Beautiful Exiles

by Meg Waite Clayton

  I hadn’t seen my Russian friend Mikhail Koltsov since he’d shown me his cyanide pill back in Madrid, but he was sitting on the hard wooden bench at the Hradčany Palace in Prague when I arrived.

  “Bonjour, étranger,” he greeted me—“hello, stranger,” but so much more inviting in French, the one language we shared.

  “Bonjour, étranger,” I replied in as flirty a tone as Mikhail had used. It would have bothered Ernest like hell to hear it, but if he’d come with me, I wouldn’t be flirting. It passed the time. It relieved the burden. It made us feel that little bit better, to be suggesting an intimacy that neither of us really meant to act upon. And Hemingway had no claim on me. He had less than no claim.

  Like me, Mikhail was anxious to talk with the Czech president. He’d been waiting there for four days already, and this day was no different; it was dark outside by the time we abandoned hope of getting an audience with the president. Mikhail helped me back into my silver fox coat, freeing my hair at the collar. I pulled the coat against the evening chill, and we joined the Czechs on the street, the two of us chatting in the beautiful round sounds of French as we walked together down the hill from the castle, through the Malá Strana Bridge Tower archway, and onto the cobblestones of the Charles Bridge. We stopped in one of the little bridge outcroppings, the old-fashioned streetlamps lighting our faces and the stone faces of the busts lining the bridge. Mikhail stood just that little bit too close for colleagues or friends.

  I said, “He could use Collier’s as a platform to win American support, if he would just talk to me.”

  Mikhail turned to the water of the Vltava River below reflecting the moonlight like a bomber in the sky. “The Czech president.”

  “If he would just talk to me,” I repeated.

  “There are Russian planes waiting at an airfield outside the city. If only he would fight, they’re his.”

  I said, “I expect talking with me would be a little less threatening than allowing the Russian air force free roam in Czechoslovakia.”

  There were no good choices for the country, so we analyzed the bad ones over pilsners and a simple dinner at a crowded workman’s cafe in the Old Town, between the bridge and my hotel on Wenceslas Square. Afterward, I had an urge to kiss Mikhail, not for the kiss itself but to stick that little claw in Hemingway’s talent. At the last minute, though, I extended my hand, and said good night, and set off back to my stale hotel room and my balcony overlooking all the good Czechs trying to go about the everyday of living, even in the face of everything.

  On September 21, the world abandoned the brave Spanish, declaring an unconditional withdrawal of the International Brigades.

  On September 23, the Czech government ordered its citizens to mobilize for war. Waiters set down plates and vendors closed their news kiosks, almost a million men gathering their weapons and reporting for duty within a short three hours. Women stood in dry-eyed support as their men set off in tanks and trucks, on bicycles and by foot, to defend their independence.

  Ernest cabled me that he’d gone from Sologne to Paris, where he was writing a short story for Esquire and hoping I’d return to him rather than stick around for a good old-fashioned Nazi drubbing. I cabled back that the good Czechs would help keep me safe until I could get back to him.

  I was still in Prague a week later, when Hitler, Mussolini, Daladier, and Chamberlain huddled over the Munich Pact with their ugly black ink, abandoning the Czechoslovakian Sudetenland to the Nazis without giving the brave Czechs time to die for their freedom.

  I got out of Czechoslovakia on the last civilian plane.

  Paris, France

  OCTOBER 1938

  Paris was changed that October. Everywhere posters called for “pour sauver la patrie,” to ready for the defense of the country. Ernest too was changed. His The Fifth Column and the First Forty-Nine Stories was published October 14, and he swore that even if he were kicked out of this world tomorrow, the stories all put together like that would make it all right. But again he saw the critics “ganging up” on him. We were in bed together, with sun streaming in through the tall windows. The room smelled of the coffee we’d nearly finished and the pastries I’d fetched for us from his favorite bakery, a last currant bun and half of a croissant all that remained on the tray on the clean white sheets. The morning sounds of Paris floated in through the window: the lovely roll of the language as strollers passed, the funny toot of Parisian car horns, the lap of the Seine. But all he could see were the reviews, pulled from a single envelope he’d insisted Max Perkins send.

  “The New York Times is good, Bug,” I said. Its reviewer had called the stories (with a few exceptions already published in magazines) still awfully good, and he was kind to the play too, which had yet to see a staging, the first producer having died and the second still struggling to find funding. This play was so close to Ernest’s big, Buggy heart, though, and no one else much cared for it. Time called it confused. The Nation declared it almost as bad as To Have and Have Not, which they declared his very worst book ever (in case poor Bug had forgotten what they’d thought about it). “Melodrama,” most everyone proclaimed.

  “The collection is selling well,” I said, stuffing my own hatefulness about the play down, knowing everyone assumed I was the girl who moved from one man to another and spent her spare time buying expensive silver fox furs while soldiers starved.

  “It would sell better if Scribner would give it store space and run a goddamned decent-size ad. Pauline said it wasn’t even in the Scribner store window on publication day!”

  Pauline.

  “Maybe she missed it,” I said.

  “She isn’t the complete fool you want her to be, Mart.”

  I didn’t want Pauline to be any kind of fool, nor did I imagine she was. Pauline was a smart enough girl that she might well have told Ernest his book wasn’t in the window when it actually was, just to spoil his fun. But there was no saying that when Ernest was in a mood.

  I said soothingly, “It’s in the store window now.”

  “It should be filling the whole damned window. It should be lined up in shelves all along Fifth Avenue!”

  “I’m sure it looks glorious filling the whole window, that beautiful cover with your name as big as a theater marquee.”

  “There’s nothing to that cover, just my name and the title with a god-awful belt. You’d think the whole art department went on fucking strike just when the cover was to be done.”

  “It’s a terrific cover. You can’t walk past it without wanting to touch the red just to see it’s real.”

  “And those damn Jews still can’t get it together to put the play on the stage.”

  I took a last slow sip of my coffee and set my empty cup on the tray, measuring my response on account of his mood. “‘The Jews,’ Nesto?” I asked lightly, poking fun rather than condemning.

  “The fucking Jews!”

  “And yet here you are in bed with a Jew, you senseless lug.”

  “You aren’t a Jew, Mookie. Jews don’t have blond hair and legs like yours.”

  “You don’t know anything about Jews, Nesto.”

  “I know those fucking Jews are making a hell of a mess out of my play!”

  “Maybe your play is a hell of a mess to start with!” A low blow, I knew, but I was made such a fool in his damned play, and he refused to acknowledge that he’d done it, and one stingy little spot in my heart took some pleasure in the critics destroying it.

  “My mother is half Jewish, and she’s the most decent woman in the world,” I said, unable to make myself take the mean words about his play back, thinking he’d left in all the laughs at my expense and taken out only the dedication to Herb and me. “My father was a Jew,” I said.

  “You’re a goddamned God-fearing Christian, Stooge.”

  “The only god I fear is the one sitting on the fucking sidelines while Hitler takes us all to hell!”

  Ernest rolled toward me, inadvertently knocking the pastry tray. I reached to
catch it, but it was too late, the tray and the cups and the plate with the currant bun and half-eaten croissant fell to the floor. He looked at me, startled, then laughed. He was always quick to laugh at his own clumsiness, and in a kind way, in a way that let all the bitterness dissipate. Sometimes I wondered if he did it on purpose—knocked over lamps and spilled coffee in the middle of an argument to break the fever spell.

  He touched a hand gently to mine. “I do love a woman who isn’t afraid to sling a good, solid cuss,” he said, and he laughed again, a further step back from the fight.

  “Muck your mucking Fascist Jew hating,” I said, falling into the way he took to editing his own work when no one would publish the real cusses.

  He climbed from bed, collected the things from the floor, and set them back on the tray. “Muck my Fascist Jew hating,” he agreed, standing there in nothing but his skivvies, offering me the retrieved pastries. “Have the currant bun,” he said.

  “I already ate mine,” I said. “That one is yours.”

  “I want you to have it, Mook.”

  “You always save it for last.”

  “But I want you to have it this time.”

  “It’s a good thing we already finished the coffee,” I said.

  He said, “It’s a good thing the china hit the carpet and not the wood.”

  Ernest was still grumbling about the critics and the failure of the producers to get the play staged when we heard the news about “La Despedida”—the October 28 farewell parade in Barcelona for the International Brigades, which had been formally disbanded and were leaving Spain. The parade had been kept secret until minutes before it began, lest the Fascists bomb it, and still three hundred thousand people lined the streets. The Hungarian war photographer Robert Capa was there to photograph it, wearing an unprecedented suit and tie in honor of the soldiers. We felt sick not to be there too, to be made to wait for the letters and reports and newsreels. It drove Ernest back to Spain, and when he returned to Paris to celebrate my birthday on November 8, he was in an even bleaker mood.

  We celebrated with a dim dinner and too much booze, and woke tired and bickering only to repeat the lousy day without even the excuse of my birthday—leaving us in a pretty bad state to hear the news coming out of Germany and Austria. Overnight, synagogues were burned to the ground and Jews evicted from their homes, their clothing and furniture flung out on the streets, shops looted. Reports were that fifteen thousand Jews had been jailed in Vienna alone. Others killed themselves rather than be taken away.

  “We can’t do anything about it with the journalism,” Ernest said. “We may as well chuck the journalism in the waste bin.”

  “If we could get all the journalists in the world screaming in unison—”

  “Not even then, Stooge. All the journalists in the world screaming in unison wouldn’t shake off this damned determination to ignore Hitler in hopes he’ll ignore us.”

  “We have to write it anyway. We have to go see it and write it.”

  “I tell you, it will do no good.”

  “But I have to write, Bug,” I said. “If I stopped writing, you’d soon enough find me jumping from the Eiffel Tower in my best St. Louis hat, to see if I could fly.”

  “I have an idea for a story about a soldier fighting with the International Brigades in Spain,” he said.

  “For NANA?”

  “A novel.”

  “But a novel, that could take years. We don’t have years to make a difference.”

  “An American soldier in Spain,” he said, and he set to writing it while I quietly made arrangements to return to Madrid. He would be going back to Key West for the holidays anyway, to see his sons—which of course meant seeing Pauline too. But I couldn’t ask him to skip Christmas with his sons. He wouldn’t love me if I asked him to, and I wouldn’t love him if he acquiesced.

  We bumped into Randolfo Pacciardi—the head of the Garibaldi Battalion who used to take me around the Madrid front on his motorcycle—in the hotel lobby a few nights later. He looked to be headed out for a spiffing time in his properly cut suit rather than the khakis and cap he’d worn in Spain. Civilian clothes. I was glad I’d never told Ernest about that ghastly back-seat business, Randolfo laughing that I was so brave at war and so scared of sex just because I declined to slide my hands down his trousers. That had been repulsive, yes, but it wasn’t a thing to hold against a fellow who’d fought so well for Spain.

  “Pacciardi, old man!” Ernest said.

  “Hemingway! And Mademoiselle Gellhorn.”

  He kissed me on both cheeks in the French way, whispering in my ear, “Ma chère amie, toujours aussi belle depuis cet épisode sur la banquette arrière.” My dear back-seat friend.

  Randolfo had founded an anti-Fascist magazine, La Giovine Italia. “Maybe you’ll write some pretty piece for me, Miss Gellhorn?”

  “Marty here is covering all of Europe for Collier’s,” Ernest said, more proud than ever, and he launched into a tirade on the treachery and rot in Spain.

  Randolfo listened politely but would not be goaded into maligning anyone he fought with, never mind that he’d been run out of his battalion when it was folded into a communist-controlled brigade.

  Ernest said, “Sure, no one is a traitor, and no one is at fault, and Spain is lost, but let’s not complain.” He laughed to show he didn’t mean it, even though he did, and Randolfo and I laughed with him.

  Randolfo couldn’t join us for a drink as he had plans, so we stood in the lobby for a long while, talking of all the brave men we’d known, memory after memory of men now buried in the fields of Spain. It was sobering. We’d experienced their dying one by one, that was hard enough, but here they were now, all stacked up to loss after loss after loss in one big unforgivable pile, and the war was over, and they’d died for nothing at all. Still the world lent no hand—not in Spain, not in Austria, not in Czechoslovakia, not in the Jewish neighborhoods all over the German Reich where temples were burning and men were disappearing. The world stood mute, leaving Hitler to his bullying ways.

  “You won’t go back?” Ernest asked Randolfo.

  “To Spain? I am happy to die for the cause, but the dying for nothing at all is less appealing, yes?”

  “To Italy, then?” I asked.

  “I am afraid the same fate would meet me in Italy. I am not on Mussolini’s favorite-persons list, you see.”

  He’d lost everything: his friends, his ability to fight, and even a homeland to return to.

  Ernest said, “Well, Paris isn’t a bad place to call home.”

  Randolfo, his tone heartbreaking in its bravery, said, “And yet it is not mine.”

  The moment we’d made our goodbyes and were out of sight of the former commander, heading upstairs to our room, Ernest leaned against the wall and, to my astonishment, began to weep.

  “Bug?” I said.

  “They can’t do it,” he sobbed. “They can’t treat a brave man that way!”

  And my heart broke again too, this time not for Randolfo but for Ernest, for his compassion and for his brave front as he’d spoken with Randolfo, and for everything he had left behind in Spain.

  I put my arms around him, saying, “You’re such a good Bug, you’re such a good, generous man.” And we stood together like that for a long, long moment, me holding him while he sobbed on the stairwell between a hotel room that was our home, and yet not, and a lobby filled not with fellow journalists like our friends in Spain but with absolute strangers. “You’re such a good, generous man,” I said. “I love you, Bug. I love you. I really do.”

  It was, I saw as I said the words, the truth. I’d been half in love with Ernest ever since I’d started reading his Raven piece, about the sightless, lipless boy back in that hospital near Morata. I’d been telling myself I loved Ernest Hemingway but that I wasn’t in love with him, he wasn’t mine and I wasn’t his. I’d been telling myself he wasn’t a man to fall in love with, that he was a man who could rip your guts out and leave them in the
street to rot. But the truth was I’d been half in love with him all this time, at least half, ever since he’d written about Raven who wanted to call him Ernie, who wanted him to promise to return.

  I had supposed when Ernest made his promise to that boy that it was one he wouldn’t keep, one he somehow couldn’t keep. But standing on that stairway holding Ernest while he cried for Randolfo Pacciardi, I saw that he had kept that promise to Raven. He had returned to visit the boy in the only way he could return: in his writing that brought the whole world along with him. And standing in that stairway holding Ernest’s grief in my arms, I saw that I was in but good for the all of Ernest Hemingway.

  PART III

  Paris, France

  NOVEMBER 1938

  Two chapters into his new novel, Ernest declared it an untamable beast, as if the beast might be anything other than his own despair. He sailed on the Normandie for New York and Key West and the holidays with Pauline and the boys, and I returned to Spain, arriving in Barcelona on November 21 to write the piece about the Spanish refugees. I’d done the three pieces Collier’s wanted on France, England, and Czechoslovakia, and sometimes we have to write what we have to write.

  I palled around with Herb Matthews, still sporting his improbable peasant trousers, and with the photojournalist Robert Capa, whom I’d somehow not met before. Capa and I fell in like siblings, joking and bickering and having the most furious arguments about anything that might be argued in the moments when his camera wasn’t in his hands, throwing words at each other that might hurt worse than the bombs so that there would be something more to worry about than the end of our lives. I told him his coat—a wide-lapelled camel hair with gaudy mother-of-pearl buttons—was a despicable thing to wear when all of Barcelona was freezing, and starving to boot. It was during an air raid, that conversation, and I let go of his hand long enough to pull my silver fox coat tighter around my neck as I said it.