She walked over to the park, which also faced the Ministry of Propaganda’s requisitioned building, and sat on a bench facing a marble statue of a man sitting on a bench while cherubs cavorted at his feet. A pediatrician, honored by the city nearly two decades earlier.
She wondered if he had children of his own, and if it was different for men when they didn’t. Hope was the cruelest master, hadn’t someone said that? Or maybe it was simply true. She hadn’t expected to foster a life, so when her little ball began glowing inside her, she didn’t have her defenses up. Milly wrapped her arms around herself as she looked at the white stone doctor, his legs crossed, his eyes downcast. She mimicked the position. But copying someone else didn’t make her feel better, so she unfolded herself and stared at the palm fronds splitting the sky above her head.
She was late for work. By another life’s timeline, she would have resigned two weeks ago. She would have a baby growing inside of her, and she would be on an ocean liner bound for the United States. Well, that future didn’t come to pass. But it didn’t mean she had to stick with her old future, the one she’d been plodding through before the pregnancy. She could resign from the Foreign Press Bureau.
The thought alone made her smile. Maybe she could go somewhere. She didn’t have to be here, in Valencia, if it didn’t suit her. She loved the city with its pastel and stone buildings and its ancient cathedrals sprinkled everywhere, but she didn’t have to stay.
She stood from the bench, brushed her skirt straight, and walked to the train station. She would just look, she thought as she was walking. Maybe she would get an idea. Or maybe she would go happily back to the Foreign Press Bureau to edit translations and help people understand what Spanish democracy was suffering.
The station must have been from about the same era as her marble pediatrician friend in the park. While she was dancing on beaches in Hawaii and dodging bullets in China, this city was going about its serious business of building railroads and healing sick children. Maybe Valencia wasn’t the place for her.
Inside the long station hall, the windows rattled with the noise of hundreds of passengers scuttling to and fro. Milly nudged her way through a crowd of soldiers so she could see the train tables.
“Excuse me,” a man said in New York English when he bumped into her. “Sorry about that, lady.”
She looked at the group more closely.
“Is Bob Merriman here?” she asked.
“Captain Merriman? Nah, he’s at the front already. But you want to see our commander?” The man turned away. “Major Amlie! Some broad here to see you!”
Milly held up a hand to tell him not to worry, but then let it fall to her side. Maybe she could get a good story out of this. It had been a while since she’d filed anything with the international editors.
The commander approached them, his face stern.
“McCarthy, I was worried.” The commander towered over the other man, but he hunched his shoulders, as if to make himself shorter.
“I’m sorry, Major Amlie. I didn’t mean to be late. But listen, this lady here wants to talk to you.”
The tall man nodded. “I’m glad you’re here, McCarthy. Steve Nelson over there needs some help with the artillery, could you help him organize it?”
Milly was surprised that the officer framed his request so mildly, but the soldier merely dipped his chin.
“Yes, sir,” he said.
“Hans, you mean. You go on leave with a pretty girl and you forget all your solidarity?” He gave a half smile in Milly’s direction.
“I wish she were mine,” McCarthy said, and flashed a smile at Milly before walking off.
“I’m sorry,” Hans said, blushing. “I hadn’t meant to scare your boyfriend away.”
“It’s all right. I just met him. I mean—” She caught herself when he blushed even more deeply. “He’s not my boyfriend. Just someone I ran into here a minute ago.” She looked up at the commanding officer. “I’m Milly Bennett. With the AP and the Foreign Press Bureau. I guess I’ll be seeing you around.”
Hans took a step back. “Will you be writing stories about us?”
“Do you think I should?
He looked over at the men, sitting on packages of clothing tied with string or huddled in groups, smoking and laughing.
“I don’t see why not,” he said. “They’re a brave bunch.”
“Where can I find you?”
Hans shook his head. “That’s not my information to give out, Miss. But if you contact the Brigade authorities, they’ll let you know. It was a pleasure meeting you.” He doffed his cap, then turned and began calling out requests to the other men meandering through the echoing hall.
Milly watched for a few minutes before she left to head to the Ministry. It was a good idea, going out to cover the Internationals. Maybe she should. But for now, some mindless writing would clear her head, some hours spent crafting sentences that someone else wanted her to write. Information bulletins that shaped the world according to the wishes of her superiors, rather than translating the chaotic and painful world that she saw. A world where blackout orders only made Valencia’s star-washed nightlife more romantic, as couples nuzzled by candlelight in cafés even while shrapnel-scarred trucks limped past, in from the front. A world where airplanes could drop bombs on Valencia’s port and the movie theaters played on. A world where a group of men willing to fight and die for someone else’s cause could make Milly forget, for a moment, her pain.
34
SEPTEMBER 1937
THE FIGHTING CAME fast and hard, according to what news they heard in Valencia. The Aragon front had exploded, and the Internationals were scrambling to retake—or was it hold—a little crossroads town called Belchite.
“I want to write about it,” Milly told the new senior editor at the Foreign Press Bureau, a sallow-skinned man with perpetual bags under his eyes. She wondered if he slept. She certainly wasn’t sleeping, not much. That was part of the reason she needed to travel.
“A front-line story?” He rubbed his chin.
“That’s right. We’ll tell people how it really is.” And if he wouldn’t let her publish it, maybe she could sell it to AP.
He pulled out a notebook from his back pocket, wrote a few words, then shoved it back into his trousers.
“Go ahead. Get a pass from the third floor”—an administrative office—“and head out to the front. Write something interesting.”
“That’s all I do.” She laughed. What lies. She thought interesting thoughts, but it had been months since she had written a solid story. But now was the time to try. If she couldn’t be happy, at least she could be a decent newspaperwoman. There were stories out there only she could tell.
It took nearly the whole day to get the pass, but eventually she had all the signatures she needed, and the driver of a propaganda truck headed north was willing to give her a ride. The truck was constructed like a gigantic megaphone, with a massive cone on the back that amplified whatever messages they were trying to send to the enemy troops to get them to desert. Mostly opera to the Italian fascists, or so she had heard. She scribbled a few impressions in her notebook.
They arrived after nightfall, and Milly tried to sleep in the truck with the windows open. But even at night, the air blowing across the plains felt like the wafts coming down from one of Hawaii’s volcanoes, and her now-chronic insomnia kept her tossing and turning. At least at home she had the London Times correspondent who lived on the floor beneath her and read her passages of Romeo and Juliet at night through the air ducts. His unrequited affection helped, somehow. As if his yearning balanced her own, even though they couldn’t ease each other’s pain.
She must have slept a little though, because she woke in the morning with her hair sweaty and plastered to her forehead. While she was sitting up and trying to arrange herself, one of the soldiers banged on the door.
“The major wants to talk to you,” he yelled through the aluminum.
“I’m coming,” Mi
lly said, then cringed as a volley of gunfire sounded in the distance.
“Better hurry, before things get bad,” he yelled.
Milly plucked at her dress, hoping to generate a little cool breeze. If a battle was unfolding here, she could be the first to write about it. She could tell the story the way she wanted to, and no one could force her pen otherwise.
She approached a grove of olive trees where men in tattered uniforms were crouching, some tending the wounds of others. A lanky man emerged hunched over from under a bower of branches, and when he straightened, she recognized the tall commander she had met at the train station.
“Major,” she called, hoping she’d remembered his rank correctly. He didn’t react, so she yelled again. Frowning, the man looked at her, then he brightened.
“Just call me Hans, Miss Bennett,” he said. In the distance, artillery exploded and a stream of machine gun fire flew. “You’re here to see the battle?”
“Yes. And it’s Milly.” She didn’t want to sound like a tourist. “I’ll write a story, tell the Americans how their brave men are fighting to keep Spain free.”
His eyes softened. “I don’t know about brave, but we’ll take whatever attention we can get. Be careful.” He gestured for her to follow him.
“We’re trying to take this town,” he said, pointing south at the moderate-sized village. Two church towers reached up from either end of the long rows of houses. An explosion sounded in the town, and a cloud of dust burst up. “The defenders don’t want to leave, though. In the last town we saw graffiti painted on the wall that said ‘Kill a red, get one less year in purgatory.’ I hear it sounds better in Spanish.”
Milly wrote down a few quick lines, but the zipper of the machine gun fire made her hands tremble. She hoped her notes would be legible later. Assuming there was a later.
“Why do we need this town?” She pointed at the expanse of low hills stretching all around beneath a large blue sky that gave the impression of presiding over a flat land.
“The short answer is, because headquarters said so.” He smiled, and she noticed his eyes crinkled at the edges like fresh gingerbread. “The longer answer has something to do with a crossroads and trying to recapture Zaragoza. But that feels awfully far away.”
She didn’t write that part. In town, an artillery shell screamed and exploded upon the wall of a building, which collapsed in a pile of bricks. Milly flinched.
“I wish they’d just surrender,” Hans said. His shoulders sagged as he gazed over at the battle, just a few hundred yards away. He looked more sad than keyed up, and Milly wondered how a gentle man like himself had fallen into command in war.
“I’d better get back to it,” he said. “Will you be all right back here?”
“Sure,” Milly said with more conviction that she felt. It seemed unlikely that the rebels holed up in those beat-up buildings would come cascading out to assault the improvised camp in the olive grove, but she wasn’t sure she wanted to bet her life on it. Still, she didn’t want to let the major down. “I’ll be fine.”
He turned back to look at her and gave her a quick smile.
“Tomorrow’s my birthday, you know. Let’s see if we win a town as my present.”
Milly returned to the relative safety of the olive grove, where she sat for the rest of the afternoon, peering around the trunk of a tree while the International machine guns spit bullets from their positions at the front of the grove and the men in the town crept from building to alley to house. The sandy orange bricks spit up a regular storm of debris that the wind carried north, back to the olive grove, and by the time night fell, Milly was fingering the dust out of her hair.
She spent the night in the truck, though she hardly slept through the sound of artillery and guns cratering the night. Before dawn, she had a meager breakfast of thin porridge. She hated to take even that from the soldiers, but she knew she would be grateful for the food later. The machine gun fire coming from town made it hard to swallow, but she tried.
A tall young man with jaundiced skin came and crouched next to her.
“We captured the church yesterday, did you hear? What do you think of it?” he said.
“The battle? I’m hardly a military expert.”
“Not like we were before we showed up, most of us.” He snorted. “You’re a reporter, you must know stuff. You’ve been places, right?”
Milly looked at the horizon, which was starting to brighten with the rising sun, defining the soft hills like the curves on a dancer’s muscled thigh.
“I have been places. It’s easy to forget sometimes, when you’re in them. That they’re places, I mean. Worth journeying to.”
He nodded, which was generous, since she knew she was making a hash of her thoughts.
“I’ve never had anyone write about me before,” he said. “Will you write about me?”
“Sure.” She pulled out her notebook. “What’s your name? Only if you want me to publish it, I mean.”
“Phil Detre. Captain.”
He told her a story about an alleyway he had assaulted the day before, and the grenades he had thrown at Captain Bob Merriman’s command.
“Merriman is here?” Milly sat up straight. It would be wonderful to see her old friend again.
He nodded. “Somewhere. Probably directing the assault down there.” He pointed toward the town. Most of the soldiers were based out of some sort of warehouse at the edge of town. “I’d better go see if I’m needed.”
Dawn was still breaking, and an airplane buzzed overhead. Everyone around her cringed and hid. One soldier, closer to the warehouse, pulled a flashlight from his pocket and flashed it up to the sky.
“What the hell is he doing?” hissed a soldier near Milly. “Mark, cut it out!” he called, but the man couldn’t hear or ignored him. She wanted to make a note of the scene, the trembling soldiers, the mad man with the flashlight, the hush that fell over the guns while everyone hoped for the airplane to pass, but her hands were shaking too much to hold a pencil. She nearly threw her breakfast up. The man with the light was only one hundred yards away.
Something hissed through the air, then crashed into the ground near the signaling man.
A brown lump lay inert.
A second crash, and a large unmoving shadow.
The man with the flashlight grabbed the two wrapped crates and dragged them up to the olive trees. The soldiers tore into them and laughed.
Inside were cured hams hocks and bread, packed above small bags of letters.
The man who had signaled the plane threw back his head in laughter. “The fascists have supplied us, boys!”
Then he began handing out lumps of bread. He reached for Milly but recoiled when he looked at her.
“What’s a gal doing here?” he asked. He looked around at the other soldiers, who were tearing into their crusts. “Paul, you sure hired an ugly whore. Send her back.” He scowled at Milly and thrust the bread he had been about to give to her to someone else.
“I’m not—” she began to object, but the man grabbed his gun and ran back toward the village, where the fighting had swelled up again. Someone yelled behind them, and most of the other men ran too. Two soldiers hanging back, both with bandages wrapped around their arms, dragged the fascist supplies back deeper into the olive grove.
Milly turned and threw up the runny porridge she had been trying to hold down all morning. Reflexively, she glanced around, worried someone would see her. Especially that man, so high on his theft from the fascists that he could cut her down. No one was looking. Her hand shook as she leaned against the small tree, and she sunk to the ground. She tried to conjure some rage, but all she could feel was defeat and the burden of her losses—the men she had loved who hadn’t loved her, the baby who couldn’t find a home in her womb, the friends who forgot to respond to her letters. Maybe she should die here. Maybe this was what her life had led her to, all her running and dreaming of writing stories and trying to save two broken marriages, all that was
leading her to Spain where she could take a bullet between the eyes and martyr herself for the Spanish cause.
It would make a swell story. She was pretty sure she’d be the first newspaperwoman to die in combat. Her blood would water the roots of this tree and season this dry earth beneath her knees.
She stood up.
Behind her, the propaganda truck with the massive horn mounted on its roof sounded, calling on the Spaniards to surrender, and she sat back down. Even her grandiose gestures were idiotic.
Against the olive tree, she watched the battle and took no notes.
After a few hours, the gunfire and artillery began to slow and grow more sporadic, as if the fighting were a massive flock of starlings landing, leaving the sky quiet. Behind her another truck drove up.
Constancia de la Mora got out, and Milly ran over to her. She nearly embraced the younger woman, but collected herself as she approached on the dusty, rocky earth, and instead gave Constancia a nudge on the shoulder.
“Come to see the action?”
“I couldn’t let you have all the fun.” Constancia’s eyes glowed, and she looked over Milly’s shoulder at the caved-in roof of the church. “They really did a number on that church.”
“It’s been brutal out here,” Milly said.
“You’ll have a good story, then.”
Milly nodded, though she knew she wouldn’t. There wasn’t much she could write about this slow demolition of ancient brick buildings, all to extricate some stubborn fascists. This hardly seemed heroic.
Another artillery shell exploded, and Constancia fell to her knees. Then, it was silence.
“Nearly over, girls,” said a man behind them. “You here to help us celebrate?” He leered at them.
“Come on,” Milly hissed. She grabbed Constancia by the elbow. A fringe of the woman’s black hair, cropped below her ears, shined in the sun where it billowed out from under her gray cap.
Milly pulled her toward the town. Down a hill from the olive grove, across a dirt road, and then through an alleyway that led between two bullet-scraped buildings.
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