The Last Green Valley Read online

  As bad as the months of starvation had been to her, and as sure as she’d been that no better life would ever find her way again, late in her recovery from pneumonia, Malia heard about a job in town, a job indoors. Adeline got the job, and in what felt like a snap of the fingers, her circumstances had changed for the better.

  Almost six months now, she thought, carrying the chicken as she ducked into a wide alleyway, passed the rear entrance to a bakery already closed for the day, and walked along the back fences of a row of large homes. She went through the gate of the third one and up the steps to a back door.

  Inside, she kicked off her boots, put on the slippers she was supposed to wear indoors, and brought the grocery sack into the kitchen. She’d no sooner set the sack down than a woman’s cheerful voice called out in Russian from another room, “Adelka, is that you back so soon?”

  “Yes, Mrs. Kantor,” Adeline said, pulling on her apron and going into the front room where an old woman sat by the window with a blanket across her lap and a black sweater about her shoulders.

  A teapot and simple service were on the table in front of Mrs. Kantor. A woman in her late twenties was sitting opposite Adeline’s employer. She wore a plain brown dress, shawl, and scarf. A large book lay on the floor beside her.

  “Esther, this is my secret treasure,” Mrs. Kantor said. “Her name is Adeline. I call her Adelka. The things she does in the kitchen are wizardry!”

  Esther laughed. “You mean witchery?” When Adeline frowned at that, Esther waved her hands. “No, no. I’m not suggesting . . . Oh, never mind. What are you cooking today, Adeline?”

  “Whatever she found out on her daily tramp,” Mrs. Kantor said before Adeline could answer. “She finds what’s available, and then I don’t know what she does back there in the kitchen, but it’s magic.”

  Adeline bowed her head, smiling. “Thank you, ma’am. I love cooking.”

  “It shows.”

  “So?” Esther said. “What did you find today?”

  Adeline picked her head up, looked from Esther to Mrs. Kantor, and swelled with excitement. “A whole fresh chicken!”

  Esther gasped. Mrs. Kantor clapped her hands against her thighs. “No! Where?”

  “Mr. Berman’s shop. I happened to walk in just after the chicken was killed!”

  “Kosher?” Esther said.

  “Yes, ma’am. I mean, I guess so. From Mr. Berman?”

  Mrs. Kantor made a whooping noise and shook her bony fists overhead. “I am going to invite my son and his family! This is a cause for celebration!”

  To Adeline’s surprise, Esther did not share her employer’s enthusiasm. “Are you sure, Mrs. Kantor? When so many are still going hungry?”

  The old woman sobered, but then nodded. “I know people are still hungry, dear, but I am also sure that if Moses himself had happened upon a chicken while he was wandering in the desert, he would have hidden it from all the tribes of Israel and eaten it with his family.”

  Esther snorted even as her hand flew to her mouth, saying, “Mrs. Kantor!”

  “What?”

  “You’re lucky the rabbi isn’t here to hear that.”

  Mrs. Kantor threw back her head, cackled. “Well, there are some things rabbis shouldn’t hear about, but as far as real chicken soup, I think he’d back me.”

  “If you ladle out a bowl for him!” Esther said.

  “That’s right!” the old woman brayed, and looked to Adeline. “How big is our chicken, dear?”

  “A good size, ma’am.”

  “Enough for my son, his wife, and daughter? And my friend Esther?”

  “Oh, Mrs. Kantor, I couldn’t,” Esther said. “I just dropped by to say hello.”

  Mrs. Kantor shot her a look. “You dropped by when a chicken appeared in the middle of the desert, so to speak.”

  Esther laughed. “Well, it would be . . . so nice to just have a taste.”

  “You’ll have more than that,” Mrs. Kantor said. “I have the appetite of a mouse. How long should it take, Adelka?”

  Adeline thought it through, said, “By sundown? Maybe a bit after?”

  “Plan on a bit after,” the old woman said to both Adeline and Esther.

  Esther grinned and got up. “I have some chores to finish, but I will come back.”

  When Esther had gone, Mrs. Kantor cocked her head at Adeline, said, “Well?”

  She startled, having been so caught up in the two women’s banter that she flushed, bowed quickly, and said, “Sorry, Mrs. Kantor. Is there anything you need before I start?”

  The old woman’s face softened. “I need a nap, dear. Please, put that book on the shelf in the kitchen. And before you boil the bird, would you run to my son’s house to tell his wife the news?”

  “Yes, ma’am,” Adeline said, picking up the book.

  “You know where they live?”

  “I do.”

  “Clever child,” she said, rearranging the blanket in her lap. “Go on, then. Do you have enough wood for the oven?”

  “I think so,” she said, and ran back to the kitchen.

  She put the book on the shelf before lifting the lid on the box where the wood was kept and saw it was lower than she’d remembered from that morning’s fire.

  “I’ll need to get more wood while I’m out, ma’am,” she called, dropping the heavy lid.

  The vibration caused the book she’d brought into the kitchen to slide off the shelf and fall to the floor behind her.

  Mrs. Kantor called, “Be quick about it!”

  “Yes, ma’am!” she called back as she stooped to pick up the book, seeing it was a bound collection of illustrations and paintings, and open to one that depicted a beautiful green valley surrounded by snow-peaked mountains with a river winding through it. Growing up in flat Ukraine, Adeline had never seen such a setting and found it so enchanting, she gazed at it for a long moment.

  “Are you going, girl?” Mrs. Kantor cried.

  “Right now!” she yelled, slamming the book shut and putting it back on the shelf with a different, heavier book on top of it.

  She got her coat and boots back on, the image of the painting still lingering as she ran through the streets to Mrs. Kantor’s son’s house and went to the back door. She found the cook, informed her she had the afternoon and evening off, and then asked her to tell the doctor’s wife that they were all invited to eat with Mrs. Kantor after sundown.

  Next, she went to a market area to buy eggs for the noodles, then crossed to where men sold firewood, but they had already left for the day. Adeline went to another spot where she could ordinarily find wood, but there was none to be had.

  Glancing at the sun angled toward the western horizon, Adeline was suddenly and desperately aware of time slipping away. Five people coming to dinner at sundown and not enough wood to boil the chicken and simmer the soup.

  Adeline imagined Mrs. Kantor getting upset and firing her as she hurried back to the house, feeling frightened, feeling like life was about to slap her down again, steal away something she’d fought so long and hard to have. As she entered the kitchen, that fear was all around her. After years of starvation and hardship, she couldn’t find enough wood to make chicken soup, and now she would be let go.

  “Adeline!” Mrs. Kantor called.

  “Yes, ma’am,” she said, hearing the quiver in her throat.

  “Is my son coming?”

  “I believe so,” she said. “I told the cook.”

  “All of them?”

  “Yes.”

  “What about the firewood?”

  Adeline felt the fear spiral and ignite again. As it burned stronger, she felt weaker.

  “Please,” she whispered, shutting her eyes. “Help me.”

  “Adeline?”

  She opened her eyes, meaning to tell the old woman the truth and ask for her forgiveness and advice, when she happened to glance at motion in the alley outside the kitchen window. She blinked and then smiled. “I’m getting it just now, ma’am!”<
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  Adeline ran outside and after a young, broad-shouldered man bent over as he walked, an impossible load of firewood on his back.

  “Excuse me!” she cried. “Can I buy some of your firewood?”

  He did not slow. “No.”

  “Oh, please, I have money.”

  “It’s already paid for,” he said, walking on. “The baker owns it.”

  A wave of dread swept over Adeline, and she cried, “Please, sir, can’t you sell me just a few pieces? I’m going to lose my job if I don’t get some wood for our oven. Please?”

  For one horrible moment, she thought he’d keep going, but then he stopped and turned to peer back at her. “Lose your job?”

  “I need to boil a chicken,” she said, struggling to regain control of herself.

  “You have a chicken?”

  “The woman I work for does.”

  “She must be quite a woman.”

  “Her dead husband was a doctor, and her son is a doctor.”

  He thought about that. “Okay.”

  “Okay?”

  He nodded, lowered the bundle off his back. “The baker won’t know how much I cut.”

  Adeline clapped with delight. “Oh, thank you! Thank you!”

  The young man stood there a moment, watching her. Ever so slowly his weary expression broke, and a smile overtook his face. “How much do you want?”

  “Four big pieces, please. Oh, you’re so kind.”

  He untied his bundle, got four stout pieces for her.

  “You’ve rescued me,” she said, handing him the money. “Thank you forever!”

  He took it and said, “If I knew firewood would make a beautiful young lady like you this happy, I would have bought an ax a long time ago.”

  He was grimy from work and stank of it, too, but she liked the way he smiled and the way he looked at her, as if he really saw her. She realized she liked his smile and eyes so much, it embarrassed her, made her blush, and she looked down.

  “I’m sorry,” he said. “I shouldn’t have said that.”

  “No,” she said, still looking down, but smiling. “It was nice and funny. Thank you, but I have to boil the chicken and start the egg noodles.”

  “What’s your name?”

  She hesitated. “Adeline. Adeline Losing.”

  He smiled again. “That’s a pretty name. I’m Emil Martel.”

  PART TWO:

  THE PURE BLOODS

  Chapter Eight

  When Emil awoke in the dark on the third full day of their exodus, a thick warm fog had rolled in, blanketing the land. He fed and cared for his horses by lantern light, rubbing more salve into their lash wounds. Though he could not see thirty meters in any direction or hear anything like a big engine, he felt anxious, like tanks or planes with machine guns could burst out of the fog at any moment.

  His instincts proved correct. He’d no sooner gotten Oden and Thor back in their traces than whistles began to blow in the fog. That German voice came over a bullhorn, warning that Soviet forces were close and moving their way. The caravan would roll in fifteen minutes.

  “The boys haven’t eaten,” Adeline called from beneath the bonnet.

  “They’ll eat as we ride. We all will.”

  She nodded. “I’ll get everything tied down except for dry food and water.”

  As Adeline turned away, Emil smiled at her the way he’d smiled the first time he met her, out in the alley behind Mrs. Kantor’s house, desperate for firewood for her chicken soup. From the very beginning, she’d made him feel needed in almost every way.

  Maybe that’s all I really need in life, he thought. Adeline’s love. My boys’ love.

  When the wagons began to move in the warm fog, there was the predictable chaos made worse by the mud that soon caked the horses’ underbellies and flanks and spotted the lash wounds on their haunches. It coated the spokes, wheel rims, and axles as well.

  For the next few hours, it seemed as if the trek were a ghostly, segmented, snakelike creature, appearing and disappearing in the fog, sliding and twisting in the muck. In the slick, near-blind conditions, wagons began to drift, crash, and overturn. It took all of Emil’s skills to keep their wagon and horses moving forward.

  Twice that morning they encountered wagons buried up to their axles in the mud.

  One of them was Emil’s parents’ wagon, so he’d pulled over and helped get them unstuck and rolling again. His mother, Karoline, was more civil than usual. His father, Johann, seemed unbothered by the foul conditions. Rese had been unable to leave her bed since Dubossary.

  “She sleeps and can’t keep anything down for long,” Karoline said.

  “I’ll make something for her stomach when we stop tonight,” Adeline said.

  Emil’s mother wouldn’t look at her but nodded.

  They rode hard and long that day, through the city of Chisinau, Moldova—where slave laborers, men taken by Hitler from every country he conquered, were building fortifications for the Wehrmacht—and out the other side, hearing stories of other battles brewing to the southeast. The fog burned off before noon, revealing land that had been occupied, conquered, and reconquered over the past few decades. Romania held dubious title to the land at the moment, a payment Hitler made to the Romanian dictator Ion Antonescu for allowing German troops to travel east to conquer Stalin in the summer of 1941.

  Emil did not care about politics or who controlled the land he and his family crossed that day. All he wanted was to be so far west, he’d never meet another Communist as long as he lived. He could tolerate traveling under Nazi protection for the time being, but when he saw a chance to get west of the murdering, inhuman bastards, he planned on doing just that. In the meantime, he kept a constant eye out for Major Haussmann.

  Was it Haussmann back there? Was I imagining him? No. It was him. But why would he have been outside Dubossary? Of all the SS men in Ukraine, why was he the one directing traffic there? Why was he the one to point us into the town?

  Those questions threatened Emil’s sanity at some level, so he flung them aside unanswered, told himself it was just one of those cruel coincidences in a lifetime. After Haussmann had done his dirty work in the early days of the German occupation, he’d been assigned in some capacity to protect the ethnic Germans fleeing west. End of story. Emil might never see the man again, and if he did, he’d make sure he, Adeline, and the boys were heading in the opposite direction.

  That third evening of their journey, the caravan finally ground to a halt and camped in the countryside twelve kilometers southwest of Chisinau. Cannon fire rumbled throughout the night, close enough to wake Emil and Adeline again and again.

  The fourth day of the trek, it rained early, which churned up more mud. They barely made fifteen kilometers’ progress. The fifth night, bombs fell so close, the Martel clan abandoned its wagons and took refuge in a large road culvert.

  The culvert trembled with each explosion. They could hear the shrieking of horses and the cries of those without shelter. But they remained safe. From that point forward, Emil looked for a culvert or some reinforced concrete work like a bridge abutment to camp near or under.

  A week into the ordeal, the trek was maintaining a ten-to-fifteen-kilometer gap between them and the Wehrmacht rear guard trying to hold back the forces of the Soviet First and Second Ukrainian Fronts. But the fear of being overtaken was constant. The Soviet tanks could come from another direction. Or the Red fighter planes might return.

  “We’re trapped between two armies,” Emil said to Adeline late the seventh night.

  They were camped by a bridge abutment west of the Moldovan town of Hincesti. The boys were already asleep, and Emil’s stomach was the fullest it had been since they’d fled. He’d dug a horizontal hole in the dirt bank a good meter from the base of the concrete abutment. The boys had gathered wood, and he built a fire before feeding the glowing coals into the makeshift oven. From their precious stock of flour and yeast, Adeline and her mother made dough, which they put in pa
ns and slid on top of the coals.

  The freshly baked bread, even with the burned crust, had tasted so wonderful, Emil had been content for a good twenty minutes. But then his fear of the tanks and the planes returned.

  “Didn’t you hear me?” he whispered louder to Adeline, who was about to get under the blankets by the still-warm oven. “We’re trapped between two armies. Hitler’s crippled men in front of us with a few able men behind us trying to stop all of Stalin’s soldiers.”

  He felt breathless. “When I really think about where we are and what we’re doing and what could happen to us in the days ahead, it’s like my thoughts speed up, Adeline. They run and repeat in circles, like a storm in my head.”

  Adeline came over and hugged him. “Everyone feels like that now and then. I remind myself what Mrs. Kantor told me once: ‘There is a safe place in the eye of every storm.’”

  “I’ve rarely found it,” Emil said.

  “You did when those tanks started shooting last week. You’ve gotten us all this far safely, haven’t you?”

  For some reason, Emil could not embrace that the way Adeline did. “We’ve got a long way to go before I’ll feel like I’ve got you all safe.”

  “Then come get some sleep. Dawn will be here soon enough.”

  Emil wanted to climb under the blankets, close his eyes, and take a rest from all of it. But then he heard voices, men’s voices singing and laughing up the bank not far off from his horses and wagon. He felt drawn to them.

  “Emil?” Adeline called softly.

  “I want to check the horses,” he said, and with his lantern climbed up the bank to the road and the bridge.

  Thor and Oden were tied and hobbled where he’d left them. The wagon appeared untouched. But the singing and the laughing had only gotten louder and more raucous. They were singing an old German drinking song. He had not heard the song in years but recognized it from his days working in a brewery in Pervomaisk, the town where the boys were born.

  Emil began to walk toward the singing. He didn’t know why. Maybe it was just to be near and hear other men trying to survive the same predicament. His father aside, he often felt like the only people he had to talk to were women. The closer he got, the more he heard alcohol in their song. Emil was not a big drinker, but he always enjoyed making wine and beer. And, on occasion, he enjoyed the easiness brought on by a glass or two or three.