The Last Green Valley - Mark Sullivan (black female authors .txt) 📗

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.”

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

He hesitated. “Dimitri.”

“Have a nice day, Private Dimitri,”