Countess Maria Catherine Ludmilla Zhivkov, was united in holy matrimony to Captain Edward J. Banning, USMC, of Charleston, South Carolina, by the Very Reverend James Fitzhugh Ferneyhough, D.D., canon of the cathedral, in a 10:45 A.m. Anglican ceremony on 12 November 1941. It was the first marriage for both.
Throughout the ceremony, the tall, black-haired, blue-eyed bride, age twenty seven and known as Milla, wondered when and how she would take her life.
She loved Ed Banning madly; that was not the problem. She had felt something special the moment he walked into her small apartment off the Bund. And this spark had almost immediately, almost frighteningly, turned into excitement and desire.
The problem was that they really had no future; and she was fully aware of that.
Ed Banning was an officer of the United States Corps of Marines, about to leave Shanghai, almost certainly never to return, and she was an escapee from what was now the Soviet Union. In Imperial Russia, she had been born into a noble family.
Now she was a stateless person without a country. Her Nansen passport-issued to stateless Russians who had fled the Revolution and from whom the Communist government had withdrawn citizenship-was a passport in name only. It was not valid for travel to the United States, or, for that matter, for travel anywhere else.
