But Grisha didn’t react, and maybe she hadn’t said it after all, and then she leaned her head against his shoulder and fell asleep.

  The next morning she awoke in her room in the dormitory with a pounding headache and a warm body in her bed. Too hot. She pushed herself upright and clutched her head, the heels of her hands pressed into her eyes.

  “Awake finally?”

  She opened her eyes to see Zhenya propped up on one elbow alongside her. A tightness in her chest released, and she laughed.

  “What?” His curved lips pursed in confusion.

  “I never know what to expect from you,” she said.

  He patted her hand, then collapsed back onto the pillow.

  “It took three of us to get you up here,” he said. “Poor Grisha didn’t move all night once you passed out on his shoulder.”

  Milly rested her head down next to Zhenya’s and stared into his long-lashed eyes.

  “What kind of marriage do we have, Zhenya?”

  He turned to look at the ceiling.

  “An interesting one. Like all marriages.”

  He pulled her toward him and gave her a soft, closed-mouth kiss.

  “We are finding our way.” He reached to pull up the hem of the dress she was still wearing. With the skirt bunched against her thigh, he began caressing the bare skin of her waist.

  “I wish our way had a lot more sex,” Milly said, then bit her lip.

  He laughed.

  “Always with the jokes, my Milly baby.” He retracted his hand and swung his legs out of bed. “Let me brush my teeth.”

  He winked and took his toothbrush out of the room, toward where the shared bathroom at the end of the dormitory hallway was. The dormitory was a converted stable tucked back behind a large house, and Milly was glad the builders had bothered to put the bathroom inside the dormitory. She took a long drink from the glass of water on her nightstand, then waited.

  When Zhenya returned, he locked the door behind him and approached the bed slowly. With his eyes on her, he unbuttoned the cotton shirt he had worn the previous night. Then he shrugged out of his pants, and she could see he already had an erection. Well. She could work with that.

  An hour later he left, and Milly pried herself out of bed. She had the day off from the newsroom, where she was now responsible for overseeing half the translator staff, on top of writing her own stories. Today, no matter how much she wanted to sleep, she needed to work on her book. Milly had interviewed a clown by the name of Durov, and she was convinced she could spin a story for American audiences out of his conviction and commitment to entertaining little socialists. She loved listening to the small man with his sparkling eyes talk about how even class consciousness needed humor, and how he used his otherwise unimpressive body to convey a message. She knew about making do with middling physical gifts, and she liked his honesty.

  She dressed, then walked into a large room on the second floor of the converted stable, where Moscow Daily News had some typewriters and tables, set out for translators. She stayed there working, not talking to anyone as she tried to force her notes into a story, and she left only to get a bland beef stew at a local cooperative restaurant for dinner. When she stepped out of the restaurant, a dingy storefront just a block from her dormitory, she inhaled. The cold bit at her throat, but it was refreshing compared to the cabbage stink of the restaurant. A strong smell of woodsmoke wafted over, and she breathed again.

  Then a commotion sounded behind the next house on the street, from the deep yard where Milly’s converted stable stood, behind another house.

  She ran.

  When she reached the yard, four other people from Moscow Daily News stood shivering in the grass. Katinka, a tall woman who worked as both a housemaid and a prostitute, stood with her arms crossed as she listened to one of the American reporters howl. Smoke poured out the windows of three of the lower-level rooms.

  “What is he saying?” Katinka said to Milly in her deep Russian. She held a telephone clutched in one of her hands, apparently pulled from the wall, judging by the trailing cord.

  “Junius!” Milly yelled at her colleague, who pressed a hand to his eyes and sobbed a few words.

  “He says his ticket back to America and his passport are locked up in some box in his room,” Milly translated for Katinka. At her side, a Russian woman clicked her tongue, as if admonishing the American for thinking his belongings were safer locked up. Or safe at all.

  “If he wants help, he should have asked.” Katinka laid her salvaged telephone at Milly’s feet, raised an eyebrow, then strode toward the burning building.

  “Katinka!” Milly yelled, but remained still, and the other woman kept walking. The stable-dormitory still spewed smoke, but she didn’t see any flames. Maybe she should try to retrieve her own belongings. Her room was on the far end of the building, away from where the fire appeared to be; perhaps it would be safe enough to rush in and retrieve her papers. Her manuscript about the clown, her letters from Zhenya and her friends and her mother. If nothing else, she could use a warmer pair of stockings. She shivered in the cold.

  “I should go—” Milly began.

  “No,” a Russian woman, probably a neighbor, hissed. “That man was crazy enough.”

  “Katinka is a woman,” Milly said. She looked over at the woman, who had an overcoat buttoned over her nightdress. Behind her rose the house closest to the street, and a few Russian women had thrown open the windows to lean out and watch.

  Junius held his head in his hands and cried about his passport, but Seema stepped toward Milly. Her hair was disheveled, pushed up behind her head. It was early to be sleeping, but then she hadn’t seemed well lately. Milly furrowed her brow, looking at the other woman’s wan complexion, and she tried to find the words to ask if
Seema needed any help. But maybe she wasn’t sick, just pregnant or something, and she wouldn’t want Milly butting in.

  “Did anyone call the fire department?” Milly asked.

  Seema nodded, but kept quiet as she watched the glowing building.

  From inside the dormitory came a loud crash, and Milly jumped. Then a roar, and Milly took a few steps closer. A plume of smoke burned her eyes.

  “Katinka! Are you—”

  The large woman came bounding out, a wide grin on her face and her hand held high. Some papers protruded.

  “I punched through the wall.” She dropped the documents in the sobbing Junius’s hands with a flourish. “There was no safe, only a small door over the wall. I punched through.”

  A clanging arose behind them, and they all spun to see a glistening red fire engine pull up under the streetlights. The light cast the engine’s winding brass fixings into sharp relief.

  “I knew someone had called,” Seema said. Milly glanced again at her, and she seemed lost in a daze.

  “Seema, are you—”

  Then, thick smoke billowed from the building, and the crowd shuffled farther back, coughing. Seema stepped away.

  Firefighters dashed past them, carrying two long hoses with golden brass nozzles. Milly was tempted to yell after them, to threaten them with something absurd if they didn’t keep her papers dry, but the words stuck in her throat. She hadn’t asked, she realized, if everyone had gotten out.

  The first hose turned on, and a broad spray of water seemed to push the smoke aside.

  “Idiots,” Katinka said.

  “What do you mean?” Milly’s teeth chattered.

  Katinka picked up her telephone box and moved it farther from the stable.

  “Whoever left his stove burning. And whoever thinks he can stop a fire by putting out the smoke.” She spat.