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

of his wife and children. None of them stirred when Emil slid under the blankets behind Walt.

He lay awake on his back with Nikolas’s cruel voice echoing in his head: I saw it in your face. In his mind, Emil heard people crying, then the flat cracks of guns, saw their flashes in the darkness beyond Captain Haussmann, who stood there, thrusting a loaded Luger at him.

That memory was seared so deeply in Emil, it took his breath away. He felt hollow and alone, a sense magnified when he thought of Nikolas shooting Jews for eighteen days.

He’s a threat to me. I don’t know why yet, but he’s a threat. I can feel it in my bones.

Emil closed his eyes, understanding that he needed to stay far away from Nikolas and he needed to rely on himself to do it, certainly not on a God who’d create a man who could shoot innocent people for eighteen days on end.

And then he was fearfully wondering if meeting Nikolas and seeing Haussmann were part of some bitter punishment for that night outside Dubossary. He drifted toward sleep, thinking, Once you decided, Emil, you were as guilty as Nikolas.

Chapter Nine

Early April 1944

Twelve kilometers east of the Romanian border

Four more days and five nights passed, and the Martels were seeing as many retreating Romanians as Germans. Whenever they passed a group of marching Wehrmacht soldiers, Adeline found herself searching their faces, hoping against hope to see her younger brother, Wilhelm, Will’s namesake, among them. Or Emil’s older brother, Reinhold. But she never did.

Emil had turned quiet and brooding since they’d camped below that bridge west of Hincesti. Adeline had learned to give her husband distance when he was like this and focused her attention on supporting him and the boys as they passed through muddy low country laced with creek bottoms, and then climbed forested ridges made treacherous by lingering ice and snow.

Parts and pieces of the broken German war machine had been discarded on both sides of the route. They saw unburied frozen soldiers being pecked by crows. And charred abandoned tanks. And transport trucks buried up to their axles in muck. And the blasted black barrels of artillery cannons that the Wehrmacht had decided to blow up rather than leave for Stalin’s forces to use against them.

Now some twelve days into their ordeal, members of the trek had begun to die from exposure, weakness, and disease. Not an hour passed when they weren’t rolling by a wagon pulled off to the side of the route so survivors could bury their dead.

“When I was getting water this morning, a woman told me they think it’s typhus,” Adeline said when they were about to turn northwest toward the Romanian border town of Iasi.

“Lice,” Emil said, thinking of Nikolas. “The lice carry it.”

“I checked both boys last night.”

“We’ll check everyone every night until this is over.”

The caravan halted. Word soon came back that tanks and forces with the Soviet Second Ukrainian Front were now moving to the west-northwest, trying to split German Army Group South into two pieces. The SS men protecting the trek kept them stalled for two hours before directing the caravan south, away from Iasi.

The sun came out an hour after they changed routes, which Adeline took as a good sign. The temperature warmed the farther south they rolled. As the hours passed, the boys dozed under the bonnet. Emil was at the reins, looking all around and taking in their surroundings.

“What are you looking for?” she asked.

His brows knitted. “I don’t know that I’m looking for anything. I’m just looking around because I never intend on coming back this way ever again.”

“Does that make you happy or sad?”

“That I’m never coming back here? Happy.”

“Good. I thought you’d forgotten how to be happy.”

He looked at her, his mouth slightly agape. “I’m sorry, Adella. I just get caught up in my worries about you and the boys and whether we should have come with the Germans or, I don’t know, gone our own way to freedom.”

“Do you know the way to freedom?”

“I figure I’ll know it when I see it,” he said, and smiled.

He glanced over at her. She smiled at him. “Remember Mrs. Kantor?”

“Wasn’t for her, I wouldn’t be in love with you.”

“Awww,” she said, forgetting what she wanted to tell Emil and scooting over to give him a kiss on the cheek.

He put his arm around her, and she snuggled against his chest as the sun rose high overhead and the air turned even warmer. Despite his dark moods, Adeline felt so safe in Emil’s arms, and the wagon and horses were moving so smoothly in rhythm that her eyelids got heavy, and soon she was dozing, too.

October 1933

Birsula, Ukraine

In Adeline’s dreams, Mrs. Kantor and her guests had all raved over the chicken and egg-noodle soup. Esther called it “a triumph,” which made Adeline blush because she thought so, too. She had taken half a bowl for herself and could not remember the last time anything had tasted so good. And there was that handsome, funny young man who’d sold her the firewood.

Emil. He made her smile. Maybe her life was changing for the better again.

She saw Emil pass by on his way to the bakery the evening after the chicken feast and the evening after that. She got irritated that he had not once looked toward the house where he knew she worked. On the third evening, he did the same thing, and she felt hurt in a way that surprised her because, really, she’d only spoken to him for a few minutes. What had she expected, anyway?

Adeline was at the sink, furiously scrubbing pots ten minutes after he’d gone past her for the third evening in a row, when she happened to look up through the kitchen window and saw Emil standing at the rear gate, looking awkward. He waved.

Adeline waved back, dried her hands, checked her hair in the mirror, and went