Salt the Snow

by Carrie Callaghan

  “God, Milly.” His face blanched. “You’d get us all arrested.”

  “Just tell me who I should talk to about Zhenya’s case.”

  He shook his head. “I don’t know. The prosecutor, I’d guess.”

  “Will you call and find out who that is?”

  He pressed his lips together.

  “No.”

  “And if I write that story?” She put her hands on her hips and tried to look imposing.

  “You won’t.”

  She kicked his desk, then closed her eyes and tipped her chin toward the ceiling. A rivulet of melted snow shivered down her neck. “What the hell am I supposed to do?”

  “Keep your head down, do your job. These arrests, Milly … Things are starting to change here. Don’t put yourself—and all of us—at risk. For an opera actor. A man you are sort-of married to, who you won’t follow to Siberia.”

  “The hell with you, Borodin.”

  She walked out and slammed the door.

  Quickly, before he could recover his nerves and emerge from his office, Milly walked over to Axelrod, the Russian editor.

  “Borodin wants you to call the OGPU,” she said. “To ask who is handling a certain case.”

  “What?” He leaned back in his chair, his close-set eyes blinking.

  Milly shrugged, as if indifferent. She bent down and wrote Zhenya’s full name on a piece of paper.

  “I think that’s it. Could you call now? My Russian’s not good enough, they wouldn’t answer me.”

  Axelrod glanced between Milly and Borodin’s closed door. Her pulse raced.

  “I don’t know why he can’t do it himself,” Axelrod grumbled, then picked up the phone. He gave the operator the numbers for the OGPU headquarters.

  Milly held her breath.

  6

  BEFORE

  MAY 1931

  A HINT OF sweet warmth crested the spring breeze, and a stout woman in black carrying an armload of white lilac blossoms took a wary step away from Milly when they passed on the sidewalk.

  “Zakaznee, purzhatsda, daitche …” Milly continued muttering, now a little louder for the benefit of the woman receding behind her. Perhaps Milly was mad, after all, to try to mail her own registered letter at the Soviet post office. But she wouldn’t always have Dasha, Anna Louise’s maid, to do the work for her. Lord, she hoped she wouldn’t be living with Anna Louise much longer. She needed to figure out how to live on her own. If she could mail her own letters, she could feel freer to write more to her friends back home. And then she’d feel less lonely.

  The trees were finally sprouting tentative green leaves, even if city workers were still carving ice blocks out of the river to chill the Muscovite iceboxes and cellars. She seemed to have survived her first Russian winter, and she reveled in the heat that her brisk stride generated. Now that winter no longer pummeled her into submission, she could get out more, and finally find some groundbreaking stories to write about.

  Milly crossed the bustling Pushkin Square and headed toward the old Strastnoy monastery, which now housed the Godless Museum. That had been a fun Easter tour, first the Godless Museum with its rotting exhumed saints, and then a quiet Orthodox ceremony in a church at the top of a hill. If only the censors had let her publish that write-up, with its delicious contradictions, the state that disdained religion and yet permitted it. Milly had loved the complexity in that story, the notion that the Bolsheviks couldn’t stand religion, yet they cared enough for the people to let them retain their rituals. Well, they hadn’t let her publish it, but she kept the story’s draft. Maybe she could get the story out to an international paper somehow and publish it anonymously.

  The post office was in a small building behind the monastery, and she recited her memorized words one more time before pushing the door open. Learning how to get around was the first step in understanding this new world.

  But when she entered, nothing looked as she remembered. The wire wicket enclosing the postmaster’s perch was torn down, and instead of the red-cheeked man with the brown mustache, a young woman sat behind a desk. A drawing of a rodent with soulless eyes hung on the otherwise bare wall behind her.

  “Post office?” Milly mumbled in Russian.

  The young woman shook her head sadly.

  “No,” she said in accented English. “The post office it has moved. This is Soviet Mousetrap Commission.”

  Milly giggled.

  “That figures, doesn’t it,” she said to the bewildered woman in English. The Soviets had a commission for everything, and she loved their ambition to solve even the smallest problems. She switched back to Russian and asked, as well as she could, where to find the current location of the post office. After a few confusing exchanges, the woman wrote down an address on Marx and Engels Pereulok.

  “You see,” Milly told Anna Louise when she returned home. “That’s Moscow for you. Changing, never fixed.”

  “Is it?” Anna Louise didn’t look up from the letter she was banging out, one finger at a time on the typewriter in her room, where they sat to eat dinner.

  Milly bit her lip.

  “Can you believe him?” Anna Louise bellowed as she pulled her letter out of the typewriter. Without waiting for Milly’s response, Anna Louise leapt to her feet and paced through the room, complaining loudly about some American writer who had criticized her latest book.

  Milly waited until the other woman took a breath.

  “Anna Louise,” she said.

  Anna Louise’s deep-set eyes skittered around the room, as if unsure where the sound had come from, and then she pinched tight the nostrils on her finely shaped nose. Her best feature, Milly thought.

  “Anna Louise, I’m ready to take that trip. That factory you mentioned in Nizhny.”

  “The Ford factory?” She frowned, and the lines alongside her mouth dug deeply into her flesh.

  “Sure, that one.” It didn’t matter where, Milly just needed to see what was happening with Soviet socialism outside of Moscow. Anywhere where the real revolution in industrialization was taking place.

  “I’ll talk to Borodin about it.”

  “Did he tell you the Vorobey story?” Milly continued. Anna Louise shook her head and sat back down at her typewriter.

  “We were having lunch at that hole around the corner, you know, the cooperative restaurant where they hand you a spoon when you walk in, and that’s all you have to eat with? Then you have to hand it back when you leave. On account of the theft.”

  Milly watched Anna Louise for a reaction, hoping she would at least smile in acknowledgment of some of the hardships of communitarian living. Milly loved Moscow—the thrill of a new culture, the passion of a people dedicated to building something unprecedented—but hell, it wasn’t perfect. For every gaggle of smiling young women reveling in women’s newfound rights, there was a bent-backed man going from door to door, looking for a stoop to sleep on since there weren’t enough rooms. Anna Louise didn’t look up from her typewriter, but merely waved a hand for Milly to continue the story.

  “Never mind,” Milly said. The story about some silly peasant misunderstanding wasn’t worth the disappointment of throwing herself against Anna Louise’s indifference. “I’m going out for a stroll. I’ll find my former palace dweller, and he’ll show me around.”

  She grabbed her cardigan from the row of hooks along the far wall and stuffed her feet into her favorite pair of comfortable heels, low square affairs that could carry her miles if she had the mind. Her walks with the opera actor past old parks and darkened churches often lasted that long.

  “It’s late, isn’t it?” Anna Louise looked up, blinking like a mole in daylight.

  “Moscow’s white nights, lovey.” Milly splashed a hand toward the window.

  With that she left, biting off the retort about Anna Louise’s self-absorption and resisting the temptation to bait her roommate with another mention of the formerly bourgeois opera performer she was going to meet. The handsome young man from the pa
rty, whom Anna Louise wouldn’t approve of, solely because the Soviets didn’t approve of him. All because the boy’s father was a rich man before the revolution. Milly closed the apartment door behind her, the heavy wood echoing down the hall. She shouldn’t get angry at Anna Louise, who had gotten Milly her job, her bed, her food. But still. The other day Anna Louise had told Milly that the true remedy for loneliness was propaganda, because it guides people and gives them a sense of being part of something larger. “Stop trying to make friends. Set your sights on the cause,” Anna Louise said while pecking away at the keys on her typewriter at home. It was enough to make a woman spit. Now Milly gritted her teeth, then forced a smile when one of the four young women sharing a room down the hall stepped out of their apartment as Milly passed. Milly didn’t have enough Russian yet to talk to her neighbor, not unless Milly wanted to inform her “there is a black cat in the alley.” But, someday.

  Outside, the setting sun licked the sky and glazed it in a strawberry glow. Milly exhaled, and paused to enjoy the view. Then she did a little shimmy with her hips and went to meet Evgeni.

  MILLY HOOKED HER arm through Evgeni’s, though his height meant she had to tilt her elbow upward to fit. She smiled looking up at him, and his cheeks glowed as he pointed down the street.

  “That’s one of the finest baths in Moscow,” he said. “The Central Baths. The building was owned by a, how do you say it, cloths maker. The finest dancers in the Bolshoi go there.” His eyes glittered in the golden summer light, and Milly pulled his elbow closer to her ribs.

  “Have you been?”

  “Not yet,” he said, more excited than resigned. “Only the right people get permission to enter.”

  “And someday you will,” she suggested.

  “Someday. After all my singing lessons, and I get voice roles.”

  “Are you trying out soon?”

  He pointed across the street.

  “A famous writer lived there, on the other side of that building.” A large arched portico opened to a two-story gallery. “Someday people will note where you lived.”

  She snorted. “I don’t think so.”

  He stopped walking and released her elbow so he could turn to face her. His young skin was tanned and fine. She wanted to rise up on her tiptoes and kiss his lips, but instead he furrowed his brows at her.

  “You do not know what the future brings,” he said. “And having a belief in the future is important.”

  “I do believe in the future,” she said, but her voice sounded tinny. “Evgeni, I’m—”

  “Call me Zhenya. My friends do.” He lowered his chin.

  “Zhenya.” The name sounded like a breeze on her tongue. “I’ve seen too much to believe in my future. My first job was writing about murders and fires in San Francisco, and from there it’s only gotten bloodier. Until here, that is.”

  “See?” He waved at the sky. “It is already better. Looking up.” He began walking again, and she followed. “It is not as if my life has been easy,” he continued, his voice low. “After my father died, I thought my mother would too. We lost almost everything, and we lived in the hallway until the house committee took pity on us. But I am lucky. My mother is happy for me to be in the opera. So why will my luck not continue?”

  He didn’t wait for an answer, but quickly began pointing out other historical buildings. The Metropol Hotel she knew already, and the mountainous Karl Marx monument as well. But she let him talk, as if his enthusiasm could spin a cocoon around them, and she slipped her hand into his.

  TWO DAYS LATER, Borodin surprised her with a rail ticket and a pass to the Ford factory in Nizhny Novgorod.

  Milly kissed him on the cheek, then laughed at his shocked expression. “I’ll bring you back a darling of a story, don’t fret.” She stuffed the papers into her breast pocket and sped from the newsroom as quickly as possible. She had a suitcase to pack and a train to catch.

  In the apartment, she dumped out the contents of her purse onto her hard bed and cursed when she saw the ticket from last night’s opera, Lohengrin. Her charming Russian friend had been acting in the performance, so he got her a ticket, and she had clapped wildly when he showed up onstage holding the queen’s train. She loved how the seats around her were filled with soot-smudged workers and bent-backed grandmothers: people who never would have seen the opera before socialism. Afterward, she told Zhenya he carried a jaunty train for the queen, better than the soprano with the cracked cadence deserved, and though he didn’t understand the slang, he laughed and held her hand. She had promised to meet him again tomorrow, but now she would be out of town. She scribbled a quick note on the back of the ticket, then ran out to ask Dasha if she would call him later.

  “Please?” Milly asked the exasperated maid. “I don’t know how to say the Russian numbers on the phone, and I don’t have time now for you to teach me.”

  Dasha huffed.

  “Fine.”

  Milly rushed to pack, and she made it to the station in time to jump onto the train before the doors closed. She smiled as the train rolled away. Now she would see the real socialism, the real work being done to launch the Soviet Union into the twentieth century and beyond.

  When she arrived at the Nizhny Novgorod station, her guide met her on the platform and escorted her silently to the automobile. Milly sat in the front seat like a gaping child, her hand clinging to the door and her forehead nearly touching the cold glass of the window. They passed under the tall brick gate fortifying the entrance, as if the grounds held an ancient castle, not a car factory still under construction.

  While she toured the workers’ housing and the factory itself, Milly was buffeted by the demands and petty rivalries. The German plumbers wanted her to deliver their ultimatum for higher wages; the American engineers told her she couldn’t possibly take that rag Moscow Daily News seriously; the Canadian housewives tried to elbow one another out of the way for the best choice of new employee cabins the management had built. A nest of grievances that Milly had to shape into a sculpture of success. Fine, she could do that. She could see what they were aiming for, see the skeleton of productivity beneath the haze of their frustrations. They sought the impossible, in a way, industrializing a countryside forgotten by time and tsars, and the workers were managing it. Milly scribbled notes into her notebook. The more she thought about the story, the more excited she grew. Yes, the foreign workers were facing difficulties. But they were in Russia, sweating to create something the world had never seen before.

  While pacing the train platform in Nizhny, waiting for her return train to arrive, Milly ran through the lines of her story. Building a new economy was a challenge, and these workers had grievances to air. But they weren’t leaving. Maybe that would be the first sentence of her story. She paused to roll the words around, and she felt a subtle prickling along the back of her neck. She turned.

  Behind her stood a tall man with a dark beard cresting his jawline, and he smiled.

  “You must be American,” he said in accented but easy English as he approached. “So much energy, so much movement.” He lazed his hand back and forth in the air, gesturing across the platform.

  “You’d better watch out,” she said with a wink. “The energy’s contagious. Want to try?” She held out her hand before she knew what she was doing, and as her upturned palm waited, and waited, the mild evening air cooling her skin, a heat rushed to her cheeks. She hadn’t brushed her hair all day, she remembered, and she had forgotten her lipstick.

  She waited, hand extended to a stranger.

  He stepped forward and laid his hand in hers.

  She tugged him playfully to and fro, then gave him a quick, suggestive demonstration of the hula dance she had learned in Hawaii. When they boarded, she stayed in the crowded train passageway and giggled with him as the farms rolled by. The train was overbooked, and she didn’t have a sleeping compartment, so the Russian insisted she take his. He would sleep with the porter, he said.

  When she woke up, she foun
d him standing again in the passageway. He was the director of construction at the Nizhny Novgorod plant, he said, and he knew she had come to write about it. But he didn’t want to talk about work. He placed a hand on her lower back, and when the train entered a tunnel, he reached up to tuck her hair behind her ear. Her skin tingled where his fingers touched. Then, he kissed her. She ran her hands around the back of his neck to pull him in deeper, but then the train jerked to a stop. She stumbled away from him, and they both laughed.

  “Here we are,” he said, gesturing out the window at the Moscow platform that seemed to have come from nowhere.

  “Fancy a stroll?” Milly asked. She picked up her bag, and they began processing down the crowded passageway toward the train exit.

  “Ah, I can’t tonight.” His face grew grim. She looked at the ground. She knew that look, the I-have-a-wife look.

  They stepped down from the train, and there, on the platform, stood her handsome opera actor with a large bouquet of flowers in his elegant fingers. He smiled brightly upon seeing Milly, but the smile faded into confusion when he glanced at the man holding her elbow.

  “Looks like you’re spoken for, for tonight anyway,” the man said in a low voice.

  “Who says a girl can’t have two escorts?” She was hoping he would laugh and let her feel wanted, but he stayed quiet.

  He raised an eyebrow as Zhenya approached, his blond head bowed and his shoulders slumped.

  “I guess I do. Especially when one companion is … that type. Good day, Citizen Milly.”

  Milly lifted her chin in a jaunty farewell, then sighed. It was amazing how the bolshies could spot a former bourgeois from a mile away.

  “Milly,” Zhenya said, then grabbed her hand to kiss it. He traded her the flowers for her valise and nudged her toward the station’s exit.

  “My broken flower,” she said in a low voice, a soft smile on her face as she looked at him.

  “You like the flowers?” he replied.

  “Sure.” Milly linked her free arm in his. “Where to?”