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

ladder of the hopper car. At the top, he looked around, seeing the all-too-familiar landscape of rural western Ukraine, with vast fields bordered by thin hedgerows and coated with snow as far as the eye could see. He was surprised that the land triggered a wave of nostalgia in him. A memory surfaced from childhood, shortly after his father pulled him out of school to work on the farm. He remembered being sad at leaving school, which he’d enjoyed, but also being thrilled to follow his father out into the fields with a long day of work before them.

He thought of his father, mother, and sister and wondered if he’d ever see any of them again. Were they with Adeline? Or had they gone back to Friedenstal as his mother had wanted? Were they somewhere to the southwest of him a hundred kilometers? Even if they were, he decided, he was still going west. He was still fulfilling his dream.

An hour later, with Emil crouching below the lip of the hopper car, the train pulled into a freight yard at the central rail station in Kiev. It was windy, brilliantly sunny, and bone-numbingly cold. Seeing men scattered about working in the yard and no soldiers, he heaved himself up and over the side of the hopper car and almost slid down the exterior ladder. He moved quickly away from the train, thankful for the brisk wind, which was swirling the snow, erasing his tracks. After getting behind other boxcars, he spotted a pickax almost buried in the drifting snow and grabbed it.

Emil threw it over his shoulder and walked down the tracks toward the main station building. Another rail man exited a door at the top of a low flight of concrete stairs. He smiled, ran up them past the man, and caught the door. He stepped inside a long narrow hallway, let his eyes adjust to the dimness, and felt an unfamiliar yet welcome sensation brush across his face, hearing noises he hadn’t heard in more than a year. Once he could see, he started walking toward the source of the sensation and the noises: the considerable gap between the threshold and the bottoms of the swinging double doors at the far end of the hallway through which a steady stream of heat flowed and the bustle of a crowd echoed.

Near the end of the hall, a door stood ajar on his left. He pushed it open and found an empty room with wire-mesh lockers, probably for the rail workers. He went in, seeing a lavatory with a deep sink and a mirror off the locker room. Emil pulled off his wool hat and moved to the mirror.

For the first time in more than a year, he saw his own face and condition. It was a shocking reflection. Adeline would not have known him if he’d asked her to dance. He barely recognized himself.

Emil had lost more than twenty-five kilos. His shabby, worn prison clothes hung off him like a scarecrow’s outfit. His hair and beard were bristly and cut unevenly. His cheeks were hollow. His teeth were yellowed. His facial bones stood out against his skin, which was scabby, drawn down, and filthy with grime. His eyes, sunken, dark, and hardened, troubled him most.

Knowing he was taking a terrible chance, but also knowing he could not go into the central station in Kiev looking like someone who’d just dug himself out of a grave, Emil struggled from his coat, sweater, and shirts. With every breath, his ribs seemed to move like so many player-piano keys against the skin of his bruised, chaffed, and lesioned torso.

He turned on the faucet and stuck his head and face under the ice-cold water. He scrubbed for a good ten minutes, dunking and dunking until his true features were revealed. There, he thought, looking in the mirror again. Adella and the boys would almost know me now.

With that, he caught something come alive in his eyes, a glint where there had been none. It reminded Emil of the plan he had come up with the night before. He smiled, headed into the locker room, and went through the lockers, finding a faded blue workman’s coverall, a pair of work boots newer than his own, and a shirt and a wool peacoat far less filthy than his prison-issue jacket.

As Emil dressed in the stolen clothes, he felt no remorse. He’d been unjustly thrown in a prison camp for a year, needed the clothes, and figured life could be unfair to someone else for a change. He threw his old clothes into an empty locker after he’d retrieved his rubles and put the wad of notes in the pocket of his pants beneath the coverall. Only then did he leave the room, surprised that no one had bothered him. Then again, according to the clock and the schedule he’d seen on the wall, the day shift had started less than an hour before.

Emil left the pickax in the hallway and went through the doors out into the organized chaos of Kiev’s central train station. The crowd of voices babbling. The colors so brilliant after so many months of gray. The wondrous smells of fresh food cooking. The harried faces of people returning to their lives or boarding trains to start new ones. For a moment, it was all so overwhelming, Emil had to put his hand on a wall to keep from falling.

Hunger pangs brought him back to his senses. He followed the irresistible smells into the ticketing-and-waiting area where he knew vendors would be selling food. He found at least ten of them, mostly women, and forced himself to look at everything they had before ordering black tea, two small rolls of bread, and a chunk of dried sausage. There were many other, richer, and sweeter items he would have much rather had as his first meal out of captivity, but Emil was nervous his gut would revolt if he