Salt the Snow

by Carrie Callaghan

  “Say the prayer?” Milly shifted her weight, hoping the chair wouldn’t collapse. She left the wine bottle on the floor, by her feet. “No. I ended up suggesting another minister, one from Germany. He did it. Gutless phony, my roommate is.”

  A waiter came and placed two glasses with brown bubbly liquid in front of them.

  “Is it beer or cola?” Milly gave Charles a half smile. “I guess at this point I’d take either.” She sipped, then tipped her head back in appreciation. Sweet soda pop sparkled in her mouth. “Well done, my champion. This is a rare treat.”

  “One of the downsides of socialism,” Charles said as he put his glass back on the gray tablecloth. “Not much cola to be had.”

  “Yet. Right?” The Soviet Union was struggling now, but she could see how people’s lives were getting better. Already there was a little more food in the markets, and little restaurants like this one were opening. Soon everyone would have soda pop.

  “You think socialism’s the way the world is going, Milly?” He leaned back in the complaining chair and crossed his arms loosely.

  “I hope so. Hearing from friends back home …” She sighed.

  “I know. It’s a damned shame. My brother lost his job at the store where he sells shoes and motor oil and whatever else he could convince people to buy. Sent home without so much as a thank-you or a can of beans to feed his four kids.”

  “That’s rotten,” Milly said. She looked at her soda pop with some guilt. Why should she have pop when there were kids going hungry in America?

  “This is some talk,” she said. “Tell me something funny.”

  Charles blinked, as if confused, and was saved when the waiter delivered two plates of overcooked beef to the table.

  “At least this place gives you a knife,” Milly said as she sawed into hers. If Charles wouldn’t make her laugh, maybe she could get a smile out of him.

  “You mean like that spoon place?” He frowned, then put a small piece of steak into his mouth and chewed. She watched, thinking of Zhenya. Maybe she could find him tonight and get more than a kiss.

  An old man pushed open the door of the restaurant and angled himself through, as if opening the door fully was too difficult. His hunched shoulders glistened with rain, and water dripped from the brim of his cap. He reached inside his jacket and pulled out a small bunch of poppies.

  “Look at that,” Milly said. She inclined her head toward the old man.

  “Eh?” Charles’s mouth was full of steak.

  “He’s got to be a broken member of the bourgeoisie. Look how he carries himself.”

  The old man approached their table and held out the poppies, which had begun to wilt.

  “Buy a flower for the lady,” he suggested in slow, clear Russian.

  “How much?” Charles held an empty fork aloft.

  “Twenty-five kopeks.”

  “That’s too much, old man,” Charles said. “For one flower? I could buy a glass of wine for that much.”

  “Bad wine,” Milly said in English.

  The old man glanced at her, but gave no sign he understood.

  “How about fifteen?” Charles suggested. He speared another cube of beef but let his hand hover over his plate.

  The man shook his head, and Charles shrugged. He popped the beef in his mouth and looked away from the man.

  “I’ll take one,” Milly said in Russian. She fished the coins from her purse. The old man smiled, and his blue eyes were soft and rheumy.

  “Thank you, my dear. I hate to have to ask for anything. Here.” He handed her two flowers. “In gratitude.” He spoke slowly enough for her to understand, then turned to extend his sad poppies to the other diners. No one else bought one, and he tucked the cluster of flowers back into his jacket and shuffled out into the rain.

  Milly shook her head.

  “I love this country, Charles. But why? Why should a well-mannered old man have it so rough? Because of who he was.”

  “It’s not like there aren’t beggars in America.”

  She nodded and fingered the red petals. “But this is socialism. They should know how to do better.”

  “Not yet, I guess.”

  They spent the rest of the meal mostly chewing, and Milly occasionally tried to elicit some sort of conversation with him by bringing up the censors at the paper, whom usually everyone liked to complain about, or Anna Louise herself, whom people often wanted to ask Milly about—what does she read, where does she go when she travels, when is her next book coming out. But Charles mostly had polite murmurs and the rasp of his knife against the plate.

  When they laid their rubles on the table to pay, Milly timed hers so she could brush her fingers against Charles’s. But he gave no reaction, and she almost sighed audibly. Zhenya would have taken her hand to kiss it.

  They walked the few blocks in the damp night to Anna Louise’s street. When they reached the narrow street with Anna Louise’s building, Milly paused.

  “That looks like an OGPU car,” she said, pointing at a black sedan parked one building down from hers.

  “Sure does.” Charles shook his head. Two smartly dressed officers got out and entered one of the neighboring buildings.

  “Poor Ruskies,” Milly said in a low voice. “They had the habit of a pampered police, and they couldn’t break it. Couldn’t do without the Cheka, no matter what they call ’em now.”

  She shivered in the damp cold, and the wine bottle almost fell from her hands, until she clutched it to her chest.

  THE NEXT NIGHT, Milly went to the opera. She wore the only nice dress she had in her closet, which was at least as fine as the feeble imitation European evening dresses some of the other ladies wore, while others, the Communists or workers maybe, milled about the gilded lobby of the Bolshoi in their simple linen frocks or heavy wool skirts. It had been a long day spent tracking down some American professor of economics visiting to assess, measure, and judge Soviet Communism, and since Anna Louise said he was famous, Milly had to interview him. What a stuffed shirt that one was, and she’d had to turn his conceited sniffing into something of a yarn. When Zhenya had called the office to say he could get her a ticket to the night’s show, she jumped at the chance. Ruth had overheard and interrupted the conversation before Milly could hang up, so the two of them had orchestra section seats for Carmen. Milly reveled in the sloppy circus of it all, the stockings striped with runs, the unshined shoes, the ill-fitting evening dresses, and the pickled smell of vodka.

  Zhenya had left their tickets at the box office with a note wrapped around them. The young woman working there winked when she handed over the tickets, and Milly blushed.

  “What’s that say?” Ruth said, leaning over Milly’s shoulder.

  “He says he’s so grateful that I came.”

  “Did he call you his baby? What’s that there?”

  Ruth tried to snatch the paper, and Milly blushed. She crumpled it up.

  “He’s terribly sweet,” she said. She looked at the ball of paper in her fist and hoped he was more than sweet too.

  They found their seats and watched as the motley crowd wound its way into the opera hall. The orchestra was quietly whining and moaning as it warmed up, and a few of the yellow lights on the wall flickered in and out behind their crystal sconces, as if they too were preparing for the performance.

  Some rows ahead of where Milly sat, a tall, slender woman in a black velvet gown bowed down and whispered something to a man in his seat. After a moment, the man produced a crumpled ruble note and dropped it into a red pail the woman held out.

  “They ask for donations here?” Ruth said.

  “I’ve never seen that.” Milly squinted, trying to make out any symbol on the bucket.

  The woman approached, and Milly envied her elegant ease, the languor with which she bent down to speak to the theatergoers, the grace with which she lifted the pail.

  When the woman was at the row in front of them, Milly frowned. The long sleeves of the woman’s gown ended abov
e her wrists, and when she moved, a bracelet emerged. A brown and dark orange tortoiseshell bracelet that caught the liquid light. Milly knew that bracelet.

  “Subscriptions for the Soviet Red Cross?” the woman said to Milly in English, and Milly looked up at her face with a start.

  Zhenya winked.

  Milly gaped, then fumbled for her purse and pulled out some coins. She dropped them into the pail, where they thudded on top of the bills lining the bottom.

  “Thank you,” he said in a sweet tenor, then moved on.

  After a minute, Ruth leaned over.

  “Was that … a man?” Her voice was heavy with anticipation.

  “Looked like it, on close inspection.” Milly’s cheeks burned.

  Ruth laughed, but Milly cut her short with a raised hand.

  “I don’t have any hard feelings toward homosexuals or lesbians or whatever,” Milly said, her eyes on the red curtain still drawn tight over the stage.

  “I didn’t say … it’s just …” Ruth giggled.

  Milly waited for the laughter to stop, then changed the subject. Soon, the overture started and the waves of music lifted Milly out of her thoughts: her worries about the handsome youth who loved to kiss her fingers and twist the bracelet that his friend gave him; her confusion about his invitations to walk the streets of Moscow with Victor, another actor from the opera, while they traded barbed gossip about the opera dance master and both tried to teach her Russian words for the things they saw—crow, maple, sunset; her conviction that Zhenya was the most handsome man she had ever had dinner with; and her fear that he didn’t know what he meant when he wrote in a letter to her, “I am only happy when I am with you.”

  She wanted it to be true.

  9

  NOW

  APRIL 8, 1934

  MILLY WALKED TO her place in line, according to the number she had obtained yesterday. She knew the routine well enough now that she hardly thought about it. Which gave her chills, when she realized.

  Milly gripped her coat sleeves so tightly her fingers ached from both anger and cold, and she wished she could be anywhere else. But waiting here was the only way she could learn more about Zhenya’s case. A month had passed since the law had been promulgated, and she’d learned nothing, heard nothing, except for one short letter from Zhenya thanking her for the food and asking for more, but maybe better to send sausages instead of cooked chicken next time. Her face had burned with embarrassment at her foolishness, which he so gently corrected in his note.

  A mocking wind whipped down the street where she stood shivering in the watery morning light, and everyone in line around her grimaced and tried to extract some shelter from the building the line snaked alongside. Only the drunk man two people behind her seemed unaffected, his nose glowing ember red and his eyes unfocused. Every so often, he drank from a dented flask, and Milly yearned for a sip too. But she certainly wouldn’t step out of line, no matter how much she dreamed of sliding onto a bar stool at the joint she’d spotted around the corner, out of the wind and probably already pouring dishes of vodka.

  With her gloved hands, Milly unfolded the note Zhenya had sent. At the end of it, he pleaded with her to get a meeting with Senior Prosecutor Rosonov, the same name Axelrod had gotten when he telephoned at her request. Earlier in the week, when Milly showed Zhenya’s letter to Borodin, he’d agreed.

  “Take your next rest day and try to find out what’s happening,” Borodin had said as they bent over the note. His hair smelled like pine and wool, and she breathed deeply, quietly.

  “Guess that means you’re not letting me go early today,” Milly said. Her next rest day was three days away.

  Borodin straightened, then stuffed his hands in his pockets. “We’ve got a paper to put out, Milly. It doesn’t wait.”

  “Neither do men in prison.”

  “All they do is wait.” He laughed, and Milly glowered. “I need you to have a spotless record. There won’t be anything to suggest you haven’t been useful to the Soviet Union.”

  She rolled her lips together, then released her grimace with a faint sigh.

  “No. There won’t be anything.” He was right, she couldn’t have a blemish on her work record, in case the Foreign Office decided to investigate her. She couldn’t help Zhenya from San Francisco.

  So she had to wait until today.

  Behind her, the drunk man started humming to himself. Like Anna Louise. How strange that he wasn’t afraid of getting himself locked up for public drunkenness. Though, Milly knew the OGPU were interested in more serious affairs, and they left the misdemeanors to the city police. Once she had gotten a tour of the city’s drunk stations from the chief of Moscow’s police. It made a swell article, especially the photographs of the ice-water tanks where they plunged the insensible drunks, to wake them up. But Milly’s favorite part had been how, after sleeping off their overindulgence, the drunks were given a hot breakfast and a bill for the cost of their stay. If they didn’t have the cash, in true socialist fashion the station chief would let the hungover sods go home, on the promise that they’d fetch back the money. They almost all did, the Moscow chief of militia told her with a proud smile. Milly had thought it charming, at the time. But now, looking around at the shivering grandmother, head bowed under her black kerchief, or the mournful-eyed teenager whose gaze skittered up and down the line as if he were searching for someone, she was less delighted. Perhaps the people returned to pay for a reason other than solidarity.

  Milly looked down at her scuffed boots and wiggled her numbed toes, trying to figure out where the icy air might be seeping through. Probably everywhere. When she looked up, a middle-aged woman in a cream-colored coat with a blue embroidered edge stood in front of her.

  “Excuse me,” Milly said in slow Russian. “The end of the line is that way.”

  The woman blinked.

  “What do you mean?”

  “The end of the line is that way. You can’t—” She searched for the word. “You can’t get in line here. In front of me. Everyone.”

  “But I’ve been here.”

  The woman’s voice was firm, but there was a flash of something, fear or defiance, in her brown eyes.

  “No. You haven’t. I would know that coat.”

  The line shuffled forward. Behind Milly, an old man chimed in.

  “You weren’t here,” he said in a voice like a brittle fingernail. “You have to wait your turn, like everyone else.”

  “But it’s not fair. My husband …” she began to say.

  “Everyone waited!” the drunk man bellowed. Milly spun around to see him brandishing a folder. A blonde woman immediately in front of him cringed but then joined in scowling at the woman in the cream coat.

  “Do you think any of us want to be here? Get to the back,” the blonde woman said.

  The interloper’s face fell, and she cradled her cheeks in her palms.

  Milly’s heart wrenched. They were all waiting for loved ones. It wasn’t right that any of them should have to wait in this interminable, frigid line. It was worse that they had to turn on one another, all while the people who had created the line, who daily revalidated the line’s reason for being by processing papers and filing charges, sat warm and comfortable inside the building that Milly now leaned against.

  She wished she hadn’t said anything.

  The woman slunk away, toward the back of the line, and everyone around Milly fell silent again.

  MILLY WAS PAINFULLY hungry by the time she made it to the front of the line. The snacks she had brought had disappeared hours ago, and she had given one slice of cheese to a gangly boy with dirty hands who had come begging. Orphaned, most likely, though he hadn’t said anything. He was brave to beg here.

  Milly told the secretary she demanded to see Senior Prosecutor Rosonov, as Borodin had instructed her. The young man stared at her, expressionless, and Milly repressed the urge to repeat herself. She was sure she’d been clear.

  “You have an appointment?”
r />   “No.”

  Milly reached into the pocket of her overcoat and ran her fingernail along the edge of Zhenya’s letter.

  “But this is the day he takes people without an appointment.” She lifted her chin.

  The young man’s shoulders sagged, and he made a note in a large ledger book open in front of him.

  “Your name?”

  She told him, and he waved her past.

  The door behind him led to a stairwell, and at the top of the echoing stair was an open door. Beyond it was a hallway, but the first door was also open.

  The sign on the door read “Senior Prosecutor.”

  Milly rapped her knuckles against the wood but entered without waiting. A thin man with a rounded back stood at a filing cabinet behind a desk, fingering his way through the folders. A door, barely open, led to another room beyond.

  “Prosecutor Rosonov?” she asked before she thought. This anteroom would be where the secretary sat.

  He looked up, let his eyes range across her body, and then settled his gaze on her face. His disappointment was familiar but no less dispiriting. Milly tugged at the lock of hair behind her ear, as if she could straighten herself into beauty.

  “I’d like a meeting with the senior prosecutor, about my husband,” she said. “I want to know the details of his case.”

  He uttered something she couldn’t understand, then sat in the green chair behind the desk. On her side, there was a single wooden chair with cracked varnish, and he gestured for her to take it.

  “Your proof of identification?”

  She rummaged through her purse and found her passport, which she slid across the paper-strewn desk to meet his broad fingers. He flipped it open and looked at each page, particularly the one with her Soviet visa.

  “Your marriage certificate?”

  Thank god Olga had suggested she bring that. Milly unfolded it in front of the man, and he snatched it away.

  “I am the senior prosecutor. What do you want?” he said finally.

  “I want to know what he was charged with. Why did they take him away? If it was about me, I—”