Salt the Snow

by Carrie Callaghan

  Olga handed her the envelope.

  On the front, where Milly had addressed it to Zhenya, a wide black mark obscured her writing.

  “Return to sender,” it read. “No such person.”

  She screamed.

  26

  AUGUST 1936

  MILLY STOOD IN Red Square with the Main Universal Store, or GUM, at her back. Somewhere, beyond the sweating marching masses filling the street in front of her, was Lenin’s mausoleum.

  “His wife’s body was displayed there for a few days,” she said to Marion, who was fanning herself against the gruesome heat. “I missed it though.”

  “What?” Marion said back. It was hard to hear over the call and answer of the thousands of workers protesting fascism. A few weeks ago Milly had written in a wire article that Moscow was watching the new war in Spain with reserved detachment; now she would have to revise that description.

  “We’ll donate a portion of our salaries to defeat Spanish fascism!” yelled a man with a bullhorn. His fellow workers, dressed in blue or red overalls, raised their fists to punch against the sky in unison. As far as Milly could see, their faces remained expressionless. The donation was not their idea.

  Still, there was something to the notion of throwing oneself against the fascist military rebels attempting to unseat, by force, Spain’s elected democratic Republic. Some of her colleagues had already pulled up stakes in Moscow to cover the fight in Madrid.

  She could go, now. She had heard no more from the NKVD about Zhenya, though she had sent a dozen letters. He must be gone, she understood, but still she could not stop herself from seeing his tousled hair or his loose gait on the street. Crowds were the worst, when every ten minutes her heart constricted, thinking she had seen him step behind a worker or turn around a corner. Her mind would catch up and scold her optimism, but not quickly enough.

  Marion tugged at Milly’s sweat-streaked elbow, then pointed into the crowd of people watching the marchers process past. A thin man with brown hair waved up at her. Victor. She had seen him a few times since she had refused to hide him, and though his fear seemed to have evaporated like the mist over the Moskva River, she regretted her stinginess. Neither of them mentioned it, but she knew Victor’s anger—or perhaps shame—still hung between them. She waved back. He nodded, then turned to face the marchers again.

  “I’ve never seen an August this hot,” she said to Marion, who nodded. The men in front of them belted out a song about revolutionary fervor, and it would have been charming if it weren’t for the gas masks hanging from a few of their belts like post-apocalyptic trophies. In July she had traveled to Leningrad to witness a mock air raid and chemical attack, and she still dreamt of inhuman gas mask faces fumbling through the haze of canister gas. At the time, the exercise had seemed droll.

  “We should go,” Milly said closely in Marion’s ear. Her friend turned and looked at her, eyebrows raised. Milly had been the one to insist that they attend the march, if for no other reason than to have something to cable to Internews in hopes of getting paid.

  “Are you trying to avoid that man?” Marion nodded her head back toward Victor. “He looks harmless.”

  Milly snorted.

  “No. I need a drink.”

  “You drink too much,” Marion said, but she followed.

  When they reached a quieter side street, Milly fell in step with Marion.

  “Did you see how forced they seemed?”

  “Who?”

  “The marchers,” Milly whispered as they walked. Moscow had grown brittle recently; Victor had been right about that.

  “I don’t know,” Marion said.

  “I’m thinking of going to Spain,” Milly said, though she hadn’t been until the march. Something was turning sour here, she could taste it.

  “You can’t.” Marion paused and grabbed at Milly’s bare elbow. “Bob hasn’t finished his fellowship, and …”

  “You’d miss me? Stop it, I’m blushing.” She laughed, but then stopped when she saw how serious Marion’s face was, her curved lips parted.

  Milly sighed and touched the back of Marion’s hand in apology.

  “You’re right, in a way. I ought to see a thing through. I came here to see what the Ruskies could do. I need to stop running.”

  “You’re not a quitter, Milly Bennett.” They resumed walking. “I think you’re not done here yet.”

  27

  OCTOBER 1936

  GRAY-FACED, BORODIN CALLED Milly into his office.

  “I’m sorry,” he said, then paused and swallowed. One of the light fixtures hanging from the ceiling buzzed in its effort to shed light. “We have to let you go.”

  “You what?”

  He shook his head.

  “There aren’t as many English-speaking engineers in Moscow anymore. You know how circulation has fallen. The Politburo is thinking of closing us entirely, withdrawing all funding … I don’t want that to happen. We’re shrinking. I’m sorry, Milly.”

  She sucked in a breath and began to pace.

  “I can barely pay my hotel bill as it is,” she said. “How am I supposed to live?”

  “I know you’re writing for Internews,” he said without looking up from the trash can he was toeing. “I thought you would have enough money.”

  “Borodin, I’m working two jobs because I don’t have enough money! Jesus,” she growled.

  He held his hands out in front of him.

  “I’m sorry, Milly. The decision’s final though. We’ve already informed the commissar and the Writers Union. You’ll still have your Union membership. But we can’t keep you on.”

  She clenched her jaw and held back the slew of expletives that pressed at her teeth.

  “Why couldn’t Anna Louise tell me?” she said.

  He shook his head. “She fought for you, Milly. She offered to take no pay herself. You should know that.”

  “Dammit. Dammit all.” Milly kicked her foot into the wooden floor, then exited Borodin’s office. She went to her desk, pulled out her few folders of personal papers, and left without another word.

  She had lost her job at the Moscow Daily News. The laughable, earnest, unloved Moscow Daily News.

  As she walked home, she let the tears sting her cheeks as they fell. She didn’t care who saw, didn’t care what they thought. Most likely no one cared anyway. Marion hadn’t been fired, none of the men had been fired.

  Just her.

  BY THE TIME she threw herself on her bed in her hotel room to sob, she already knew what she would do. Have a good cry, and then write twice the stories she had been writing for Internews. They paid her by the piece, and if they saw more from her, they would buy more from her. She needed to stay a little longer, maybe another year, so she could collect enough material for her book. How could the story end now, with Moscow afraid of fascist invasion and the factories just beginning to hum? The Soviet Union was approaching a crucible, or perhaps cresting a mountain, and she needed to be here to witness what was on the other side.

  Milly sat up, then got off the bed to kneel next to it. Out from under the bed she pulled a box of papers, her archives, and she hefted it onto the mattress. She lifted the lid and flipped through the carbon copies of her old letters. Her early enthusiasm, her frustrations, her growing sense of mastery. All her letters from Zhenya, including the last one she had received, ten months ago. She looked up at the ceiling and wondered what he would have her do. This was a setback, yes. But life in Moscow was always changing. She replaced that box then pulled a smaller, lighter one out. She didn’t need to open it, but rather wanted to weigh the progress of her typed book draft. Not nearly enough.

  She would get by. She always had. Like her mother, scrubbing school floors until her knuckles bled. Milly could write fast and clear. She’d find a way to pay for the roof over her head and some bread in her belly. Then, she could publish her book, a truer account of life in Moscow than the fluff that Anna Louise wrote, and a more clear-eyed look at the passions a
nd perils of building socialism than anyone had written before. She gritted her teeth.

  The next day, Milly stepped out from the telegraph office onto the sidewalk and fumbled to button the uppermost button of her camel hair coat. Lord, it was cold already. A horse-drawn cart lumbered past in the street, and a black Ford buzzed past it, startling the horse. The poor beast should have been used to such disruptions by now, but Milly sympathized. Change is hard to adapt to. She clenched her gloved fist as she watched.

  The staccato patter of the news stories she had just wired filled her head while her stomach rumbled. This was an update to Internews, which they didn’t pay her nearly enough for. She wondered which of the four stories in this wire they might be most interested in commissioning a full story for, while on the sidewalk an old woman with a kerchief binding her hair shuffled, hunched over like a comma. Maybe the story about the Soviet impatience with the dithering non-intervention committee, charged with preventing anyone from fueling Spain’s war fires by providing weapons. In practice, only the governments who might have helped the democratically elected Spanish Republic were the ones to abide by the agreement, while the fascist powers flaunted it, smiling to the committee and delivering munitions and even fighters to the right-wing military rebels now chewing through Spain’s territory. Milly kicked a rock into the street where it disappeared in a slick of rotting leaves. She didn’t blame the Soviet spokesman for threatening to disregard the unfair blockade. The fascists shouldn’t be able to use their willingness to break rules to overtake another European country. No one should be bound by rules that weren’t fair.

  She hoped that was the story the editor would pick, but she knew it was more likely to be the arrest of the Soviet officials charged with granting themselves outrageous gifts in advance of next month’s revolutionary holiday. Sneering at another country’s shortfalls and hypocrisy was a winner for the international papers. She reached up into her coat sleeve and gave the edge of her glove a tug, pulling it up over her cold wrist bone. The city was already sawing away at her body, winter ready to cut her into pieces.

  THREE DAYS LATER, Milly was leaving the Savoy lobby when the desk clerk ran up to her.

  “Miss Bennett, there’s someone here for you. Now.” His grip on her arm hurt, and she snatched it away.

  “I’m going to work, Citizen,” she said. “Can’t it wait?” She was already at least half an hour late to the interview she was conducting with the American ambassador, Bill Bullitt, who was finally talking to her. He was growing frustrated with Stalin, and she hoped she might get an interesting story out of him. Maybe a breaking story.

  He clucked his tongue and shook his head. No. Then he waved over a stout man in worn blue trousers and a heavy brown jacket still buttoned up to his low-hanging chin.

  “Alexei Andreievich,” the man said, and the clerk disappeared. “Pravda.” One of the two official Soviet newspapers. “And here’s my colleague, Captain, er …” He paused, then mumbled a last name as a uniformed man in a long coat approached. Milly looked at the embroidered lines on the man’s coat collar and sucked in a breath. NKVD.

  “Let’s have this conversation somewhere more comfortable. Your room, perhaps,” Alexei said, his bushy eyebrows raised, as if it were a real question.

  “Yes.” She wrapped her arms around herself.

  They led her toward the elevator. She started to protest that they could take the stairs, it was only on the third floor, but then she pinched her mouth shut. As they waited for its clanking descent, her thoughts raced over what was in her room, what notes she might have left carelessly scattered. Maybe this captain was here to conduct a thorough search, exposing her doomed marriage and her foolish affair with Lindesay, and the writer was here to humiliate her by publicizing it. In the elevator, she looked over at the NKVD officer, who was opening and closing his gloved hands, as if to stretch them. Her mouth went dry.

  They entered the room without a word, and when Milly closed the door behind them, the captain walked straight toward the small table on the other side of the room from her bed. He paused, frowned at the papers on the table, then took two more steps and went to the window, where he stopped, his arms clasped in front of himself as if he were at attention. Her notes, including the most recent pages she had typed for her book, were scattered on the table.

  She unbuttoned her coat and hoped she didn’t smell of fear.

  “Our contacts tell us,” Alexei said, then shuddered with a racking cough. He raised a hand and recovered. “They tell us that yesterday the corrupt Hearst newspapers published a telegram from their staff reporter—that would be you—saying, and I quote, ‘The USSR intends by all means necessary to expedite the shipment of weapons and other war materiel to Spain. And the USSR is ready to act against the attempts of other states to interfere with this shipment of Soviet weapons.’” He lowered the typewritten page he had been reading from and glared at her. The captain shifted his weight.

  The room was silent.

  “‘Ready to act?’” Alexei quoted again, his voice dark. “Is that what you meant?”

  That quote wasn’t exactly what she had wired to her editor, especially not about expediting shipments. But on the other hand, she had reported on the Soviet frustration with the useless non-intervention agreement. That news had seemed interesting but harmless. The foreign ministry was frustrated, her contacts had told her as much, and all she had done was report the truth. Her pulse pounded in her throat, and she looked at the captain, whose face was impassive.

  The Soviets were playing a delicate foreign policy game, she guessed. They must not want their frustration with the non-intervention committee known, though she didn’t understand why they would pretend to be happy with British and American efforts to dither while Spain burned. Milly swallowed, her throat dry, and glanced again at her table. Her original telegram to Internews from the twenty-seventh lay there, in a stack of other papers, and she suspected she didn’t want anyone to see it. It would be harder to deny whatever it was she needed to deny if the NKVD had evidence. She hugged her arms around herself, and her legs began to quiver.

  “Why are you telling me this?”

  The reporter frowned, then coughed again.

  “I am here to discover the truth and correct the record. The captain has come along to deal with the situation in the case that my suspicions are incorrect.”

  Milly glanced back and forth between the men, who seemed to be ignoring each other. She was the one trying to discover the truth, she wanted to say. She parted her lips, but the captain pulled one glove tighter onto his hand, then looked up at her with a raised eyebrow.

  “I am glad you told me,” Milly said, the words tasting like ash. “That’s not what I wrote.”

  “I knew the lying capitalist Hearst had fabricated the story,” Alexei said. “Now we will publish our own story. The truth. Can you read this and tell me if it is correct?” He handed her a paper.

  Milly read out loud.

  “I did not send the telegram that was published by Internews dated 27 October 1936. I did not receive such information from the Soviet Foreign Office.” Her stomach had soured, and she lowered the paper.

  “You can sign at the bottom.” He extended a pen toward her.

  Behind the captain, the radiator clanked, and Milly gave a small jump.

  She took the pen, though she bobbled and nearly dropped it, and went to the small table. The captain nodded and took a step back to give her space.

  Izvestia and Pravda would surely both publish her “statement,” if one newspaper had gone to the trouble of sending a reporter here. She began to sweat. Her editors in London would hear of her retraction, and she wasn’t sure what she would say. The editors had mischaracterized her telegram, but she knew that if the Soviet Foreign Office was this angry about the news story, there must have been some truth in what Internews published. That truth, that’s what her readers deserved. The Soviet Union was frustrated at the fascists’ flagrant violations of the w
eapons ban, and she had heard rumors that Stalin was preparing something more than a public statement. American readers would need to know Moscow might change its position, and if so, perhaps Washington could also stop its useless non-intervention policy. If she renounced the story, she would be lying to those readers.

  She looked again at the captain, who had tipped his head up to stare at the ceiling. Signing also meant preserving her visa. She wasn’t happy here, it was true, but she wasn’t finished with Russia. If she displeased the Foreign Office, she could be kicked out, or … The captain shifted his weight, and the floor creaked. Rose, an Englishwoman who had once worked at Moscow Daily News and more recently spent a few years writing on her own, had disappeared. Arrested by the NKVD, the rumors said.

  Milly laid a trembling hand against the paper and signed.

  “Randolph Hearst is a liar and a fascist,” Alexei said as he took her statement and folded it into his coat. “I don’t know how you can work for him.”

  With that, he spun around and exited the room. The captain followed, whispering an apology as he squeezed between Milly and the bed. Outside in the hallway, Alexei coughed again.

  “I don’t know how you can work for a thuggish propaganda outlet,” she muttered in English toward the still-open door. But her stomach clenched, and she sat on the edge of her bed. She did know.

  On November 2, both Soviet newspapers printed articles savaging Hearst as a liar and quoting her refutation of the October cable. Her limbs felt at risk of dissolving and floating away as she cut the articles out from the Soviet papers. She typed out the quote and then walked through fresh-fallen snow to the Northern Telegraph office, where she sent a cable to her editor in London. “Statements available if desired,” she wrote, her stomach knotted and nauseous. Maybe if she was honest with her editor, that would erase the smear of guilt souring her stomach. Later, she dropped off a letter to Borodin and Anna Louise at the newsroom, offering to explain. She waited outside on the sidewalk for an hour, pacing in the cruel cold, but no one came out of the old palace. That night, she spent half her remaining rubles on a filleted herring, which she fried on the primus stove in her room and ate alone, trying to savor the flesh as she cried.