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

of her neck again as the malaria cycle started over. With each new attack coming six to eight hours apart, Adeline became weaker, unable to keep food down. She lost weight. She feared for the baby growing inside her but could do nothing until Emil found a doctor who gave her quinine.

Improving steadily by the end of September and through October, Adeline had not had a malaria attack in nearly twenty days when November took the calendar and the birth of her first child loomed. On the twelfth of that month, she was sewing a blanket for the cradle Emil had built. The baby was active, kicking all the time, something she adored.

It was early afternoon, but she was very tired and set her handiwork down and closed her eyes, almost immediately feeling the familiar, hated, lovely pressure at the base of her skull. She slept the dreamless sleep and awoke to malarial fevers different from the previous bouts, higher temperatures and headaches so bad, she thought the pain would break her eardrums.

Emil would later tell her that he had to soak her in wet sheets while she spoke gibberish to people he could not see. She took more quinine, but it did not knock the disease back as quickly as it had before. On the fifth day, while in fever and suffering through a long, hard delivery, she gave birth to a son they named Waldemar.

He was small at birth, under two kilos, but even as sick as she was, she’d experienced the most intense joy of her life seeing her firstborn child, holding him to her breast and seeing him feed on her milk. He was everything she’d ever wanted or hoped for. When Emil had thrown his arms around the both of them, she’d felt more complete, and happier than she’d ever been.

But the malaria would not let her go. Adeline was symptom-free one day and feverish the next. As it does, malaria chipped away at her, wore her down. During another attack between Christmas and New Year’s, she became distrustful of ever feeling good again. Then her breast milk trickled to an intermittent seep.

Waldemar was struggling, barely getting enough to survive by the start of the second week of January 1936. Adeline’s fevers had stopped finally. She was eating and beginning to get her strength back. But she was barely able to give her baby a single feeding a day let alone the seven or eight he needed to thrive.

They’d taken the baby to the same doctor who’d given Adeline quinine, and he’d told them the baby needed milky fats immediately. He recommended they either find a wet nurse or get fresh cream from a dairy to feed to him until her strength and milk returned. But they could not find a wet nurse, and cream had so far been impossible to come by in Pervomaisk in the dead of winter.

“I’ll go out again,” Emil said.

“I’m going with you,” Adeline insisted.

Emil went to fetch his mother. Karoline had fallen on her hip before Christmas and was walking with a cane.

“He’s very weak,” Adeline told her.

“I can see that,” her mother-in-law said.

Adeline started to give Karoline instructions, but the older woman held up her hands. “I’ve raised a few of these myself already.”

Adeline and Emil went out into the streets and walked for hours that day, asking anyone and everyone how they might find cream for their sick child. Though there was a black market on such things, after nearly nineteen years under Communist rule, no one was able or felt confident enough to tell them.

Emil had to work that evening. Adeline walked with him to the brewery. Outside, she started to cry. “I can’t give him milk. That’s why he’s dying. This is because of me.”

Emil grabbed her, held her tight. “We’ll find out a way to—”

“Emil?” a man said.

They looked up to see a fellow worker of Emil’s from the brewery.

“I found your son some cream,” he said. “I left it with your mother at your apartment.”

Adeline’s spirits soared. She kissed Emil on the cheek and ran home while he went to work. She reached the modest apartment building where they lived, climbed to the third floor, and went into their flat.

“Where is it?” she said before shutting the door.

Her mother-in-law said, “Where’s what?”

“The bottle of cream,” Adeline said.

“Oh, what does that doctor know?” Karoline said. “I tried to give the baby a spoonful, and he spat it up as soon as it went down. Same thing the second and the third time. So I drank it.”

Adeline stared at her mother-in-law incredulously. “You drank it?”

“Not all of it,” Karoline sniffed, a little indignant. “And like I said, it wasn’t doing him a lick of good. And besides, I haven’t had real cream in five years, maybe more.”

Adeline shrieked. “You . . . you hateful witch, get out of my house! You just killed your own grandson!”

“I did nothing of the sort,” Karoline shouted. “Anyone with two eyes can see he’s so far gone because you can’t give him your milk! My sipping some cream has nothing to do with it!”

She slammed the door behind her.

In the end, eight-week-old Waldemar was too far gone. When Adeline gave him some of the remaining fresh cream, he did indeed throw it up and every spoonful after. Then he developed a cough that further weakened him. Two evenings later, Emil came home to find Adeline cradling the baby in her arms. He was swaddled and laboring for breath.

“He’s dying now,” she said. “He won’t open his eyes anymore.”

“No,” Emil rasped. “He’s not dying.”

“He is,” she said. “I can feel it. Can we hold him together?”

Sadness swallowed her husband whole before he came over beside her and they held their infant son between them, grieving for hours before he took his final breath and let it go in a slim, devastating wheeze that tore through the last bit of strength holding Adeline together. She began to choke, sob, to moan with a