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

worked, as he marched, and as he slept, that fact kept worming around in his head: seventeen hundred and fifty men were left to rebuild a city of three hundred thousand people. It’s impossible. It would take us twenty years.

He had been telling himself every morning that he was enough, that even if he could not escape, he could survive Poltava.

But for two decades? And what would I have to go back to?

Emil would be in his early fifties by then, close to his father’s age when the Soviets let him go. His sons would be grown strangers. Adeline would have given up on him long ago and found another man and another life. And how would he ever find them in the first place?

Emil’s confidence started to slip. He noticed how much weight he’d lost and with it some of his strength and stamina. Mixing concrete was hard labor, and he was unable to work at the same pace he had just the month before. His slowdown attracted the attention of the guards and the foremen, who berated him twice that afternoon to speed up the production of concrete blocks while the foundation cured.

Marching back to the museum that evening, chewing the last of his bread ration, Emil knew he’d broken two of his father’s rules, work hard and stay unnoticed. But how was he going to work hard and stay unnoticed if they didn’t give him enough to eat?

Twenty years with men dropping at this pace? he thought as he watched the burial detail set off with three more who died at work. The numbers are wrong. They’re lying. We won’t last a year. I won’t last a year. If I don’t escape, I am going to die.

Emil felt caged and had trouble breathing as he climbed down the stairs into the dreaded basement where he found a spot on the bottom bunk against the wall in the far corner where he would not have men to either side of him. Already feeling the heat building in the low-ceilinged room, he took off his boots, put them along the wall in a defensible position, and used the coat he’d been given for a pillow.

Closing his eyes, he remembered Adeline the day he married her, when his lips had touched hers at the ceremony’s end and she was all he needed in life and their future had seemed impossibly bright. They had a small celebration afterward. Mrs. Kantor had hired an accordionist so everyone could dance. Emil had been nervous about slow-dancing with Adeline, but when she came into his arms, it was as natural as breathing. When their first dance ended, the accordionist played a toe-tapping tune that set their feet afire and made him deliriously happy, maybe the happiest he’d ever been.

“I love you, Emil Martel,” Adeline cried at one point.

“I love you, too, Adeline Martel,” Emil said. “You make me feel like I fell asleep in Russia and woke up in paradise.”

Lying in his bunk in the prison camp, he drifted off to sleep, thinking, You still make me feel like that, Adella. Be strong and wait for me.

September 28, 1945

Gutengermendorf, Soviet-Occupied east Germany

The following morning, Adeline felt her heart swell with happiness as she watched almost eight-year-old Walt and almost six-year-old Will trot away from her down a grassy knoll and through a field of ripening sunflowers on their way to the rural village. It was a Friday, and this was their first day at school. They would be tested today and assigned to classes. Actual studies would begin on Monday, but she remembered her own first days of school and felt excited for them.

They’ll love it, she told herself. They’re boys. They’ll love it here, and I will learn to.

They’d already adapted to so much, hadn’t they? After sleeping outside hungry near the Reichstag, she’d found a shelter for refugees for two nights before the Soviet occupying authority sent them on a train to Gutengermendorf.

An elderly man named Peter Schmidt had begrudgingly picked them up at the station and taken them to his farm a kilometer and a half from the village. His wife, Greta, wasn’t happy to have a family of three foisted on her on top of the Russian soldiers already billeted in their home, but she’d given Adeline and the boys their own room in an outbuilding that was clean and dry and safe.

Given her history, they put Adeline to work as a field hand. Within a few weeks, she had proved her worth, and the couple turned friendlier, especially when they discovered she was as skilled in the kitchen as she was weeding, scything, or threshing.

“They grow up fast,” Mrs. Schmidt said. She’d come up behind Adeline as she held her hand to her brow and watched her boys exit the sunflowers, heading toward a line of elm and chestnut trees that marked the village boundary.

“Too fast, Frau Schmidt,” Adeline said. “I wish my husband could be here to see this.”

The elderly woman put her hand on Adeline’s shoulder. “Almost everyone has lost someone they loved because of Hitler’s war.”

Adeline smiled sadly and nodded, knowing that the Schmidts’ son had died on the western front the winter before, fighting with the Wehrmacht against the invading Allies.

“But maybe your Emil will be one of the lucky ones,” Frau Schmidt said. “Maybe you will see him walking through the village someday. But you should not dwell too much on that kind of dream. That kind of dream, Adeline, can break your heart.”

Adeline thought of her mother. “I know it can. The sunflowers?”

“We need every one of them down before nightfall. Peter says it’s going to rain tonight, first real cool-off of the season.” She paused. “You’ll be needing us to watch the boys tomorrow night?”

“Please,” Adeline said. “I can’t tell you what a help that is.”

“I’m glad to do it,” she said. “When soldiers are drunk, they’re savages.”

Adeline went with two other field hands down into the sunflowers where she