The Last Green Valley Page 34

  Emil had never been to the graveyard or even to this part of the ruined city before, so he looked around with interest, seeing large pieces of Poltava that were still snow-covered wastelands, no signs of human activity at all. But here and there, he’d catch sight of civilians scratching out a life in the frozen demolition zone. Several of the children were boys as young as his own, filthy, cold, and hollow-cheeked.

  As they left the city with two Soviet soldiers trailing them, Gheorghe said, “The guards don’t speak German. Finish the story. The Nazi gives you the pistol, says shoot the three Jews. What did you do?”

  Emil stopped the pony as they came to the edge of a large snow-covered field with dense forest on the far east and south sides. The sun was fully up now, reflecting off the snow, glary, almost blinding. He squinted, saw more drifts ahead, and bare ground and dead grass in places where the wind had scoured a high point.

  “Stay in the grass. We’ll dig out drifts if we have to,” Corporal Gheorghe said as if reading his mind. “Tell me the story. He has a gun to your head?”

  Emil took several deep breaths, trying to keep his head turned away from the Romanian and facing the bitter wind. But the raw gale, driving loose snow, forced him to turn toward the corporal and face the truth.

  “I decided to kill them, Corporal. I told Haussmann I would do it. In my heart, it was already done. I walked right up and tried to aim at the teenage boy. I was squeezing the trigger.”

  As they reached the middle of the field, Emil explained how a senior officer had intervened because of Himmler’s policy and how he was sent instead to shovel lime on the hundreds of Jews who had died the night before.

  “I prayed to God not to be a part of killing Jews,” Emil said bitterly, “but I wasn’t heard. Instead, that gun was put in my hand, and I made a decision to kill those kids. I shoveled lime the entire night. There were so many men shooting and so many innocent people dying that I stopped believing in the common goodness of men. And I stopped believing in my own basic goodness because I had decided to kill those innocent people, children. As I shoveled, I knew I should have been praying over the bodies in the ravine, but I couldn’t because I no longer believed in God.”

  The guards called a halt at midfield, said they would wait for them here.

  “Where do we bury them?” Emil said.

  “We don’t,” Corporal Gheorghe said. “The ground’s frozen. We’ll dump them at the back of the opening along the edge of the woods there. Crows and wolves will do the rest.”

  “Really?” Emil said, disturbed.

  “This is why Russian guards are so afraid of the place. They won’t go down there. In a good storm? We’ll go down there, take the pony off the cart, and we’ll escape and get a strong head start with the snow covering our tracks.”

  Emil did not reply at first, still feeling like he needed to unburden himself.

  “I hadn’t prayed again until yesterday, Corporal Gheorghe,” he said as he led the pony and the cart down the descending ridge where the snow was shallow. “And today I wish I hadn’t. I’m right back to believing that God does not answer, does not exist, and most men are not good by nature, including me.”

  “Then what are most men by nature?”

  “Beasts. They may act like they’re good. But it only takes a threat to their own life to lose that, to become a different creature like I did, not a human, a savage, an animal.”

  The Romanian kept walking. The pony blew through its nose and kept plodding.

  Emil could not stand the silence. He said, “Maybe I deserve this. Maybe I am here to be punished. Maybe I am not meant to be forgiven. Maybe I am meant to live out my days dragging dead, diseased bodies to the wolves and the crows. And maybe Nikolas was right. I was doomed the moment I took the gun and decided to kill those three kids.”

  They reached the bottom of the hill and a part of the field where they were sheltered from much of the wind. The snow was deep and powdery. The pony was able to easily pull the cart and seemed to know the way toward a cove-shaped clearing along the wood line.

  “I’m doomed,” Emil said, and shook his head. “Just like these men we’re dumping.”

  As they entered the small clearing, Corporal Gheorghe said, “Doomed for what? You did not pull the trigger. You did not kill anyone.”

  Emil looked at him angrily. “But I decided to kill them. In my mind, I’d already done it.”

  “But you did not shoot.”

  “Because of that SS colonel. If he had not been there, I would have shot them. I would have. I chose to kill those innocent people after praying and not being heard. I got so angry at God for not hearing that—”

  “Didn’t God?”

  Emil frowned. “Didn’t God what?”

  The death cart’s wheels began to bog in deeper snow, and the pony struggled. The Romanian didn’t reply as he went around the back of the cart to push.

  Emil joined him, saying again, “Didn’t God what?”

  “Hear you.”

  “No, I wasn’t heard!” Emil said sharply. “If I was heard, do you think I’d be here?”

  “I can’t answer that, but I can tell you that you were heard.”

  “Ignored, then.”

  “No, no,” the Romanian said as he strained to keep the death wagon moving. “You begged God not to make you a murderer. Then you showed courage telling that Nazi, no. You believed God’s word, Commandment Six. You said you would not kill.”

  “But then I changed my—”

  “Stop! When you said no, did you know Heinrich Himmler had a rule that no one would be killed if they refused to kill a Jew?”

  Emil thought about that. “No.”

  “And so, when you refused, you risked your life to do the right thing and accepted the consequences of saying no. From where I’m standing, I think you showed your true self to the Almighty One that night and you were rewarded for it.”

  Emil couldn’t think that way. “I changed my mind. I was going to shoot them.”

  “But you were stopped, yes?” the Romanian said as they neared the back of the clearing. “You did not have to kill because you did the right thing. Can’t you see the hand of God in that, Martel? Bringing that officer to stop you from murdering the three Jews? I am not a smart man, but I see the Universal Intelligence’s hand in that as plainly as I see this Christmas morning and you.”

  Emil stared at the snow ahead of them, trying to filter what the corporal had just told him.

  For more than four years he had blamed, then denied God for making him decide to kill those Jews. But now, he could see the work of a greater power in all of it. He didn’t have to kill that night because he had refused to do the wrong thing in the first place. Emil’s heart pounded. I was heard. I was. Emil felt breathless as he looked over at Corporal Gheorghe, thinking of him no longer as some head-injured madman, but as a strange and divine messenger of salvation.

  “You believe that?” Emil said finally.

  Nodding, the Romanian said, “I think the Almighty One spared you after refusing to kill the three Jews. See? You were a hero to God. And to your wife and sons and to your sister-in-law, sweet as honey.”

  Emil blinked. A hero? He shook his head.

  “A hero doesn’t give up, and I gave up yesterday,” Emil said. “I was weak. Lost. I reached my limit. I said I could not go it alone anymore.”

  He smiled. “See? You have a hero’s heart, but you are a man. You have limits. Even you can’t go alone, can’t do everything by yourself. What did you do when you gave up yesterday?”

  Emil thought back. “I had this terrible weight in my chest, and I prayed for it to go.”

  “Yes. You showed faith, prayed. Asked for help with your burden. It’s good. Now, ask the Divine to walk by your side. You will never be weak or lost again. With the Almighty as an ally, even a crazy beekeeper with a dent in his head can survive the Battle of Stalingrad!”

  The pony stopped with a snort, and the cart came to rest in the ax
le-deep snow.

  “Far enough,” the Romanian said, and went around his side of the cart. Emil did the same. It was only then that Emil saw all the wolf tracks and crow feathers and the odd bone or two sticking up out of the snow about three meters in front of the pony, whose flanks twitched and shivered.

  “We just dump them here?” Emil said.

  “They’ll never know. We turn the cart around, we push, they fall, we leave.”

  They led the pony in a tight circle and then released the lever that held the bed of the cart down and pushed up on the end closest to the pony. The stack of eight bodies slid off into the deep snow. Nikolas’s corpse landed faceup.

  “We should go now,” Gheorghe said. “That way, the guards won’t be suspicious.”

  Emil barely heard the Romanian. Seeing his past in a completely different light now and no longer imprisoned by that night in Dubossary, he walked over by Nikolas’s corpse and the bodies of prisoners he did not know. On Christmas morning 1945, after more than fifty months of denying God, Emil began to pray, asking the Almighty to walk by his side and to accept the departed souls of the corpses he was about to turn over to the birds, the wolves, and the wind.

  Chapter Thirty-One

  January 25, 1946

  Berlin, Soviet-Occupied east Germany

  Adeline climbed down off the crowded train with two large, empty canvas bags and the purse Frau Schmidt had given her as a parting gift. She walked outside the station where teams of men under Soviet guard were working to patch bomb holes and erect new ironwork. Outside, she was shocked. The last time she was in Berlin, the summer before, she and the boys had to weave in and around the destruction, which seemed everywhere. Now, but for the skiff of snow, the streets were mostly clear, and traffic was flowing.

  She got out a notebook in her purse and checked an address. She asked a police officer how to get there and was relieved to find it was only twelve blocks away.

  Walking into a raw north wind through Berlin on that dank, cold day, Adeline thought to herself once again that it really was remarkable what a month could do to your life. The day after Christmas, Frau Schmidt had helped her go to the local committee in the village to seek a lodging reassignment.

  When the clerk asked why, Frau Schmidt said, “To keep from being raped.”

  The clerk, a woman, had immediately softened. “I’ll see what I can do for her.”

  “She’s a wonderful cook, too. It’s a crime having her as a field hand.”

  The clerk knitted her brows, then tapped her lips. “How good a cook?”

  Frau Schmidt said, “She can make a stringy old hen taste like a spring chicken. She makes wonderful noodles and apple cake.”

  The woman said, “Let the poor thing speak for herself. Do you speak Russian? Know any Russian dishes?”

  Adeline smiled and nodded. “I speak fluent Russian and know many Russian dishes from a kitchen I used to work in back in Ukraine.”

  The clerk sent her immediately to a large home at the edge of town, the billet of the ranking Soviet officers in the area, including a Colonel Vasiliev, who was in his sixties, corpulent, and curt. But he loved the pork chop and spicy applesauce dish Adeline prepared for him for lunch, and hired her on the spot.

  When Adeline happily hurried back to the clerk’s office for a housing reassignment, the colonel had already called ahead. It was done. She could move the very next morning to new quarters in a room in a house on the village’s main street, not far from the school.

  Reaching the address in Berlin that Colonel Vasiliev had given her, Adeline remembered how relieved she’d been when she reached the Schmidts’ house that day and found Captain Kharkov and the other officers had not returned. Frau Schmidt had been upset that Adeline was packing already but pleased at the change in her fortune.

  Adeline told the boys only that she’d gotten a job cooking and they had to move into the village, closer to their friends from school, which they liked. They had so little to their name, it did not take more than an hour for her to get their things into the little wagon, which Herr Schmidt helped load into his larger wagon.

  “Can we come back to sled?” Will asked.

  The old farmer smiled and patted him on the head. “Anytime you want.”

  “You’re always welcome, Will, and you, too, Walt,” said Frau Schmidt, who insisted on riding into the village with them so she could see how they’d be living.

  They set off in the last twenty minutes of good light as fat snowflakes filled the frigid air. Halfway to town, Adeline saw Captain Kharkov and the other two Soviet officers walking up the road toward them.

  When Kharkov spotted Adeline, Will, and Walt and their little wagon, he stood in the road blocking the way. Herr Schmidt reined his horse to a stop.

  “What is this?” Kharkov barked. “What is happening here?”

  “They have been given new quarters in the village,” Herr Schmidt said.

  “I was never apprised of this!”

  “Orders of Colonel Vasiliev,” Frau Schmidt said. “She cooks for him now.”

  In Berlin weeks later, Adeline grinned, recalling the fury in Kharkov’s face as he stood aside and glared at her.

  I beat him twice in three days, she thought proudly, before walking up to a Soviet soldier standing before the door that matched the address she sought. Adeline showed him her papers and the official letter from Colonel Vasiliev granting her entry.

  The Russian guard, who could not have been older than nineteen, nodded and handed them back to her, saying, “Buy me a little chocolate in there, yes? The food we get is dung.”

  “No promises,” Adeline said.

  He sighed and opened the door into a commissary for ranking Soviet officers. She entered, and the door closed behind her. Adeline took a look around and felt as if her breath had been stolen.

  The room was long and wide, with a low ceiling, and shelf after shelf after shelf bulging with food. And not just the staples. There were freshly butchered meats, beef and pork, and fowl; and herring and other fish chilling on ice; and cheese and honey; and twenty different kinds of vodka and four cigarette brands. They even had the specific beluga caviar the colonel had placed at the top of her shopping list.

  After a lifetime of want and lack even in the best of moments, Adeline found that being there in the officers’ commissary, amid the dizzying array of delicacies and endless choices, was almost overwhelming. She’d known that people high up in the Communist system lived differently than the ordinary people they claimed to support. She just had not understood how well they lived while others like her had suffered for decades.

  Adeline did the numbers in her head as she shopped. Near the end of her list, she realized the colonel had given her more than enough cash to cover the purchases. And she had a little money of her own. She paid for Colonel Vasiliev’s list of groceries and acted as if she were going to leave, then made a show of staring at the list and groaning.

  “I forgot a few things,” she said. “Can I leave the bags here?”

  The cashier, a bored female Red Army soldier, shrugged. Adeline quickly returned with a jar of blueberry jam, three large chocolate bars, one small chocolate bar, and a wedge of cheese. She paid for them with her own money because she knew the colonel or one of his staff would check the receipt against the cash she returned. After paying a second time, Adeline rewrapped her scarf against the cold and went outside. The same young Russian soldier was standing there, stamping his feet and looking gaunt and unhappy.

  “Here,” she said, giving him the smaller chocolate bar.

  The soldier broke into a grin, thanked her, and snatched it from her.

  Tearing at the wrapper, he said, “It’s true, you know?”

  “What’s true?” she asked.

  After popping the candy between his lips, chewing, and swallowing with great contentment, he said, “In the Soviet Union, if you have chocolate, vodka, or cigarettes, you can change a yes to a no and a no to a yes.”

&nb
sp; She thought about that and smiled. “What’s your name, Private?”

  He hesitated. “Dimitri.”

  “Have a nice day, Private Dimitri,” she said. “I don’t want a yes or a no changed today.”

  The Soviet private cocked his head at her, a little puzzled, before Adeline turned and walked away carrying her shopping bags, one in each hand to maintain balance on the slippery roads and sidewalks. She thought of Emil for only the second time that day. In their new home—a single, large room in the house of a widow younger than Frau Schmidt—she’d continued her habit of rising at sunrise and facing the East to think about Emil and his promise to find her.

  But during the day, when she was cooking especially, she’d found it best to push thoughts of him aside. The fact that she had the ability to not think about Emil for hours at a time made her feel horrible deep down and . . . Adeline stopped, realizing she’d taken a wrong turn or two somewhere and was disoriented and then lost.

  A girl walking by gave her different directions back to the train station. Two blocks along that route, she saw a queue of people waiting outside a building that had a white flag with a red cross on it fluttering above the door. Having endured such lines as a refugee in Wielun, Adeline figured they were waiting for medical attention.

  But when she asked an older woman at the end of the line, she was told that most were waiting because they had been separated from loved ones during the war. The building housed the International Red Cross, which was taking names and addresses of people to be printed on big lists that would be posted in public places in the Soviet, British, French, and American zones.

  Adeline stood there, debating whether to stand in the line. Emil had been taken east. He’d said he would look for her in the West. But who knew when or if he’d ever get a chance to look for her and the boys? And who knew if these lists would still be up somewhere five or ten years on? She shook off these doubts and others that wormed through her and took her place in line.