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

waiting behind long tables and piles of clothes thrown behind them.

“Strip!” a soldier shouted. “Keep your papers and strip. Leave your clothes here, and then give your papers to be protected. Alphabetically. A to M, left, N to Z, right!”

Walt stared in fright at Emil. He did not like to be naked, but Emil said, “Do what the officer tells you.”

Will stripped off his clothes right away and was dancing about, laughing and ignoring the disapproving looks from the men just coming into the courtyard. Walt finally complied. Holding his hands over his groin, he followed Emil and Will and his grandfather to the officer who was taking their papers.

“Don’t worry,” the soldier said. “They’ll be given back to you on the other side. Through those doors, bitte.”

Inside, soldiers led them to chairs where their hair was shorn off with clippers. Emil’s and Johann’s beards—long and bushy from the six-week journey after a long winter—were taken down to stubble, too.

Both boys rubbed their hands across their buzz cuts uncertainly as Emil led them and his father through the third set of doors into a low-ceilinged space with drains set in the concrete floor. More soldiers waved them in, yelling, “When the order is given, you are to close your eyes and cover them with your hands. If you open your eyes, they will be burned by the shower that kills the disease-carrying lice on your bodies. Repeat: do not open your eyes until the second order is given!”

“Did you hear him?” Emil asked both boys who were looking up at pipework and shower nozzles for the first time in their lives. Their home in Friedenstal had had no running water. They were used to drinking and bathing in pail-drawn well water.

“We close our eyes,” Walt said finally. “We wait for the order.”

More men and boys were crowding into the delousing room behind them.

“Will?”

His younger son stood up straight, slammed shut his eyes, and covered them dramatically with his hands.

“Good boy,” Emil said.

“Quiet!” a soldier roared. “Listen to the loudspeaker!”

The doors were shut, cutting off all light. The boys clung to Emil until the voice came over a speaker saying, “Cover your eyes with your hands. Tilt your heads down. Close your eyes and wait for the order to open your eyes.”

Water mixed with chemicals that smelled like tar rained down on them for several minutes and then stopped. They were ordered to remain with their eyes shut and covered. After what seemed like hours, a second shower began, longer than the first and without the petrol smell.

When the water turned off, doors on the near wall opened. They stepped out into a grassy area in the sun. Eight military lorries were parked four opposite four and fifteen meters apart with their tail ends facing each other. Soldiers were unloading piles of clothes from the trucks.

“Retrieve your documents first,” a soldier in uniform yelled. “Then go to the clothes. These have all been boiled clean. There are pants, shirts, coats, and shoes divided into small, medium, and large. Get one or two of everything for now. You will be given more clothes once you have been assigned a place to live.”

Emil stood in line only a few minutes before retrieving their documents. It did not take them long to find clothes and shoes that fit them all well enough. Emil was amazed by the feel of the fabric of the pants and shirt he now wore. He’d never worn clothes this fine in his entire life. Except for torn yellow stitches on the left chest, the suit jacket he discovered was almost new.

“I’m hot,” Will said.

“Take off your jacket for now.”

“I want my shorts.”

“We’ll find you shorts,” Emil said, and was surprised when they did.

With their new clothes on and more in their arms, they were directed to another larger courtyard to wait for their families. Not long after, Malia and both grandmothers came out of the doors on the opposite side of the courtyard, wearing new dresses and shoes, but completely shorn of hair. None of them looked happy about it.

They became unhappier when Will and then Walt started pointing at them and laughing. “I hate lice,” Malia said, tying a scarf around her head.

“If we had them, they’re gone now,” Adeline’s mother said.

“Where’s Adella?” Emil said.

“Helping Marie find clothes for the babies,” Malia said.

Karoline put on a scarf as well. She walked to Johann and said, “I don’t recognize you without the beard and the wild hair.”

“I could say the same,” he said.

They fell quiet and stood there awkwardly.

Emil had never truly understood their relationship, tottering between indifference and rancor at times, a marriage that had a gaping wound in it from years spent apart, not knowing whether the other was alive or dead.

Adeline came into the courtyard with one of Marie’s sons in her arms and trailed by her cousin and her other boy. She wore a dark-blue skirt now, a gray blouse of fine quality, and a blue-and-red scarf around her head. Even with her hair shorn, Emil thought she looked radiant in the late-day light.

A new life was beginning for them. He could feel it. They’d relied on themselves to get through the abandonment of their lands forever and a long, difficult journey. They had made it to Poland when so many had died along the trek. Rese’s accident was a senseless tragedy, but seeing her reaction to Praeger calling her “beautiful” actually gave him hope that his little sister would recover and find a way to a better life.

“Who is that strange-looking man?” Adeline asked, waving one of the baby’s hands at Emil as she walked up to him.

“I know who you are,” Emil said. “I’d recognize you anywhere, Adeline Martel.”

They kissed. He pushed back her scarf to look at her haircut. “It becomes you.”

“Don’t count on it lasting,” she said.

The courtyard filled as more refugees streamed out of the delousing station, wearing their almost-new clothes. SS soldiers appeared and led