The Last Green Valley

by Mark Sullivan

  He did not look convinced. “They don’t want you to do well, haven’t you heard?”

  He stared at the table a moment, and then smashed it with his fist. “First the Communists killed all the smart people who made things work in the cities. And now they want to make doing good at anything at all a punishable crime! What has happened to the world? How did we end up in an asylum?”

  He looked at his stunned wife, daughters, and son, who were all slightly cowering from him. Ordinarily, Karl Losing was a quiet, well-tempered, even affable man. But now his shoulders were slumped, and there was anger and then despair in his voice when he said, “You don’t grow grain, people starve. You grow too much and feed too many, and you become an enemy of the people. How is this right?”

  “It’s not right,” Adeline said.

  “Not a bit,” Malia said, surprising everyone. “If you work hard, Papa, if you hurry to it, you are doing the right thing because God rewards your hard labor.”

  Their father’s eyes misted as he gazed helplessly at his brain-injured older daughter.

  “Yes, sweetheart, but that was when life made sense. Now there’s nothing but madness.”

  They came at three o’clock the following morning with heavy fists and batons pounding on the front door, waking the entire family up. Lydia began to cry almost immediately, and so did her older daughter.

  “What’s happening?” Adeline’s little brother said sleepily from the trundle bed below her.

  “Shhhh,” she said. “I’ll go see.”

  Adeline climbed down from the bed in the dark.

  “Papa?” Adeline said when she’d reached the short upper hall and saw the silhouette of her father starting down the steep stairs with a lantern.

  “Stay there, child,” he said softly, gazing back at her. “It’s okay.”

  But she could not help herself and followed him, creeping two stairs to look down and to her right where her father stood before the door, trembling.

  “Open up!” a voice called in Russian.

  He bowed his head, set the lantern on the ledge, and drew back the bar. A baton came out of the night, striking her father low in the gut. He buckled, staggered backward, and fell.

  Adeline screamed, “Papa!”

  He doubled up, rolled over in agony. Two big men in dark long coats came in.

  “I am Commissar Karpo of the OGPU,” said the third man behind them, smaller, older. “Comrade Losing, you are hereby charged with being a kulak.”

  “You mean someone who knows what they’re doing?” he gasped.

  One of the bigger men kicked him.

  “No, comrade,” the commissar said. “I mean someone who steals from the people and from the state.”

  “I’ve stolen nothing,” Adeline’s father said. “I gave you a good harvest.”

  Commissar Karpo looked at his men. “Search it. Out back, too.”

  “What are you looking for?”

  “We’ll know when we find it.”

  Lydia, Malia, and Wilhelm gathered behind Adeline on the staircase, terrified as they watched the secret policemen handcuff Karl and leave him sprawled on his side as two of the goons tore the lower house apart. Ten minutes into the search, one of them came back with a big sack of grain.

  “Found it in a bin in the shed,” he said.

  The commissar smiled. “And you say you steal nothing, Comrade Losing?”

  “A man has a right to provide a little extra for his family in return for all his hard work.”

  “Wherever did you get that idea?”

  Lydia pushed by her children and went weeping down the stairs. “Please don’t kill him.”

  “Kill him?” the commissar said, amused. “No, your husband will go to work now where he will learn to think better of his fellow man. In Siberia.”

  They gave her father an hour to gather his warmest clothes. He was permitted to hug his wife and each of his children before they led him toward the door.

  Lydia wept. “How long will he be gone?”

  “That is not my decision,” Commissar Karpo said.

  “What is to become of us?”

  “What becomes of all kulaks,” he said, and turned away.

  “I will come back!” Adeline’s father shouted as he was dragged off into the night. “I promise you all I will come back!”

  Chapter Three

  Late March 1944

  Twenty-five kilometers east of the Transnistria-Moldova border

  In the Martels’ wagon, trailing another wagon, and hundreds more ahead of them all mixed into the semicontrolled chaos of the retreating German armies, Adeline could remember her father disappearing into the darkness of that terrible night as if it happened yesterday.

  I promise you all I will come back!

  Nearly fifteen years of waiting had passed since that night. Adeline could still recall the raw loss on her mother’s face in the days and weeks after her husband vanished, a wound that had grown deeper with each passing year of not knowing, of trying to keep hope alive.

  Adeline glanced over her shoulder, saw her boys dozing with blankets around their shoulders and across their laps. Despite the quickening wind, she got up to stand on the wagon bench beside Emil as the horses took them clip-clopping down the road. Looking back over the top of the canvas bonnet, she saw her older sister sitting next to her mother in their wagon, head up, swiveling, taking it all in, seeming fascinated by the newness of the landscape and the ever-changing convoy.

  But not Adeline’s mother. Lydia was slumped behind the reins as if her shoulders bore a lead weight, staring at her ponies, lost in years of unanswered prayers. Lydia had never stopped believing Karl would return. When they were finally thrown out of their ancestral home in 1930, she had insisted on writing a letter to her husband, telling him where they had gone and why. She left it behind a loose stone in the foundation where he always used to secret his valuable things.

  Recalling the years of hardship, toil, and loneliness her mother had endured after their father was taken and after they’d been turned into the streets, Adeline felt her heart ache with pity. And what about Wilhelm, her younger brother? She had no idea what had become of him after the Germans drafted him to fight three years ago. It was the same story with Emil’s older brother, Reinhold. Drafted into the Wehrmacht, taken from his family, Reinhold had been sent west to defend Paris and had not been heard from since.

  Adeline looked past her mother’s wagon and saw six or seven others behind her, all driven by women, all with those same hunched-over shoulders and gritted expressions, all widows of Stalin. Her mother was not the only one leaving loved ones behind that day. Yes, this trek west under Nazi protection was a new beginning for Lydia and for all the other single women in the caravan. But it had to be the end of their hopes as well, an end to their dreams of ever seeing their husbands come home.

  How do you live with that? Adeline wondered sadly. How do you survive?

  “Adeline,” Emil said, tapping her leg, “get the boys ready. There’s a storm coming. We’re going to get hit hard.”

  Adeline looked north and saw the bruised clouds coming fast. She woke the boys and helped them into their patched woolen overalls, jackets, and hats, before pulling wool leggings up under her smock and dress and putting on a heavy wool sweater under her coat. She took the reins from Emil to let him change. He’d donned the last of his woolens when Adeline felt the first snowflake hit her cheek.

  He retook the reins as the snow flurries became big flakes that began to stick and plaster the horses’ flanks and withers. He told Adeline to get under the bonnet and the tarp with the boys.

  A kilometer farther on, the snow became driving sheets of white spiraling out of the northwest and hitting them sideways. The horses turned their heads away from the wind, which made reining them and keeping the wagon on the road difficult in the increasingly treacherous conditions. The snow came slanting in even harder, stinging Emil’s eyes and cheeks. With every gust, the wagon creaked a
nd groaned, and the bonnet stretched and squealed across the bowed wood frame.

  Emil looked back at his family. “I want all of you on the right side against the wind, so we won’t tip over. And check the knots holding the cover to the frame, Adella.”

  While Adeline got the boys shifted over to the right side and checked the knots, Emil wrapped his scarf around his neck, mouth, and nose and pulled his cap down low over his eyes. But the snow now rode on a shuddering gale. It pounded him, found the collar of his coat, and crawled down his back. It stung his knuckles through his mittens and gnawed at the exposed right side of his face until his skin was raw and then numb.

  The horses plodded on with their heads held left and low, leaving their right shoulders and flanks exposed to the wind that grew more frigid and gustier by the moment. Realizing his horses were at risk, he pulled off to the side of the track and gestured to his mother-in-law to do the same. Other wagons ground past him.

  Adeline and the boys were huddled on the wagon’s right side beneath the blankets. She had her back to the side of the wagon, which was now shaking violently. She looked at him in alarm. “Will it hold, Emil?”

  “I don’t know,” he admitted, rummaging in a box before coming up with leather blinders for both horses.

  He threw his forearm across his eyes, then fought his way back to Oden and Thor. He buckled the blinders to their hackamores, shielding their eyes from some of the brutal sidewinds. Then he went back to Lydia’s wagon, got her ponies’ blinders, and put them on. Looking back along the track, he saw a gap in the line of the convoy.

  Emil jumped back aboard his wagon, grabbed the reins, and snapped them across the horses’ rumps. The wagon slid sideways for a few meters in the snow, then straightened and began to roll forward. The blinders seemed to be helping. Both horses had their heads more upright and their ears forward and alert. Emil saw their earlier cue, and ducked his own head low and left, absorbing the brunt of the weather across his right shoulder and side.

  He kept sneaking quick looks toward the snowed-in track, catching glimpses of the wagon in front of him a good thirty meters, and little else beyond or to the sides. Everything had gone white and billowing. Emil sensed they were moving across wide-open farm country with little to block or slow the winds. In the woods or where the land was broken, he was sure they would have stopped the trek, told everyone to take cover in a creek bottom or a ravine.

  A huge gust howled toward them, smashed the Martels’ wagon broadside. They went up on two wheels and slammed back down. The boys and Adeline screamed.

  Thor and Oden felt the jolt, heard the screams, and dug in with their hooves, taking short, choppy strides fast enough that the wagon’s rear end swung in the snow, almost throwing Emil off and causing him to drop the reins. Thor and Oden ducked their heads away from the oncoming gale and snow, and before Emil could stop them, they had gone right, off the track, and were gaining speed across bouncy terrain.

  The snow and wind were blinding as Emil reached forward again and once more tried to grab the reins lying over Oden’s rump. But they’d iced up and slipped through his mitts. He thought about the brake on the left front wheel but feared flipping or breaking an axle in this uneven ground. His horses were spooked, disoriented, and at a canter now, quartering to the storm as they went, throwing wet snow and mud behind them. The wagon pitched, bucked, and slid as the blizzard pounded them.

  “Stop them!” Adeline shouted. “We’ll crash!”

  Emil took off his left mitt and leaned and reached as far as he could, snagging the reins with two fingers. He soon had them wrapped three times around his right wrist before grabbing forward on the reins with his bare left hand, bracing his feet, and driving himself backward against the weight of his runaway horses.

  He yanked at the bits in their mouths, forcing their heads lower and lower, until they finally slowed and stopped. Their sides heaved and quivered with exertion and fear. They blew hard through their noses and coughed, stamped their feet, and again turned their heads from the storm.

  “I want to go home!” Walt said.

  Emil ignored him, tied off the reins, turned his back on the weather, and climbed up on the bench to look behind him. All he could see was white and swirling. No trees. No hedgerows. No other wagons. No track. Nothing but the storm.

  “Emil!” Adeline shouted. “Which way do we go?”

  He thought about all the bucking and sliding they’d done, the mud and snow clods the horses had kicked up, and said, “We’ll follow our tracks back.”

  It worked for the first few minutes. He was able to see where they’d come from but understood how fast the snow was falling and how quickly the wind was covering their tracks. He wanted to urge his horses to go faster, but he was having trouble seeing.

  And then he couldn’t make out their wheel tracks at all. Everything was snowed over. The snow was up to the axles of the wagon. If I keep it up . . .

  Emil did not like thinking about ifs. He decided instead to zigzag forward from the last trace by dead reckoning, hoping to come upon tracks the storm had not yet erased. But with the wind churning the heavy snowfall, there was nothing. He finally turned the wagon broadside to the wind, stopped, and set the brake.

  “What are we doing?” Adeline asked.

  “Waiting out the storm,” he said. “We can’t be more than five hundred meters from that road, but I have no idea where exactly. When we can see, we’ll find it. We’ll catch up to the trek.”

  He climbed down and unharnessed the horses. He brought them around on the leeward side of the wagon, tied them to it, and then climbed into the back of the wagon.

  “You look like a snowman, Papa!” Will said from under the blankets.

  Emil looked down and saw he was coated head to toe in snow.

  Walt started to laugh. So did Adeline, who said, “Take it off or brush it off. You’ll get us all wet if you get under the blankets with us.”

  Emil struggled to get his coat off, then shook it out the back and laid it to the side.

  He did the same with his boots and pants, and then slid under the blankets next to Walt. It was warm, and even though the wagon was getting buffeted, the bonnet and his frame seemed to be holding. They were safe for now.

  The wind ebbed a little and then a lot. For a good fifteen seconds, the bonnet above them luffed. Then a gust hit before another lull and then another howl. Emil gazed across the heads of his boys at his wife, frightened and transfixed by the weather.

  “We’ll be okay,” he said.

  Adeline roused slowly from her nap, at first not understanding where she was, only that her body was warm, and she was breathing in bitterly cold air. The horses shifted against their leads and the wagon, bringing her fully awake. She opened her eyes, saw it was still day but no longer snowing. Emil was already up and gone.

  Will stirred, said, “Are we there yet?”

  Walt said, “Does anything look green out there to you?”

  Adeline tickled Will, and then got out from under the blankets and onto the bench. Her breath threw clouds. The sky was clearing. The sun said it was midafternoon. Everything as far as she could see, and she could see quite far, was sparkling and brilliant white, so dazzling, it hurt her eyes to look for long.

  Emil came around the side of the wagon, leading Oden and Thor. “Can you fetch some grain?”

  “Yes. Where are we? Where’s the road?”

  “I think it’s near that thin tree line way over there,” he said, gesturing with his free hand. “But we’ll go up that little hill to get a better look.”

  “I don’t see any wagons or vehicles.”

  “We will from up there,” he said, harnessing Oden. “I promise you we’ll be on that road before dark and caught up to the trek before you know it.”

  When Adeline jumped down, the snow was up to her knees in places, but she could see where it had drifted deeper. After she’d gotten the horses a full can from their single sack of oats, and Emil had harnessed Thor
, they set out for that hill ahead of them.

  “You think we’ll make it to the top?” she asked. “We don’t want to get stuck.”

  “We’ll get as close as we can, and I’ll climb from there.”

  In the wake of the storm, the air had turned so bitter, the blowing snow writhed like smoke around the horses’ legs and the wagon wheels. Emil stopped them well short of the base of the hill, which was drifted over.

  “I’ll be right back,” he said, and handed her the reins.

  Adeline watched her husband march into the drift, only to go as far as midthigh, which delighted both boys, who laughed.

  “Papa got stuck,” Will said.

  “Not for long,” Adeline said as Emil fought and kicked his way up to shallower snow and then went steadily up the hill.

  He was about three-quarters of the way up when, over the boys’ talking and the horses’ jingling their harnesses, Adeline heard a low rumble to the south, back toward the tree line. She got up on the wagon bench, shielded her eyes, and saw six German Panzer tanks about a kilometer away, grinding through the snow in their direction.

  “Thank God,” she said to the boys. “Once they drive through, they’ll pound down all the snow, and it will be easy for us to get from here to the road.”

  The sound of the tanks seemed suddenly to get louder and closer, so close she barely caught the sound of a voice yelling. Then she realized the sound was not coming from the south, but from the north.

  She whipped her head around, seeing Emil leaping down the hill toward them like some spooked goat, his knees pumping and his lower legs snapping forward, getting buried in the snow, and then vaulting up and out again. Even with seventy meters separating them, she could see the terror on his face.

  “Adeline!” he screamed.

  “Mama! Look on top!” Walt yelled.

  Up the hill and behind Emil a good two hundred meters, the barrel of the cannon of a Soviet tank appeared, followed by its huge turret and armored hull, treads chewing up the snow and the semifrozen earth below.

  “Run!” Will screamed. “Run, Papa!”