Salt the Snow

by Carrie Callaghan

  She was so alone.

  Three days later, Milly turned at the top of the stairs toward her floor, and she saw the door to her room was open.

  “What is this?” she gasped when she reached the room.

  The reporter Alexei Andreievich stood in the room, his arms crossed. The NKVD captain was kneeling by her bed, and upon hearing her, he stood, with a box in his hands.

  “Your paper posted our denial,” Alexei Andreievich said, his faced narrowed into a grim line. “And said we had pressured you. What are you writing to them, Miss Bennett? Or Mrs. Mitchell? Or Konstantinova?”

  Milly took a step back, but her ankle rolled on the uneven carpet beneath her, and her leg buckled, smashing her into the wall. Neither of the men moved to help her, and she remained standing. Her ankle throbbed. She leaned against the doorframe, her eyes on the box in the captain’s gloved hands.

  “They did not ask me about that, and I did not say I was pressured,” she said, silently cursing the London editor for reading between the lines too well.

  “We need you to—”

  “Look.” Milly gingerly stepped on her ankle and moved toward Alexei. He raised both eyebrows. Her pulse raced.

  “You have to let it go. Don’t give the stupid story any more attention. They are having fun with you, don’t you see?” At her expense, no less, and Milly cursed the editor again. Some fellow named Smith, who had surely never thought how his bold gambit from the safety of London would affect her.

  “Stupid story?” He narrowed his eyes again, then glanced at the NKVD officer. The captain drew his arms more tightly around the box.

  “You know what I mean. You’re giving Hearst attention, making it seem like you have something to hide by continuing to deny their claims. Let it go.” She was sweating now, probably in rhythm with the pulsing pain of her ankle.

  “Just let their lies stand?”

  She began to speak, but her voice quaked and broke, so she took a breath and tried again. “Sometimes dignified silence is the best response.”

  He cocked his head, looked again at the officer, then straightened. “I will speak to my editor.”

  With that, Alexei Andreievich lifted his chin and paraded out, squeezing past Milly by the door. But the captain remained in the room. His eyes were large and still.

  “Is there a receipt for me to sign?” Milly said quietly.

  “No,” he said.

  He nodded and, with the box in his arms like a gift, he walked out.

  Milly turned and watched as they walked silently down the hallway, where the captain’s long strides quickly caught up with the journalist’s waddling. The captain overtook the other man and made the turn around the corner to the staircase first, and then they were both out of sight.

  “Shit,” Milly said. She limped over to her bed and bent down. As she had suspected, it was her book that had vanished. Slowly, she lowered herself onto the bed and tried to remember every word she had written. Was any of it counterrevolutionary? She hadn’t meant it to be, but what was clear-eyed to her was probably blasphemous to an NKVD officer. Once they found someone to translate it. She took off her glasses, rubbed her eyes, then replaced the frames on her nose and limped her way down to the lobby. She would look at the ankle later. Now she had a telegram to send.

  She was fed up with letting men yank her this way and that. If Internews didn’t make her a full-time correspondent with more money and more control over her stories, well, she’d stop writing for them. And if she was a full-time correspondent, surely they would protect her from any angry secret police who might come for a follow-up interview. As she limped, her resolution stiffened. It wouldn’t be running away to issue an ultimatum here, no, that was taking a stand. If they didn’t offer more pay and stature, she would be resigning. Effective December 1.

  28

  DECEMBER 1936

  MILLY WAS SEATED in the American ambassador’s office. Bill Bullitt stood at his desk, his signature red carnation sagging from the buttonhole of his suit jacket as he leaned over to look at the newspaper spread out on the wood.

  “Do you see this, Milly?” He pointed at the paper then straightened. “There’s a war going on in Spain! After six years in Russia, you should give yourself a gift. A trip to somewhere relaxing. My god, woman. Try Bermuda. White sands, blue sea …” He looked into the distance, as if the beach were behind her. Ambassador Bullitt had once been one of the Soviet Union’s most steadfast defenders, but since relations between President Roosevelt and the Soviets had soured last year, so had he. Milly sympathized. They both felt, in some way, that the Soviet Union had let them down. Backed away from a promise or, worse, revealed that it never intended to keep the promise in the first place.

  Or, even worse, and what Milly worried about as she lay in bed at night, Moscow proved that the promise of a better world was impossible from the beginning. That people would never grow into better selves.

  “Bill, you’d go yourself if you could. That Philadelphia blue blood notwithstanding.” She forced a smile.

  In the past year, Milly had grown more comfortable around the American officials who had once disdained her. The Internews job, which she no longer had, had helped. But so had their appreciation for both her experience and her skepticism.

  Bullitt sighed. Then he reached inside his jacket, uncapped the pen he pulled out, and signed her papers.

  “There’s your safe conduct pass and exit visa,” he said. “Don’t put yourself in front of any gun barrels, Mrs. Mitchell. It’s not becoming to sport a big hole in oneself.”

  Milly waved a hand.

  “Battle will still be better than this place.” The bravado felt false, but it was what the situation called for.

  “Moscow sets a low bar.” He folded up the newspaper on his desk. “If I were escaping, I’d refer Paris, myself.”

  “Mention it to the president,” Milly said as she put away her papers and gathered her coat.

  “Oh, I have.” The ambassador smiled, and Milly returned the gesture with a half-smile before nodding and leaving. He was fascinating, a mix of rigid upper class and fierce iconoclasm, bound together with a bright intelligence. If only she had known him longer. If only he socialized with newspaperwomen.

  Milly spent the next week making her farewells. After Internews had ignored her telegram, there was nothing else for Milly to do but leave Russia. She had no job, no love, and only Marion Merriman for real friendship. Internews didn’t want her, nor, it seemed, did anyone else, unless the NKVD had plans for her. But now that it was time to go, she still felt surprised. Undoing her life here was harder than she had envisioned. When the time came, she rushed to give away most of her clothes to the neediest Americans she knew, she scrambled to make sure she had money from her accounts in the States wired to a bank in Paris, and she hopped around town saying farewell to those she could. So many of her friends over the years had left, so she had only the long-term holdouts like herself, and the more recent arrivals, like Bob and Marion Merriman. She even spared an afternoon to say goodbye to Louis Fischer, whose resolute faith in the Soviet Union seemed to be wavering, though he was too proud to say as much. Lindesay she skipped. Anna Louise Strong she took to the ice-skating park on the Moskva River, but Anna Louise kept worrying that someone would see them and judge her as decadent, so they left. Milly gave her an awkward hug and thanked her for all she had done. Their friendship had been rocky, and Milly didn’t enjoy Anna Louise’s company, but she knew she wouldn’t have survived Moscow without the woman’s boisterous help.

  At Olga’s, Milly sat and shared two quiet glasses of tea. There wasn’t much to say. Milly had needed to file for divorce so the Americans would change her passport back from married, since the Soviets still refused to provide any proof of Zhenya’s death. She hadn’t told Olga, and she wouldn’t. When they finished their tea, Olga sobbed briefly into Milly’s shoulder before drying her eyes on her sleeve and disappearing into her bedroom. When she emerged, she placed her cl
osed fist into Milly’s hand, then opened it. Zhenya’s tortoiseshell bracelet glistened in Milly’s palm.

  “I can’t,” Milly whispered.

  “You must.” Olga’s voice quavered. “He loved you. Take that to America and show people. Tell his story.”

  Milly nodded, though her hand shook as she dropped the bracelet into her pocket. Her first effort at telling Zhenya’s story now sat in NKVD files. Fortunately, in that first draft she had barely touched on his plight, and she’d had the sense to leave Olga entirely out of the narrative. Now she owed them both a second try.

  “Could you give this to Victor, please?” She gave Olga a sealed envelope. Inside was a short letter saying she understood. Zhenya had forgiven him long ago, and she did too.

  As she left Olga’s building, the relentless wind drilled into her chest and her aching heart. She took off her glasses, wiped them, then rubbed at her eyes. This was not the Moscow she had expected, six years earlier. She had gained and lost in equal measure.

  TWO DAYS LATER, Milly took a train from Moscow to Leningrad, where she switched trains to board a Finnish train headed to the border. This train gleamed, in comparison to the battered Soviet railcars, and though Milly wished she weren’t the type of person who noticed, she was nearly delirious with comfort as she sank into the soft bedding of the clean cabin.

  When the train arrived at the Finnish border, all the passengers disembarked and stood shivering in the snow while they waited in line outside the border post. Milly had only three suitcases, two of which were her archive of letters and carbon copies, and she worried as she dragged them forward in line. It was bad enough the NKVD had her unfinished draft. In her letters, she had recorded dozens upon dozens of less-than-flattering stories, and the truth about Zhenya was written across some of those papers too. A cursory glance, like what the censors had surely given each individual letter, would reveal little. But the whole collection, at a time when the Soviets already regarded her with suspicion, thanks to Hearst, could send her right back to Moscow. Or Siberia.

  The man in front of her, a German, protested loudly that he was anti-fascist, opposed to Hitler, but still the guards took him and his single suitcase into a back room. Their voices grew muffled. Milly’s arms trembled as she held her suitcases.

  The soldier turned to her and asked for her passport. He flipped through it, then slung her first suitcase onto a table where he opened it. That case was the one with her clothes: one nice black dress, three pairs of wool trousers, and the few other things worth taking out of Moscow.

  The soldier snapped her suitcase shut. Her palms were damp as she looked at him and tried to figure out if it would be better to watch him closely or look away. He shifted his gaze behind her, narrowed his eyes, then stamped her passport. He waved her on.

  When the train finally blew its whistle to announce their departure from the Soviet station, Milly pressed her nose against the cold glass. The train rolled slowly across a bridge that spanned a frozen river. When the train, crawling, reached the middle, two dozen uniformed Russian soldiers and NKVD officers jumped off and walked over the thick ice back toward Russia. Inside, the train was silent. Milly wondered if the German man had boarded.

  THREE WEEKS LATER, in Paris, she stood inside Brentano’s bookshop running her finger down the spines of the books on Europe. Surely there was a good history of Spain, new or used, in this place. She had already checked two of the other English-language bookshops in Paris, to no avail.

  “Spain’s popular,” one of the clerks had said with a shrug.

  “Then you should stock more books on it,” Milly replied. He shrugged again.

  This selection seemed more promising, more books about Spain at least, but no recent histories. She doubted knowing about Miguel de Cervantes would help her understand the current tensions tearing Spain apart. Maybe she should scrap the history idea and buy some Spanish poetry in translation. She’d heard the Spaniards were serious about their poets.

  “Milly Bennett!” A familiar voice glowed behind her, and Milly spun around to see the tall Bob Merriman standing with a smile on his young face. The heavy-rimmed glasses that always seemed too serious for him hugged closely to his eyes.

  “Studying collective farms in Paris?” Milly asked.

  Bob laughed. “If only. No, I’m taking the same plunge as you, in a fashion. Going to Spain.” He lowered his voice. “To fight.”

  “They’re taking Americans?” Milly had heard of the fascist military incorporating foreign troops from Italy, and the main rebel army absorbing the colonized Moroccan troops, but she hadn’t heard of Americans.

  “The loyalists will take anyone they can get to help defend the Republic, from what I hear,” Bob said, glancing around the empty store. “Though of course it’s still against our own laws to go. Non-intervention committee nonsense. Marion didn’t want me to go.”

  “Marion’s opinion had nothing to do with the non-intervention pact, I assure you. Your Marion’s a smart girl. You two want to have dinner tonight?”

  Bob shook his head, his eyes on the ground.

  “She’s in Moscow. It wouldn’t be safe for her in Spain, and she doesn’t have a visa for France. Besides, I won’t be in Spain for long. The war will be won by spring.”

  “Here’s hoping, kid.” Milly looked back at the bookshelf and spied a promising title. The Soul of Spain. Not what she was looking for, but it would do. She grabbed it, then pulled Bob toward the cash register. “Have you bought your gas mask yet? That’s where I’m headed next. One for me and four more for the other AP fellows already there.”

  “Gas mask?”

  Milly shook her head. “For a guy with some reserve officer training, you sure are clueless.” She smiled, thinking of Axelrod. Maybe she should send him a photograph of her and her masks: proof that, at long last, she had fulfilled the requirement. But only because in Spain, she might need the protection. “Come on. We’ll get you a gas mask,” she said.

  Marion might not be able to be there, but in her absence, Milly would do her damnedest to keep her young friend’s beloved husband safe.

  Someone deserved happiness in marriage.

  PART THREE

  The streets of rearguard Valencia are feverish with the backwash of war.

  —MILLY BENNETT

  29

  FEBRUARY 1937

  THE AUTOMOBILE BOUNCED along the macadam road between Madrid and Valencia, and Milly craned her neck to watch the sky while the driver cursed in impenetrable Spanish. In the back, two men, also writing for the Republic’s Foreign Press Bureau, dozed. Milly was tired, but she couldn’t sleep. She scanned the harsh blue sky for bombers. They still had at least an hour before they made it back to Valencia, that ocean-side city that counted as home these days.

  In Madrid, she had tried to sift some good news from the rubble that was the Spanish war. The rebellious fascist generals had stalled west of Madrid, that much was true. But they had seized the coastal gem of Málaga, slaughtering hundreds of government supporters, if the reports were to be believed, and thus deprived the Republic of an important port. Milly could feel the fascist noose tightening around the government, no matter how valiantly the loyal troops defended the Republican holdings. And now, as the writers raced back to Valencia, the rebel forces might as well have been chasing them. There was a battle brewing to the east of Madrid, and Bob Merriman’s hodgepodge collection of American, British, and Irish troops was going to be involved. The Abraham Lincoln Battalion, they called themselves, and though they were passionate, Milly had seen them two weeks earlier in their training camp, lunging through frigid mud to try to bayonet straw dummies with broomsticks. There was no ammunition, Bob had whispered as she stood, her notebook slack and her pen capped in her gloved hands. In the cold air, someone yelled for the troops to come in for the sludge they called lunch, and then admonished the men “to study, to fortify ourselves in revolutionary doctrine.”

  Milly wanted to ask about how doctrine would de
fend them against bullets, but she saw the pride in Bob’s eyes while he watched the tired men listen carefully as the political lecture began, and she kept silent.

  In recent weeks, Bob’s correspondence had grown vague. Something was happening.

  The driver downshifted and turned the car off the main road onto a smaller, bumpier one. Milly groaned. Around them languished rolling hillsides prickly with bare olive trees. In Spain the sun felt closer than it ever had in Moscow, no matter how cold the Spanish air was, and she relished the harsh brilliance. The car circled around a hill and a small gas station came into view.

  One of the Spaniards in the back awoke when the car stopped.

  “I know this place,” Milly said as he rubbed his eyes. She scanned the bright horizon, while the other man slumbered on, or at least pretended to. The curves of the hills beyond the wooden gas station were certainly the same she had seen before. She nudged the sleeping man, since he was the more friendly. “Come translate for me. Por favor.”

  He said nothing, but opened his eyes and looked at her. Then he got out of the car, and Milly followed.

  “I was here last month,” she said as they walked across the crunching dirt. “With the American air attaché. Passing through.” She hoped he wasn’t getting the wrong idea from the mention of her travels; the American air attaché was a quiet man with a wife and son waiting in Virginia. Not Milly’s type. “We met some children, and one promised me a drawing. A boy named Peter. Can you ask?”

  He rubbed his eyes and nodded before walking into the little café next to the two pumps. Milly waited, then followed. Maybe she could find a cigarette to buy him for his trouble.