The Last Green Valley Page 29

  An hour later, they reached a slowdown in traffic. A truck carrying young Soviet troops rolled by them and slowed to a stop. The soldiers were drinking vodka and singing. They noticed Marie pushing her cart, her blouse sweated through, her breasts swollen with milk. One of them called to her in Russian.

  “Beautiful lady, why are you alone? Come in here with us, and we will party!”

  Marie did not answer, just kept walking past them. The soldier got up and peered around the canvas at her.

  “Did you see the size of her tits?” he asked his friends. “Bazookas!”

  His friends roared with laughter and seemed not to notice Adeline and her boys as they walked past the truck. A few moments later, she saw other vehicles ahead begin to move and heard the brakes of the truck behind them sigh. It rolled past her, and she saw that same soldier hanging out the side of the truck.

  “Beautiful lady!” he called as the truck passed Marie again. “You should not be alone like this. Come with us. We will have fun.”

  The truck stopped. If Marie heard him, she did not show it. She just kept walking in that same quickened pace she’d adopted since leaving Hans’s grave. And Adeline and the boys again hurried by the truck and were ignored once more.

  The soldier was, if anything, determined. When his truck went by Marie a third time, he held out a full bottle of vodka and said, “Beautiful lady, forget your miserable refugee life! Come with me. We will drink and party all the way to Berlin!”

  The truck kept moving and got a good fifty meters ahead of Marie before it stopped. Adeline’s cousin did not break stride as she abandoned her cart and started toward the truck. The soldiers saw what she’d done and started yelling encouragement and waving their vodka bottles at her.

  “Come on, beautiful lady!” cried the soldier who’d been heckling her. “You’ll never get a chance like this again!”

  “Marie!” Adeline shouted. “Don’t!”

  But then the truck started up again, and her grief-shattered cousin broke into a run. The Russian soldiers went wild screaming and yelling to her. Marie sprinted and caught up to the truck. Hands reached out and hauled her up and inside.

  A bottle of vodka was shoved into her hands while many other hands roamed over her. To the delight of the troops, Marie began writhing her body sinuously against their hands, tilted the bottle back, and started guzzling.

  The truck sped up, and Adeline’s cousin spiraled out of her life like a leaf caught in a gale.

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  July 3, 1945

  Poltava, Ukraine

  In the five weeks since his arrival at the prison camp, Emil had learned to cherish the wind. Even the thought of it blowing against his skin was enough for him to survive the nights. The Soviets kept Emil, Nikolas, and six hundred of the remaining two thousand prisoners in the vast basement of the Poltava museum. The upper floors had been destroyed in the bombing.

  They slept one hundred men to a room on long, low, crudely built wooden bunks with no mattresses. That many bodies in that confined a space created its own infernal heat and humidity, so, in the dense air, water dripped from the ceilings and upper bunks all night long. Emil couldn’t decide which was worse, being outside in the raging sun, or in the dank hole of the bunkroom, crammed in with all those stinking men snoring, moaning, farting, weeping, and crying for deliverance in their sleep.

  The sanitary conditions were beyond abysmal. Men went outside, sat on flat boards, and shit into a long trench that they dug and buried every three days. The city water was compromised. Prisoners began to fall ill almost immediately from giardiasis and dysentery. Emil could hear the afflicted men groaning and quick-footing it to the latrine all night long.

  They slept in their clothes so they could be woken, brought up from the museum basement quickly, and then mobilized to march six blocks to a makeshift kitchen set up in front of the ruins of the Poltava city hall. Several of the remaining women in the city cooked for the prisoners, whose diet consisted of thin vegetable soup, a pound of bread to last the entire day, beets, potatoes, and the occasional chunk of boiled fatback.

  Other men complained, but Emil closed his eyes and imagined every meal was cooked by Adeline. As he spooned the soup, he tasted her chicken soup with handmade egg noodles. When he bit into the bread, he imagined the strudel she used to make in the fall, filled with fresh berries picked from the vine. And when he put the fatback in his mouth, he swallowed it as if it were her finest schnitzel.

  They were assigned to crews. The first few crews were put to work reconstructing the main waterworks, the city hall, and the museum.

  Emil and Nikolas were assigned to a two-hundred-man unit charged with rebuilding the hospital. They had a hand in all of it at first: clearing the rubble from the ruins of the facility, digging out the remains of the foundation, and then building wooden forms to hold concrete.

  When the forms were in place, Emil was put to work on a team mixing lime, clay, and fly ash for the cement, and then mixing that with sand, gravel, and furnace slag to form concrete, which was poured into the forms. The assignment kept him off to the side of the fury of activity on the hospital site, and he preferred it that way. The guards barely gave him a glance as he mixed concrete. He held his head down, worked hard, and kept his mouth shut.

  I can survive this, he told himself over and over again those first few days. I will survive this place, but only if I rely on myself alone. No allies means no betrayals.

  Emil also kept alert for opportunities to escape. So far there had been none. They were guarded at the hospital site. They were watched marching to meals and on their way back to the museum basement. Once down there and on the wooden bunks, Emil ignored the men shifting to either side of him and tried to fall straight asleep, hoping to be in a deeper, darker place when the night suffering began.

  But in the middle of the night, when he’d been pushed or kicked or snored awake, he’d try to think of Adeline and Will and Walt to give him hope of making it through another day.

  July 5, 1945

  Cottbus, Germany

  As they approached the first large town in Soviet-held eastern Germany, Adeline was still shaken by Marie’s decision to jump into the truck with the Russians. But then, she’d look back at the boys, still pushing the cart. What might I do if both of them were taken from me or killed?

  Those thoughts haunted her every step of the next four days, which unfolded in blazing heat and humidity. At a fork in a road that passed through woods near the town of Falkenberg, Adeline called for a rest. Her mother limped over and sat on a boulder in the shade.

  “You can all go on without me,” she said. “I’ll live here.”

  Adeline sighed. “On that rock, Mother? In this forest?”

  “No,” Lydia snapped, and gestured to the road sign. “I am going into that town, finding out who is in charge, and asking for a place to stay.”

  “Mother,” Adeline said, “we’re less than two weeks’ walk from Berlin. Two weeks from finding a way to the western Allies and—”

  “Stop that nonsense!” her mother shouted, pounding her bony little fist against her thigh. “That was Emil’s crazy idea, not mine and not yours. For better, for worse, we know how it works under Stalin. The sooner we settle down and adapt, the better. Admit it, Adeline, once and for all. Karoline was right. Emil is gone, just like his brother. He will never find a way back to you. Don’t waste your life waiting for him. Your foolish dream of a green valley is over.”

  Adeline was surprised at the fierce bitterness that pumped through the old woman. “It is not over, Mother, until I say it is over. My husband, who I love and trust, told me to go as far west as I can, and he’ll find me. I believed him then. I believe him now.”

  “I believed your father when he said he’d come back, too.”

  Adeline ignored her and looked at Malia. “We can find a place for her to stay, and you can come with us.”

  Her older sister smiled sadly and took Adeline’s h
and in hers. “My place is with Mother; you know that.”

  Adeline gazed at Malia, both of them blinking back tears. “I told you once I couldn’t do this without you.”

  “I know, but now you have to,” Malia said. “I don’t want you to go, but you have to do what you think is right.”

  “We’ll find each other again, won’t we?”

  “That’s in the hands of a power far greater than us, dear,” Malia said, taking Adeline in her arms. “But take my love with you wherever you go. And I’ll take your love with me. And hopefully, someday, like your friend Mrs. Kantor, we’ll be able to see the beauty in every cruelty we’ve had to endure. Even this moment.”

  Leaving her older sister’s arms felt like roots were being ripped from her chest. That feeling amplified when Adeline went to her mother, who would not look at her as she said, “Don’t promise me anything.”

  “I won’t, Mother,” Adeline said. “This is good-bye, then.”

  For a few gut-wrenching moments, she thought Lydia would be cold at their parting. But then her mother’s shoulders trembled, and she got up to hug her daughter.

  “You always were braver than me,” Lydia whispered. “Like your father.”

  “I got the rest of me from you,” Adeline said, her throat constricting as she felt how thin her mother had gotten on this most recent walk toward freedom.

  When they broke apart, Adeline called to the boys to say good-bye to their oma and aunt Malia. Walt was stoic, but Will began to cry as he hugged Malia. And then they had to go.

  “I can’t sit here watching you leave,” Malia said. “We’ll each go our own way at the same time.”

  Adeline nodded, unable to stop the tears from flowing down her cheeks as she went to the front of the little wagon and picked up the handle. She wiped at the tears, then looked at the boys, forced a smile, and said, “Here we go. The Martels are off on another adventure.”

  With a weak last wave toward her mother and older sister, Adeline turned fully away, mentally chopping the ties, drenched with fear, but taking a step in her own direction and another and a third. She would later think that the first step she took that day, away from her past and toward an uncertain future, was like a leap between cliffs and the second-most courageous act of her life.

  On July 16, 1945, Adeline, Walt, and Will walked down a road that passed through beautiful fields of ruby, purple, and white wildflowers glistening in a light mist and fog. The chill on the northerly breeze felt good after so many days walking in the heat. She smiled as the sun came and went, gleaming, giving her a show and making her realize just how much she loved flowers. Their hue, delicateness, and shape. Their tragically brief time on earth.

  “It sure is pretty here, Mama,” Walt said.

  “It is,” Adeline said.

  “Is this our valley?” Will wondered. “I can’t see any mountains.”

  “I can’t see much of anything except flowers and fog, and that’s enough for now,” Adeline said, relaxing, feeling less anxious about their future.

  Will ran off the road, picked her a bunch, and ran to catch up. “So you can look at them all day, Mama,” he said, which got her choked up and more in love with her little boy than ever.

  They reached the southeastern outskirts of Berlin about an hour later. What they saw in the next five hours made Adeline question her decision to leave her mother and sister behind. She had never been in a city as large as Berlin, so at first, she felt the excitement of newness. But as the fog swirled in and out and they walked deeper into Hitler’s fallen capital, she soon realized that nearly ten weeks after the Nazi surrender, even with many streets cleared for traffic, Berlin remained a landscape of ruin, a deeply scarred and wounded place, a charred, haunted maze where the smells of bomb soot, burned chemicals, and death vied for dominance. Eighty-one thousand Soviets, one hundred thousand German soldiers, and one hundred and twenty-five thousand civilians had died in the Battle of Berlin, street by devastated road and building by rubble and wreckage. Depending on location and the wind, the stench of death rose and fell. Some bodies had evidently not yet been found, gathered, and buried or burned.

  There were Red Army soldiers and prisoners everywhere, picking at the debris. They were stacking usable bricks and loading the rest into dump trucks. As she passed each knot of prisoners, Adeline scanned their faces, hoping against hope that she’d somehow spot Emil among them. But no one even resembled him among the men at hard physical labor.

  Is this what Emil is doing? Is he like these prisoners?

  In the ebb and flow of mist and fog, and the closer they got to the center of Berlin, the more the city was revealed as a ruptured, alien place with many of the structures being amputees, or skeletons, or debris. In that vast graveyard, she saw thousands of people living in apartments where some of the walls were missing, or under sheets and tarps amid the destruction. Adeline and the boys walked past hundreds of burned-out buildings, and women washing clothes in buckets of water from a hydrant, their children streaked with bomb soot and playing on mounds of shattered brick and bent steel.

  She heard them speaking in German, all telling a similar tale of still being shell-shocked by the vicious street battle waged in Berlin during the last nine days of the war and worrying about their sorry lot in life now that Hitler was dead and the great Reich had been destroyed.

  You have no idea of the suffering your Hitler caused, Adeline thought a little angrily. Everything we have is in this cart, and I don’t have enough food to feed my children tonight.

  One prisoner picked up a chunk of cement, turned, and walked at her with vacant eyes that made her shudder. He reminded her of Johann when he first came back from Siberia—a broken man—and she felt ill at the idea that Emil might return to her in a similar condition.

  Adeline pulled and the boys pushed the little wagon a good three kilometers into the city before they were finally stopped at a Soviet checkpoint by a soldier who asked to see her papers. She spoke to him in Russian, which seemed to confuse him, as she lied and said she had no papers. She told him a convoluted story about being dragged out of Ukraine by the German army and getting separated from her husband.

  “I was told he is here, working in western Berlin,” she said in a pleading tone. “We are just trying to find him.”

  The soldier glanced at Walt and Will, filthy and exhausted by the last few weeks of walking. Adeline intentionally thought of Emil and summoned tears. The sentry got a disgusted look on his face and waved them through.

  When she saw the first British soldier, she threw back her head and cheered. The boys looked at her like she was crazy.

  “We made it, boys! We’re where Papa wanted us! In the West, with the Allies!”

  Adeline hurried up to a British soldier and tried to ask him where she could get food and shelter. But he did not speak German. When he heard her try in Russian, he pointed her back the way she’d come, shrugged, and turned away.

  She pushed on, figuring she could find at least one American or British soldier who spoke Russian or German. Soon after, she and the boys were looking high up at the ruins of a church, seeing its spire split: one side was whole and barely scorched, and the other a blackened maw where some explosive from the sky had struck it a glancing blow, cleaving it in two. She couldn’t believe how one side could remain untouched while the other was blasted and burned. She stared at the split spire for several more moments without understanding exactly why before pushing on.

  Had it been a clear day, she might have used the sun as a guide to keep going west, deeper into the British Zone. But the skies darkened around noon and rain came. They ran, seeking shelter, abandoning all sense of direction and getting lost.

  “Where are we going?” Walt asked as they huddled in an empty building.

  “I don’t know,” Adeline said, so tired she felt confused now, unsure.

  Will said, “I’m tired of walking, Mama.”

  “And I’m thirsty,” Walt said. “And hungry.”
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  Irritation and then anger bubbled inside Adeline. With the rain and the relentless uncertainty all around her, she almost took out her fear of not being enough on the boys: not being enough to make it to the West, not being enough to find Emil, not being enough to get food and water for her children. But she didn’t. Instead, she took a deep breath and got them the last of the water from the wagon and the last of the bread she’d bought from a bakery outside the city.

  The rain finally relented. They walked and soon found themselves in Tiergarten, a giant forested park that had been turned into a base for the British. Men were sawing down trees and clearing the land.

  She tried two more British soldiers. Neither spoke German. But the second one understood some Russian.

  “I need food for my children,” she said.

  “That way,” he said, gesturing out of the park.

  Not knowing that she was changing the course of her life, Adeline turned her sons and the little wagon in that direction. An hour later, they walked toward the bombed Reichstag, and she knew she’d gone the wrong way; a giant Soviet flag—bloodred with gold hammer and sickle—flew off the top of the damaged dome. The sun came out and hit the flag as it fluttered, causing it to glow brooding yellow and scarlet, like jaundice and fever. That’s what tyranny was, Adeline decided, a sickness, a fever, a poison in the liver of mankind. The workers’ flag, those foul colors, and the Nazi flag had waved above almost every injustice and harm she had ever lived through. Right then, she thought about turning around, going back into the British Zone and begging for food.

  Walt said, “Mama, I’m tired of walking.”

  She heard him but did not answer.

  “Mama,” Will said. “I’m hungry and—”

  Adeline couldn’t take it anymore. She spun around and glared at her sons. “I know you’re tired and hungry and thirsty, but I am not a magician. I cannot make things appear with the snap of my fingers or by closing my eyes and wishing it were so.”

  Unsettled by the unusually harsh tone in her voice, the boys retreated a step.