Salt the Snow

by Carrie Callaghan

  Milly read the piece and groaned. Parts of it were incomprehensible.

  “What is this about?” she asked one of the senior editors, a small round man with a broom brush of a mustache. She held up the paper and read aloud. “Women are likely to be spies. Sit at cafés. Talk with soldiers. Reptiles in the rearguard.” She flapped the paper in his face. “What in the hell?”

  He thinned his lips. “That is what we are worried about. There have been spies. Haven’t you heard?”

  She shook her head. “There are always spies. Men and women.”

  “Fix it, Milly.”

  She glared at him, and held the paper between two hands, her fingers pinched at the edge. But then her stomach roiled, and she placed her hand on her womb and remembered. It was a girl, she decided, a girl who would be born into a world that reviled her, a fatherless female, but a girl with a mother who would do anything to take care of her. Starting with keeping a roof over their heads.

  “Fine.” She snapped her wrist, extending the article toward him, and he took it. “But the Republic deserves better than this.”

  “Stop stalling and get to work.”

  She growled but sat at her desk and put a clean sheet of paper into her typewriter. She would do what she could.

  Before leaving that night, the mail boy tossed an envelope on her desk.

  “This came for you.” He walked away.

  She recognized Hermann’s elegant handwriting immediately and grabbed the envelope like a wild dog seizing a carcass. But then she saw the date on the postmark, some month earlier. This would have been written before he could have received her latest letter, before she knew about her little burden.

  This letter would be his honest thoughts, his feelings before the vise of obligation could constrain him. This letter was about him and her alone.

  She slid the envelope into her pocketbook, then stood, placed the cover over her typewriter, and handed the clean article to the boss. She hadn’t bothered to find the translator in the end. Anything in the original mash-up that she didn’t understand, she had rewritten herself. There were no facts here to get wrong, only admonitions to shape.

  “See you tomorrow,” she said.

  She walked down the steps of the ornate Ministry of Propaganda, once a rich bank, and glanced up as she habitually did at the fresco ornamenting the ceiling of the front portico. In the dark she could barely make out the blue-and-gray medallion, but it comforted her to know it was there. That beauty could persist in a time of war, that the people who came before her gave some thought to beautifying a space you had to go out of your way to see. She pressed her hand to her belly and walked through the park, darkened to conceal it from air raids, and then she continued the remaining winding blocks to her hotel.

  When she reached the narrow lobby of the Hotel Reina Victoria, she nodded at the clerk, whose elbows were propped on the desk as she passed. He still wore gloves, though the equalizing forces of war had a year earlier removed the obligation of such class strictures. He nodded back, his face hopeful for a moment that she might approach and chat, then sagging again in boredom as she walked on, winding up the marble staircase with its wrought iron bannister. Ordinarily, she wouldn’t mind a chance to practice her terrible Spanish, but now she needed to rush to the safety of her room. The letter may as well have been a hot coal in her purse, glowing and burning with her impatience.

  Her room, fortunately, was empty—Marion must still be with Bob. Milly collapsed into the only chair in the room, a brocaded armchair that spoke of another century.

  She opened the letter and read.

  Her limbs felt weak and fevered by the end. She had misunderstood, he wrote. Their coupling, though tremendously pleasant, was meant to be only a passing affair. Shouldn’t people have sexual relations without further obligation, he asked? He had thought she was as modern minded as he was, and he wouldn’t have entered into their affair if he had known how attached she would become. He didn’t want to hurt her.

  He didn’t want to hurt her.

  THE NEXT DAY, Marion was still asleep on her cot when Milly awoke early. Milly was tempted to wedge her curved body next to the petite one of her friend, to curl into the comfort of her friendship, and to cry her pain away.

  But the shame of admitting her folly would hurt more than the pain of bearing it in silence. She was a fool, chasing after men who didn’t want her.

  Milly sat at her small desk and tried to think of someone to write. Someone who would love her no matter what she said. Her sister, maybe. Milly let her pen sag in her grip.

  Marion sat up and stretched.

  “How’s Bob?” Milly asked, forcing her voice straight, like a limb tied to a splint.

  “Better.” Marion rubbed her eyes. “He can walk a little.”

  “Do you need a break? Let’s go drink some fresh orange juice and stare at the ocean. I’m sure we can find some.”

  “Ocean?” Marion smiled.

  “If we’re lucky.” Milly forced a smile back. The beach was a long walk from their hotel, about an hour, but it was worth it when she had the energy. At night, she liked to watch the ships bobbing in the darkness, their lights extinguished for fear of fascist bombers, but their outlines visible in the starlight.

  “Sounds swell.” Marion stretched again, and her slender limbs glowed in the hazed sunshine coming through the curtains. She was darling, though Milly knew her friend no longer saw her beauty, only her inability to conceive. As if her body were a dried straw doll, Marion had once said.

  All the more reason not to confide.

  “Up and at ’em,” Milly said. “Before everyone else buys the oranges.”

  TWO WEEKS LATER, a second letter from Hermann came. Now he had read her news about the little medicine ball, and though he already had a teenaged son from his first marriage back in America, his words hummed with optimism.

  “What agony you have gone through, my Milly,” he said. He bemoaned her sickness, and though he said nothing about his dismissal, he urged her to take care of herself. He might be able to take a vacation in Paris, he said. One week.

  She hugged the letter to her breast. It was pathetic, but she would accept the comfort from his letter. She didn’t care. Her morning sickness had continued to rack her, and she was losing weight. Even Marion, occupied by her own sadness, had begun to look at her searchingly.

  Milly pulled a clean piece of paper from her desk, while around her, the other editors at the Propaganda Ministry typed away on their clattering machines.

  “Yes,” she wrote. “Just say where.”

  She sealed it up and dashed his address on the envelope before she could reconsider.

  “How’s the exhibition coming?” Constancia said when she dropped her letter in the box near Constancia’s desk. Milly was collecting an anti-fascist show of Spanish children’s artwork, drawings done by kids that showed their villages demolished by fascist bombs or their families’ blood flowing into the soil. The project reminded her of Peter, the little boy who died in a bombing somewhere near a petrol station, and she did the work in his honor. Once she had all the drawings, she would take them to Madrid for the government to display to the foreign press.

  “Rosy,” she said. She didn’t have the words to explain how the children’s anguish tore at her heart, and yet that same heart glowed with the hope that Hermann would embrace her and this little life. She picked up a drawing done in charcoal stick and looked at the bowed, childish lines of a house that seemed to cow in the face of a line of massive bullets. What place was there in this world for innocence? And yet.

  “The exhibition’s coming along great,” Milly continued. Maybe the children’s art would make a difference.

  “Perfect,” Constancia said. “After all, the children are our future.”

  Milly restrained the urge to touch her belly. She wasn’t sure if she’d lose her job over the pregnancy, and she certainly wasn’t going to risk her employment yet.

  “Indeed they ar
e,” she said, smiling.

  32

  JULY 1937

  THE WAR HAD started a year ago, and every day the fascist rebels seemed to gnaw more territory away from the Republic. Milly kept a map tacked up on the wall of the small apartment in Valencia she now rented, much cheaper than the hotel, and she sketched the evolving front onto it. Her stomach sank with each government loss. In May, while she was in Paris with Hermann, the Republican leadership had fled under the cover of night from Madrid to Valencia, and now her seaside town was the capital, though Madrid still held, thank goodness. And even Valencia didn’t feel safe. The diplomats were starting to flee, and each night, the British were rowed out to their destroyer the Resource to spend the night safely in her bunks. Soon, Milly feared, the capital would shift again. Each time she looked at the map, she thought about taking it down. All the map did was remind her of the strength of evil.

  It was nighttime, and though it was a mournful anniversary, the Spanish spirit remained undaunted. Mandatory blackouts began at ten p.m., but men and women capered in the streets with flashlights and candles afterward. Milly sat in a café with Kajsa, a Swedish woman who had fought with the Internationals last fall, when women were allowed to do so. Now Kajsa stayed in Milly’s apartment as she figured out what else she could do to help the Republic’s cause. The leaves of the orange trees planted along the sidewalk rustled in the dark.

  “Are they celebrating or protesting?” Kajsa said, watching a band of teenaged boys walk arm in arm down the street crowing revolutionary songs.

  “I don’t know.” Milly took a small sip of her wine. She didn’t drink much, now that she cradled her little medicine ball in her belly, which was swelling with a comforting tightness against her pants. Soon she would have to tell people, though she suspected Kajsa and Marion, who had found her own apartment, had their suspicions.

  “Have you heard from your doctor? Hermann?” Kajsa asked. Her blond hair glowed in the candlelight shed by the taper on their table.

  “He sent some sugared violets from his trip to Toulouse,” Milly said, though the violets had come weeks ago. Their visit in Paris had been pleasant, but Hermann had been so solicitous of her health that he refused to make love, no matter how often she tried to throw her legs around him. Since then, his letters had been full of paternal affection and concerns about his laboratory in Moscow. She fretted.

  “And the soldiers?” Kajsa giggled. She was delighted with Milly’s love life, or what she imagined of it, and she made much of an American from the International Brigade who had stopped to flirt with Milly outside the Ministry of Propaganda once.

  “I’m sure they’re at the front.” She picked at a piece of hardened wax that had splattered on the circular table. She wondered if she should tell Kajsa now. Milly had prepared her resignation papers, to be effective August 1, from the Propaganda Ministry. Her appetite had only tiptoed back, and she hardly had the energy to manage half the information bulletins her editor was constantly asking her to write. But still, she hadn’t filed the papers. Hermann had insisted he would pay for her to return to the United States, but she couldn’t peel herself away from Spain. As if the Republic couldn’t stand to lose a single ally. In the street, a woman in trousers swirled an anti-fascist banner and laughed. A bearded man, or so he seemed in the dark, caught her in his arms and dipped her back as if dancing.

  Then, a twinge that had been scratching at Milly’s stomach seized into a spasm. She gasped.

  “Are you all right?” Kajsa paused, her wineglass held suspended before her pale lips.

  Milly nodded, but then another spasm gripped her all the way around her midsection.

  “Oh god,” she moaned. The pain subsided, and she took a breath, only to find another cramp clamping her down. She doubled over. Kajsa leapt up, nearly toppling the table, and ran to her side.

  “What is it? Do you need a doctor?” She squeezed Milly’s hand.

  “I’m fine …” She gasped again. “Home. I need to lie down.”

  Kajsa threw Milly’s arm around her tall shoulders and hefted her out of her chair. Haltingly, they made their way back to the apartment. Milly’s pants grew slick, but she told herself it was sweat. Sweat from the Spanish heat. When she lay down, she kept her pants on and refused to look closely at the damp circle spreading along her thighs.

  In the morning, the baby was gone.

  SHE SPENT A week in bed, with Kajsa cooing over her and dabbing her forehead with a damp cloth. There was no fever, but that was Kajsa’s remedy for heartbreak. At the end of the week, Milly pulled herself out of bed.

  “There’s a war,” she said, her prepared words feeling stiff in her mouth. “People are dying at fascist hands. I’m here for a reason, and it’s not to lie in bed.”

  “But you …” Neither of them could say what had happened.

  “Could you bring me some paper? I have a letter to write.” She needed to tell Hermann. To relieve him of his burden. And to reassure him that she would keep it a secret. He was fighting a legal case to gain custody of his teenaged son in Texas, and word of an illicit affair in Spain would undoubtedly count against him. She would tell no one.

  “And then?” Kajsa handed her a sheet of paper and a pen.

  “I’m not sure.” She took the paper and placed it on a closed book on her lap. She had a hole she needed to stop up before her life and soul gushed out of it, leaving her empty and alone, but she didn’t know how.

  Kajsa took Milly’s hand in hers and pressed it against her cheek.

  “You have had a difficult thing.”

  Milly snatched her hand away.

  “I cannot pity myself when I’m lying in bed in a country at war. Where bombs fall and children die and mothers starve.”

  Kajsa looked down.

  “I’m sorry,” Milly continued. “It’s not you I’m angry at. I think … I think I need to be serious about this war. I’m not committed enough.”

  “I don’t know what you mean,” Kajsa said.

  “You will.”

  She gritted her teeth and lifted her pen.

  33

  AUGUST 1937

  MILLY SAT IN a small room overlooking the flat walls and carved portico of the old church across the plaza. Santo Domingo, she thought it was. At the desk across from her, a young man with straight black hair cropped carelessly above his ears coughed.

  “Citizen,” he said, making her wonder for a moment if she were back in Moscow. “Did you hear the question?”

  She had, but she needed the moment to think. She had already botched the answer on dialectical materialism, and she wasn’t sure what he had wanted her to say when he asked her views on private land ownership. The Communist Party of Spain had been making noises as if it supported private ownership, but she wasn’t sure.

  “What is the role of the Party in the bourgeois democracy?”

  She drummed her fingers on the desk. She had wanted to get in, wanted to subsume herself to someone else’s leadership. This morning she had continued past her office and walked the additional block and a half to the Communist Party Headquarters. She had filed her intention to apply a week ago, and she wanted to see if she had earned an interview.

  She had.

  “The role of the Party is to nudge the society through its bourgeois phase.” She was sure “nudge” wasn’t a Marxist word, but hell, she’d still never had a chance to study the man’s writings. She’d just have to wing it, based on the dozens and dozens of cocktail conversations she had overheard.

  He held his pen aloft, waiting, then made a quick note.

  “I want to get in, join the Party,” Milly said, unprompted. She was nervous. “It’s the only thing bigger than myself that I can believe in these days. There’s just so much nonsense out there, so much horror, death, and you people are the only ones trying to make a difference.” She shouldn’t have mentioned death. A dry darkness began to suck at her core when she mentioned death, as if in an echo of what she had lost. She pinched her ey
es closed.

  The young man cleared his throat.

  “Were your parents workers?”

  She snapped her eyes open. There was another echo, and she rubbed her head.

  “They asked me that in Moscow,” she muttered.

  “What?”

  She parted her lips to answer, to again tell the story of her mother’s sacrifices, but then thought better of it.

  “Why does it matter?” she said.

  “How could it not matter? Your class history informs you.”

  “Does it?”

  The young man placed his notebook on the desk.

  “Will you be answering the questions that are part of this interview?”

  Pique rushed in a heat to Milly’s face, and her cheeks burned. She slapped her palm on the table, and was about to tell him what to do with his interview, when she caught herself.

  She took a deep breath.

  “I wanted to be a part of something bigger,” she said. “But I guess that’s not for me.”

  She stood, gathered her purse, reached over to lift her application card from his desk, and walked to the door. As she passed the wastebasket, she crumpled the card and dropped it in.

  “Thank you for your time,” she said.

  When she reached the street, she breathed the hot, salted air and gazed up at the sun-bright sky.

  If only her father could see her there, controlling her temper and making a split-second decision.

  Maybe he would be proud after all.