The Last Green Valley Read online

  A girl’s voice grumbled loudly behind them. “Stop with all the hugging. It’s giving me a headache on top of my stomachache.”

  Adeline looked across the fire, past her mother-in-law, and saw Emil’s sister, twenty-one-year-old Theresa, who was climbing down from their wagon. Known as “Rese,” she was dressed as Adeline and the other women were, in heavy, dark wool jackets and long smock skirts, but unlike the other women, Rese wore her golden hair down rather than wrapped in a kerchief or wool scarf.

  “How do you feel?” her mother asked.

  Rese had her hands jammed in the pockets of her jacket. “Like I’m freezing and there’s a nail in my head and I want to puke.”

  The boys started laughing. Adeline smiled. She liked Rese. As with her own sister, you never knew what she was going to say.

  Sure enough, Malia tapped her head and chimed in, “Could be worse. You could have a mule kick your skull.”

  Rese stopped, tapped her lower lip. “I will not argue with you, Malia. A mule kick to the skull would be worse than wanting to puke when you’ve got a nail in your head.”

  Will and Walt laughed at her again. Even Emil chuckled until Karoline said, “That’s enough, all of you. Don’t encourage her. Rese, do you ever think before you speak?”

  Emil’s sister walked past her mother, dismissively. “What fun would that be?”

  “My God, what have I created?” Karoline said.

  Adeline caught a flicker of pain crossing Rese’s face before she smiled and said, “You didn’t create me alone, Mother.”

  Her mother gasped at her impudence. Johann smiled.

  Rese held her cold hands out to the fire. “And think: if God had a hand in it, too, if being born is a miracle like you once told me, Mother, then I am a miracle, and I am everything I am supposed to be right now. Right?”

  Karoline was staring at her like she was speaking another language. Malia broke into a huge grin.

  “Johann,” Karoline complained, “where does she think these things?”

  He shrugged, still smiling.

  “In her brain,” Walt said.

  Rese laughed, pointed at Walt. “I like how my little nephew thinks.”

  Karoline threw up her hands, looked to the first stars in the night sky, and said, “I give up. She’s beyond me.”

  Rese came around the fire and talked to the boys while Adeline stirred the stew. When she was done, Rese came over and whispered, “Ever notice how it’s always about Mother? What did ‘I’ create? What did ‘I’ give up?”

  “Now that you mention it.”

  “Deep down, I think she doesn’t like other people because she doesn’t like herself.”

  “I gave up trying to understand your mother a long time ago,” Adeline said, and retrieved the pot from the coals.

  Lydia brought bowls that Adeline filled with piping hot stew.

  “That smells great,” Rese said. “Can I have some?”

  Her mother heard that. “You have your supper here. Biscuits and dried meat.”

  “Biscuits and dried meat?” Rese complained. “It’s cold out, Mother. I’d rather eat what they’re eating.”

  “I’m sure you would,” her mother said. “But if we all eat like that now, we’ll all be starving before this journey’s over.”

  There was a long, uncomfortable silence that was finally broken by Malia, who looked up from her stew bowl, smiled at Karoline, and said, “Thank you, Mrs. Sunshine.”

  Adeline turned and walked away to not be seen smiling, but Rese howled with laughter. Emil was trying not to, but soon had his head thrown back, chuckling. His father had his head down, snickering, before Lydia and the boys joined in. Everyone around that campfire was laughing, then, feeding on each other, their worries and pains forgotten. Everybody, that is, except Adeline’s mother-in-law.

  When Adeline looked back at Karoline, she had stood up. Her lower lip was twisted with scorn as she spat venomous words at Malia.

  “You’ve forgotten the Horror?” Karoline said in a harsh whisper. “You’ve forgotten what it’s like to starve, haven’t you? Of course you have. You’d have to have only half a brain to forget what it feels like to have an empty belly for weeks on end. The things you’ll do to keep living.”

  The laughter died. Lydia said, “That’s not right, Karoline.”

  “Your daughter’s not right in the head,” Emil’s mother said.

  “You spiteful woman. You—”

  Malia put her hand on her mother’s shoulder, then looked at Karoline without a trace of self-pity or anger. “No, I am not right, Mrs. Martel. Not as right as you. But I have more than half my brain left, so I remember the Holodomor. I remember being so hungry, we ate field grass. Mama and Adeline and our brother, Wilhelm, were right beside me, on our hands and knees and crying because Papa was taken east two years before, and we had nothing, and we were all choking at the way the grass cut at our throats and swelled in our bellies. I remember that plain as day.”

  Adeline’s right hand had gone to her throat, for she could suddenly taste the gritty chaff from the grass stalks coating her tongue and felt a pang of the abdominal pain that built in her gut after days on a grass-and-weed diet.

  Karoline appeared shocked to be talked to this way by a younger woman, even more so as Malia went on. “But we kept eating the grass and anything we could find because we wanted to live. I ate worms and bugs and a dead bird because I wanted to live. Even with my head kicked in, I wanted to live so someday I could eat a bowl of good stew like tonight. What did you eat to survive the Holodomor, Mrs. Martel? What did you do to live through it?”

  Emil’s mother stood there, staring at the ground for a few moments before glaring at Malia. “You have no idea,” she said, and walked off behind their wagon.

  The rest of them ate in uncomfortable silence. When the dishes were done, Will came over and hugged his mother’s skirt. “I’m tired, Mama.”

  “Bedtime,” Adeline said. “Bedtime, Walt.”

  Their older son was dozing by the fire. Emil went to him, meaning to wake him, but then squatted and scooped him up and carried him to the wagon. The boy never stirred.

  Adeline had already laid out the blankets inside beneath the bonnet. Emil handed Walt to her. She laid him on one blanket before covering him with another. Adeline helped Will in beside his sleeping brother and promised him a second blanket when she returned.

  The fire was dying. Only Johann was still up, sitting on his stump and staring into the fading embers of his life. Beyond Emil’s father, other campfires had already gone to coals, and voices in the surrounding darkness dwindled with each passing minute.

  Emil looked above the trees to the clear night sky, seeing the tapestry of stars and feeling suddenly small, insignificant, as if his life meant little. A truck passed. A German soldier yelled that the bridges ahead would open before dawn and the convoy would begin moving soon after. That worsened Emil’s mood, made him feel like a pawn, made him want to retreat and fight at the same time.

  “Emil?”

  He startled. Adeline had crept up on him.

  “What are you looking at?”

  The trance was broken. “The moon and the stars.”

  “What about them?”

  “When I was a boy, I’d go outside almost every night to look at them, and now I rarely think about them at all.”

  Adeline stepped into Emil’s arms, rested her cheek on his chest, and held him.

  “Give thanks. We made it through the first day,” she said.

  “Somehow,” he said, seeing himself whipping the horses over and over.

  “Because of you and because of God.”

  He pressed his face to her hair. “We’ll get farther away from the tanks tomorrow.”

  Adeline kissed him, said, “Stay strong, Emil.”

  “Always.”

  “And pray for us. God helps those who ask.”

  Emil offered only a noncommittal grunt. “I’ll check the horses.”


  He did not wait for a reply but went to Oden and Thor, feeling irritated, and thinking, Pray? A waste of time. You do what you want, Adella, but I’ll figure my own way, thank you. No reason to get God involved if he does not exist.

  Emil had been raised Lutheran just like his wife. Miraculously, she had retained her faith through thick and thin, but Emil’s had been taken from him piece by piece over the past fifteen years of calamity, persecution, and situations no man should ever have to face, making decisions no man should ever have to make.

  He tried not to but had another memory of himself the day he lost his faith completely, saw himself shaking his fist at the sky, lonelier than he’d ever been. Emil shivered as he tried to block out that hated time and saw to his horses, checking their lead ropes and halters. They fluttered their noses and puttered their lips as he put more salve on their wounds.

  When Emil returned to the wagon, Adeline had already retrieved the rest of the blankets and spread another across Will. She was lying down beside their younger son. He blew out the lantern and climbed in beside Walt before reaching across both boys to squeeze Adeline’s arm good night.

  The night fell cold and silent for a moment before Will whispered, “Tell me again, Mama, about where we’re going.”

  “It’s a beautiful place,” Adeline whispered sleepily. “It’s surrounded by mountains and forests. And snow up high. And below there will be a winding river and green fields. We will live in a warm home, and every morning I will bake bread for you, and there will be a big garden in the back, and we’ll have so much food, we won’t know what to do with it all.”

  Emil had closed his eyes and was trying to listen to his wife, trying to see such a magical place in his mind. But despite his every effort, images from the day cycled and wormed through him, made him deaf to Adeline’s description of paradise. He relived the tank battle before drifting toward sleep and hearing the echoes of Malia’s voice from the campfire. What did you eat to survive the Holodomor, Mrs. Martel? What did you do to live through it?

  Chapter Five

  March 1933

  Birsula, Ukraine

  In his fitful dreams that night, Emil was twenty-one again and wandering through the misty streets of a small city northwest of Friedenstal. He weighed less than fifty-five kilos by then, not an ounce of fat left on his frame. Though the sensation of hunger came and went, he ached constantly and everywhere, joints, muscles, and bones. Deprived of fat reserves, his body was beginning to eat him from the inside out.

  Apathy had begun to set in as well. A fog seemed to shroud Emil’s mind as he roamed far and wide in yet another desperate hunt for food. His most recent meal had been three days before when he’d gone out beyond the city limits and into the farm fields where he’d found a shriveled, soil-caked pumpkin that had survived the winter and other scavengers. After washing it in a stream, Emil had eaten pumpkin until he was beyond full, sat in the sunshine feeling fat and happy, and then promptly slept right there on the bank. When he awoke, he ate the rest of the pumpkin and smiled at how his belly had distended again.

  But that was days ago, Emil thought as he searched the streets for something new to eat. How much longer can this go on? How much longer can I survive?

  Emil had been fending for himself since his family was thrown off its land in Friedenstal, more than three years earlier.

  His father, mother, and his sister, eight-year-old Rese, had gone to live in Pervomaisk, a city to the east on the Bug River. At first, Emil had been lucky. He had farming skills and had little problem finding work on a collective farm as a field laborer.

  He was quiet by nature, but he did not miss much. As a boy, he’d learned that the key to survival under Communism was to be silent, do your job, and not aspire to leadership of any kind. Within three months of his parents’ leaving him to his own wits, he had learned that people who spoke up, people who tried to do things better or tried to teach others a better way, tended to vanish or to die young.

  Emil slept where he could that first year on his own, and he made enough to keep food in his belly. The second year, 1931, was even better when he was given a tractor to drive.

  But in the fall of the following year, Joseph Stalin decided to quash all opposition to Soviet rule in Ukraine. He withheld almost all food to the region. His goal was to starve its entire population.

  As Emil trudged through Birsula six months into the Holodomor, he had the wind in his face, and he was lost in a series of dull, repetitive thoughts of fear and want. He didn’t realize that he’d wandered to a road that ran along the rear of the rail yard and the train station.

  Emil had not wanted to come to this place ever again, but there he was, and he looked all around now, seeing newly starved corpses and the near dead sprawled against the fence that surrounded the rail yard. Scattered among them and still standing, the merely starving and desperate clung to the chain-link fence, looking at a small mountain of wheat not eighty meters away.

  Four armed soldiers stood around the huge wheat pile while others worked at it with shovels, turning the grain over, exposing the kernels to the mist so when the sun returned and beat down on enough food to feed the city for weeks, it all would simply rot. Emil did not want to look at the wheat, but he could not help himself. He went around a weeping woman holding her dying child and to the fence where he gazed at the grain as if it were a mirage or dream.

  He fantasized what he might do with his pockets and hands full of that wheat. He could almost smell the bread in the oven.

  One of the soldiers laughed. Emil heard him, shook off the fantasy, and then saw him. Cigarette in his mouth. Hacking laugh. He’s not starving, is he?

  The more Emil thought about the well-fed Russian soldiers deliberately destroying food in front of starving people, the more a primal anger flared in him. What had he ever done to Joseph Stalin? What had any of his family done to Joseph Stalin? Why would you kick good farmers off their land and then deny food to innocent people?

  Why would a just, kind, and benevolent God let this happen?

  Since the Horror began, Emil had been to the rail station twice before, and each time he’d left feeling helpless and doubting the existence of a power beyond himself. Before he could sink into those dark feelings this time, he remembered his father telling him that God helps those who help themselves.

  But then a weaselly voice inside him said, Trust in no power but your own, Emil. If you want to be saved, save yourself.

  At once unnerved and emboldened by that voice, Emil decided he would have to venture outside the city again. He would walk and search until he found food or dropped dead in his tracks. He pondered which direction to go in. To the east, he might find an unharvested beet or turnip patch. But he decided instead to head west toward farmland that had creek bottoms running through it.

  From his days on the farm, Emil knew that by early March, creek bottoms that had not flooded were often green and lush with edibles if you knew what you were looking for. He might find the baby ferns his mother used to pick and cook or pickle in brine. Or baby asparagus shoots. Or mushrooms. Or freshly laid duck eggs. Or the carcass of a winter-kill rabbit, still frozen in the last of the snow.

  Or he might walk until his legs would not work anymore.

  Emil had seen the way starving people went from walking and talking to suddenly tipping over on legs that would no longer support them. Then they just lay there, some of them mewing like newborn kittens, begging their mothers for milk.

  Go west, he thought, and tore himself away from the fence around the rail yard. Those creek bottoms.

  But within blocks, Emil knew he would not make it to the first of the creeks nearly five kilometers away. Or if he did make it, unless he was lucky and found food immediately, he’d probably die there. He was simply too weak to walk all that way and then forage.

  All he really needed was just a little food. A little food and he could make the walk with enough energy left to find his next meal and the one after that.


  It began to snow. Emil sat down by the side of the road to conserve his energy and to decide whether to seek shelter or food. Across the street, in a little park, he noticed a starving woman, who stumbled, sprawled, and did not move. He felt sorry for her, and if he could have helped her, he would have. If he’d had food, Emil would have given her some. But he was beyond being shocked at people suddenly collapsing. He saw it happen nearly every day now.

  The image and voice of the cackling, well-fed soldier from behind the train station filled Emil’s mind, made him angry all over again. That Russian soldier would smoke cigarettes today. That Russian soldier would destroy food and eat well today while he, Emil, had nothing.

  Nothing.

  He fumed on that, understanding that other people in the world were not starving and that even some local people in Birsula were getting more than enough food on a regular basis, local people allied with the party, with Joseph Stalin.

  Oddly, Emil did not feel more resentment, more helplessness. Instead, that weaselly voice deep inside him said, Go, steal from them, Emil. The party men. Steal from them and save yourself.

  The thought at once terrified and thrilled him. Emil knew if he were caught, he’d be sent to a work camp. Or shot. But he didn’t dwell long on those options or the fear of them, because he knew he would soon die if he did nothing, and he rather liked the idea of stealing from the bastards watching him starve to death.

  There was an inch of wet snow on the ground by the time Emil had walked through the city and found a large dacha behind a high wall. He used to see the man who lived in the house often out on the collective farm. One day the prior December, he’d seen the same man enter through the gates of this dacha.

  Emil knew the man was a high-ranking party member overseeing grain production in the region. Everyone in agriculture within fifty kilometers of Birsula worked for him. Emil didn’t know the party leader’s name and didn’t want to. He was the cold bastard who’d driven them mercilessly to bring in a big harvest the year before. He was the same cold bastard who’d given it all to Stalin. And Emil was betting that he was the kind of cold bastard who could feast while his neighbors were starving to death.