The singing died off into rough laughter about the time he stepped into a clearing on the other side of the road. A fire burned before a half circle of wagons like his own. Four men he did not recognize were drinking from tin mugs. The biggest of them, a tall, rangy fellow in his early forties, saw Emil approaching and stopped talking. Then they all did.
Emil held up his hands. “I didn’t mean to interrupt you,” he said in German. “I heard the singing. I guess it’s been a while since I’ve heard men singing over drink.”
The rangy one said, “Sounds like your wife’s got control of your drink.”
The other men laughed, and so did Emil, who said, “It came down to a small cask of homemade wine going with us or a small wagon I made for my sons last Christmas. The wagon won on a three-to-one vote.”
The rangy one smiled and beckoned Emil closer. “Come, have a drink. I am Nikolas. What is your name, friend? Where are you from? And how old are your sons?”
Emil told them. Nikolas introduced the other men in rapid fashion, so he caught few of their names. But up close, in the firelight, he noticed the quality of their clothes. They were all wearing newer wool coats, pants, and hats. A mug of red wine was handed to him. He drank from it and felt like he’d been given a short reprieve from the fear of the Soviets.
He learned that Nikolas and his friends were all refugees as well, running from Stalin under the protection of the SS. They were from the town of Rastadt, west of the Bug River. Emil told them he had lived in Pervomaisk, north of Rastadt, for several years before returning to the family farm in Friedenstal.
“Ever been to Bogdanovka?” Nikolas asked. “It’s not far south of Pervomaisk.”
“I remember a collective farm from that area,” Emil said. “We bought barley from them when I worked at the brewery in Pervomaisk.”
“What did you do there?”
“Most of the physical work. Hauling grain. Pouring grain. Mixing.”
“How did you get on the trek?” Nikolas asked.
Emil looked at him, puzzled. “Uh, German officers came to our village and told us the Soviets were coming and if we did not wish to die, we had two days to pack.”
“No, I mean, what qualified you? Were you Selbstschutz?”
Emil knew what he meant, and it made him uneasy. Nikolas was asking him if he’d been a member of the Selbstschutz, a militia group the Nazis formed after the German invasion in 1941. Recruits to the Selbstschutz had all come from the ethnic-German population in the region.
In the Romanian-controlled Governorate of Transnistria, one of the Selbstschutz missions was to protect the Volksdeutsche communities and colonies from marauding Romanian troops. But Emil also knew there was more to tell about those militias and the things they had done. Much more.
A good part of him wanted to leave right then, but instead, he said, “There was no call for Selbstschutz or that sort of thing in Friedenstal. It is a tiny place in a sea of grain fields. The Romanians never bothered us.”
Nikolas nodded but kept watching Emil, who felt the need to fill the silence.
“Were you Selbstschutz in Rastadt?” he asked.
“All of us,” Nikolas said, and raised his mug to the other men. “It’s how we showed we were good Germans worthy of being brought home to the Fatherland. With the documents to prove it. You have them, yes? These documents, Emil?”
Emil nodded. “Since the first days of the invasion. Proving it was not difficult. My mother had our family Bible going back generations all the way to Germany and all of our birth records from the church.”
“They didn’t draft you into the Wehrmacht?”
“They wanted to at first, but I told them that I was the last useful man left in my family, and I would be a better farmer to the Germans than a soldier. They told me to go back to our farm, start growing, and we did.”
“How lucky for you,” Nikolas said, but he didn’t sound satisfied.
Emil drank more of his wine and was offered a second cup and a third while the militiamen sang, got maudlin over the lives they were leaving behind, and anxious about a future away from the Soviets. Near the bottom of Emil’s third mug, one of the men called it a night.
Emil knew he should be getting back to his family. But then Nikolas poured him a little more. Last one, he promised himself as the other two men waved off Nikolas’s offer and announced that they, too, were going to sleep.
“We never know where life will take us,” Nikolas said when they were gone.
“I am trying to live life,” Emil said. “Not life living me. Not anymore.”
“You are drunk, my friend.”
“A little,” Emil said, raising his mug. “Thanks to you.”
Nikolas clinked his mug, and they drank and then lapsed into silence the way men are wont to do. Emil was pleasantly studying the glowing coals of the dying fire and thinking he really should go back or he was going to have a headache come morning, when Nikolas spoke.
“How many?”
Emil looked over to see the man staring at him. “How many what?”
Nikolas curled his hand into a gun shape, closed his left eye. “How many Jews did you have to shoot to get your land back and be on this trek?”
Emil felt as if he’d been punched and must have looked it.
Nikolas smiled and nodded. “Uh-huh. I thought so. You had to do something for them, the Germans. Everyone did. Otherwise they wouldn’t be taking you with them, protecting you and your wife and your sons. You were a shooter just like me, weren’t you, Emil?”
Emil had a vivid memory of himself staring at a Luger in his hand. His head swirled, and his stomach boiled. He’d had far too much wine.
“I knew it,” Nikolas said smugly. “I see it in your face, Emil. How many?”
Emil shook his head, but Nikolas was having none of it. He came closer, loomed over Emil. “How many stinking Bolshevik Jews did you have to shoot to get a spot on this trek?”
“None!”
Nikolas sneered at him. “Bullshit. Hell, I got no problem saying it, and neither should you. We did a good thing, a noble thing, wiping the earth free of those lice-ridden kikes. That’s how it started for us. The Romanians sent all their Jews to that farm at Bogdanovka, and the Yids started to die of typhus because of the lice crawling on them. Could have become an epidemic. Could have killed everyone for hundreds of kilometers—German, Russian, Ukrainian, everyone—if they didn’t keep it contained. The Nazis knew they had no choice, so we, the Rastadt Selbstschutz, had no choice. Took us eighteen days to shoot them all and twenty days more to boil or burn their clothes.”
Eighteen days shooting? Emil thought in horror, staring at the man’s newer clothes before he staggered a few feet to his right and vomited up Adeline’s bread and four mugs of wine.
“There you go,” Nikolas said. “We’ve all felt that way, one time or another, because of what we did. Get it out; you’ll feel better. And the way I see it, we had no choice, right?”
Emil turned, glared at him, acid burning the back of his throat as he said, “You had a choice. And I’ve never shot or killed anyone in my life. We’re on this trek because of an old Bible and because I’m a good farmer and smart with my hands. Thanks for the wine.”
He picked up his lantern and headed by dead reckoning back into the darkness with Nikolas yelling drunkenly after him, “Bullshit! I saw it in your face. It takes a man like me to know a man like you, Emil. You see them when you’re sleeping, don’t you? Hear them, too. All the lice-ridden rats you put down!”
At that, Emil began to run blindly, trying to put space between himself and Nikolas, and terrified that Adeline might somehow be hearing the ravings of a drunken killer. He tripped and almost went down but caught his balance and slowed. The shouting had stopped.
“I never . . . ,” Emil muttered shakily after he’d lit the lantern and found the road to the bridge. “Never.”
He passed his horses and scrambled down the embankment. Then he extinguished the l
ight and crept toward the sleeping forms of his wife and children. None of them stirred when Emil slid under the blankets behind Walt.
He lay awake on his back with Nikolas’s cruel voice echoing in his head: I saw it in your face. In his mind, Emil heard people crying, then the flat cracks of guns, saw their flashes in the darkness beyond Captain Haussmann, who stood there, thrusting a loaded Luger at him.
That memory was seared so deeply in Emil, it took his breath away. He felt hollow and alone, a sense magnified when he thought of Nikolas shooting Jews for eighteen days.
He’s a threat to me. I don’t know why yet, but he’s a threat. I can feel it in my bones.
Emil closed his eyes, understanding that he needed to stay far away from Nikolas and he needed to rely on himself to do it, certainly not on a God who’d create a man who could shoot innocent people for eighteen days on end.
And then he was fearfully wondering if meeting Nikolas and seeing Haussmann were part of some bitter punishment for that night outside Dubossary. He drifted toward sleep, thinking, Once you decided, Emil, you were as guilty as Nikolas.
Chapter Nine
Early April 1944
Twelve kilometers east of the Romanian border
Four more days and five nights passed, and the Martels were seeing as many retreating Romanians as Germans. Whenever they passed a group of marching Wehrmacht soldiers, Adeline found herself searching their faces, hoping against hope to see her younger brother, Wilhelm, Will’s namesake, among them. Or Emil’s older brother, Reinhold. But she never did.
Emil had turned quiet and brooding since they’d camped below that bridge west of Hincesti. Adeline had learned to give her husband distance when he was like this and focused her attention on supporting him and the boys as they passed through muddy low country laced with creek bottoms, and then climbed forested ridges made treacherous by lingering ice and snow.
Parts and pieces of the broken German war machine had been discarded on both sides of the route. They saw unburied frozen soldiers being pecked by crows. And charred abandoned tanks. And transport trucks buried up to their axles in muck. And the blasted black barrels of artillery cannons that the Wehrmacht had decided to blow up rather than leave for Stalin’s forces to use against them.
Now some twelve days into their ordeal, members of the trek had begun to die from exposure, weakness, and disease. Not an hour passed when they weren’t rolling by a wagon pulled off to the side of the route so survivors could bury their dead.
“When I was getting water this morning, a woman told me they think it’s typhus,” Adeline said when they were about to turn northwest toward the Romanian border town of Iasi.
“Lice,” Emil said, thinking of Nikolas. “The lice carry it.”
“I checked both boys last night.”
“We’ll check everyone every night until this is over.”
The caravan halted. Word soon came back that tanks and forces with the Soviet Second Ukrainian Front were now moving to the west-northwest, trying to split German Army Group South into two pieces. The SS men protecting the trek kept them stalled for two hours before directing the caravan south, away from Iasi.
The sun came out an hour after they changed routes, which Adeline took as a good sign. The temperature warmed the farther south they rolled. As the hours passed, the boys dozed under the bonnet. Emil was at the reins, looking all around and taking in their surroundings.
“What are you looking for?” she asked.
His brows knitted. “I don’t know that I’m looking for anything. I’m just looking around because I never intend on coming back this way ever again.”
“Does that make you happy or sad?”
“That I’m never coming back here? Happy.”
“Good. I thought you’d forgotten how to be happy.”
He looked at her, his mouth slightly agape. “I’m sorry, Adella. I just get caught up in my worries about you and the boys and whether we should have come with the Germans or, I don’t know, gone our own way to freedom.”
“Do you know the way to freedom?”
“I figure I’ll know it when I see it,” he said, and smiled.
He glanced over at her. She smiled at him. “Remember Mrs. Kantor?”
“Wasn’t for her, I wouldn’t be in love with you.”
“Awww,” she said, forgetting what she wanted to tell Emil and scooting over to give him a kiss on the cheek.
He put his arm around her, and she snuggled against his chest as the sun rose high overhead and the air turned even warmer. Despite his dark moods, Adeline felt so safe in Emil’s arms, and the wagon and horses were moving so smoothly in rhythm that her eyelids got heavy, and soon she was dozing, too.
October 1933
Birsula, Ukraine
In Adeline’s dreams, Mrs. Kantor and her guests had all raved over the chicken and egg-noodle soup. Esther called it “a triumph,” which made Adeline blush because she thought so, too. She had taken half a bowl for herself and could not remember the last time anything had tasted so good. And there was that handsome, funny young man who’d sold her the firewood.
Emil. He made her smile. Maybe her life was changing for the better again.
She saw Emil pass by on his way to the bakery the evening after the chicken feast and the evening after that. She got irritated that he had not once looked toward the house where he knew she worked. On the third evening, he did the same thing, and she felt hurt in a way that surprised her because, really, she’d only spoken to him for a few minutes. What had she expected, anyway?
Adeline was at the sink, furiously scrubbing pots ten minutes after he’d gone past her for the third evening in a row, when she happened to look up through the kitchen window and saw Emil standing at the rear gate, looking awkward. He waved.
Adeline waved back, dried her hands, checked her hair in the mirror, and went out. “More wood to sell?” she asked.
“Uh, no. Uh, you need some? I can make sure you’ve got enough.”
Adeline smiled. “You can drop by a little every day if you like.”
Emil blushed, smiled, and then nodded. “I can do that. I . . . I’d like that.”
Their conversation never ended from that day forward. Granted, it stopped during the day when they were apart and working, but together they picked back up right where they’d left off, both of them mooning over each other like fools. At times, Adeline felt like they could complete each other’s sentences, and her heart physically ached whenever they parted.
But when Emil asked her to marry him on the first anniversary of their meeting, Adeline was conflicted and asked him for time to think about it. She loved cooking and taking care of Mrs. Kantor. And she had a steady paycheck for the first time in her life and made more money than Emil did gathering firewood. On the other hand, she adored Emil. He was funny, hardworking, and even though he had not stayed in school as long as she had, he was smart, street-smart, the kind of man who would survive. But would he grow and thrive? Would she have a better life with him than a life alone?
The next morning, Mrs. Kantor noticed her fretting, and Adeline explained her predicament, finishing, “I have it so good here. You are kind to me. We have enough to eat, and you’ve given me a warm place to sleep. What should I do? He collects firewood for a living.”
Mrs. Kantor gazed at her for several moments before replying. “I shall be heartbroken if you leave, Adelka, but it is better to be a poor wife than a rich maid. You have said Emil is a good man, which means you will know love if you leave me. You will have children if you leave me. You will have a family. And what a family it will be!”
Her employer had said this last statement with such enthusiasm that she almost knocked over her water glass. This caused Adeline to burst out laughing, which very much pleased Mrs. Kantor.
“Keep laughing,” she said, wagging a finger at her. “Laughter keeps you young at heart. Laugh at least once a day. Twice is better.”
“That’s easy,” Adeline said.
“Not always. Can I give you some other advice that has helped me in life?”
“Please,” she said.
Mrs. Kantor waved her to the chair across from her where her friend Esther had sat. Adeline took the chair tentatively, but then smiled at the older woman.
“My dear,” Mrs. Kantor said, “I have come to believe after eighty-one years on this earth that our job in life is to endure, to be kind, and to constantly put the past behind us and not dwell too much on the future. If you must look back, try to find the beauty and the benefit in every cruelty done to you. If you must think about the future, try to have no expectations about it. Trust in God to guide you through. You understand?”
Adeline did not understand everything the older woman was saying, but she nodded.
“Good,” Mrs. Kantor said. “Because when you do that, my dear, you will know God’s blessing and deserve every happiness and abundance this life has to offer as long as you give part of your abundance to others less fortunate. Do you understand?”
Adeline was still not fully grasping what Mrs. Kantor was telling her, but she nodded again. Her uncertainty must have shown in her face because her employer sighed.
“I’m trying to give you the keys to a long and happy life, Adeline,” Mrs. Kantor said. “Listen again. Our job in life is to endure, to be kind, and to constantly put the past behind us and not dwell too much on the future. If you must look back . . .”
The old woman’s voice blurred and faded, replaced in Adeline’s dream by another memory, a later memory, one far more bitter and scarring.
January 13, 1936
Pervomaisk, Ukraine
Feeling weaker and more helpless than at any other time in her life, twenty-year-old Adeline gazed down at her baby boy, dear sweet Waldemar, fussing in her arms, still trying to nurse at her painful, dry nipples, his own arms so tiny, and his skin so thin and close to the bone, she wanted to break down sobbing and did.
The Last Green Valley Page 9