Seema came to Milly’s side. “Axelrod is going to kill us,” she said in Russian. Sometimes she and Milly preferred Russian over English, partially, Milly knew, out of pride, but also because Russian felt better suited to some things. Like worrying.
“The News isn’t responsible for the building.” Milly watched the firefighters as she spoke. They seemed to be concentrating their efforts on the side of the building away from her room, but still her stomach knotted.
“No, but the paper will have to help everyone replace their clothes. And find us new places to sleep.” Seema hugged herself and shuddered. Her dark fingers were bare, and Milly was tempted to grab them and rub them in her own hands. But she knew Seema wouldn’t want to be touched.
“Your rooms are safe?” Katinka asked them both.
“I think so,” Seema said. She pulled her coat, no, bathrobe, tighter across her chest.
“But—” Katinka pointed at the second floor of the stable, where the smoke now spewed. There hadn’t been any sign of fire there a few minutes earlier.
“Those are the offices. Typewriters, desks, no one’s personal belongings.” Milly shook her head.
“Typewriters?” Katinka straightened. “You would let those burn?”
“Hell,” Milly said, though she blushed in the dark. Axelrod had fined her three rubles last month when a hammer on one of the machines got bent. “I am going to get in trouble for that.”
Katinka huffed, then bent down to pick up her telephone from the dry grass at Milly’s feet. “You have so much money, you can afford to let your tools burn?”
“No, we can’t, but what can we do?” Milly’s voice slunk out from her throat.
“Someone has trusted you with those tools. And you stand here and watch them burn. Those typewriters must cost as much as I earn in a year. At both my jobs.”
“Hell.” Milly looked around at her colleagues. Junius had taken his rescued papers and fled to the street, past the main house, and Seema had her arms wrapped around herself for warmth.
“They’re not worth dying for,” Milly said.
Katinka held up her telephone, as if that proved something. Milly took off her glasses to wipe them clean of the smoke. She replaced them on her nose.
She strode toward the building.
The stair was dark and filled with smoke, but only a little warm. The steps held as she walked up, and soon she heard a clomping behind her.
“At least you have some spirit,” Katinka said from over Milly’s shoulder.
Upstairs in the workroom, the air was hotter. Milly wondered if the floorboards beneath them were on fire. She didn’t know how fire traveled.
“How many can we carry, do you think?” she asked Katinka. Mostly, she was wondering how many Katinka could carry in her well-muscled arms and broad shoulders. Milly would be lucky if she could carry one.
“No time for that.” Katinka shook her head. Then she picked up a typewriter, yelled “Look out!” and threw it out the closed window.
The glass shattered, and a distant thump sounded.
“That’s not going to save them!” Milly called. She wondered if Katinka had ever used a typewriter.
The other woman ignored her, picked up another one, and threw it out the broken window with a scream. The smoke thickened, and Milly coughed.
“Aw hell.” She picked up a typewriter. Then, with a swing, she launched it in a flying parabola out the window.
The typewriter hummed and then crashed as it hit the ground. Outside, someone squealed.
Milly threw back her head and laughed. After he fined her, Axelrod told her to protect the machines no matter what she had to do. She supposed saving them from fire counted as protection.
Katinka looked at her, wide-eyed, then picked up another machine, widened her legs, and swung it low between them before rocketing it out the already-broken window. Milly cheered.
Behind them, the smoke reared up like an angry cobra, and Milly picked up another typewriter.
“This is one way to think of freedom of the press,” she said, coughing. She pitched the typewriter out, though this one didn’t land far.
“One more each?” Katinka asked. Through the increasingly hazy room, Milly looked at Katinka, who was wiping sweat from her broad forehead, and she smiled.
“No one can say we didn’t try.”
“Try? We have succeeded!” Katinka hurled a typewriter out of the room.
“To victory!” Milly yelled, and picked up an Underwood. “To truth and courage and hope!”
She pushed the machine into the air and watched it as it sailed away into the dark.
17
NOW
APRIL 30, 1934
MILLY STOOD ACROSS the sidewalk from the massive apartment building, which rose some eleven stories at its highest points and occupied an entire block. The House of Government, everyone called it, named for all the senior Soviet officials who lived in the hundreds of apartments built in the demolished wake of the former metalwork and chocolate factory here on the bank of the Moskva River. Behind her, ice chunks still skimmed the fast-flowing river, already swollen with the spring melt-off. Milly took a deep breath, opened and closed her fists, then crossed the street.
The Orlovs lived around the side, at Entryway 10. Not the most prestigious entrance, the daughter had told her, but not far either from the best apartments and their river views. Milly had met Vera, the family’s daughter, in a class Milly had taught the previous fall. Now she resurrected the old connection out of desperation. She’d talk to anyone who would help her with Zhenya.
Milly walked past the neoclassicist rectangular columns flanking the riverfront entrances and, following Vera’s instructions, turned the corner to find Entryway 10. She walked under a four story-tall breezeway held up by even more massive columns, entered a courtyard, and then found the awning marked “10.”
A doorman frowned when he opened the metal-and-glass door upon her buzzing and frowned more deeply when she explained she was there to see Vera Aleksandrovna Orlov.
“Do you have an appointment?” he asked.
“Do eighteen-year-old girls require appointments? She must be more popular than I thought.” Milly pretended to frown and bite her lip pensively.
The doorman snorted, but he picked up the phone on the table to his side and dialed. After a hushed conversation, he hung up. He narrowed his eyes, then pointed down the hall at his back.
“The elevator is on your left. Fourth floor.”
Milly walked down the tiled hallway, her steps slicing through the quiet of the building. She pushed the elevator button and the contraption clanked in response. Of course, she could take the stairs, but she wanted to see what a deluxe Soviet elevator was like.
The elevator attendant was a hunched woman whose quick movements to crank open the gate and then close the door behind Milly made her think the woman wasn’t as old as her lined face would suggest. They ascended to the fourth floor in silence, and there, the woman repeated her rapid performance. Maybe she got tips for speed.
Vera stood waiting in the hallway.
“Welcome!” She threw her arms open wide, both indicating the expanse of their surroundings and preparing to embrace Milly. Milly stepped closer and gave the young woman a quick kiss on the cheek. They hadn’t seen each other in months, not since Vera had been hospitalized with rheumatic fever before the class had ended, and before Zhenya was arrested. Their lessons had ceased then, though Vera had written her letters assuring Milly she would be fine. Milly hoped so, though she worried.
“We’re that one,” Vera said, pointing at a set of tall white doors two apartments down from the elevator, at the end of the short hall. Milly looked around and wondered what Zhenya would have thought of such luxury. Luxury like what his family had had, before the revolution.
“That’s Platon Kerzhentsev’s family’s apartment. He’s the chief theoretician for the Bolshevik Conception of Time.” Her voice was hushed as they passed.
“He thinks about how to change time?”
Vera looked quickly toward Milly, and she seemed to flinch.
“How to make our use of time more socially conscious.” They reached Vera’s door, and she smiled. “I think.”
The entrance was two narrow doors, and only the one on the right opened. Milly followed Vera inside.
“My father’s not home yet,” Vera said. She led Milly past a small kitchen and into a sitting room. It adjoined an eating area, which was crowded with one heavy oak table and its stern, rectilinear chairs. The sitting room had two armchairs and a sofa, and bookshelves lined the walls behind the chairs.
“Sit,” Vera said. “I’ll ask Tania to bring you some tea.”
While she stepped into another room, behind a door, Milly craned around to scan the titles on the shelf, covered by a glass door. Brehm’s Life of Animals, and something by Lermontov, the title obscured by a photograph propped against the book’s spine. Milly squinted and leaned toward it, trying to make sense of the scene. It was an urban street from somewhere Milly didn’t recognize. Not Moscow, but probably somewhere else in Europe.
A young woman with a square face and a blank expression entered the room and delivered a cup of tea, in thick blue glass, to Milly. She had no saucer and no side table to rest it on, so she tried to balance the hot cup on her knee, alternating the fingers that held it to avoid getting singed.
Vera entered holding her own cup of tea.
“Father will be here soon,” she said. “He comes home for lunch on the days when he doesn’t have meetings.”
“You didn’t tell him I was coming.” Milly had been about to take a sip of tea, but now she held the cup suspended before her lips.
Vera shook her head. “It’s best to surprise him. Say, do you want a tour of the building? There’s a movie theater and a performance stage! And a laundry, you can see how they maximize community efficiency by having all these ladies in their white uniforms ironing, like a factory, and—”
“I think I’d better wait. I’ll get nervous if we leave. Thinking I might miss him.” She finally took a sip, and the tea was cooler than she had expected. Bracingly strong though. “How about we practice your English?” she said in that language.
Vera grimaced but relented, and for some half an hour they groped their way through a conversation about the weather and a comparison of Moscow and San Francisco.
“The bridge is red,” Milly said. “You would like it.”
“I certainly would,” said a deep voice in heavily accented English. Milly looked up to see a short man standing in a khaki-and-olive-colored uniform.
“Father, I didn’t hear you come in.”
Vera set her teacup on a shelf near the sofa and stood to plant a kiss on her father’s cheek.
“General Orlov.” Milly stood as well, but still held her cup awkwardly. She might splash the remaining contents on him, she realized, so she gulped the rest of the bitter brew down.
Orlov laughed.
“Thirsty, are we. Vera, who’s this?” He continued speaking in English.
“Milly Bennett. My … teacher.”
Milly worried he would ask what she was a teacher of, but he smiled blandly, to Milly’s relief. A senior general in the OGPU might not appreciate Milly’s more inquisitive brand of journalism. She wanted socialism to succeed as much as the next gal, and she was sure it would, but all the probing questions still needed to be asked along the way.
“It’s a pleasure,” Orlov said, his small eyes lighting up. He had a broad forehead exaggerated by a receding hairline, and a narrow mustache bristled over his small mouth. Not an unpleasant-looking man.
“Where’s your mother?” he asked Vera.
Vera shrugged. “Still at the office, I guess.”
He nodded, as if he had expected as much. He looked again at Milly.
“Are you here to help our Vera improve her English? It is a good skill.”
“Your own English is impressive,” she said.
“I spent two months in New York.” He shrugged, but the pride in his voice was clear.
“General Orlov, I may as well be frank. I’m not much good at being anything but.” She cast an apologetic glance at Vera, whose fair skin flushed pink. “I’m here to ask you about Mikhail Kalinin. I’ve been trying to get an appointment with him, but no one answers my letters.”
Orlov exhaled loudly through his nose, then pinched his shaved chin.
“Kalinin. He’s in the Politburo. Why would you need to see him?”
“It’s for my husband. He’s been arrested, and Senior Prosecutor Rosonov suggested I talk to Kalinin about the case. The conviction is wrong, I’m sure. He’s a baby, he can’t make it—”
“Enough.” Orlov’s face burned crimson. “I don’t want my family involved with criminals.”
“But he’s not, that’s what I’m trying to say.”
Orlov glanced at Vera, then back at Milly.
“I don’t know Kalinin,” he said. “He does not have much dealing with the OGPU. I am sorry.”
He turned and walked back toward the kitchen, where Milly could hear him barking orders about the meal in a rounded Russian that she couldn’t quite place.
“Hell,” she muttered.
“I will talk to him,” Vera said, her eyes wide and liquid.
As a part of the class Milly taught, she had taken Vera with her for one interview, about a month after her dormitory had burned down. Only five months ago now, that interview with the American stage actors Alfred Lunt and Lynn Fontanne, but it seemed much longer. Vera had done as she promised, hovering at the fringes of Milly’s conversation with the couple, making notes when Alfred said something she could understand. His long fingers, which seemed to dance as he spoke, gesticulating, reminded Milly of Zhenya, and his boyish, handsome face seemed to captivate Vera, whose eyes rarely left his sculpted lips. Milly watched how Alfred and Lynn interacted when she asked them questions: each answering in turn, deferring to each other, tapping each other’s hands to indicate whose turn it was, like a precise machine. Milly was fascinated. At one point, Alfred said he liked to call his wife Rich Lynnie for all the money saving she did, and she laughed, perfectly on cue, though surely she had heard the tease dozens of times before. Lynn, who had a prominent nose and eyes like crystal, turned to Milly at the end of the interview, extended a finger toward Vera, and said, in her posh British accent, “That girl of yours is delightful.” Then she leaned back in her chair and gave a throaty laugh. “I don’t believe a husband and wife should be separated for more than a month. At most. Don’t you agree?” And Milly couldn’t tell if the question was aimed at her or Alfred, so she focused on the notes she was scribbling in her notebook. Then, Vera had leapt to her feet.
“Milly doesn’t live with her husband,” she said in English so heavily accented that Milly wasn’t sure the actors would understand. But Lynn raised one finely plucked eyebrow, then looked at Milly and winked.
Now, in Vera’s sitting room, Milly’s stomach clenched. What would Vera say to her father? What little the girl knew of Zhenya was unlikely to help his case. Milly walked to the kitchen.
The small space was crowded with Tania, who had wrapped her blond hair in a kerchief, and Orlov, who was giving her some instructions about vinegar.
“General, I am sorry,” Milly said.
He looked at her with narrowed eyes.
“For imposing. My husband is young, and he’s too delicate for Siberia. You know what it is to worry, don’t you?”
“We all have worries,” he said. His words, still in English, were perfectly articulated, like diamonds cut with his teeth.
“Forgive me for imposing. I thought I might help my Zhenya. I don’t know what else to do; he’s such a sweet boy and now they’ve taken him for no reason to a freezing place to break rocks and cut down trees and …” Her voice snagged, and she pinched her eyes closed for a moment.
“You misunderstand me,” Orlov said, now in Russ
ian. “I sympathize, but all criminals against the state must be punished. Do you think I doubt my own state?” He straightened his shoulders. “Vera will show you out.”
Milly stepped back, and her arm jarred a frame on the wall. She flushed, then turned to straighten it, only to fumble with the balance. Inside the frame, Lenin’s portrait stared distantly over her shoulder. She wanted to cry.
Vera opened the door, and Milly followed her out. In the hallway, their steps echoed against the white-and-black tile.
“I can find my way down,” Milly said.
“I’m sorry,” Vera said, her voice trembling. Her eyes brimmed with tears, and she was blushing more deeply than Milly had ever seen her before. “My father, he—I shouldn’t have surprised him like that. I should have known he’d be like that.” She whispered so low that Milly could barely hear her.
“It’s fine. I should have thought—”
“No. He’s so strict. I hate him, sometimes.”
Milly laid a hand on the girl’s hot forearm, then withdrew.
“Come around the office when you’re ready for some work,” she said, though she doubted the girl would.
Without waiting, Milly hurried down the broad open stairway next to the elevator. Tall windows fronted the steps, and as she descended, she could see the children playing in the courtyard below, their bodies getting larger as she reached each floor’s landing. Perhaps they were aging before her eyes, growing into the native and pure socialists their country needed. Better than the adults it had now. She rushed into the lobby and waved at the curious doorman in his gray uniform. Outside, the wind bit at her cheeks, even though it was supposed to be spring, and she didn’t try to wipe away the foolish tears that fell as she walked back to her empty room.
LESS THAN A month later, on May 22, Milly and Seema walked through the rain to Olga’s building. It was Milly’s birthday, and Olga was hosting a party for her. In Milly’s pocketbook was a letter she had received that day from Rosonov.
He had concluded that there was no compelling evidence to alter Zhenya’s sentence. He was guilty, sentenced to three years in the prison camp, subject to reduction in the case of good behavior.
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