Marion Merriman came out of the party and threw a bare arm over Milly’s shoulders. The younger woman’s flesh burned against Milly’s cold neck.
“I saw Lindesay come in. He looks like he’s lost half his hair and gained half his weight since the summer.”
It wasn’t true, but Milly appreciated the effort. She gave Marion a quick peck on the cheek.
“Thank you for not thinking I was a husband stealer,” she said. “After your Bob, or something.”
“You’d be welcome to try.” Marion laughed. “Keeping that man fed is more than I have in me, sometimes.”
Milly nudged Marion with her elbow. If she weren’t so darling, her marital bliss would be insufferable.
“Let’s go dance,” Milly said.
“I heard you wrote a divorce story,” Marion said, without moving from the doorway. Her fine-boned face narrowed in thought. “Do you think women were better off when they could pay three rubles and mail the husband a postcard to end the marriage?”
Milly rocked back on her heels and cocked her head.
“Maybe. But men could send divorce postcards too. And what then of Marooshka with her three children and papa nowhere to be found?”
Marion nodded.
“Look, kid, why did you ask about divorce?” Milly looked at her. “You’re not … ?”
“Us? Heavens, no.” She giggled, then cupped Milly’s cheeks with her hands. “I was thinking about you. I’m worried you’ve been here too long, Milly. Maybe it’s souring you.”
Behind them, the lights flickered off as the power wavered, but the phonograph continued playing. Milly gave Marion a gentle punch to the shoulder.
“I want to help make people’s lives better here. I’ve done a lot of running away in my life, and I’m sick of it. Maybe I can’t help Zhenya, but I can still send him packages of cured sausage and socks. And I can still help socialism. I’m not going anywhere. Except to dance.” Milly laughed. “Come on.”
But as they were walking into the dark room lit only by the glowing tips of cigarettes and the lights from the street signs shining through the large window on the other side of the room, a stone seemed to settle in Milly’s chest. She would stay, she would stick this out the way she had intended. Once Zhenya was out, she could return him safely to Olga and then make her own choices.
In the dark newsroom, a calloused hand grabbed hers, twirled her through a few dance steps, then released her back into the crowd again. She strained to find the hand again, or any hand whose fingers would twine with hers. Next to her, a woman purred in pleasure and a man laughed.
Someone jostled her, perhaps the petting couple, and she stumbled a step. The music halted as someone changed the phonograph record to a new jazz number she hadn’t heard before. Though it was dark, she closed her eyes and shimmied to the song alone.
25
FEBRUARY 1936
IT WAS LATE when Milly entered the Hotel Savoy lobby, where she was staying now, and the mild air inside made her glasses fog. She took them off, wiped them down, then put them back on.
She yelped.
In front of her stood Victor, holding his worker’s cap in his hands and looking at her with eyes that darted back and forth from Milly’s face to the door behind her.
“Milly, can we go up to your room? I’m sorry to ambush you. Please?” He worried at the felt cap with his fingers, and the seam was coming undone.
She tipped her head to the right, regarded him, then sighed.
“Hell, Victor,” she said. “You could give a girl some warning.”
She had seen him only a few times in the past year, and mostly they seemed agreed to leave each other alone. Zhenya never mentioned his old friend in the letters he wrote, and the letters themselves had grown increasingly infrequent.
They said nothing as they walked up the two flights of stairs to the third floor. Milly shivered in spite of the mild heat the hotel managed to produce. During Moscow’s winters, she worried she would never get warm.
When they reached her room, small but pretty, she left her coat on and pulled the bottle of vodka down from its shelf. She poured them each a dish, clinked them both together in a toast, then handed Victor his. She went to go sit on the radiator, where her long coat protected her legs.
“They’re arresting more and more people,” he said. “Have you heard what Ezhov is saying? About the Zinovievites?”
“Zinoviev was convicted, what, a year ago? What does Kirov’s murder have to do with anything?”
Victor shook his head and placed his still-full glass on the small table Milly used for meals. Beneath her, her bottom was beginning to scorch, but the tops of her thighs still felt like ice. She stayed put.
“They’re making more arrests. Claiming they are allies of Zinoviev, and that he himself is allied with Trotsky.”
Milly snorted. “With Trotsky in Mexico? He’s been gone nearly a decade.”
Victor waved a hand.
“None of that matters. Aren’t you listening? They’re arresting people. I’m afraid I’m next.”
“You haven’t done anything,” she said, though it felt like a lie. Victor had helped convict Zhenya, and whenever she thought she could forget that, her resentment surged upward.
“Giorgi was arrested again. He’d been detained earlier, when they were investigating the ballet, but he was released. Like me. And now they’ve arrested him.”
“Giorgi? I don’t know him. And you don’t know what he did, Victor. Maybe he had secret meetings after rehearsal. The government here can be blockheaded, but I can’t imagine they’d convict innocent men.”
“You can’t?”
Victor held her gaze.
“He wasn’t innocent,” she whispered, then looked away. “He couldn’t stop who he was.”
“But how does that make him guilty?” Victor yelled. He threw his cap across the room, then turned wild eyed toward Milly.
“This isn’t about Zhenya,” she said, low.
“Maybe it should be.” He pressed his hands over his eyes. “We both failed him. And now we’re going to fail others.”
Milly stood, her backside finally too hot. She finished her drink and thought about pouring herself another, but she didn’t. Instead she paced in the small space between the bed, next to the radiator, and the wall.
“We’re not failing anyone, Victor. You’re being hysterical. No one is trying to arrest you.”
“Let me stay here tonight. One night. On the floor. And then I’ll leave.”
“I’ll have to register you at the desk.”
“No! Just the one night.”
For Zhenya, she would have ignored the rules. For Lindesay, in their time, or Olga. But looking at Victor’s pinched face, his flushed cheeks, she frowned.
“I can’t risk getting thrown out now. Zhenya’s supposed to get released this month. Didn’t you know? He won’t want to stay with his mother, she’ll smother him. He needs this room.” It was all true, and yet she felt like she was lying.
“Milly.”
She stopped pacing.
“Aw, hell, Victor. You want to know the truth? I think you’re being selfish. You’re trying to believe they want to punish you, so you can feel less guilty about what you did to Zhenya. No one wants to arrest you. I think you’re weak, and …” Her voice began to choke up. “And Zhenya deserved better than both of us.”
She sat on the bed, but not even the release of tears came.
Victor scowled, and walked over to pick up his cap. Without another word, he let himself out of the room.
THE NEXT DAY, Milly went to see Olga. The older woman seemed brighter than when Milly had last seen her, a month earlier, and her hair looked freshly trimmed.
“You are looking forward to having Zhenya back,” Milly said, after complimenting her haircut.
“Yes,” Olga said, but in a surprisingly casual manner. Milly looked at her again.
“Have you heard from him?” She set her string bag, bulging wi
th potatoes and onions, on the table, then opened the tied mouth to put the produce away in the bins under the sink.
“No.” Olga’s face darkened. “But he said he would be on the train at the end of February, right?”
Milly nodded. The last letter from Zhenya was a month old, and while his letters had become less frequent since the cold weather set in, going a month without hearing from him worried her. Particularly since in the last two letters he mentioned that his cough had returned. If he was willing to complain about something, it must be serious.
“What are you doing this afternoon?” Milly asked, straightening from the bin.
“What?” Olga’s cheeks grew red.
“We should go to the NKVD office and pressure them to tell us something about Zhenya.”
“We can’t pressure them,” Olga whispered. She glanced around the apartment, though none of the other residents were there.
“Ask. I meant ask. There’s no harm in asking for his file.”
“Not for you, at least.”
Milly took her glasses off, then put them back on, without bothering to wipe them down.
“Don’t you want to know?” she asked softly.
Olga held up her palms. “Of course I want to know. But I can’t be seen to be bothering the police.”
Milly nodded, then grabbed the last three potatoes from the table and placed them in the bin. She could understand Olga’s caution, even if she hated it. They had done so little for Zhenya. His absence weighed on her like a debt she could never repay, even if she might sometimes forget about it.
“I’ll go. I’ll let you know what I learn,” she said, brushing the dirt from the potatoes onto her wool trousers.
Olga bowed her head.
“Thank you,” she said.
Milly bundled up and trudged out to the gray cold and snow-piled streets. The administrative headquarters loomed at the end of Pushechnaya Street, where Olga lived. As she walked, the wall of the shoveled snowbank was so high she could barely see the street, and pedestrians had to squeeze past one another in the narrow sidewalk trench. A uniformed officer in a wool trench coat walked past, said “excuse me” when he bumped into a middle-aged woman. No one said anything, and she wondered if she was imagining the tension that seemed to stiffen the gaze of all the passing citizens.
She made a left-hand turn at the end of the street, and there loomed the massive Lubyanka building, some nine stories tall and all the more hideous for its grim faux balconies and third-story rounded windows, as if those gestures at ornament made up for the decades of misery inflicted. It was so tall you could see Siberia from the basement, Lindesay had once joked. He was disappointed when Milly didn’t laugh.
She walked around the block to the main entrance and frowned when she saw no line. Not a single grandmother or young son waiting to send a package or request information.
Milly pulled open the heavy wooden door, and the burnt smell of dense cigarette smoke rushed out to greet her. Inside, a young man sat behind a desk facing the door. He had his overcoat on, and he puffed away at a small cigarette while frowning at a paper in his hand. Behind him, the center of the building opened up to a tall atrium that must have reached all the way to the ceiling, judging from the glow of natural light against the marble floors and columns, though Milly couldn’t see that high from the entrance.
“Excuse me,” she said. He glanced at her, then put down the letter and began typing something on the typewriter next to him.
“I’m here with the Moscow Daily News,” she said. “I’d like to get some information about the reeducation camps. The prisoners.”
He stopped typing and stared at her, his eyes wide under his brown eyebrows. Milly’s stomach twisted, and though she was still cold, she began to sweat. She should have named one of the other papers she wrote for, one of the internationals. Not the newspaper that would get Borodin or her other friends in trouble.
“Moscow Daily News? What do they want to know about prisoners?” He stubbed out his cigarette.
Milly puffed out her cheeks, then collapsed them.
“Look, it’s just me. Not the paper. I want to know about a friend. If he’s due to be released soon.”
The man stood up.
“What kind of counterrevolutionary request is that? Give me your name. Our local commissar should know you are making false claims on behalf of the paper. Do you even work there?”
Milly took a step back.
“Aw, shove it,” she said in English. Then she turned and ran out of the building.
The young man yelled behind her, something she couldn’t understand through the echoes of her feet against the tile, and then the door slammed shut and his voice vanished. She ran all the way into Dzerzhinsky Square, across the street, and then stopped, panting, with her hands on her knees as she felt the cold air rip through her throat.
What an idiot she was.
She straightened and looked at the gray sky. She would have to wait for Zhenya. Just a little while longer.
THAT NIGHT, MILLY splayed the day’s copies of Pravda and Izvestia, the primary Soviet newspapers, across her bed. She was writing wires for Internews, Hearst’s wire service, more regularly now, and she needed content. Content they would buy.
A photograph in Pravda of a little girl, about ten years old, caught her eye.
“Murdered,” said the headline.
Milly crawled onto the bed, the thin papers crinkling and tearing beneath her knees, and she read the article. The girl’s schoolteacher had thrown her down a well, breaking the poor child’s neck in the process, because the girl had denounced his counterrevolutionary acts. The article did not say what those acts were. Milly read the story two more times to ensure she had understood it, then scribbled down a quick summary. She cut out the picture of the girl, for herself, but changed her mind and folded it up with the rest of the paper. What a terrible story, she should have nothing to do with it. But dead girls sold copies, and maybe both the girl and the teacher deserved to have their stories known. Milly wished she could go interview the man. “Why did you do it, you bastard?” she’d say, like she had back in San Francisco in the twenties. “Was it so bad to have a kid call you counterrevolutionary?”
She wadded up the paper and threw it into the wastebasket. Outside, snow fell, consuming the city silently.
Maybe it was so bad.
She wished she could ask Zhenya.
THE NEXT DAY she went to the train station after sending off her wire. Seven rubles it had cost her to wire her pitch, but at least Internews would repay her that expense, even if they didn’t pick up the story. She rubbed her gloved hands against the cold and stared up at the day’s train schedule. There were two coming in that she guessed Zhenya could be on, and she waited an hour for the first one. When all the passengers had streamed past, jostling through the station where she stood, shifting her weight back and forth on the tile floor because that was better than sitting on a cold marble bench or leaning against a frigid stone wall, she stared at the door to the platform and willed him to step through. Late but smiling, like her darling of old. He had once waited for her here, when she was returning from that reporting trip and had flirted with the handsome Party member. Then, he had seemed crestfallen to see another man help her down from the train, but now she wondered if it was something else he was disappointed by. Something about Milly herself—her nose, her chin, her bursting laugh—that had made his long wait seem too high a price to pay.
She hugged her arms around herself, then went home.
When she could, over the next few days, she went to wait at the train station. It was silly, of course, to hope she would manage to hit upon his arrival in Moscow, when certainly he would head straight to Olga’s, and Olga would know how to find her. But still, Milly clung to the hope that fate would make the past years up to her, to him, and she could surprise him. To be safe, she wrote a letter to him saying she was waiting, and he should tell her if his release date had changed. But it
would take two weeks, at least, for her letter to arrive and for him to reply, and that was only if the censors were quick. Or so she assumed. She had never seen a redaction in his correspondence, but she could feel the weight of his fear in his relentless cheerfulness and his vague reports on his life. Or, she thought the undercurrent was fear. It was impossible that he was happy.
After a few days of returning to the train station, she began to recognize some faces: the haggard conductors ending their shifts, the boys selling newspapers and, when they could, roasted chestnuts in small brown bags. The station pulsed with a predictable rhythm, the ebb and flow of passengers and trains like blood throbbing into and out of the heart. She ought to write a story on the station. But she left her notebook in her pocket.
She worked later at the newsroom to make up for the hours she spent waiting, and she woke up early, shivering in the sunless morning, to check the local papers for any possible wire stories. Borodin called her once into his office, raised his hand to say something, then seemed to reconsider.
“Never mind,” he said.
After that, they rarely spoke. Milly’s stomach curdled with nervousness at the office, and she worked harder to find stories that would interest the editors in London and New York.
Then it was March, and there was still no Zhenya.
Olga called her at the newsroom one afternoon.
“Come over,” she said, breathless. “Come quick.”
Milly threw down her pen and ran out of the newsroom so fast she was halfway down the stairs before she realized she had forgotten to put her boots on. She ran back, kicked the shoes off and the boots on, and ran out again.
At Olga’s apartment, Milly swung the door open without knocking.
Only Olga was there, sitting at her small table. Her face was pale as she looked up. She held out an envelope.
Milly recognized it as her own within a few steps, her boots still on, the door still open. In the hallway, the voice of a mother scolding her child echoed.
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