Salt the Snow

by Carrie Callaghan

  “What are you doing?” Constancia hissed. The area near them was quiet, but a few guns fired some blocks away.

  “We’re here to observe the battle, so that’s what we’re going to do. Up close,” Milly said. Then she stopped. “Go back, Constancia. I didn’t mean to drag you here. This is me being bold and mad and loony.”

  “But …” Constancia looked around, her eyes wide.

  “Go.” Milly turned her back toward the olive grove, and Constancia ran.

  The town was nearly in ruins, and a sickly rotting smell rolled over the heat emanating from the bricks. Milly walked a few more steps, until the alley led to a larger street. The buildings there must have been stores and fine homes, but now they were mostly gaping mouths filled with piles of brick at the back of the throat.

  Something moved in the shadows, and Milly froze. The scraping sound of a brick sliding then falling came from inside one of the houses.

  “Don’t shoot,” Milly said, then repeated it in Spanish. She held up her hands.

  Silence.

  She looked above the hole smashed through the building’s frontage and saw a poster proclaiming, simply, “Spain!” The symbol decorating the poster was probably some sort of fascist propaganda, but she didn’t recognize it. She probably should have.

  She took another step forward.

  “Don’t shoot,” she said again, though she had probably imagined the sound. If she could just pull down the poster, that would be enough to take back and prove she had been here. Had been brave. She could look at that poster and know that once she hadn’t run away.

  She crossed the street toward the damaged building, and as she did, the smell lashed at her. She gagged and covered her nose with her sleeve. Down the street, she saw a huddle of Internationals lighting cigarettes. The fighting must truly be over.

  She used her foot to tip over a large piece of cement, probably a cornice from a building corner, all while keeping her sleeve over her face.

  She stepped up on it.

  A woman shrouded in a mantle stepped out of the building.

  Milly shrieked and toppled.

  She threw her arms out and landed, wobbly but without injuring herself.

  “Don’t shoot!” she said again to the woman. But when she looked up, she saw the woman held a baby. The dusty black mantle on the woman’s head fell back from her forehead, and her cheeks showed the streak marks of tears.

  Milly took a step closer.

  The infant in the woman’s arms was dead. A crust of dried blood coated its small head, and a gray arm fell limp from its body. The baby’s fingers were curled inward, like a little fist wanting to nurse.

  The woman sobbed. She stood perfectly still, holding the baby close to her chest, but not squeezing it. Her thin cheeks spasmed as she wept, but she made no sound other than a gasping for breath.

  Milly wiped her sleeve against her own cheeks, and as she did, she felt the nub of the tortoiseshell bracelet. She slid it from her wrist and extended it toward the woman.

  “You can sell this,” she said in Spanish, or she tried to say. In English, she added, “The soldiers won’t hurt you. I know they don’t want to trouble the civilians. Just the fascist troops.”

  The woman had stopped sobbing, but still the tears ran down her face.

  “Hice nacer a la muerte,” she said.

  Milly understood. I gave birth to death.

  “Me too,” she whispered. She took a few more steps closer, until she could reach the woman. She slipped the bracelet in between the woman’s fingers and the bundle of her dead child.

  “You can sell it,” she repeated. “Zhenya would be glad to help.”

  He would. She pressed her eyes closed and imagined his smiling gray eyes and his blond hair, tousled by the breeze. He wouldn’t have known what to make of Spain, but he would have tried to ease this woman’s suffering.

  Blinking back tears, Milly turned around and walked back to the alley.

  As she crossed the main street, she saw a tall figure regarding her from the end of the block. In the bright sun it was hard to tell, but she thought she recognized Hans Amlie. The man tipped his cap at her. She raised a hand to wave, hoping her tremors didn’t show.

  She found Constancia interviewing the man who ran the sound truck. Milly joined their huddle but said nothing.

  Behind them, the sound truck whirred to life and began projecting calls to surrender. “Your leaders are lying to you,” a voice said in slow Spanish. Milly put her hands over her ears and still the voice pained her. “You will get no reinforcements. Come over to us and live.”

  And live, she thought. She ran her fingers over the lines of her face, caressing her large nose, her jutting chin, her smooth cheeks. How glad she was to be alive.

  “We should go,” Milly said to Constancia.

  To her surprise, the other woman agreed.

  “It reeks of death here,” she said. “I hadn’t expected that.”

  Milly shook her head slowly.

  “I hadn’t either. But now we can tell people, so everyone knows.”

  ON THE DRIVE back, Milly wrote furiously as the car bumped along the road. She described the battle, the sacrifices of the men, and the destruction the fascists left in their wake. She was unstinting in her evaluation of the loyalist troops’ offensive: all that sacrifice for a hollowed-out town with no strategic significance. None that she could see. She wrote and wrote.

  A day later, she typed up the story and handed it to the senior editor at the Foreign Press Bureau. She stood and watched as he read.

  His face grew pale.

  “You are mad,” he said in a low voice. The skin under his eyes grew even more green tinted as he blanched. “We cannot publish this. I cannot allow any newspaper in the world to publish this.”

  “You don’t understand. If people know the truth, they will fight harder. The Americans will change their policy, they’ll abandon non-intervention when they learn how bad it is here.”

  “They’ll throw their money after a losing cause?”

  He gasped as soon as the words left his mouth. The admission hung in the air between them, and in the quiet, Milly heard the gentle patter of typewriter keys in the next room. Like the distant fall of gunfire.

  The editor reached into his desk, pulled something out, then held Milly’s pages up. Before she could say anything, he lit them on fire.

  The flames surged, hungry, and leapt up the paper. Quickly, he dropped the burning pages into the metal wastebasket by his feet.

  “Don’t pull a stunt like that again,” he said, articulating each word carefully. “That is not how we win a war.”

  “What do you know,” Milly said.

  “More than you.” He glowered at her.

  She turned on her heel and stormed out.

  Outside, a girl in a yellow dress held up a bunch of flowers and called out a price. Her hair was divided into two braids, each slinking down the back of her browned ears. Milly blinked back a tear.

  “Here.” She pulled out the smallest peso note she had and handed it over. The girl wouldn’t have change, no one could find any coins these days, but Milly didn’t care. At least she was doing something to help. The girl handed out two branches of white blossoms, not a flower Milly recognized.

  “Gracias.”

  The girl trotted off, happy with her sale. Milly grasped the branches tightly, then noticed she had crushed a few of the flowers. She loosened her grip and tried to straighten the blossoms. Two of them fluttered to the ground.

  Back in her apartment, she pulled the notes she had made from her notebook and rewrote the story. It wasn’t good, but it was something. She couldn’t mail it, the censors would filter it, but she could give it to one of the correspondents passing through. Tucked into their luggage, the story would escape the notice of all except the most diligent border guard, and the guards had more worrying things to search for than sad news stories. She would find someone to give it to.

  Mont
hs earlier, during one of her visits in Madrid, Milly had found Ernest Hemingway in the lobby of the Hotel Florida. The great man was sitting alone, so Milly had taken a deep breath and invited herself to join him at his table. He nodded toward the empty chair.

  Over the course of one whiskey, Milly had told him about her writing, and the novel about her time in Moscow that she wanted to write.

  Hemingway had nodded.

  “If you write how people think it was,” he said, “it’ll be rotten writing. You have to write it true. The way it happened.”

  Now she looked at the story she had written. It was true. That much she knew.

  35

  OCTOBER 1937

  A MONTH LATER, Milly packed her bags and talked her way into a car heading north, to Quinto. She’d had enough of the Foreign Press Bureau, so she rattled and bumped through the ride north, until she showed up in the headquarters of the Lincoln Battalion like Little Orphan Annie.

  “Is Major Amlie here?” she asked.

  The adjutant who greeted the car full of reporters frowned at her request.

  “I’m here to be the battalion secretary,” she said. “He’s expecting me.” It wasn’t true, not yet at least. But what was true was the fight happening here, not the stories being spun in Valencia. She needed to be here, on the front, where the action was. This was where Spain’s future was being written, not by the bureaucrats—however well-meaning—back on the coast.

  The town was nestled against a hill, alongside the winding Ebro River, and the battalion headquarters was on the outskirts. Milly lifted her face to the autumn sun, and she breathed in the crisp scent of rotting leaves and cook fires. The two other reporters in the car had already disappeared into the camp, made invisible by their maleness, while Milly stood and waited. She hated that she needed permission to be here.

  Eventually, Hans strode out of a large tent in the middle of the camp, followed by Bob Merriman and, to Milly’s delight, Marion Merriman. Milly threw herself into her friend’s arms.

  “We’ve been needing another woman’s touch around here,” Marion said.

  “You know that’s my specialty,” Milly said with a snort.

  Milly stepped back. Her eyes were unexpectedly damp, and she smiled to see Marion’s concerned face.

  “Come out of the wind,” Marion said, taking Milly’s hand. She shot a look at Bob, who seemed about to object. “I meant it. This place could use another straight-thinking woman.”

  And with that, Milly found herself at home in the Lincoln Battalion.

  SHE SLEPT IN an old wooden shed outside the circle of tents, and though she trembled at night while thinking of fascist scouts, she was glad to have the protection against the rain and damp ground that the tents couldn’t offer. Each morning, Marion showed up in their outdoor mess hall, pale-faced and shivering, as if she had spent the night damp. Milly, though, slept better than she had in months.

  During the day, she wrote. She followed the men as they played cards or cleaned their rifles or came back from patrol. She made notes about the way they spoke and the contradictions that wove through the battalion like veins of mold in cheese. The men wanted a voice in military decisions, but they knew the unit needed discipline. They yearned for home but scorned deserters. They professed egalitarianism but rarely sat down alongside men whose skin color differed from their own. She wrote it all down.

  In early November, the two American military attachés surprised the battalion by rolling up in a sleek black car with small American flags snapping from the front. Milly ran down to greet them, her calf-length pencil skirt shortening her strides as she hurried down the hill. She laughed as Colonel Fuqua, the military attaché, and his colleague Major Griffith, unfolded themselves from the car.

  “Well, well,” she said, laughing. She had met Thomas Griffith, the air attaché, in Madrid, back when she was writing only for the AP, and he had proved an interesting source of information about the German planes bombing the city. Back then, no one was willing to admit the level of German involvement in Spain’s war, but she wanted to force the world’s eyes open.

  Major Amlie, Bob, and Marion all joined them and showed the men around the camp. One of the senior International Brigade commanders, a man most of the men despised, took the opportunity to show off and present Bob with a ceremonial watch in honor of his bravery at Belchite. Bob was now deputy commander in the battalion, second to Major Amlie. Everyone clapped politely, and Bob passed the watch around. Milly handled it quickly, and as she passed it to the next person, her eyes caught on Hans, who stood round shouldered at the back of the crowd. Then, Colonel Fuqua, not to be outdone, offered Bob a leather jacket that Fuqua said had been his own in the Great War. Milly watched Hans, whose face remained blank except, she thought, for a slight pinching at the corners of his eyes, as if the sun shined too brightly. No one was honoring him, though he had fought too. No one even mentioned his leadership.

  She walked over to him.

  “I think we’re alike,” she said.

  “What?” He turned to her in surprise. Around them, everyone clapped for the leather jacket. Bob flushed with pleasure, then announced that Marion, his beautiful wife, was soon traveling to America to make speeches for the cause.

  “We see things, but others don’t always see us.” Milly took her glasses from her face and wiped them clean. She replaced them and looked back at him. “Am I right?”

  “I don’t know,” he said slowly. “I think people look at you quite a lot.”

  She shook her head.

  “It’s not the same, being looked at and being seen. I used to think it was.” She thought of Zhenya, parading with the soprano’s train in his elegant hands, hundreds of eyes upon him. It had taken her so long to understand him, and she was ashamed.

  “But you don’t think so anymore?”

  “No. I don’t want to be looked at now.”

  He laughed. “Hard to avoid that, in a camp full of men whose eyes drink in a woman’s every curve.” Then he blushed. “The point is, you’re an interesting lady. People want to get to know you.”

  Around them, the crowd dispersed, though the American officials still stood talking to Bob and Marion.

  “Are you going to join them?” Milly asked.

  “No,” he said. He looked at the ground. “Would you like to go for a walk?”

  “I think they’re serving us lunch,” she said, nodding her head at the Americans. “It wouldn’t look good for the battalion commander to disappear before the meal.”

  “That’s true.” He fiddled with the button on his coat. “Maybe afterward?”

  “Yes, I’d like that. Afterward.”

  36

  DECEMBER 2, 1937

  MILLY AWOKE THAT morning in Hans’s tent. They had, after two weeks of talking and flirting, finally escaped to his tent to make love on a pile of blankets on the dirt floor. His long, lean body seemed to fit into her soft one, and she wrapped herself around him as they slept. Now he was already up and dressed, ready to begin his morning’s duties, but he glanced over when she yawned. His blue eyes were warm with affection, and her heart puddled, like snowmelt. The first night they had stayed up late, sitting around a banked campfire, he had asked her about her parents. No man had ever asked about her parents. Unless she counted the interviews to enter the Writers Union or the Communist Party, but she didn’t.

  “I had not expected to find a woman like you,” he said quietly in the morning dark. “Not anywhere, and certainly not here.”

  “You should have most expected to find me here.” She propped herself up on an elbow. The blankets slipped low on her breasts, barely covering her nipples. “My whole life has been leading me to Spain, I think. This is what I was meant to see, to write about. Where people are fighting to be free and make other lives better, but it’s so hard to do it right.” She thought of the woman with the dead baby.

  He got down on his knees and kissed the tip of her nose.

  “I’m glad,” he s
aid. Then he stood and walked out.

  She dressed quickly, knowing how embarrassed he would be to be seen with a woman in his tent. But she hoped this wouldn’t be the last time he let her spend the night. Being together felt right, fitting in a way that she hadn’t fit with a man in years. If ever.

  The day was cold, and when she emerged from the tent, the wind stung her eyes and nearly swept her glasses from her nose. A few gunshots echoed in the distance, but those had been sounding for some weeks now, and she didn’t make much of it. Their scouts were telling them the fascists didn’t intend to launch an offensive on this part of the line; they were more likely to move south, closer to Valencia.

  She walked to the mess tent, where the cooks were ladling porridge into tin bowls. She had forgotten the cup she usually brought with her, but one of the other men lent her his. No one acted different, or otherwise acknowledged her night with the commander. Hans himself was already gone, probably inspecting the fortifications outside the camp.

  A few more gunshots sounded, this time closer. Milly glanced over at the soldier next to her, a man she recognized from her weeks with the battalion, and raised her eyebrows. He shrugged.

  “Maybe we got some fascist scouts.”

  She nodded and sipped the chicory-flavored coffee filling the tin cup. Terrible stuff, but at least it was hot.

  A man sprinted into the camp, sweat streaming down the side of his face.

  “They’ve been shot!” he yelled. “Major Amlie and Steve Noll, they’ve both been shot!”

  Milly ran.

  SHE SAT NEXT to Hans’s bed in the field hospital. She had ridden in the ambulance with him, some three hours south of Quinto, to this ward filling the former country estate of some Spanish princess. In what must have been the princess’s dining room, a long row of mostly empty beds waited for the war’s injured. Hans had been hit in the side, and he had been incoherent during the transit. But now, a few days later, he was recovering well. Milly held his hand and watched him sleep.