Salt the Snow

by Carrie Callaghan

A young doctor, probably English, stopped by the bed.

  “He’s going to be fine, you know,” he said. “You should get some sleep.”

  “I have,” Milly said, though she had only slept a few hours at a time. Each time her mind succumbed to darkness, her dreams grabbed hold of her and whispered that Hans would be lost, that his wound would grow infected and no one would notice until too late. So she shot awake and shuffled to his bedside, where she kept her vigil.

  The doctor clucked his tongue.

  “Here.” He pulled the sheets back from Hans’s side and then lifted the nightshirt covering his body. “See? The wound here is healing well. Redness around the stitches is normal and healthy. There’s no excessive swelling, no sign of infection. We removed the bullet, clean.” He replaced Hans’s shirt, and as he did, the patient flickered his eyes open.

  “Milly?”

  “Tell her to go get some sleep,” the doctor said. “She can’t heal you with the force of her presence.”

  “Don’t be too sure,” Hans said, his voice scratchy. Milly handed him a cup of water that she had already poured.

  The doctor shook his head and walked away.

  “But he’s right,” Hans said. “You do need to rest. You could get sick if you don’t take care of yourself.”

  “I sent a telegram to your brother,” she said. She had learned, during their long walks, that Hans’s brother was a US congressman from Wisconsin.

  “You told him I’m fine?”

  “More or less.”

  Hans squeezed her hand.

  “I need to get back to the fight. The men need me.”

  “No, they don’t. You need to heal.”

  Hans closed his eyes. He worried about the men, constantly. He wondered if they had enough spare spectacles, and he had tried to order more. He asked Brigade headquarters if they could improve the mail deliveries, so the men could have better word of their sweethearts at home. He chased down the quartermaster, so he could make sure they were getting the best food the battalion could possibly afford.

  But when the young man had run up saying Hans and the other soldier were injured, no one had seemed concerned. Hans was no Bob Merriman, instinctively commanding the love of his soldiers. Just like Milly was no Marion, easily finding the love of her life. Milly squeezed Hans’s hand.

  “You need to take your time,” she said.

  A WEEK LATER, more injured men started to pour in. The fighting had restarted, now around Teruel, close to the field hospital. Sometimes Milly had to tread carefully as she led Hans on his short walks around the ward, since the floor might be slick, newly washed to clean away the blood of a recently arrived man. Once, she walked outside for a breath of fresh air and gasped to see the corpse of a young man lying on the ground where the ambulance had left him, gaping at the sky. War was creeping closer.

  She had left all her notes about the Lincoln Battalion behind when she rushed into the ambulance with Hans, and when her belongings arrived at the hospital, her notes and books were not among them. Her letters to Quinto produced only apologetic responses. Her writing was lost. Frustrated, Milly started writing again, but describing the moans of injured men and the blue sky over the red-tiled roof of the princess’s seized manor felt hollow.

  Then, a writer from the Ministry of Propaganda visited. He had a small notebook and a wide smile, and the English doctor led him around the ward. Curious, Milly followed at a distance.

  “Innovative care will restore our men for the fight,” the doctor said, his eyes bright as he pointed out the transfusion equipment that Dr. Barsky had helped design earlier in the year, with Hermann’s help.

  “What fight?” Milly said from behind them. Both men spun around. “Without international support, how can the Republic possibly fight? How can the bodies of our men stop the fascist guns? What will blood transfusions do to stop that?” Her chest heaved.

  “Transfusions keep men alive,” the doctor countered, his gaze narrow.

  “For one more turn at the battlefield, until the fascist guns can really cut them into pieces. Write that,” she said, turning to the newspaperman. “Write that their lives are a finger in the goddamn fascist dike, nothing more than a stopgap, so long as the democratic countries of the world starve Spain.”

  The man picked up his pen, put it to the paper, then let his hands fall to his sides.

  “That won’t pass the censor,” he said. He had full cheeks: the face of a man who had been eating well for the past few months. Milly rolled her eyes.

  “You want to make a difference?” she demanded. “Tell the truth. Tell the goddamn truth.”

  In the ward, Hans angled himself up in bed. His side still pained him, but he was regaining his mobility. He watched her, his blue eyes deep and unknowable. She swallowed.

  For so long, she had been as men had wanted her. As she thought people had wanted her to be. When she was a little girl, Milly had taken the cork from her mother’s ink bottle and gone out into the apartment building’s hallway. There, crouching in front of the wallpaper, she carefully stamped circle after circle onto the yellow pattern. Making it so much prettier, making the pattern deeper and more meaningful. But then one of their neighbors had come out and screamed. “Look at that brat!” she yelled. “We’ll all have to pay to replace the wallpaper!” Suddenly, a blow shattered Milly’s cheek. She held her ringing face and looked up to see her father, her beloved father, red-faced and looking down at her. “You’re a disappointment, Mildred,” he said. She dropped the stamp and wept.

  He hadn’t understood.

  Now she walked over to her lover.

  “Hans,” she said. “Let’s get married. Let’s be a team, and together we’ll tell the Americans what it’s really like. We’ll convince Roosevelt to change his tune. What do you think?”

  “You can’t get married,” the Ministry newspaperman said from behind her. “Men in the Brigades can’t get married if they’re not already wed.”

  “They can if they’re dying,” Hans said quietly. He looked at Milly. “Am I dying?”

  She reached out and held his hand. His knuckles were knobbed and rough, and his grip was firm.

  “You tell me.”

  “Doctor,” Hans called. The doctor stepped closer. “I need a deathbed marriage.”

  The Englishman looked back and forth between them. Milly pressed Hans’s hand to her forehead and closed her eyes.

  “Indeed you do,” the doctor said softly. He was a good man.

  Milly kissed Hans’s fingers.

  37

  DECEMBER 1937

  MILLY CLOSED THE lid of her suitcase and looked around their Barcelona hotel room. Not only had they managed permission for a wedding, but Hans had received discharge papers, due to his wound, and they had made it to Barcelona for two days of honeymoon. She tried to memorize each flocked fleur-de-lis of the gold wallpaper, and each tassel on the lampshades. Here, they had gotten to know each other in ways that they hadn’t managed in Quinto. Here, Milly felt joined to her husband in a way that she had never felt before, not with any of her previous lovers. Hans was a serious shadow to her flitting candlelight, a quiet pause to match her chattering birdsong. She was almost surprised to find how much she loved him.

  “Let’s stow the luggage at the train station and spend one last day seeing the city,” she said. They had a train to Paris that evening, and from there they would make it to port to catch their ocean liner back to the United States.

  He buttoned his cotton shirt and bent over to give her a kiss on the forehead.

  “Perfect,” he said.

  They deposited their luggage with the porter at the train station, then found a café for lunch. Milly laughed at Hans’s silly jokes, and he looked into her eyes as if he were drinking deeply at a well. When they paid the bill, she blushed at the heart she saw the waiter had written on the receipt.

  They stepped out onto the sidewalk, and Milly flagged a passing boy hawking the newspaper. She hoped to bring as m
uch news as she could back to New York, real news that she could interpret for American audiences. She handed him a five peso note, all she had, and told him to keep the change. He grinned.

  Then, the air raid sirens sounded.

  The sirens screamed, rending the air, and Milly and Hans ran. They scrambled down the stairs to a subway entrance, and behind them, the earth shook. Milly and Hans fell into each other’s arms at the base of the stairs, then stumbled into the tunnel entrance, while outside explosions rocked the street. Crumbled mortar spattered the stairs. They ran down the steps.

  When the noise subsided, and the all-clear bells rang, Milly and Hans emerged tentatively into the daylight. Dust still clouded the air, and they coughed. The café where they had lunched was blown out, its glass shattered and tables overturned. Rivulets of blood ran out along the floor, and a dead woman lay sprawled next to the threshold. Milly turned to gag.

  “We were there,” she said.

  Hans nodded.

  “This war.” Hans stood, the words stuck in his throat. Milly understood. What more was there to say? The horror was unspeakable. A man staggered from the café, clutching his gut and moaning. Hans ran to him and helped him into the middle of the street, where soon a medic with a stretcher arrived to carry him over the rubble. Milly helped a black-haired woman with a gash in her arm pick her way over the piled stones toward an ambulance at the end of the street. There was nothing to do but help.

  That night, as their train pulled away from Barcelona, Milly leaned into Hans’s shoulder. She held her breath, wondering if the German and Italian planes would return, obliterating their escape. But the train rattled on, rocking its way through the darkness.

  “We’re doing the right thing, aren’t we?” She couldn’t help but doubt herself. She hadn’t thought she was running when she decided to leave, but maybe she was.

  Hans ran his thumb down her temple and along her jaw.

  “I don’t know,” he said. “I’m following you.”

  She nodded. She could stay, but in Spain her stories would be stifled. The censors thought they knew how to protect Spain, but they were wrong, and they needed people like her and Hans. Out in the world, talking about Spain’s war.

  “We’re doing the right thing.” She looked out into the dark night, where she knew invisible Spanish farms and mountains and rivers lay. “We’ll tell people the truth.”

  “And we’ll live our lives.”

  “I don’t mind that,” she admitted. “We’ll live our lives.”

  Then, she reached down into her valise and pulled out a notebook. There was an empty divot on her right wrist where the bracelet used to rest when she pressed her hand on paper, and she caressed the absence with her finger.

  After a few minutes of staring into the gilded dark, she began to write.

  HISTORICAL NOTE

  Milly Bennett, born Mildred Bremler, nosed her way into my life all the way back in 2003, and she hasn’t left since. I found her story when I was researching the Spanish Civil War for my master’s degree capstone project, and I was captivated by this brave, vulnerable woman who reported on the Spanish Civil War. In writing this novel I hope I have done her justice and created a Milly whom she would recognize and appreciate.

  Like any story, my reflection is sure to have its distortions from the original. Milly’s voluminous correspondence and papers, in the Hoover Institution Archives, are a boon to any researcher—but also a challenge. I chose to simplify some aspects of Milly’s story, in hopes of keeping this novel to a reasonable length. Milly had more flirtations and lovers than I could keep track of, so I focused on her most significant affairs. She also flirted with Communism all her life, but she was too independent-minded to bind herself to the Party in the way that many of her contemporaries did. She never became a Party member.

  I also simplified the workplace politics of Moscow Daily News, notably by combining some of the editors and reporters and by disregarding the paper’s first years of life, when it was not daily. Until 1932 the paper was called Moscow News, and it competed with the English-language Worker’s News.

  For those interested in learning more about the lives of elite Bolshevik leaders in the 1930s, I highly recommend Yuri Slezkine’s The House of Government. Platon Kerzhentsev wasn’t the chief theoretician of the Bolshevik Conception of Time when he lived in the House of Government (when Milly visited, he had moved on to being chief administrator of the Council of People’s Commissars), but I loved the title and how it reflected Soviet efforts to reconceptualize the world.

  We are all engaged in reconceptualizing the world, since this crazy, complicated world of ours resists any one definition. During my graduate school studies in international relations, Professor Eliot Cohen argued that wars often don’t end. They linger in the bodies of veterans, the resentments of the defeated nations, the distorted maps, and the world’s collective memory. Both the Russian Revolution and the Spanish Civil War had legacies that lingered well beyond the tidy dates that marked their conclusions, and in some ways, we are still feeling those legacies today. Milly lived in the shadow of both wars, particularly as they sowed the seeds for the fearful Cold War that followed. After Milly returned to the United States to pursue her writing and advocacy for Spain, the FBI grew increasingly interested in her. Periodically, over the rest of her life, she endured interrogations and even harassment by a paranoid FBI convinced she was a Communist agent. She never gave up fighting for her independence, however, and she resisted their attempts to intimidate her, including berating an agent who came to her house. She continued to withstand what she deemed FBI harassment until she died in 1960.

  Upon her death, she gave her extensive personal records to two friends from her years in Russia. Milly knew she had witnessed and done extraordinary things, even if she didn’t succeed in publishing her own book-length account in her lifetime. Her friends, in turn, donated the records to the Hoover Institution Archives. In 1993, A. Tom Grunfeld published the part of her memoirs that Milly had completed, taking her from her early years through her adventures in China. Readers looking to learn more about Milly would be wise to start with that fascinating book, which Grunfeld titled On Her Own.

  Maybe Milly was alone for many of her years, but she found the courage to believe in herself, even when it seemed like the world didn’t. I’m so glad she did.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  First, reader, thank you for reading books, including this one. Milly’s story would be incomplete without your participation.

  Her story, as I’ve rendered it, would never have taken flight had it not been for my passionate, insightful agent, Shannon Hassan. I’m eternally grateful for her guidance and faith.

  The team at Amberjack continues to make me feel at home, and I’m so glad to be a part of their family. Thank you to Justin Mitson, Madison Perdue, Katie Erwin, Dayna Anderson, and Cassandra Farrin for all your hard work. Particular thanks to Cherrita Lee for her patience, wisdom, and editorial skill in pushing me to make this book better. Kerianne Steinberg is a goddess of detail, whose close attention corrected my many inconsistences and comma splices.

  I’ve taught a workshop on how to edit your own writing, and I preface it with a confession: the premise is false. I rely on the keen eye and masterful feedback of my writing crew, and I don’t know what I would do without them. Thanks to Mary Aceituno, Felix Amerasinghe, Suzie Eckl, Jeanne Jones, Terri Lewis, Melody Steiner, and Kathryn Wichmann for reading an early sample. Particular thanks to brave souls Mara Adams, Richard Agemo, Meredith Crosbie, Andrea Pawley, and Samantha Rajaram for reading the entire manuscript. My Authors18 crew helped teach me the ropes of this whole author thing, and they were the best company a new author could have.

  Writing about Russia was a massive leap of faith for me, and I’m grateful to Aidos Bekturganov for his generosity in translating numerous letters and answering my many questions. Ksenia Coulter helped me with naming conventions, and Kseniya Melnik and her parents generously explained
regional pronunciation. Elga Zalite was the researcher of my dreams, and both Julia Mickleburg and Lisa Kirschenbaum were kind to lend their deep expertise to this novelist’s quest. None of this would have been possible without the Hoover Institution Archives’s commitment to preserving Milly’s records.

  My family and friends continue to astonish me with their love and support. There are too many to list (I tried), so I merely bow my head in appreciation.

  The writing life is hard, and sometimes the brunt is borne by those who are the closest. I’m grateful to my children for all the times they played independently while I worked, and for their patience with their mom and her ever-present books.

  Finally, my eternal love and gratitude to my husband, Patrick. He makes it both possible and worthwhile.

  CARRIE CALLAGHAN is a writer living in Maryland with her spouse, two young children, and two ridiculous cats. Her short fiction has appeared in Weave Magazine, The MacGuffin, Silk Road, Floodwall, and elsewhere. Carrie is also an editor and contributor with the Washington Independent Review of Books. She has a Master’s of Arts in International Affairs from the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies, and a bachelor’s degree from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

  Jacket design: Danna Mathias

  Cover image: woman, Shutterstock/ViChizh;

  St. Basil’s Cathedra, Shutterstock/dimbar76

  Author photo: Erica B. Tappis Photography

  Printed in the United States of America