The Last Green Valley Read online

  “Whoa!” Will said, thrilled.

  “Mama!” Walt said, and grabbed Adeline around the waist.

  “Everyone in!” Emil shouted, and ran to untie his horses from the tree.

  When he was up on the bench with the reins in his hands and had checked to see that Adeline was beside him and the boys under the bonnet behind him, he yelled to his mother-in-law, “Let’s get as far away from the battles as we can today!”

  “As fast as my ponies will take us!” Lydia called back.

  Emil released the wagon’s simple lever brake and clucked up the horses, which leaned hard into the load, the wagon rolling slowly at first, and then gathering enough speed to slip into a gap between other wagons and groups of refugees on foot who stood to the side, all their belongings in burlap sacks, staring in envy as the Martels passed.

  At the west end of the village, they passed Emil’s parents’ home, his childhood home. The front door to the old place was open. There was nothing worth saving in the yard.

  Emil refused to let a single memory of his childhood or their more recent life in Friedenstal come up. That was over. The person it had happened to no longer existed. As far as he was concerned, that fractured life was now rubble.

  Next to him, Adeline gazed into passing yards, seeing the ghosts of relationships past, of children playing, and parents singing at harvest, their entire way of life tied to and celebrating the seasons.

  She remembered a happier time: 1922, being seven, and bouncing in a wagon like this. Adeline had sat in the back by baskets of food her mother had prepared as they rode out to the fields where the men were cutting wheat. It was almost October, but the air was still warm and smelled of everything lovely in her life. She took the basket to her father, the chief of harvest, as he worked on a mechanical threshing machine.

  Karl Losing had a soft spot for his younger daughter and grinned when she brought him lunch. They’d sat side by side in the shade of the thresher, looking out over the golden hills of grain, and ate fresh bread with dried sausage and drank cold tea.

  She remembered feeling completely safe and totally in love with her surroundings.

  “Will we always live here, Papa?” young Adeline had asked.

  “Forever and a day, child,” he said. “Unless, of course, the stinking Bolsheviks have their way, and we’re thrown to the wind and the wolves.”

  In their wagon, rolling toward the far end of Friedenstal some twenty-two years later, Adeline recalled vividly being upset when her father had said that. For a time, she had walked around looking over both shoulders for fear wolves would burst from the forest and hunt her.

  She felt the same way when they left the village, heading west with the rising sun and cannon fire still rumbling behind them, past fields waiting for plowing, and trees budding, and birds whirling and whistling above the bluffs, and dreams destroyed, buried by the realities of famine and war.

  More German fighter planes raced across the sky, heading toward the battle lines.

  “Where are we going, Papa?” Walt asked, sounding worried.

  “West,” Emil said. “As far west as we can go. Across the ocean, maybe; I don’t know.”

  “Across the ocean?” Adeline said, surprised and a little frightened by that idea.

  “Why not?” her husband said, glancing at her.

  She said the first thing that came to mind. “We can’t swim.”

  “We’ll learn.”

  Will said, “But why are we going west?”

  “Because life will be better there,” Emil said.

  A horse whinnied and then screamed in the shifting chaos of carts and wagons and tanks and trucks behind them. People began to yell and to shout. Walt scrambled to look back.

  “Someone’s wagon got hit by a Wehrmacht truck, a few behind Oma’s wagon,” he said. “A horse, too. It all tipped over, and the horse broke its leg and can’t get up.”

  Emil clucked to Oden and Thor, and they hurried to close the gap with the wagon ahead.

  Will still seemed upset. He climbed into his mother’s lap, snuggled against her chest, and said, “Tell me what it will look like, Mama.”

  “What?” Adeline said, hugging and rocking him.

  “West. What will it look like?”

  Stroking her son’s face, Adeline gazed into Will’s eyes, smiled, and said, “We’re going to a beautiful green valley surrounded by mountains and forests. And snow up high on the peaks. And below, there will be a winding river and fields of grain for bread, and gardens with vegetables to feed us, and Papa will build us a house where we’ll all live together forever and ever, and we’ll never be apart.”

  That seemed to soothe Will. The little boy relaxed.

  “I think there will be other boys to play with,” he said.

  Adeline smiled at his expression, so innocent and hopeful, it made her heart swell. She tickled him, said, “I imagine there will be many boys to play with, and lots of work to be done, too. But we’ll be happy, and you and your brother will grow up to follow your hearts’ desires.”

  “What does that mean?”

  Emil said, “That you’ll be who you want to be, not who you’re told to be.”

  “I’m going to be just like you, Papa,” Will said as his eyes drifted shut.

  Adeline glanced at her husband, who smiled, and then over her shoulder at Walt, who had lain down and was dozing.

  She looked back at Emil, whose smile had fallen into something more pained.

  “Are you sure you’re okay?”

  He belched. “There, that should do it. Probably what I was feeling back there.”

  After a few moments, she said quietly, “We’ll find it, won’t we, Emil? A valley like that we can call home? A place we’ll never leave?”

  Emil’s face tightened further. He wouldn’t look at her when he shrugged and said, “Someone once told me that if you keep praying for something, you can’t help but get it someday.”

  “I told you that,” Adeline said, smiling. “And Mrs. Kantor told me.”

  “I know.”

  “It’s grace, Emil. God’s answers to our prayers. You still believe in grace, don’t you?”

  “Adeline, with what you and I have seen with our own eyes, there are days I don’t know if God hears us, much less answers. But I’ll tell you something I do believe in.”

  “What’s that?”

  “Wherever we end up, it’s going to be better than the hell we’ve already lived through.”

  The caravan crested a rise onto a plateau and turned north, giving Adeline one last long look back at their abandoned life. The cold wind had turned blustery. She heard cannons again and saw smoke rising from the ridges beyond the village.

  “You’re right,” she said. “Anywhere will be better than that.”

  Chapter Two

  November 1929

  Schoenfeld, Ukraine

  The light bulb flickered and died. But fourteen-year-old Adeline Losing had anticipated the cut in electricity at the small school she attended. She had already lit the kerosene lantern above the sink in the school kitchen where she worked after classes were over.

  Scrubbing the last big pot of the day, Adeline felt hungry, a common-enough state in her recent life. She glanced at a bag filled with fresh potato-skin shavings on the counter, wondered how her mother might cook them, felt even hungrier, and then dried the pot and put it back on the shelf.

  Two hours, Adeline thought, drying her hands. Two hours of my life for a few rubles and a kilo of peelings. Is it worth it?

  She’d no sooner asked the question than she told herself to stop that line of thinking. Questioning your work and what you got in return for it could get you in trouble if you said it aloud under the rule of Joseph Stalin. Even thinking about it too much might let the words slip out by accident. And then where would she be?

  Thrown to the wind and the wolves, as her father liked to say. That was where she’d be. Thrown to the wind and wolves in some far and frozen place.


  Adeline put on her heavy wool coat, a gift from a dead aunt, telling herself, Not me. I am going someplace better in my life.

  She got emotional at the thought of a better place. Somewhere she and her family could lead a better life than the unfair and cruel one they’d been given. She didn’t know much about this future life, but the simple idea of “better” made her smile and feel not as tired as she might have been.

  Adeline wrapped her head in a wool scarf, picked up the lantern and her bags, and went to the kitchen door. She opened it and stepped out into a cold, dark night. Shivering, she locked the door, and then held up the lantern and set off west for the other side of town and home.

  Hurry to it, she thought, and quickened her stride. That’s what Papa always says. If you want things, hurry to it. If you want things done, hurry to it.

  She’d never known anyone who hurried to it more than her father. He was up before everyone and last to bed, and in constant motion every minute in between.

  Adeline kept up a steady, hard pace through the deserted streets of a farming colony that dated back four and five generations to when Catherine the Great reigned. Even in the late 1700s, the farmlands of Ukraine were among the most bounteous on earth, with rich, black soil that could yield bumper crops if properly sown and tended.

  The peasants living there at the time, however, were poor agriculturists, and so the empress began approving the immigration of thousands of German families. These ethnic Germans, or Volksdeutsche, were given land and made exempt from taxes for decades in return for their agricultural skills and yield. They came in waves, farmed and prospered in self-imposed exile across Ukraine, providing wheat for Mother Russia for more than a century.

  The Volksdeutsche, especially the so-called “Black Sea Germans” who lived between Odessa and Kiev, never fully assimilated into the Russian culture. They built their homes and laid out towns and villages like Schoenfeld as replicas of the ones they’d left behind in Germany, erecting churches to perpetuate their Lutheran faith and schools to educate their children and keep their native tongue alive.

  But multiple generations removed, the Black Sea Germans had become isolated from Germany and its culture, almost completely disconnected from their roots. All in all, however, life was very good for the Black Sea Germans and for the roughly one million other Volksdeutsche living across Ukraine until 1917. Before the Bolshevik Revolution, Schoenfeld had been a thriving colony of ethnic Black Sea Germans who regularly produced high-yield crops that helped feed themselves and Russia.

  But no longer.

  By that evening, as young Adeline hurried through town, most of the other old families had been banished from the colony, thrown out of their houses and off their lands, replaced by people from the city who did not know how to farm at all. That was the main reason the Soviets decided to allow Adeline’s family to remain in their ancestral home: her father was the only one left locally who understood how to bring in a big grain harvest. Without him, the idiots from the city would be doomed to one crop failure after another, and everyone around would starve.

  But we’re safe, Adeline told herself halfway through town. Mama said so. They need Papa, so we’re safe for now. And we should have enough food for the winter.

  Adeline stopped, lifting the lantern higher and peering at the form ahead of her, dark and lying still in the high dead grass. She took a cautious step, and then another. Reaching out with the lantern, she took a third step, and then froze.

  The dog, a big mongrel, had been killed, its throat cut, and left to die in a halo of its own blood. The blood was wet, not yet frozen. It shimmered there in the lantern light, and that scared her even more. Someone had only just killed the animal.

  Adeline raised the lantern and peered all around, seeing nothing but the pale skirt of light about her and shadows and darkness beyond. No movement. No sound but the beating of her heart in her ears and her own voice in her head.

  Tell Papa!

  She took off at a run, the lantern held out and to the side as she passed a horse barn that used to belong to her father’s friend on the long lane before the final turn and home.

  She spotted the second dead dog moments later, a small terrier, throat slashed and cast in the ditch. Adeline knew the dog, a friendly yapper, and wanted to cry. She’d seen him only just that morning on her way to school.

  They killed two!

  Terrified now, she ran even faster and fought dark imaginations, all of them feeding into another until her mind was flooded and swirling with the murder of the two dogs. She finally made the gate to her home, a beautiful wooden house her great-grandfather had built almost a century before in a modest Bavarian style, with a sweeping shake-shingle roof, two gables, and red trim along the soffits. Kneeing open the door bar, she pushed inside and used her heel to shut the door behind her.

  “Put that lantern out,” her father called from the table where he was repairing a leather harness for his plow horses with two glowing lanterns hanging from the rafters above him and a blazing fire at his back.

  “Papa, I—”

  “Put your lantern out, girl,” Karl Losing said. “Fuel’s rare these days.”

  “Listen to your father,” her mother, Lydia, called from the kitchen beyond him. “And where are those peelings? I expected you long before this.”

  Adeline swallowed her frustration and blew out the lantern as her eleven-year-old brother, Wilhelm, came in from the back with wood for the fire. She hung the lantern on a hook by the front door and put away her coat and scarf before hurrying with the potato peels past her father and brother into the kitchen where Lydia had a loaf of bread coming hot from the wood oven.

  “Peelings,” Adeline said, putting the bag down. “A whole kilo. I measured.”

  “You done with the onions to go with them, Malia?” her mother said, setting the bread tin on the stove to cool.

  “If I was, you would be the first to know, Mother,” Adeline’s older sister, Amalia, said in her odd cadence. She had her back to them and was chopping onions slowly but steadily.

  “Set the table, Adella,” her mother said. “And fill the pitcher from the well.”

  “I have to tell Papa something, Mama.”

  “You’ll do as you’re told.”

  Adeline knew it was impossible to reason with her mother once an order had been given, so she grabbed the pitcher and went outside to the pump in the backyard. The temperature was dropping, and her hands were stinging when she returned and put the water on the table. She set spoons for five around the table and around her father, who kept at his harness, engrossed in his work. Once there were cups and bowls laid out as well, Adeline stood squarely in front of him.

  “Papa,” she said.

  “Can it wait for dinner, child?” he said, never looking up at her.

  “Can’t you see your father’s busy?” her mother called.

  Adeline felt unseen, unheard, and something in her broke. She burst into tears. “Papa, please! You need to listen to me!”

  At last, her father took his attention off his leatherwork, looking puzzled by the outburst. “What is this? Why the tears? What have you got to be sad about today?”

  “On the way home from school,” she blubbered, “I saw two dead dogs. Their throats had been cut. The blood was fresh.”

  Her father’s face fell. He set the harness on the table and said softly, “Calm down, Adella, and tell me where you saw them.”

  Her crying slowed. She wiped at her tears with the frayed sleeve of her sweater.

  “How far from here?” he said.

  “The second one three hundred meters?” she said. “Maybe less.”

  Her father studied his leathery hands. Adeline had always thought him larger than life and full of fire, but now he seemed suddenly smaller, less sure of himself.

  He glanced at his wife, who stood in the kitchen doorway, worrying her apron.

  “It’s someone else, Karl,” she said. “One of the new fools flap
ping his jaws.”

  He swallowed hard and nodded. “Let’s pray so.”

  Adeline could not help herself. She went around the table and threw her arms around her father. He said nothing, just rubbed her arm for several moments before saying, “I have to finish my work before supper, girl. Go help your mother.”

  She kissed his cheek and drew back. He smiled softly and touched her face before returning to the harness with the awl, the big-eyed needle, and the leather cord.

  Adeline went back to the kitchen where her mother was stirring onions and potato peels in a cast-iron skillet.

  “Mama,” she said.

  “It’s for one of the fools,” her mother declared.

  “What is?” Malia asked.

  Adeline started to reply, but her mother looked over her shoulder sharply at Adeline and shook her head.

  “Nothing, sweetie,” Adeline said.

  Malia said, “I’m not going to break, you know.”

  “I know.”

  “I’m better than ever.”

  “You are,” their mother said. “Better than we could have hoped.”

  “Thank you, Mama,” Malia said, and seemed to lose her train of thought. “What am I doing next?”

  “Sitting down, dear,” Adeline said. “We’re going to eat.”

  “Oh,” her sister said, brightening. “I like that.”

  Aside from Malia and Wilhelm, the mood at the table that evening was somber. Adeline and her parents feared what the dead dogs meant.

  There was no insane man on the loose with canine bloodlust in Schoenfeld. The OGPU, Stalin’s secret police, was well known to arrange to have dogs murdered so their barking would not give the police away when they came in search of political prisoners during the night.

  At one point during the meal, Adeline was stunned to see her father’s spoon shake and his food fall back into his bowl.

  Her mother put her hand on his elbow. “You brought in the best harvest they’ve had in six years, Karl. There are grain shortages everywhere else. They cannot do without you.”