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

rise that gave them a view ahead where even more wagons were strung out along a fairly wide road that traversed a steep hillside. Some of the wagons farther to the west had veered off into the left lane. To their right and down the steep bank, there was yet another wreckage. Two wagons had become entangled, and they and their horses and humans had gone over, flipping off sideways and tumbling down the bank.

Men and women were running across the route and down the bank toward the wreckage. By the time the Martels closed on the scene, German soldiers had appeared and were keeping the wagons still on the route moving forward. As they got close, Adeline saw that amid the wagon debris there were crippled horses, dead bodies, and many others hurt and wounded.

She closed her eyes, tried to go far away to that mythical green valley in her mind, tried to see it with rainbows in a clearing sky after a summer rain. But a woman’s agony intruded.

“Help me, please,” she called. “Please. Dear God, someone help me!”

She heard another woman saying, “We’re here. We’re helping as best we can.”

Adeline opened her eyes and saw two women only a few meters ahead and to her right, on their knees on the road, and working on a woman who’d been brought up the bank. Her face was battered, filthy, and bloody. Both her legs were clearly broken. A bone stuck out of one shin.

“Oh God,” the woman groaned. “Help me, please! I have no one else!”

Adeline stared after the woman as they passed, hearing another voice utter similar words in her mind.

August 9, 1941

Pervomaisk, Ukraine

That hot day, Esther put her trembling fingers on the back of Adeline’s hand as she held Will. “I need your help. Oh God, please, I have no one else to turn to.”

“They’re shooting Jews?” Adeline said as Will squirmed in her arms.

The fear had Esther frantic as she said, “I have seen it with my own eyes. Old women in wheelchairs shot. Men kicked, beaten. Can we go somewhere safe? Can I tell you what I need?”

“Yes, but we don’t have . . .”

“Money? I don’t need money. I have money, my dear. Can we please go somewhere that’s not on the street? Where I could be stopped?”

Will squawked in her arms. He was clearly hungry. Walt said, “I’m thirsty, Mama.”

Esther’s desperateness triggered memories of the woman being at Mrs. Kantor’s house several times and how kind she’d always been.

“Yes, of course,” Adeline said, smiling at the poor distraught woman. “We’ll do anything we can to help you, won’t we, Walt?”

“I’m thirsty, Mama.”

“Well, hold Aunt Est—hold Aunt Ilse’s hand. We’ll go straight home.”

Fifteen minutes later, Walt was gulping water, and Adeline was feeding Will in the kitchen of their tiny, bleak flat. Esther sat in a chair opposite her.

“Thank you, Adeline,” she said for the tenth time. “You are a blessing.”

“How can I help?”

Esther reached into her purse and came up with a name and an address on a piece of white paper that she pushed across the table.

“This man is a forger,” she said. “My cousin in Odessa put me in touch with him. There is a black market now in documents that can erase your past. My mother was Jewish. That could get me shot, Adeline. I paid him half up front to change my papers so my mother was a descendant of German settlers like my father, but the forger lives in Bogopol, and I don’t dare go there again.”

“You want me to get your papers?” Adeline said, feeling unsure.

“And pay him the rest of the money,” Esther said. “I’ll pay you, Adeline.”

Adeline swallowed hard. If the Nazis were shooting Jews, they’d shoot her for helping one, wouldn’t they? But this was Mrs. Kantor’s friend. And she’d always been so kind.

“You don’t have to do that,” Adeline said finally.

“I insist.”

“And I still say no,” Adeline said, doing her best to smile. “I’m sure you’ll pay me back in some other way at some other time.”

Esther looked ready to cry. “You’ll do it?”

“You’re a friend of Mrs. Kantor. It’s the least I can do. When do I go?”

“Tomorrow,” she said. “He said they’d be done tomorrow.”

“Good. Then you’ll stay here until I bring them to you.”

Esther wept in relief and held Adeline’s hand. “You are a good person,” she said. “A very good person, Adeline. Mrs. Kantor was right about you.”

“How is she?”

“Oh, didn’t you know? She passed last year, bless her. I saw her the week before, and when I said I was moving here, she said I should find you. And now I have. And now here you are helping me. It’s as if she knew.”

Adeline had a great memory of the way Mrs. Kantor used to laugh, and felt deeply sad that her happy soul was gone.

“She taught me a lot,” Adeline said. “I loved her.”

“And she loved you.”

The front door to the apartment opened and shut. Emil, tired and hot from work at the brewery, came and poked his head through the kitchen doorway.

Adeline’s shoulder shook and shook again. She startled, unsure where or when she was, then saw the refugee wagons strung out ahead of her, and Emil beside her.

“There’s another storm coming,” he said, gesturing toward the western horizon where dark purple clouds raced toward them.

For almost an hour, the rain came in sheets that forced Emil to drop his head constantly and leave it to the horses to follow the wagons ahead and keep them on the slick route. He huddled into his coat and pulled his hat down over his ears.

“I should take a turn,” Adeline said. She was under the bonnet with the boys.

“No use both of us suffering,” he said. “Besides, it’s lightening up.”

It was true. The rain had ebbed from driving to steady to light as the wind picked up out of the south. By the time the trek was halted, they were close to the Romanian border at