The Last Green Valley Read online

  She saw them do it and felt terrible. She went to them, got down on her knees, and hugged them. “I will get us food as soon as I can. Please, I’m just as hungry and as tired as you are. Okay?”

  Will squeezed her tight. “Okay, Mama. I’m not that hungry.”

  “Neither am I,” Walt said.

  Adeline rested her head on theirs a moment, realizing that once again her children might go to bed without a proper meal and a proper bed in which to sleep. In the shadow cast by the flapping Soviet flag, she felt cut off from everything she’d ever known and everyone she’d ever loved but for her boys.

  She looked to the sky and said, “You’ve got to help us. We have no one else to turn to.”

  PART FOUR:

  A TALE OF TWO PRISONERS

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  September 27, 1945

  Poltava Prison Camp

  Four months into his imprisonment, Emil awoke to the shouts of the Russian guards and realized he’d survived another night. He sat up, relieved to see that the men on either side of him on the bunk were moving as well. After lacing his boots, he shuffled to the staircase and climbed out into the dawn.

  Emil lined up in the now-familiar formation, shivering in the cool fall air after the inferno of the basement. Nikolas stood three rows in front of him and to his left. They worked on the hospital but never together and had not spoken since June, which was how Emil preferred it. Two prisoners led a pony pulling a large wooden, four-wheel, flatbed cart into view.

  The pony cart came empty and left the museum laden every morning and every evening. Emil saw the pony cart as he marched off to eat and as he marched back to sleep. Not once since he’d arrived back in May had he seen the cart depart the museum empty.

  Every dawn revealed dead men in the bunks. Every dawn their corpses were dragged out of the basement, loaded on the pony cart, and taken to be buried in a field near the woods at the edge of the ruined city. The men who’d died at work during the day were loaded on the death cart and taken out in the evening by a second team of two prisoners.

  The burial details were voluntary. Prisoners who agreed to handle the dead were rewarded with double rations of bread, soup, and fatback.

  Despite his father’s rule of eating everything offered to him, Emil had not volunteered for the detail even though it would have meant extra food. The idea of burying the dead brought back excruciating memories of that night in Dubossary.

  He could also see that, despite the extra rations, the prisoners on the burial details did not last long. Disease was rampant in the camp. Handling the bodies struck Emil as a straight road to eternity. Like a many-headed hydra, the sicknesses came and went, only to return. Dysentery fluctuated between a scourge and an epidemic. Mosquitos thrived in the wet basement. Malaria reared and attacked. To prevent the spread of typhus, their hair was kept scalp-tight, and their clothes were boiled every other week to kill the lice that transmitted the disease. The Soviets tried to boil enough drinking water for the prisoners as well, but there were outbreaks of cholera.

  Indeed, nothing seemed to stop the men around Emil from dying. Some two thousand men had entered Poltava with him. By his count, two hundred and fifty men had died since, leaving seventeen hundred and fifty of them to rebuild the city.

  As Emil worked, as he marched, and as he slept, that fact kept worming around in his head: seventeen hundred and fifty men were left to rebuild a city of three hundred thousand people. It’s impossible. It would take us twenty years.

  He had been telling himself every morning that he was enough, that even if he could not escape, he could survive Poltava.

  But for two decades? And what would I have to go back to?

  Emil would be in his early fifties by then, close to his father’s age when the Soviets let him go. His sons would be grown strangers. Adeline would have given up on him long ago and found another man and another life. And how would he ever find them in the first place?

  Emil’s confidence started to slip. He noticed how much weight he’d lost and with it some of his strength and stamina. Mixing concrete was hard labor, and he was unable to work at the same pace he had just the month before. His slowdown attracted the attention of the guards and the foremen, who berated him twice that afternoon to speed up the production of concrete blocks while the foundation cured.

  Marching back to the museum that evening, chewing the last of his bread ration, Emil knew he’d broken two of his father’s rules, work hard and stay unnoticed. But how was he going to work hard and stay unnoticed if they didn’t give him enough to eat?

  Twenty years with men dropping at this pace? he thought as he watched the burial detail set off with three more who died at work. The numbers are wrong. They’re lying. We won’t last a year. I won’t last a year. If I don’t escape, I am going to die.

  Emil felt caged and had trouble breathing as he climbed down the stairs into the dreaded basement where he found a spot on the bottom bunk against the wall in the far corner where he would not have men to either side of him. Already feeling the heat building in the low-ceilinged room, he took off his boots, put them along the wall in a defensible position, and used the coat he’d been given for a pillow.

  Closing his eyes, he remembered Adeline the day he married her, when his lips had touched hers at the ceremony’s end and she was all he needed in life and their future had seemed impossibly bright. They had a small celebration afterward. Mrs. Kantor had hired an accordionist so everyone could dance. Emil had been nervous about slow-dancing with Adeline, but when she came into his arms, it was as natural as breathing. When their first dance ended, the accordionist played a toe-tapping tune that set their feet afire and made him deliriously happy, maybe the happiest he’d ever been.

  “I love you, Emil Martel,” Adeline cried at one point.

  “I love you, too, Adeline Martel,” Emil said. “You make me feel like I fell asleep in Russia and woke up in paradise.”

  Lying in his bunk in the prison camp, he drifted off to sleep, thinking, You still make me feel like that, Adella. Be strong and wait for me.

  September 28, 1945

  Gutengermendorf, Soviet-Occupied east Germany

  The following morning, Adeline felt her heart swell with happiness as she watched almost eight-year-old Walt and almost six-year-old Will trot away from her down a grassy knoll and through a field of ripening sunflowers on their way to the rural village. It was a Friday, and this was their first day at school. They would be tested today and assigned to classes. Actual studies would begin on Monday, but she remembered her own first days of school and felt excited for them.

  They’ll love it, she told herself. They’re boys. They’ll love it here, and I will learn to.

  They’d already adapted to so much, hadn’t they? After sleeping outside hungry near the Reichstag, she’d found a shelter for refugees for two nights before the Soviet occupying authority sent them on a train to Gutengermendorf.

  An elderly man named Peter Schmidt had begrudgingly picked them up at the station and taken them to his farm a kilometer and a half from the village. His wife, Greta, wasn’t happy to have a family of three foisted on her on top of the Russian soldiers already billeted in their home, but she’d given Adeline and the boys their own room in an outbuilding that was clean and dry and safe.

  Given her history, they put Adeline to work as a field hand. Within a few weeks, she had proved her worth, and the couple turned friendlier, especially when they discovered she was as skilled in the kitchen as she was weeding, scything, or threshing.

  “They grow up fast,” Mrs. Schmidt said. She’d come up behind Adeline as she held her hand to her brow and watched her boys exit the sunflowers, heading toward a line of elm and chestnut trees that marked the village boundary.

  “Too fast, Frau Schmidt,” Adeline said. “I wish my husband could be here to see this.”

  The elderly woman put her hand on Adeline’s shoulder. “Almost everyone has lost someone they loved because of
Hitler’s war.”

  Adeline smiled sadly and nodded, knowing that the Schmidts’ son had died on the western front the winter before, fighting with the Wehrmacht against the invading Allies.

  “But maybe your Emil will be one of the lucky ones,” Frau Schmidt said. “Maybe you will see him walking through the village someday. But you should not dwell too much on that kind of dream. That kind of dream, Adeline, can break your heart.”

  Adeline thought of her mother. “I know it can. The sunflowers?”

  “We need every one of them down before nightfall. Peter says it’s going to rain tonight, first real cool-off of the season.” She paused. “You’ll be needing us to watch the boys tomorrow night?”

  “Please,” Adeline said. “I can’t tell you what a help that is.”

  “I’m glad to do it,” she said. “When soldiers are drunk, they’re savages.”

  Adeline went with two other field hands down into the sunflowers where she spent the day cutting their stalks and piling them into bundles and then hauling them up to the barn where they were hung upside down to dry before the seeds were harvested. She liked the work because it was familiar, and that gave her comfort and peace during the long hours of toil.

  She sang and hummed old songs for hours until she remembered how Emil used to sing lullabies to the boys before they slept. It was the only time all day she stopped to cry.

  The boys returned later in the afternoon, running from the village as she cut down the last of the sunflowers. They sprinted when they saw her, hugged her, and babbled on about the school, their teachers, their new friends, and could they go tomorrow to play with them in the village. It would be Saturday after all, no school until Monday, and Will’s new friend had a real leather soccer ball. They were so excited and full of the newness of their lives, it was contagious, and she couldn’t help but laugh and clap and want to ask them about every moment of their day since they’d been gone.

  That feeling remained with Adeline through dinner and even afterward as she led the boys in the moonlight from the farmhouse back to the outbuilding where they slept. She felt satisfied with the day, almost content with her lot. She had worked hard doing what she liked for people she liked. They had fed her family well in return, and now she was going to sleep with a roof overhead and with her schoolboys at her side.

  “Is this our pretty green valley, Mama?” Will asked before they went inside.

  “It’s pretty,” Adeline said, yawning.

  “No mountains and no big river running through it,” Walt said in mild protest.

  “Is it, Mama?” Will said. “I like it here.”

  She smiled at him. “Remember what I told you when you asked me that same question last year in Romania?”

  “No.”

  “I do,” Walt said. “You said, ‘This is the green valley we are in today, and we should enjoy it.’”

  “That’s right,” she said, and kissed him on the head, grateful that her older son seemed to be coming out of the shell that had formed during his repeated encounters with tanks and bullets.

  Adeline slept fitfully that night but rose before dawn as she had nearly every morning since she’d gotten to the farm. She dressed quietly so as not to wake the boys and went out into the crisp air, smelling the fall and looking east for the first rays of the sun. She’d taken to imagining that they belonged to Emil, reaching out to her.

  She helped pitch hay until three o’clock that Saturday afternoon when Will and Walt returned from playing in the village. After taking a shower, Adeline and the boys went into the farmhouse where Frau Schmidt had already cooked their evening meal: thin pork chops with onions sautéed with fresh black pepper, squash from the garden, and applesauce made from fruit gathered from the trees out back. It was so incredibly good, Adeline begged her for the recipe, which pleased the older woman all the more.

  Kindness and good people still exist, Adeline thought as the farmer and his wife chatted with the boys about their new friends at school. Once again, in the company of her sons and this couple, she was content, almost at home, and it made her feel a little guilty and anxious. This farm, this village, weren’t as far west as she could have gone, and she was not going to find the freedom that Emil longed for here. No matter how comfortable her life felt at the moment, the Soviets had only been in control of eastern Germany for less than five months.

  Give them a little time, Adeline thought. They’ll ruin this place and the hearts of these good people, take their lands, cast them out, sow hate, and turn them against each other. It’s guaranteed. It’s what Stalin does. It’s what tyrants do. And I don’t want to be here to see it happen. I don’t want the boys to be so beaten down by life, they—

  “Adella?” Frau Schmidt said. “Did you hear me say it’s nearly five o’clock? Saturday night?”

  Adeline’s eyes shot to the clock. “Sorry. I was off somewhere,” she said, getting up and hurrying to the sink to do the dishes.

  When she was done and the boys were drying and stacking, she gave them each a hug and a peck on the cheek. “Mama will be home in the morning, and we’ll think of something fun we can do together.”

  “Like what?” Will asked.

  “Pick the rest of the apples,” Frau Schmidt said. “Every tree. You’ll get to climb the tallest ladders and eat the ripest fruit.”

  Both boys broke into grins, hugged their mother one more time, and went back to their chores. Frau Schmidt followed her out of the farmhouse and onto the modest front porch.

  “Thank you,” Adeline said again.

  The older woman took her hands and said, “You’ve been through enough. We don’t need to add insult to injury, do we?”

  “No,” Adeline said, and squeezed her hands. “I’ll see you early. Make sure the boys keep their door locked.”

  “Early’s good, and I will make sure they’re sleeping it off.”

  Adeline went back to her room and put a blanket, a pillow, a bottle of water, and a small Lutheran Bible Frau Schmidt had given her in a large cloth sack. She put the sack over her shoulder and left the outbuilding and then the farmyard, headed down the knoll toward the cut-sunflower field and the village. She’d reached the stubble, scattering three roe deer that had come in for the seeds that had fallen during the harvest.

  Then she heard men laughing and singing to her left. She looked across the northern hayfields to the dirt road that led from the village to the farm and saw the three Soviet soldiers who also lived with the Schmidts. The men were too far for her to see clearly, but she knew each of them carried a bottle of vodka issued to them by the Red Army. It was Saturday night, vodka night, payback for staying mostly sober the other six days of the week. It was also rape night, when the Soviet soldiers were free as a matter of unwritten policy to take any woman over the age of sixteen and under the age of fifty, consenting or not, as a spoil of war.

  Adeline did not consent, and she would not be a spoil of war. She took her attention off the Russians and hurried on through the cut field and across the south hayfield toward that line of hardwood trees turning color. The air was already cooling. The light was soft and golden in the late-day sun. Horses neighed in their pastures, and cocks crowed in the distance. Far behind her, she heard her sons laughing as they played before dark.

  Reaching the trees, Adeline stopped in the shadows beneath one old elm. She shut her eyes and listened and breathed, her nostrils open to the smell of leaves and cut hay. She could still taste the applesauce, and for a moment she could almost believe in a world without hardship and strife.

  Then she heard the soldiers singing raucously in the distance, drunk already, soon to be fed and soon to be drunker and in search of a woman. Adeline stayed in the shade of the trees and walked the length of them behind houses that reminded her of the nicer homes in Birsula, and one in particular that always put her in mind of Mrs. Kantor’s house. She did not stop to admire it but hurried on into thicker foliage until she was abreast of the rear of the old Lutheran chur
ch and out of sight of the main road that ran through the village.

  Adeline continued past the church a good twenty-five meters, looked around to make sure she was alone, then squatted to pee before returning to the church. The small rear door was slightly ajar. She paused to listen and to peer at the narrow slices of the main village road she could see. No one was walking. No one was talking.

  She dashed across the forty meters of grass that separated her from the door, pushed it open, slid inside, and then almost closed it shut. She turned, breathing deep and slow as she let her eyes adjust to the dim interior, seeing two women in their forties already camped in the pews forward and left, and a much younger woman midway down the center aisle on the right.

  Adeline knew them by sight, if not by name. They all had Soviet soldiers billeted in their homes. One by one, more women entered the church by the rear door and began to stake out places to sleep. Adeline preferred a pew in the back right. Most of the women who sought refuge in the church were locals, either from the village or the surroundings. They knew who Adeline was, where she lived, and her circumstances. They treated her with civility but little warmth or friendship.

  That was fine by Adeline. She was there for one reason: to sleep in safety so she could rise and go home early to be with Will and Walt while the Russians slept and suffered their hangovers and wondered where all the village women went on Saturday night. Let them. She was going to pick apples tomorrow and enjoy the bounty and beauty of harvest time before it was gone and snow blanketed the land.

  There were sixteen women in the old church when one of the fathers of the two youngest girls wished them all good night. An older woman barred the door behind him. Adeline heard him bar the door from the other side and lock it in place with three different locks.

  Adeline sat on the blanket, looking forward past the small knots of women whispering to each other. For a few minutes, she stared into the fading light at the altar and the shadow where the cross had hung high on the wall behind it.