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

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.

It couldn’t hurt. Could it?

Chapter Thirty-Two

February 3, 1946

Poltava, Ukraine

The weather had shifted in late December, turning as cruel as it had the year before. There was near-constant snow, too much of it to make a run for it even with the pony, and days on end when the thermometer outside the cement works failed to rise above negative twenty Celsius. With windchills exceeding forty below zero at night, Emil and Corporal Gheorghe had decided it would be suicide to try to escape. They would wait for a thaw to reduce the snowpack and then a trailing storm to cover their tracks.

At Emil’s request, after another of his workers died, the Romanian corporal came to toil in the cement-block shop. They gathered scraps of lumber from around the site for the cooks. And they continued to work the burial detail together, pushing bodies off the pony cart with the rise and fall of the sun. In early January, the bodies would have vanished almost overnight. Now they lingered for days in various stages of desecration. So many men were dying, the wolves and crows could not keep up.

Of the more than two thousand prisoners who had walked into Poltava in May 1945, three hundred and eighty remained alive and working to rebuild the city so they could go home. And there seemed little slowing to the spread of disease or the variety of death. When one outbreak ended, another began.

“We’ll all be dead in six weeks,” one of the other concrete workers said before exiting the shop to go out into the cold.

Corporal Gheorghe was pushing a wheelbarrow of lime to his mixing trough and smiled after the man. He tapped the dent in his head and nodded to Emil.

“He will be dead in six weeks because he says he will be dead in six weeks,” the Romanian said, shaking his head and then laughing. “Why doesn’t he ever say, ‘In six weeks, I will run in fields of honey clover chasing a sweetie girl’?”

Emil snorted with laughter, seeing that image in his mind as he used the wooden paddle to stir his final batch of cement for the day. “Because one is likely and the other is fantasy?”

“Both are fantasies; both are dreams of what could be,” the corporal said seriously as he dumped the lime in the trough. “Either can become real. Eventually. But people never learn this. They never realize that the Divine, the Almighty One, God, is listening to their hopes and dreams and trying to help. For good or for bad. Death or fields of clover. It is our choice.”

“Is it?”

“Everything is our choice. Did you not choose to think about Dubossary differently?”

“Yes.”

“And did it not make a difference?”

It was true. Ever since Corporal Gheorghe had shown Emil a different meaning to his story of Dubossary, he’d felt better mentally and emotionally than he had in the more than four years that had passed since that terrible night.

“A big difference.”

“There you go, then.”

“But that was the past,” Emil said, pouring more fly ash into the concrete mix. “How can thinking change the future?”

“Not change, influence,” Corporal Gheorghe laughed as he picked up his paddle and stirred. “The way you think about Dubossary now will influence your life in the future, won’t it?”

Emil felt that was true also, but he couldn’t put his finger on why exactly. That irritated him, but he nodded.

The Romanian said, “And if you ask yourself today what your opportunities are, will you see them? Will you find them in the future?”

“What opportunities?”

“Any opportunity. A chance to escape, for example. If you think about it now, will you be looking for the chance in the future?”

He thought about that. “Yes. I will be.”

“It’s the same with everything else,” he said. “What you seek is what you will find, but only if you hunt it with all