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

war was over and that stealing alcohol from SS officers was one of the dumbest moves he’d ever heard of.

But Adeline’s older sister, Malia, said, “What will you do?”

“I will be a beekeeper,” the corporal said. “Make honey. Sell honey. I love honey.”

He moved with the wine to Karoline, who shook her head and gestured to her daughter. “None for Rese, either.”

“I’m twenty-one, Mama,” Rese protested.

Karoline glared at her, said, “This is not about age, Rese, and you know it.”

Rese went into a huff, crossed her arms, shut her eyes, and said nothing.

“Why a beekeeper?” Malia asked as he poured Adeline and Lydia some wine.

The Romanian raised his eyebrows at Emil, who shook his head. The corporal made a sad face with a pouty lower lip before walking over to Malia, saying, “Bees and honey are good for men and women and little boys. If you eat honey, you’re strong, never get sick. If you get stung, it makes you even stronger. And you eat the royal jelly? You live and live and live. And a beekeeper, he does not have to work so hard all year. It’s a good dream. Every night, I dream the war is over. Crazy Stalin, loony Hitler, all gone, dead, to hell. In my dream, I throw my gun away, go home, raise bees, make honey, and find a good woman to make happy.”

He smiled at Malia. “My wife and I will live long. No war. Just love everyone. Make sweet honey together, right?”

She blushed, dropped her chin, said, “That does sound like a dream, Corporal.”

“Dreams come true,” he said, grinning. “You know this, yes?”

She looked up in confusion and then glanced at her mother. Lydia shook her head and said, “Dreams are nonsense, Corporal Gheorghe. They don’t come true.”

“No, no, dreams come true,” he said, taking off his helmet and gesturing to a still-livid scar above a slight crescent-shaped depression in his skull above his right ear. “The old Corporal Gheorghe? Before the mortar hit? He hated life. He suffered every day, dark and angry, and listened to scared voices in his head. Why me? Why not me? Who will shoot me? The old Corporal Gheorghe did not believe in God. He did not believe that dreams come true.”

The Romanian soldier put his hand over his heart, and his eyes widened. “But then the mortar bomb hit, knocked me cold. I woke up and everything was different. I was part of everything and everyone. I saw it. I felt it. I understood! Private Kumar was right! Dreams come true if you hold them in your heart and act from your heart. Every night, right here in my chest, I know I was born to make honey, find a beautiful woman, and make more honey.”

He laughed, touched the scar with his right hand again, and closed his eyes, his face as blissful as a man’s face could be. “I can wait. I have patience and peace and am not afraid. I know in my heart I am already a beekeeper. No matter what, I am a beekeeper.”

Emil had concluded by then that the Romanian was a raving lunatic or a drunk or both. He felt a little hostile as he said, “You did not tell us where you learned to speak German.”

“Oh, my grandmother was Austrian,” he said, opening his eyes. “I went to live with her for several years after my mother died.”

Malia said, “And where were you when the mortar hit?”

The rapture drained out of the corporal’s face. His face clouded. His hand dropped from his heart and grabbed the bottle of honey wine. After pouring a generous slug into his mouth, he swallowed it, shivered, and stared at them all with a haunted expression.

“Stalingrad,” he said. “The Elbow of the Don.”

Over the course of the next hour, while the fire burned down to embers and they consumed the rest of the honey wine, the beekeeper told his story of the longest and bloodiest battle ever fought on earth. Despite not trusting the man, Emil could not help listening closely as Corporal Gheorghe described leaving his hometown of Barlad in eastern Romania and being ordered onto a troop train in his summer uniform in July 1942. The beekeeper left the train two days later and then marched for nine days to a position near the town of Serafimovich more than one hundred kilometers northwest of Stalingrad.

“It was steppe country south of Cotul Donului, the Elbow of the Don River,” he said. “Open. Few trees. Lots of wind. Hot then, too. Private Kumar, that crazy little Indian, he thought the wind and the sun were just fine. I hated it.”

A soldier in the Romanian’s platoon, Private Kumar worked hard digging trenches, foxholes, and pads for machine gun nests and cannons. As they dug into their position on a ridge about two kilometers from the elbow of the river, Corporal Gheorghe learned that Private Kumar’s father was an expatriate from India who owned a textile company, had lived in Bucharest for thirty years, and early on married Kumar’s mother, a beautiful Romanian woman. They had three children. Kumar was the oldest.

The Romanian drank again from the honey wine, said, “Private Kumar was even shorter than me but he was twice as strong. And later, when it got colder than cold? He would not shake. He’d just sit down, shut his eyes, make this little smile, breathe deep and slow for ten minutes. And then he’d be fine and go back to work. Finally, I asked Kumar if he was praying. He said, no, he was meditating. I told him I had no idea what he was talking about. He said praying was where you talk to God. And meditation was where you listen.”

He paused, smiled. “At the time, I thought Private Kumar was kind of nuts and—”

“I thought you were going to tell us about the battle.” Lost in all this rambling talk, Emil had gotten to his feet, intending