* * *
—
The Viipuri prison was a hulking stone building with cells deep in the earth. Viskey found the warden, who led us down into the icy honeycomb, adjusting and readjusting the silver pince-nez on his nose, and walking with a heavy determined clop, as if the soles of his shoes were made of iron instead of leather.
Finally we arrived at the cell of a Russian POW, a flier who’d been shot down and captured near Kouvola. He sat on a low cot, his back very straight against the concrete wall. He seemed to be sleeping with his eyes open until the guard clacked at the bars with the toe of his boots. Then he rose, looking startled.
He was tall and narrowly built, with a reddish growth of beard coming in, and sad pale eyes. He couldn’t have been much older than I was, I thought, and he looked very cold. We had a brief conversation, a tangle of translation from Russian to Finnish to French and then to English. I wanted to know what he thought he was fighting for.
“To save Russia, of course,” he said quietly.
“From what?” I pressed.
“We hear this again and again,” the warden intervened. “The government has told them Finland is the attacker. They fight because they think they must.”
“Is everything propaganda?” I shuddered and looked again at the pilot, who was here in this godforsakenly frigid place, and probably thought he was going to be shot at any moment. All because his government had told a great lie. He was living that lie, and didn’t even know.
“Ask him if he has a family,” I said to the guard. He did, but when the Russian pilot answered, the guard turned away because the man began to cry, holding his hand flat at the level of his waist to show the height of his daughter. His wife was pregnant with a second child, he pantomimed, while tears coursed down his cheeks into his beard.
The warden coughed, a half-strangled sound. Viskey looked at his shoes. I wanted to scream.
“Please, let’s leave him alone now,” the guard begged, which I understood to mean he couldn’t hear anymore, not if he was going to do his job and sleep that night.
We saw two more Russian POWs, who looked so lost behind their cell bars that I begged the guard to let me give them cigarettes. I was rattled at this point, distracted and emotional, and could barely look at them without wanting to weep. They had the thinnest sort of cotton pants, threadbare coats, and the wrong sort of shoes for this weather.
The men must have been almost mindless with cold, but they answered my questions solemnly and respectfully, and smoked my cigarettes as if they might never be offered such a pleasure again, drawing each breath in deeply before exhaling. Through the guard who stood there, they telegraphed the same general message the flier had, that they were fighting because they didn’t know how else to save Russia. They’d only had ten hours of training before being shipped to the front. They had families. They were afraid of dying.
“You have a soft heart,” Viskey said as we made our way out of the honeycomb later. I was breathing hard as we climbed, and not from exertion.
“Governments and world leaders should be punished,” I said. “Not men.”
“I don’t hate anyone,” he explained. “But war insists we be practical, doesn’t it?”
“It’s just so sickening, that’s all.”
He cleared his throat loudly. The sound bounced off the deep stone walls and echoed up and down the stairwell before landing back where we were. “Yes.”
* * *
—
A short while later, we were at the airfield, though I hadn’t asked to see it. The squadron commander was a version of the colonel I’d met that morning, and as he paraded me by the five planes, shiny with rivets behind camouflaging snowdrifts, I made sure to praise them and also scribbled notes to reassure him. When I was finally released to a nearby dugout, the men of the pursuit squadron stood around barrel fires, their faces glowing. One played a guitar with fingerless gloves, his touch light and effortless seeming. A folk song, a love song, an anthem—I wasn’t sure of the sense of the words, but the music seemed to rise over the edges of the dugout as the snow came soundlessly down. I looked at Viskey, and his lower lip was trembling.
“I see you have a soft heart, too,” I said. Actually, I had begun to wonder.
“I know this song,” he said simply. “It makes me forget how terrible things have been, a little.”
I felt it as well. How for a moment his voice seemed to lift us all beyond this war—beyond any war. Beyond what humans could ruin or distort. For as long as he sang, I could let go of where I was and what the world was up to. Almost.
* * *
—
For the next string of days, I dug in at the Karelian front, taking advantage of my special access from Roosevelt. I wasn’t just the only woman there, but the only reporter who’d gotten through at all. As alone and as frightened as I felt, I knew that I’d been given a serious responsibility, and I meant to live up to that, or try with all I had.
It was almost surreal to watch the Finnish soldiers flicking through the snow-heavy, misty tree line on skis, aiming to surprise the Russians. To hear artillery fire half swallowed by a blizzard, and villages laid to waste almost silently. To see the whole white wet forest burning.
Back in Helsinki in a café, I tried to write what I’d seen and to keep out what I felt. Collier’s wanted reporting, not histrionics or hand-wringing. Not tears. And yet how could I keep my feelings to myself? This was a war of gluttony. Because a very few people—Hitler, Franco, Mussolini, Stalin—wanted to control everything they could, ordinary people were dying in droves, and they didn’t even know why. At least in Spain, there had been a cause, a reason for the fighting and the loss of life that gave a measure of dignity to both. But this, this was going to drive me mad if I thought about it too much.
It was three o’clock and also twilight in the far-north winter dark. I sat at the café table while my tea grew cold. It was raining and the fog was like damp and wretched bandaging coming apart. Collier’s had sent word that I could leave as soon as I finished this piece, but apparently there were no planes going out now. Arranging transport during wartime could be difficult. You came and went in borrowed cars or convoys, cadging a seat on a plane when you could beg one, unless anyone more important needed it, which was nearly always. But here things had grown even more intense than I’d experienced before. The Russian fleet had moved from Kronshtadt, and the sea was unsafe, too. I wanted to send a cable to Ernest to let him know I might be stuck here indefinitely, but the wire communication had gone down completely.
I felt helpless and desperate. Now that I’d done my work, all I wanted was to be home again at my own desk while Ernest sat at his, with sun streaming in the windows from everywhere, and time to wallow and think and be quiet. I couldn’t now remember any of the difficulties of the fall, or my worries about Pauline. There was only the love I had for Ernest and our life. I didn’t want to be apart from him now, or ever again. If only I could get back to our precious foxhole again, I would tell him that, and then show him, over and over.
“Gee, Gellhorn, who died?”
I started, blinking, and saw it was Frank Haynes, an American military attaché I’d run into half a dozen times. We expats were a pretty small bunch.
“Hi, Frank. Sorry. I think I froze to death weeks ago, actually.”
“Looks that way. Maybe it’s time you went home.”
“Don’t tease me. I can’t take it.”
“I wouldn’t. I just got word there’s a flight going out tomorrow. I can get you on it if you’d like.”
I nearly jumped out of my café chair and flung myself at him. “Oh Christ, yes. Yes! Where to?”
“Sweden?”
“I can live with that. Oh, my God—Frank! Really? You’ve no idea how you just saved me. Do you think I might make it home by Christmas? Is that too much to hope for?”
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“Maybe not. You can try.”
I did jump up then, and kissed him hard, full on the mouth, which had him laughing. But I would have kissed a lamppost. A leather shoe. A lump of coal. I would see my love, soon. I was going home.
45
From Sweden I headed for Lisbon to catch the Pan American Clipper bound for Cuba, but fate intervened in any number of ways. First I was waylaid in Paris, where I learned Gustav Regler, our colleague from long-ago Madrid, was languishing in prison as an enemy alien. They were questioning his Spanish citizenship and he had no one to help him untangle the snarl of red tape around the situation, so I wrote Eleanor Roosevelt to see if she could persuade the French government to see reason, and then visited his wife and gave her a little money so she could stay her course while she waited for good news.
I cabled Ernest saying it looked like I’d be home by the first of the year, now, but there were more delays in Paris. My exit visa needed sorting out, and there was a question about whether I could find a French plane to take me to Portugal, or anywhere at all, given the tense, tangled state of Europe. So I waited and bit my nails, and smoked more than was good for me, and longed for the Finca and my desk and Ernest’s arms until they blended together into a steady, pounding ache.
The only thing that did anything for my nerves was Paris itself, which was quiet and cold and incredibly beautiful—more beautiful, actually, for the way the city didn’t seem to know it existed on borrowed time. War was coming here, too, of course. It was already an inevitability—but for the moment there was only a silvery snow falling on the empty Place de la Contrescarpe. Ernest had walked here as a young man, looking into all the café windows with a knot of hunger in his belly and a hole in his shoe. He had told me all the stories, and they seemed like gentle ghosts as I threaded my way through the Latin Quarter, past the good cafés burning boulets in their braziers, thinking of him.
* * *
—
Ernest looked scruffy and yet wonderful when he met me on the dock in a thick fisherman’s sweater, his hair grown over his ears. The weather was unseasonably cold in Cuba, but I didn’t care about that or anything else. When he held me, we were both shaking a little.
“Hello, Rabbit,” he said.
“Oh, Rabbit,” I said, pulling back to see his face. His face: my God, I had missed it. The feathered lines around his eyes. His strong straight nose. The dashes of gray coming through at his temples. “Promise you’ll tie me up next time I talk about going away, please?”
“Tie nothing. I was thinking chains. I haven’t been able to eat or sleep for worrying about you.”
As we walked toward the car, I pulled my jacket more tightly around me, wondering if Finland’s cold had permanently lodged in my bones. “What’s with this weather?”
“I don’t know. The boys and I kept a fire going for days and slept in our clothes.”
“The usual lawlessness, you mean.”
“Without women, what do you expect?”
“Exactly that. Just kiss me, all right, and don’t stop kissing me until I tell you to.”
He smiled. “You have a lot of demands for someone who’s been away for two months.”
“Two months and sixteen days, and I won’t do it again. I promise.”
He stopped and reached for me, clasping his hands together around my rib cage until I felt the vise grip of his arms, strong and warm. “I want it in writing.”
* * *
—
The next morning, I woke in my own bed and sank farther into the pillow, stretching long under the piled-up blankets. Ernest was working already. I could hear the keys of his Corona striking the paper against the roller, a steady pleasant clacking sound—the sound of things coming together as they should.
I lay there without moving and listened as the rhythm intensified, like a boulder rolling downhill and picking up speed. Then there was a silence as he read over what he’d written, and thought, and waited for what came next. His mind turning and turning, sifting through the things he knew, the true things he’d kept close to him for years and years, sometimes, waiting for the right moment.
Later, I would do the same. The places I’d just been and the people who’d moved me were with me, ready to feed my work. And I saw now, in a way I hadn’t before, how having the Finca and Ernest, too, made it possible for me to go away and return, changed and stronger, and better, and more myself somehow. It was a version of what I’d said to Tillie in Sun Valley, only truer. I didn’t want to have this life with Ernest and my work to prove I could have everything. I needed them both in order to feel whole.
“Rabbit?” I called from the bed.
“Yes?”
“This is everything I love. It’s all right here. We’re our own country.”
* * *
—
My God, but I loved being back at my desk. The first thing I did was pore over the publishing contract that had arrived while I was away. I had sent A Stricken Field to a handful of editors in New York, initially planning to include Max Perkins at Scribner’s. But Ernest had convinced me not to, saying that it might not be wise for two writers in the same family to also be competing for attention at the same house. I agreed, moving on to other possibilities, and had finally hit pay dirt with Duell, Sloan and Pearce. The book would be published the following March, and I was over the moon. I couldn’t have loved it any more if it were my own child, and now it would have a place in the world, not just in my heart and imagination. I sat with the contract in my hands for a long time, absorbing the realness of it and the seriousness of the legal language that bound the book and me to a future.
It was Ernest’s faith in me, and the rootedness we’d claimed together, that helped bring this book to life. I felt that profoundly, felt the value of what we’d made here. The future was as terrifying as ever, with Europe tumbling and shattering into awful shards. Ernest’s divorce, too, was still only an idea. Hard words thrown down followed by awful waiting. But here was something solid. Ernest and I gave each other guts and roots, and a bright horizon. We filled our days with meaning and laughter and rich, real talk. I could never do any better, or have what amounted to more. I only had to say yes.
Reaching for clean paper, I snapped a sheet into the carriage and wrote,
I, Mrs. Martha Rabbit Bongie Gellhorn Hemingway, do forthwith and otherwise swear never to undertake the leaving of my current love and future husband again, nor send him into wretchedness for two months and sixteen days, nor trouble his mind and heart, for he is everything that matters to me in this life.
Let it be known to these witnesses (imaginary as they might be) that I will endeavor to protect him from further loneliness and storminess of mind by staying put and loving him body and soul. And I promise this from the soundest and best of intentions, and with the squarest, most right mind I can muster for these proceedings, and with more love than I can properly state.
Martha Gellhorn Hemingway
Part 5
THE SUN AND THE MOON
AND THE SUN
JANUARY 1940–DECEMBER 1941
46
“She could put me out of business if she wanted to,” Ernest said of Pauline. We were still waiting for her to agree to the terms of their divorce and wondering if she could stall for months, or even years, to spite him. Us. In the meantime, she had sent the boys off to boarding school and shuttered the Key West house to be in New York with her sister. “Jinny has too much influence over Pauline and always has. Things could get a lot worse now before they get any better.”
“Let’s try to be optimistic,” I told him. “Maybe she’ll want to move on for her own reasons. She’s still a young woman. There’s plenty of life left.”
“Maybe,” he said, sounding unconvinced. “In the meantime, I’m going to put everything I have into this book. I’m going to write so well that all the
other books will seem small in comparison. That’s the kind of optimism I can get behind.”
I understood the way he leaned on his work in the face of uncertainty. I was doing exactly that as I waited for A Stricken Field to finally land in the world, with its dedication to Ernest, and all my hopes and wishes for a lasting career as a novelist tucked inside its pages, written invisibly in all the spaces between the words.
But from the moment the first notices began to roll in, I crumbled. The story was too much like reporting, the critics said, too factual and journalistic, and not imaginative enough. Marianne Hauser at the Saturday Review went so far as to call my heroine, Mary Douglas, “more noble than real.” She couldn’t have hurt me more if she’d said the same about me, to my face.
“I wonder if they know how deeply we take this stuff in,” I said to Ernest, the latest notice in my hands. A hard, acrid lump resting just below my rib cage.
“There was Mrs. Roosevelt’s piece. That was positive.”
It had been lovely, in fact. She’d praised the book in her “My Day” column, calling it “a masterpiece as a vivid picture,” but against the sea of mostly negative commentary, I couldn’t trust her praise. “She’s just being loyal.”
“You should let me read them for you,” he finally suggested. “You’ll make yourself ill this way—or, worse, you’ll start believing what they say.”
“That would be cowardly, wouldn’t it? Not to even look?”
“Nonsense. It’s self-preservation. What’s the use of having two writers under one roof if we can’t look out for each other?”
I gave in, and did actually stop reading them, until Time magazine arrived in a thick bundle from the mail boat, like a very quiet bomb made all of words. They’d given me a splashy feature—half a page—but it wasn’t about the book at all. It was gossip, a biting piece about me and my “great and good friend” Ernest Hemingway.