They sat at the small table and ate a few bites silently.
“Delicious,” Milly said. She looked at her husband. What a strange word, husband, and stranger yet that she had found one here, in Moscow. “Where did you get that bracelet?” She pointed her fork at the tortoiseshell bracelet curving around his wrist. The orange and brown colors looked like a stilled campfire atop his pale skin. “You wear it all the time.”
He swallowed, then placed his fork down so he could finger the bracelet, turning it around his wrist.
“A friend gave it to me. A school friend, before he moved to Japan. He was my closest friend, and I miss him.”
Milly swallowed her last mouthful, then reached over to lay a hand on his arm.
“I would like to give pleasure to you,” she said. “If you show me how. You’ve made me feel … like no one else ever has.”
Her heart raced as she dared the words. They were treading so close to the swamp that she knew he didn’t want to address. She brushed a finger against the fine hairs curling around his bracelet.
“I don’t know what you think of me,” he said, resting his wrists upon the table. “I’m different from other people. From everyone.” He looked up at her, his gray eyes like flint. “I feel—everything.”
She took his hand in hers. “I know. And I want to …”
She paused. Her own feelings were so tangled. No one had sought her out before, not like Zhenya had.
“I want to protect you,” she said. “To be what you need.”
He kissed her fingertips.
“No one can.”
He stood and brought the dishes into the kitchen, where he washed them in the cold water.
“You are brave, Milly,” he said as he stacked the clean dishes. “But I don’t think you know how to love yourself. Do you?”
“This isn’t about me.” She stood up.
He shook his head. “You don’t see. I need everything, but I don’t need anyone to be everything for me.”
Milly stood up from the table and placed her hands on her hips. The flesh there felt round and tender under her fingers.
“I think you, Zhenya, love yourself, but you don’t know how to be brave. Why can’t you ask for what you want? Why can’t I give it to you?”
He shook his head, placed the last dish on the pile, then turned to stare out the window.
“I’m sorry,” she said quietly. “I didn’t mean—”
“No,” he said. “Perhaps you are right. Perhaps I don’t know.”
He approached and picked up her hands. Then he kissed them and left.
13
NOW
APRIL 11, 1934
MILLY HANDED ZHENYA’S last crate to Seema, who passed it to her latest boyfriend, Bill. Bill was a newspaperman from Boston, and some in the newsroom seemed to find it scandalous that he, a white man, was dating Seema. No matter that Seema had traveled to the Soviet Union to perform in a movie—The American Negro—and was an invited guest of the Kremlin. Milly liked Bill better for his choice in dating partners, but otherwise he was a drag. He stood in the wagon bed and heaved the crate inside. The day before, Milly had seen Zhenya’s name on the confirmed list posted outside Butyrka prison. Her finger trembled as she drew it across the letters of his name, as if to strike it out. His sentence of exile was ratified, though it didn’t say where he would go. When Milly told Olga that night, the older woman nodded. “We must pack his belongings,” she said, as if she had expected the outcome.
“That’s it? I thought we were going to petition his case.” Milly planted her feet on Olga’s scuffed wooden floor, prepared for battle.
“We will. But this is how it goes here. He will get sent regardless.” Olga paused and rubbed at her closed eyes. “I have thought, recently, that maybe he deserved the sentence.”
Milly gritted her teeth and wanted to growl. Was she the only one willing to fight for him? But she sucked in a breath, held it, then stomped away to pull Zhenya’s sweaters from their mothballed boxes at the top of his small wardrobe. He had enough clothes to fill four small crates, and she packed them full. She held in reserve only one pair of pants and a shirt. For when he came home.
Now Bill pulled her and Seema into the back of the wagon, then got down and, with the wagon driver’s help, hoisted Olga in behind them.
It was midday and the streets were crowded, filled with horse-drawn carts, streetcars, and pedestrians. Seema tried to engage Olga with pleasantries, but the old woman frowned, and Milly was too drained to try to translate Seema’s accent-laden Russian. After a few minutes they fell silent and watched the men and women of Moscow at their business, carrying sackcloth bags filled with mushrooms and onions, or staring at the monochrome window displays of crates of potatoes or workers’ trousers. A teenaged girl with a baby in her arms attracted cooing and baby talk from a knot of grandmothers. A boy stood yelling out the newspaper headlines, and Milly strained to hear if he was yelling in English or Russian; often, it was hard to differentiate through the boys’ accents. She was curious to see where the Moscow Daily News was sold: often near Torgsin or the embassies, and certainly the Metropol, all places where Americans and Brits passed by.
It was better to think about the newspaper than Zhenya.
Their cart rumbled down a busy avenue, then lumbered up Novoslobodskaya Street for nearly half an hour. The wagon jolted to a stop.
“Where the belongings must be delivered,” the driver said in a husky voice with a peasant accent. He must have been among the thousands—or was it millions—who had fled the pains of collectivization for life in the city. Milly clambered down out of the cart and looked around the quiet alley. There was no sign, nor any OGPU personnel visible. She held her pocketbook close to her chest.
A metal gate swung open, and an olive-uniformed man beckoned them through. Milly relaxed her arms.
The wagon pulled into a courtyard filled with boxes, crates, and suitcases. With a few words, the OGPU officer checked Zhenya’s crates, made a note on a list he held on a clipboard, and hurried them back out. Olga and Seema remained in the wagon bed, while Milly and Bill worked to help the driver back his wagon out the narrow gate. When they finally succeeded, Bill helped Olga out, Milly paid the driver, who wished her luck, and then she and Olga watched them clatter off.
Milly took Olga’s arm in hers and led the old woman around to the front entrance. Milly’s hands trembled at the thought that she would finally see Zhenya, and she squeezed Olga’s forearm tighter than she had intended to. The redbrick building stretched around the block like a forbidding urban castle, though its three stories of windows were framed in incongruous white, as if to suggest a glowing hope within.
There a few people stood in line, but not as many as Milly had seen in the past. Perhaps they had come too late.
“Wait here.” Olga pointed at the end of the line. “This is best left to the old woman.” She straightened the black kerchief over her gray-blond hair and walked to the front of the line. She spoke a few minutes with the old man there, then went inside. Milly dug her nails into the nail bed of her thumb, then pushed until it hurt. She needed to see Zhenya. Olga wouldn’t visit him without her, surely. Milly strained to see over the heads of the people in front of her, looking for Olga. Sure, Zhenya’s wasn’t a conventional marriage, but she thought they had a … companionship. Once, when Milly was sick and confined to her room in the hotel she was staying at, Zhenya delivered a picture he had drawn of her, and though it was wobbly and primitive, she had never looked so beautiful. She tacked the picture onto the plaster wall.
She would do the same for him. She would let him feel seen and understood. If she, an ugly, brassy woman with more spirit than sense, deserved to be loved, then she could easily let him see how his beauty and generous spirit, his heart that loved more widely than he wanted, deserved tenderness too.
She stood on the pavement outside his prison and frowned.
He had sworn that his dalliances with men were over. Bu
t here he was, in prison.
Olga came out the door and made her way down the steep front stair. She gestured for Milly to stay.
“We are in the right place,” Olga said. “Here we wait.”
This line moved even more slowly than the previous lines had, and so it was not until the five o’clock hour that they left the cold of the street for the interior of the Butyrka prison.
Inside, they told a succession of secretaries that they were there to see Evgeni Konstantinov, a prisoner. Each nodded and waved the women on, until an officer led them down a dirty hall and into a small room. A single lamp rested on a table, and Milly blinked in the dark.
A chair scraped across the floor, and Zhenya stood.
Olga ran to him and threw herself into his arms. They embraced in silence for a moment, and then Zhenya looked up at Milly. His face was a little bloated, and his hands seemed so, too, pressed against Olga’s back. Supposedly, such swelling was normal in prison. Milly clutched her hands as she looked at him. His blond hair fell in gentle waves almost to his ears, and his succulent lips curved into a shy smile.
“Milly baby,” Zhenya said. He released his mother, and Milly approached. He took her face in his hands and kissed both her cheeks. His dry lips sparked against her skin, and tears quivered in her eyes. Before he released her, he held her gaze. “It is good to see you,” he said. “So good.”
“Stop speaking English,” one of the two OGPU guards sitting at the dark periphery said.
“But we speak in English,” Zhenya replied, his voice mild.
“Please,” Milly added. She could speak to him in Russian, of course, but that would put yet another layer of distance between them.
The first guard narrowed his eyes and opened his mouth, but the second guard laid her hand upon his.
“We will get an interpreter. No speaking in English until I return,” she said. Her boots snapped against the cement floor as she walked out.
They waited in silence. Milly opened her mouth to say something in Russian, but Zhenya narrowed his eyes in such an uncharacteristic reprimand that she swallowed her words. Instead, she looked around the room. The remaining OGPU officer picked at his fingernails, and then blushed. Only when Milly smelled the flatulence did she understand. She turned to Zhenya, ready to laugh with him about it, or at least share a secret smile, but his gaze remained on his feet. His shoes were more scuffed than she had ever seen them, and one of the black laces had been replaced with a too-short brown one. Milly could see, barely, his toes squirming beneath the leather. It was the only part of him that moved. She yearned to fold him into her arms and tuck his face into the crook of her neck, and she even leaned toward him, but she remembered herself and held still.
Beside her, Olga whispered a cadence that could only be a prayer. Milly bowed her head. Her breath seemed to bellow through the silent room as she let her chest rise and fall.
The door shot open, and the female officer entered, followed by another woman in uniform. This woman had a slightly different insignia above her breast, and her eyebrows were furrowed.
“Now you may begin. Hurry, your time is limited.”
Milly bit back a retort, then took a deep breath and turned to Zhenya.
“Are you all right? Do you eat?”
The interpreter whispered an echo in Russian to the two officers at the periphery.
“I’m fine,” he said. His gray eyes met hers.
Milly squeezed herself, then sat down in a chair.
“Is it true, Zhenya? What they say about you.” She leaned forward. The Russian echo sounded, harsh, from behind her. The charges against Zhenya shouldn’t matter, they didn’t matter, and yet she needed to know. Why was Zhenya taken from her? Or really, what she really wanted to know was in how many ways had she failed him? Her fingers trembled against her thighs, as if her hands were about to dissolve into the cold room. “I wasn’t enough,” she whispered, so quietly she wasn’t sure anyone could hear.
Zhenya sat in the chair facing her, though his expression remained still.
The English-speaking officer leaned forward.
“You may not ask the prisoner about the specifics of his case,” she said.
“But the senior prosecutor told me to!” Milly was grateful for someone to snap at. “How else am I to know my husband’s situation, how else can I help him?”
The interpreter glowered. “You have been misinformed.” She leaned back, alongside the other woman, who seemed to be suppressing a smile. “If you ask about sensitive matters again, the interview will be over.”
Milly narrowed her eyes. Hell if this woman was going to stop her from finding out what happened. But then, next to her, Olga whimpered, confused by the exchange. Zhenya held out a hand toward his mother, whose chair was closer to his.
“It’s fine, Mama,” he said in Russian. “They treat me fine here.”
“Did you get the mended socks? I fixed your favorites, the ones with the silk, did you see?”
“Yes, Mama.”
Milly sighed, and the fight went out of her. Maybe she was a coward, letting these bullies tell her and Zhenya what to talk about. But she wouldn’t be the one punished if they decided to exact retribution.
“Luba sends her greetings,” Milly said in a flat voice. If she could work Victor into the conversation, that would be a clue at least.
“Did she make you her borscht? I’ve been missing everyone’s cooking. And especially your company.” He looked back and forth between them, and his eyes glistened.
“We will get you out,” Milly said.
“It is only a three-year sentence.” He raised three fingers, like a child.
Olga must have understood, for she said enthusiastically in Russian, “The work will do you good, Zhenya. Strengthen you.”
“Think of the roles I can get onstage when I have more muscle.” Zhenya poked at his arm, bundled in a wool sweater.
“Right. Only three years.” Milly tried to sound optimistic. She had been thinking of returning to America this summer, but not now. She needed to stay and fight for him here. “We will write you.”
“Please do.” Zhenya leaned forward in his chair. “Then it will be like we are talking in the kitchen.”
“I will ask Victor to write you too,” Milly said.
“And you can visit!” Zhenya scuffled his feet against the floor, as if to gain traction to stand, but a look from the male guard settled him back into his chair. “With the OGPU permission, you can visit.”
“Where are you going?” Milly grabbed her purse and rooted inside for a pencil.
Zhenya glanced at the interpreter.
“To the north,” the officer said. She sat up in her chair.
“Where?” Milly held her pencil over a notepad.
“That is all you can know. It is not authorized to discuss more.”
“What?” Milly’s pencil fell to the floor, and she bent down to snatch it up.
“North.”
“Now, hold on,” Milly said, low. “Other Russian wives, mothers, children learn where their exiles are going. They get to know. Why can’t I?”
The interpreter’s cheeks darkened in the dim light.
“I will report this,” Milly said. “To the senior prosecutor. Or the Moscow police. Or your committee!” She didn’t know if OGPU officers had a work committee, but it was worth a try.
“You are a filthy capitalist, with your bargaining,” the woman said. The two guards glanced wide-eyed between them.
The interpreter growled, then huffed out a puff of air.
“He is going to a labor camp north of Novosibirsk. Eight days’ journey from Moscow.”
Milly slid her fingers under her glasses and rubbed the bridge of her nose. Eight days was probably an optimistic calculation, she guessed, based on what she knew of Soviet trains.
“You are wasting your time,” the interpreter said. “Return to approved topics.”
“Which were?” Milly held her pencil above her pape
r. She should stop provoking the woman, but she couldn’t help herself, she hated witless authority.
“His health. Your health. Matters of the household.”
“And how are you?” Zhenya interjected. His eyes were pinched at the corners, and she wished she could let herself fall into his arms.
“I’m fine, Zhenya,” she said softly. “Only worried about you.”
Zhenya smiled. “If my baby writes me every day, it will be the best thing that has happened to me. I can know everything you are doing.”
Milly gave a soft laugh. “You do love letters.”
“Maybe not every day. I do not want you to worry. But every week? You will write?”
“Oh, Zhenya, of course I will write you. And I will visit.” She shot a look at the interpreter, who was pretending to pick lint off her heavy skirt. “I’ll get permission.”
She wanted to promise to get him out too. He deserved to be released, she was sure of it. Even if he had dallied, what did that matter to the Soviet state? He had been nothing but loving and kind to her. But she knew enough not to promise. She pressed her lips together into a silent kiss, then listened as Zhenya and his mother spoke about rations and wages and how else Olga would get by. Milly would help, of course, though neither of them mentioned her.
When they were finished, the two guards grabbed Zhenya by the elbows and lifted him to his feet. To her surprise, Zhenya shook them off, then gave each a reassuring smile. He made a slight bow toward first the interpreter, then his mother. He paused, then squeezed the tortoiseshell bracelet off his hand and gave it to his mother, closing her fingers around it. Milly’s chest felt like it was caving inward, as if the ceiling of the dark room had collapsed upon her, and her breath grew ragged. He turned toward Milly, who stood. He lifted his fingers to his mouth as if to blow her a kiss, but he let his fingertips hover over his lips until he broke her gaze and walked away. She pressed two hands over her mouth. She barely knew him at all, she feared suddenly, even with two years of their strange marriage. Why hadn’t she asked him more questions when they had been alone, when they had walked Moscow’s snow-dusted streets and held hands in silence? Why hadn’t she found more time to spend with him? Now Zhenya and the guards exited and turned down the hallway, away from the front door.
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