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

There were fewer of them the farther she got from the bridge and none on the street of old warehouses where she found the address Esther had given her. She knocked on the door and got no reply. Will began to fuss. She knocked again, louder this time. Still no answer.

“Hello!” she shouted, and pounded on the door. “Is anybody here?”

She heard nothing and didn’t know what to do. All she had was the address. Esther didn’t even know the forger’s name. Will began to squawk and cry.

Adeline admitted defeat and walked away from the warehouse door while teasing the boy’s mouth with her knuckle. “Shhhh,” she said. “Mama’s going to . . .”

She heard a creak behind her. A woman said, “Patience is not one of your virtues, is it?”

Adeline turned around, seeing a much older woman, holding on to her hip as if in pain and peering at her.

“Who are you looking for?” she asked.

As Esther had told her to, Adeline replied, “Ilse Koch.”

“Ahh, you’re lucky. Ilse Koch only just arrived.”

Adeline followed the older woman into a musty, hot, dimly lit building that smelled of grain chaff and up a set of rickety wooden stairs into a loft where an old man wearing a jeweler’s loupe was crouched over a drafting table. The woman went to a cabinet and retrieved an envelope that she opened. She looked at the picture and then Adeline.

“That’s a problem,” she said.

“I’m picking them up for Ilse Koch.”

The man lifted his head and loupe. “That cannot happen. She must come herself. We told her that.”

“I know but—”

“No buts,” he said. “If you are caught with papers that do not belong to you, they will ask questions, and if they ask questions, they could find us.”

“They won’t find her papers,” Adeline said. “I will wait until my baby has pooped, then put the documents under his back and between these two scarfs. If I need to, I’ll speak to the sentries in German, get them to talk about their sweethearts back home.”

And that was exactly what she tried to do. Except going back west across the bridge toward her flat in Golta, she encountered Romanian sentries, who barely spoke Russian and zero German. It was near noon and brutally hot again, but they started to give her a hard time about going back and forth over the bridge in a single day. Then the breeze shifted, and the stench of Will’s foul diapers reached their nostrils.

The baby was crying again when she arrived at the apartment door fifteen minutes later. She knocked twice softly. A few moments later, the door opened, and she slipped inside.

Esther closed the door behind her. Walt, who’d been playing on the floor, made a disgusted face. “Will stinks!”

“Thank God he does,” Adeline said, reaching into the overlap between the two scarves that held Will, retrieving the forged papers and handing them to Esther.

She held them to her breast and started crying. “Thank you, Adeline. Thank you from the bottom of my heart. You’ve given me . . . you’ve given me a future, a life.”

“I hate that you even need those papers to have a life,” Adeline said. “And I need to clean this little guy right now.”

When she was finished and Will was falling asleep in the cradle and Walt was already napping, Esther began gathering her things.

“You don’t need to leave just yet,” Adeline said.

“It’s better that I’m gone before your husband returns.”

“Where will you go?”

“To where I have some things stored outside the city. And then I don’t know. I’m going to leave that up to a power greater than me to decide. But I’ve heard about Argentina. Or Palestine. I’d like to end up somewhere like that eventually.”

Adeline did not know either of those places but wished Esther good luck and hugged her at the door.

“May God protect you,” she said.

“And you,” Esther said. “There are no words.”

Adeline put her hand over her heart, opened the apartment door, and Ilse Koch was gone from their lives.

Mid-April 1944

Central Romania

Near the back of the Long Trek, the Martels rolled slowly westward.

Behind them, the German and Romanian armies were successfully fighting off the Soviets in their initial attempt to invade Romania from the north. Nevertheless, at the town of Onesti, the SS turned the caravan southwest toward Targu Secuiesc.

They had left the rolling grass hills of far-eastern Romania behind them by that point and now climbed into leafless hardwood forests below mountain peaks capped with snow. The weather was wildly unsettled. Rain. Sleet. Hail. Snow. Mud was a constant hazard.

And since there were so few mature men on the trek, Emil felt obliged to stop and help any family of women and small children stuck in the mire or having suffered an accident. If they were in the mud over their axles, he would have them unload their wagon and then unharness Thor and Oden and tie them to the empty wagons’ horses to yank them free, all the while supporting the rear end by himself so the wheels and axles would not break under the torque. The sight of people digging graves for the newly dead had become commonplace. Every time Emil saw somebody being buried, he looked away as they passed.

They were negotiating a series of steep switchbacks in the route near the town of Oituz where the mud was thin, more like grease, when they came upon a newly overturned wagon and a weeping woman from Kiev, her three children, and her now-dead father, who’d been thrown in the crash and hit his head on a rock.

“Stop, Emil,” Adeline said. “We need to help that poor woman.”

He sighed but reined the horses to a halt. He tied Oden and Thor to a tree just starting to throw green buds and detached them from the wagon while Adeline, Walt, and Will went to comfort the woman and her children.

When Emil was done, he started down the hill to detach the woman’s horses