The Last Green Valley Page 11

  Emil sensed immediately that there was something not quite right about the man. Why had he been in the creek bed? Where did the wine come from? When he glanced at Walt and Will sitting by their mother, both boys were frowning, distrustful. But not Adeline. She seemed amused by their visitor.

  “I’ll take some honey wine, Corporal Gheorghe, please,” Rese said.

  “You will not,” her mother said.

  “I will,” Emil’s father said.

  “I will, too,” Adeline said. “Where did you get honey wine? And how does a Romanian corporal know how to speak German?”

  He walked up by the fire, smiling at them all as he twisted the cork from the bottle. “I stole the honey wine from an SS officers’ camp just up the road.” He went to Johann and poured some in his cup, saying, “Do you know what the stars and the moon and the Almighty One say I am going to do when the war is over and I get to go home?”

  Emil wanted to tell him that he didn’t care what he was going to do after the war was over and that stealing alcohol from SS officers was one of the dumbest moves he’d ever heard of.

  But Adeline’s older sister, Malia, said, “What will you do?”

  “I will be a beekeeper,” the corporal said. “Make honey. Sell honey. I love honey.”

  He moved with the wine to Karoline, who shook her head and gestured to her daughter. “None for Rese, either.”

  “I’m twenty-one, Mama,” Rese protested.

  Karoline glared at her, said, “This is not about age, Rese, and you know it.”

  Rese went into a huff, crossed her arms, shut her eyes, and said nothing.

  “Why a beekeeper?” Malia asked as he poured Adeline and Lydia some wine.

  The Romanian raised his eyebrows at Emil, who shook his head. The corporal made a sad face with a pouty lower lip before walking over to Malia, saying, “Bees and honey are good for men and women and little boys. If you eat honey, you’re strong, never get sick. If you get stung, it makes you even stronger. And you eat the royal jelly? You live and live and live. And a beekeeper, he does not have to work so hard all year. It’s a good dream. Every night, I dream the war is over. Crazy Stalin, loony Hitler, all gone, dead, to hell. In my dream, I throw my gun away, go home, raise bees, make honey, and find a good woman to make happy.”

  He smiled at Malia. “My wife and I will live long. No war. Just love everyone. Make sweet honey together, right?”

  She blushed, dropped her chin, said, “That does sound like a dream, Corporal.”

  “Dreams come true,” he said, grinning. “You know this, yes?”

  She looked up in confusion and then glanced at her mother. Lydia shook her head and said, “Dreams are nonsense, Corporal Gheorghe. They don’t come true.”

  “No, no, dreams come true,” he said, taking off his helmet and gesturing to a still-livid scar above a slight crescent-shaped depression in his skull above his right ear. “The old Corporal Gheorghe? Before the mortar hit? He hated life. He suffered every day, dark and angry, and listened to scared voices in his head. Why me? Why not me? Who will shoot me? The old Corporal Gheorghe did not believe in God. He did not believe that dreams come true.”

  The Romanian soldier put his hand over his heart, and his eyes widened. “But then the mortar bomb hit, knocked me cold. I woke up and everything was different. I was part of everything and everyone. I saw it. I felt it. I understood! Private Kumar was right! Dreams come true if you hold them in your heart and act from your heart. Every night, right here in my chest, I know I was born to make honey, find a beautiful woman, and make more honey.”

  He laughed, touched the scar with his right hand again, and closed his eyes, his face as blissful as a man’s face could be. “I can wait. I have patience and peace and am not afraid. I know in my heart I am already a beekeeper. No matter what, I am a beekeeper.”

  Emil had concluded by then that the Romanian was a raving lunatic or a drunk or both. He felt a little hostile as he said, “You did not tell us where you learned to speak German.”

  “Oh, my grandmother was Austrian,” he said, opening his eyes. “I went to live with her for several years after my mother died.”

  Malia said, “And where were you when the mortar hit?”

  The rapture drained out of the corporal’s face. His face clouded. His hand dropped from his heart and grabbed the bottle of honey wine. After pouring a generous slug into his mouth, he swallowed it, shivered, and stared at them all with a haunted expression.

  “Stalingrad,” he said. “The Elbow of the Don.”

  Over the course of the next hour, while the fire burned down to embers and they consumed the rest of the honey wine, the beekeeper told his story of the longest and bloodiest battle ever fought on earth. Despite not trusting the man, Emil could not help listening closely as Corporal Gheorghe described leaving his hometown of Barlad in eastern Romania and being ordered onto a troop train in his summer uniform in July 1942. The beekeeper left the train two days later and then marched for nine days to a position near the town of Serafimovich more than one hundred kilometers northwest of Stalingrad.

  “It was steppe country south of Cotul Donului, the Elbow of the Don River,” he said. “Open. Few trees. Lots of wind. Hot then, too. Private Kumar, that crazy little Indian, he thought the wind and the sun were just fine. I hated it.”

  A soldier in the Romanian’s platoon, Private Kumar worked hard digging trenches, foxholes, and pads for machine gun nests and cannons. As they dug into their position on a ridge about two kilometers from the elbow of the river, Corporal Gheorghe learned that Private Kumar’s father was an expatriate from India who owned a textile company, had lived in Bucharest for thirty years, and early on married Kumar’s mother, a beautiful Romanian woman. They had three children. Kumar was the oldest.

  The Romanian drank again from the honey wine, said, “Private Kumar was even shorter than me but he was twice as strong. And later, when it got colder than cold? He would not shake. He’d just sit down, shut his eyes, make this little smile, breathe deep and slow for ten minutes. And then he’d be fine and go back to work. Finally, I asked Kumar if he was praying. He said, no, he was meditating. I told him I had no idea what he was talking about. He said praying was where you talk to God. And meditation was where you listen.”

  He paused, smiled. “At the time, I thought Private Kumar was kind of nuts and—”

  “I thought you were going to tell us about the battle.” Lost in all this rambling talk, Emil had gotten to his feet, intending to care for his horses.

  “And how I got hit in the head, yes,” the corporal said. “It’s coming.”

  Though the Soviet air force bombed Corporal Gheorghe’s position several times in the ensuing months, the beekeeper, Private Kumar, and the rest of the Third Romanian Army were largely untested well into the autumn of 1942, which was unseasonably mild and spawned windstorms and tornadoes across southern Russia.

  Gheorghe said, “In November, the Red Army came to the heights on the other side of the Don River. Tanks. Cannons. Many divisions.”

  The beekeeper’s face had gone hard with the memory. He said Private Kumar had a vision while he was meditating. In his vision, the Soviets attacked at night, and he was killed.

  “I told him not to think that way, that he had to be ready to fight, and Kumar would just smile at me. I went to sleep and had this dream that I lived through the battle, walked right through it, became a beekeeper, and lived a long, happy life.”

  In the early hours before dawn on November 23, 1942, three Soviet armies attacked the Romanians, who were stretched thin along a hundred-kilometer front from Corporal Gheorghe’s position on the Elbow of the Don, east toward Stalingrad.

  “The snow and wind had come in, first big storm of winter,” the beekeeper said, looking up at the night sky. “I could not hear the tanks, but Private Kumar said he could hear them idling. Then cannons and mortars started thumping and hitting all over our ridge. Private Kumar was over at the other end of the s
ame dogleg trench, not far, maybe forty meters away. I tell you, when the bombs started falling, he just put his gun down and sat there, eyes closed, with that silly little smile on his face.”

  The Romanian stopped his tale to offer them the last of the honey wine, but they all shook him off. Malia asked, “What happened?”

  He gazed sadly into the fire. “At first light, a mortar shell hit Private Kumar, and he was gone, like red snow blowing away on the wind.”

  “What?” Rese said, recoiling. “Really?”

  “Sad but true. And then in the snowstorm, there were big flashes like lightning. And boom! I got hit, too, and everything went dark.”

  The Romanian’s gloved fingers went to the scar and the depression on the side of his head before he took his attention off the night sky and stared wide-eyed at them all.

  “I woke up, facedown in the snow. It was daylight. My ears rang and buzzed. My head felt broken. I was caked with snow, and I could feel I was injured here in my head and bleeding out my nose and ears. More bombs fell. More cannons fired. Tanks were coming. And riflemen. And machine gunners. But I was dizzy, and time seemed slow until I saw thousands of Soviets in white clothes crossing the river and climbing the hill in the storm. I saw them shoot six men below me and heard them say, ‘Take no prisoners.’”

  The corporal paused, transfixed and horrified, remembering the moment of his approaching doom. His body trembled, then, not in fear, Emil noticed, but with a strange joy that suddenly seemed to burst from his chest and radiate from his face. He gazed around at them all, grinning like a madman.

  “The Russian soldiers, they ran right past me, like I was invisible!” he said. “Then more came, and it was the same. And right then, I knew I was different after the mortar bomb, like something got knocked into place in my head. I was very calm, at peace, and as I surveyed the battle that raged around me, I knew in my heart that Private Kumar was correct. You, me, the fire, the universe, everything is the Almighty One. And when you know that, when you embrace that, dreams come true because you are in the Almighty and the Almighty is in you.”

  Emil wanted to stop him right there because it all sounded totally insane, but then he noticed how Malia and Adeline and Rese seemed almost entranced by the Romanian.

  “What did you do?” Malia asked.

  Corporal Gheorghe smiled at her. “I took my rifle, got up out of the trench, and walked through the blizzard, straight through combat.”

  He claimed he saw dead Soviet soldiers in white coveralls and took a set off one of the corpses. He said Russian and Romanian machine gunners shot past him. Bombs fell. Cannons roared. Tanks clanked by him at less than one and a half meters while he buried too many of his comrades.

  Corporal Gheorghe said he walked through battles and the aftermath for days, seeing the brutality, the carnage, and far too many dead—Germans, Soviets, and Romanians, civilians and military personnel alike. He rummaged in the packs of dead Romanian soldiers. If he found food or something useful, he buried those soldiers. To avoid lying in the snow, he slept where the bombs had hit most recently.

  “The ground was black, warm, and smelled like oil smoke,” he said. “The third or fourth morning, a fog came, and I walked into it. When I came out of that fog, the battle of Cotul Donului was over, and I was very much alive.”

  He shifted his attention to Malia, widened his smile, and said, “This is why I know I will be a beekeeper and find a good woman and live a honey life.”

  Adeline’s older sister blushed again and giggled. “A honey life.”

  “Well,” Lydia, her mother, said, getting to her feet, irritated. “I’ve had enough, and so have you, Malia. We must go in the morning to find our own honey life.”

  The Romanian seemed to find that funny and laughed and bowed. Lydia and a reluctant Malia left the dying fire along with Adeline, who carried Will while Walt trudged sleepily beside her toward the wagon and bed.

  Karoline urged Rese and Johann off with her as well. And then there were just Emil and the Romanian soldier in the fire’s last glowing light.

  “You understand, Martel?” Corporal Gheorghe said. “The Almighty One, God, the Divine, the Universal Intelligence, whatever you call it, is all the same thing. The One hears us and helps us, moves the moon and stars for us if we ask in the right way. And dreams come true.”

  Emil felt leaden inside as he shook his head and snapped, “There is no God, no Almighty One, no Divine, no Universal Intelligence, no moon and stars moving because of dreams. Just your own hard work and what you build for yourself and what you can hide from. That’s it!”

  The Romanian touched his head scar. “I walked through war at its worst and wasn’t touched after the mortar bomb. I saw thousands die, Martel. But not me. I am here, by your fire.”

  “If what you said is true, you are a lucky man,” Emil said. “I’ll give you that. Good night, Corporal Gheorghe. Have a good life.”

  Gheorghe put his hand over his heart and then rocked back his head for a moment, eyes closed, before opening them and staring at Emil with his hand extended. “I have the feeling I will see you again, Martel. In fact, I am sure of it. It will happen when the moon and stars move.”

  Emil reluctantly shook the madman’s hand. “Sure, okay, and good luck with the honey.”

  “Not luck,” he said as he picked up his rifle and empty bottle. “In my heart, I am already a beekeeper.”

  He chuckled and walked away, down into the dark creek bottom. As Emil went to check on the horses, he could hear the Romanian corporal talking to no one and crashing through the brush. The night had fallen silent when he crawled beneath the blankets under the wagon.

  “Was he crazy, Emil?” Adeline whispered.

  “Hit in the head and completely cracked,” he whispered back. “Worse than Malia.”

  He thought she might be angry at that, but instead, Adeline said, “I didn’t understand half of what that man said, but my sister seemed to understand all of it. They do see the world differently, don’t they?”

  “Like I said, hit in the head. Now, go to sleep.”

  Chapter Eleven

  In the chill deep darkness of night, Adeline awoke to a shrill whistle followed by an explosion, fifteen hundred meters away, no more. It tremored the ground beneath them. There was another whistle and another, more violent explosion even closer.

  The Soviet Fourth Ukrainian Front was attacking from the east.

  “The culvert!” Emil shouted. “Get Will! I’ll bring Walt!”

  Adeline grabbed her shoes, pulled them on, grabbed Will, and together they scrambled from beneath the wagon, hearing her mother and sister screaming for her.

  “Which way?” Malia cried as another artillery round hit.

  “Toward me!” Adeline screamed back. “Toward me!”

  “Keep yelling!”

  There was a tremendous flash as a bomb hit the Wehrmacht encampment close to them. The blast threw Adeline off balance, and she stumbled even as she saw Emil and Walt in front of her and Will, going for the creek and the culvert.

  She felt blinded when the blasts stopped but kept going in the direction she’d last seen Emil. Then another bomb went off, and he was right there, holding out his powerful arms to grab Will and then her, and guide them into the cold water and where to duck into the culvert.

  Adeline’s shoes and feet were soaked and cold in two steps. But when the next bomb went off, she didn’t care. The explosion sounded muffled, almost distant.

  “I can’t see, Mama,” Walt said, deeper into the culvert.

  “I’m cold,” Will said. “Where do I stop?”

  “Get to Walt,” Adeline said. “And we’re all cold, but we’re safe for now.”

  When Will reached Walt, Adeline got beside him and told her sons to turn their backs to the culvert wall and to get their feet up out of the water and braced against the opposite wall. There was a splash.

  “Mama!” Will cried. “I fell in!”

  “Get up,” Emil
yelled from close to the entrance to the culvert.

  “Yes, get up,” she said, her stomach knotting because she knew he was in trouble now, cold and wet. “Come to me.”

  Adeline felt Will’s frigid little hands against her thighs, reached out in the darkness and lifted him up onto her. Her legs and back strained against the pressure, but she hugged her already-shivering son to her chest.

  “It’s okay,” she murmured in his ear. “Mama’s got you.”

  “I’m so cold.”

  “It’s just until Papa says it’s okay to go out.”

  Ice-cold and wet, his fingers sought her cheeks in the darkness. She kissed them, grabbed them in her own dry hand.

  “Why do we have to do this?” Walt asked in the darkness. “I don’t like being in here.”

  “Sometimes you have to do things that you don’t want to in order to stay alive,” Emil said. “As bad as it is, it’s better than being with the wagon.”

  “What if the wagon is gone?” Walt asked. “What if Thor and Oden are dead?”

  “I’m cold, Mama,” Will said, squirming in her arms.

  “Think of somewhere you were very hot,” she said. “The hottest place you’ve ever been. So hot you just want to get into the shade and sweat.”

  Then they all fell quiet, each of them finding a hot day in their minds. For reasons she did not quite understand, Adeline’s thoughts went to August 9, 1941, in the city of Pervomaisk during a heat wave.

  It was sweltering hot. Adeline carried Will, almost two, in her arms, with almost-four-year-old Walt beside her. She was returning to their apartment from a shopping foray with little to show for the effort. As she walked, her attention roamed everywhere, still trying to learn the world order anew. A week before, the Germans had invaded and now occupied the city, and she’d only just learned that her younger brother, Wilhelm, had been conscripted by the Wehrmacht to fight the retreating Red Army. He was already gone.