The Last Green Valley

by Mark Sullivan

  Emil put his arms around her shoulders. “My friends are trying to find cream for him. We will find some; I’m sure of it.”

  “We’ll both go ask strangers,” she said, panicked. “Anyone and everyone. Find your mother first. Get her to come take care of her grandson while you and I try to keep him alive.”

  The couple had relocated to Pervomaisk shortly after their marriage because Emil’s mother had moved there and said there was work in the small city four hours east of Birsula. Emil got a job first as a field hand and then in the brewery. Life as newlyweds suited them despite their humble living arrangements, and soon Adeline became pregnant.

  Back in August 1935, more than six months into her term, Adeline was still working in the fields. The month had started out wet, and then turned hot. The mosquitos along the aptly named Bug River were thick as she worked, so she never knew which bite passed the disease. But by the first of September, as she entered her seventh month, Adeline was suffering the debilitating symptoms of malaria. The first attack began with a pleasant, heavy feeling at the base of her neck that led to drowsiness and then to a delicious sleep in a darkness so complete and comforting, only painful joint ache and a soaring fever could wake her.

  Day after day, Adeline burned up, hallucinating her father’s long-awaited return as new fevers spiked and then broke, drenching her in sweat. Within minutes, she’d be chilled to the bone and shivering so violently, blankets could not warm her.

  She’d fall asleep finally, only to have the same pleasant, heavy feeling at the back of her neck again as the malaria cycle started over. With each new attack coming six to eight hours apart, Adeline became weaker, unable to keep food down. She lost weight. She feared for the baby growing inside her but could do nothing until Emil found a doctor who gave her quinine.

  Improving steadily by the end of September and through October, Adeline had not had a malaria attack in nearly twenty days when November took the calendar and the birth of her first child loomed. On the twelfth of that month, she was sewing a blanket for the cradle Emil had built. The baby was active, kicking all the time, something she adored.

  It was early afternoon, but she was very tired and set her handiwork down and closed her eyes, almost immediately feeling the familiar, hated, lovely pressure at the base of her skull. She slept the dreamless sleep and awoke to malarial fevers different from the previous bouts, higher temperatures and headaches so bad, she thought the pain would break her eardrums.

  Emil would later tell her that he had to soak her in wet sheets while she spoke gibberish to people he could not see. She took more quinine, but it did not knock the disease back as quickly as it had before. On the fifth day, while in fever and suffering through a long, hard delivery, she gave birth to a son they named Waldemar.

  He was small at birth, under two kilos, but even as sick as she was, she’d experienced the most intense joy of her life seeing her firstborn child, holding him to her breast and seeing him feed on her milk. He was everything she’d ever wanted or hoped for. When Emil had thrown his arms around the both of them, she’d felt more complete, and happier than she’d ever been.

  But the malaria would not let her go. Adeline was symptom-free one day and feverish the next. As it does, malaria chipped away at her, wore her down. During another attack between Christmas and New Year’s, she became distrustful of ever feeling good again. Then her breast milk trickled to an intermittent seep.

  Waldemar was struggling, barely getting enough to survive by the start of the second week of January 1936. Adeline’s fevers had stopped finally. She was eating and beginning to get her strength back. But she was barely able to give her baby a single feeding a day let alone the seven or eight he needed to thrive.

  They’d taken the baby to the same doctor who’d given Adeline quinine, and he’d told them the baby needed milky fats immediately. He recommended they either find a wet nurse or get fresh cream from a dairy to feed to him until her strength and milk returned. But they could not find a wet nurse, and cream had so far been impossible to come by in Pervomaisk in the dead of winter.

  “I’ll go out again,” Emil said.

  “I’m going with you,” Adeline insisted.

  Emil went to fetch his mother. Karoline had fallen on her hip before Christmas and was walking with a cane.

  “He’s very weak,” Adeline told her.

  “I can see that,” her mother-in-law said.

  Adeline started to give Karoline instructions, but the older woman held up her hands. “I’ve raised a few of these myself already.”

  Adeline and Emil went out into the streets and walked for hours that day, asking anyone and everyone how they might find cream for their sick child. Though there was a black market on such things, after nearly nineteen years under Communist rule, no one was able or felt confident enough to tell them.

  Emil had to work that evening. Adeline walked with him to the brewery. Outside, she started to cry. “I can’t give him milk. That’s why he’s dying. This is because of me.”

  Emil grabbed her, held her tight. “We’ll find out a way to—”

  “Emil?” a man said.

  They looked up to see a fellow worker of Emil’s from the brewery.

  “I found your son some cream,” he said. “I left it with your mother at your apartment.”

  Adeline’s spirits soared. She kissed Emil on the cheek and ran home while he went to work. She reached the modest apartment building where they lived, climbed to the third floor, and went into their flat.

  “Where is it?” she said before shutting the door.

  Her mother-in-law said, “Where’s what?”

  “The bottle of cream,” Adeline said.

  “Oh, what does that doctor know?” Karoline said. “I tried to give the baby a spoonful, and he spat it up as soon as it went down. Same thing the second and the third time. So I drank it.”

  Adeline stared at her mother-in-law incredulously. “You drank it?”

  “Not all of it,” Karoline sniffed, a little indignant. “And like I said, it wasn’t doing him a lick of good. And besides, I haven’t had real cream in five years, maybe more.”

  Adeline shrieked. “You . . . you hateful witch, get out of my house! You just killed your own grandson!”

  “I did nothing of the sort,” Karoline shouted. “Anyone with two eyes can see he’s so far gone because you can’t give him your milk! My sipping some cream has nothing to do with it!”

  She slammed the door behind her.

  In the end, eight-week-old Waldemar was too far gone. When Adeline gave him some of the remaining fresh cream, he did indeed throw it up and every spoonful after. Then he developed a cough that further weakened him. Two evenings later, Emil came home to find Adeline cradling the baby in her arms. He was swaddled and laboring for breath.

  “He’s dying now,” she said. “He won’t open his eyes anymore.”

  “No,” Emil rasped. “He’s not dying.”

  “He is,” she said. “I can feel it. Can we hold him together?”

  Sadness swallowed her husband whole before he came over beside her and they held their infant son between them, grieving for hours before he took his final breath and let it go in a slim, devastating wheeze that tore through the last bit of strength holding Adeline together. She began to choke, sob, to moan with a pain she’d never known, worse than giving birth to him, more primal, the agony of her heart cracking.

  Emil stayed strong for her, held her through the worst of it. He sat by her for more than an hour, and never broke, never even uttered a word until she said, “We have to bury him. We need a little coffin.”

  He hesitated, and then said, “I haven’t been paid yet this month. We don’t have the money to buy the lumber.”

  Adeline gazed dully at him. “What?”

  “We don’t.”

  “Then?”

  “I don’t know,” he said in total defeat. “I don’t.”

  “We can’t just bury our baby in the dirt!
”

  “I know, but I—”

  Adeline pushed her swaddled dead child into her husband’s arms. “Hold him. I . . . I can’t be in here right now. I just can’t.”

  She got up on wobbly legs, took her coat and hat, and went out into the predawn. It was mid-January in north-central Ukraine. It should have been bitter and snow-clad. But the cold and the storms had not yet come. Everything around her was bleak and shadowed in brown and gray as she sat on the front steps of the building, looking southeast, trying to spot the first hint of light on the horizon.

  But Adeline saw only darkness there, and her grief fought against her numbness.

  She bowed her head and prayed.

  “You must have taken him from me for a reason,” she said, trying not to blubber, but not succeeding. “I don’t know why . . . I don’t know why you let me get sick, why he had to die. But please don’t make me put my baby in the cold dirt like something you throw away. Please don’t make me do that to my blessed little boy.”

  Unable to go on, Adeline sat there in the dark, tears streaming down her face, arms wrapped around her knees until she saw a rose-hued glow appear low in the sky to the east. Then she heard through an open window above her the tortured sound of her proud, stoic husband crying for the first time in their marriage.

  That cored her out, put her in an otherworldly daze in which she faced the sky where fingers of that glowing rose color were growing, extending. Adeline was so battered by that point, she barely noticed the coming dawn as she questioned how much pain a woman could go through before her mind broke as badly as her heart.

  From above her, she heard Emil hit something in their apartment and then curse God. Adeline put her face in her hands. She had heard what happens to couples when a child dies like this. She wondered if her marriage was over and felt worse than abandoned. She felt tossed aside, trash, nothing in the eyes of heaven.

  A breeze began to blow. Chilled, Adeline lifted her head, wanting to pull her coat collar tighter around her neck. Though she remained in dark shadow, the rose fingers of dawn had become long and beautiful now, the tips almost over her head as the sun finally began to rise, throwing a weak crown of golden rays on the horizon.

  She watched it grow stronger, thinking, How can something as beautiful as this happen on a morning as vicious as this?

  The breeze gusted. Out of the corner of her eye, she caught something move on the stiffened wind, tumbling, twirling, and dancing in an odd stutter. It fluttered and lifted and then fell as the gust sighed, spiraling to a stop about a meter in front of her.

  Adeline gaped in disbelief at the yellow-and-white twenty-ruble note, more than enough money for Emil to build Waldemar a coffin.

  She started to sob all over again.

  “Adella,” Emil said, shaking her shoulder softly. “Easy now.”

  Adeline startled awake, looked around for a moment in total confusion before settling on Oden and Thor pulling the wagon and then back to Emil. “I was having a bad dream.”

  “A nightmare,” he said. “You were all shook up.”

  “You slept longer than I did, Mama,” Will said behind her.

  “And me,” said the second Waldemar, born in October 1937, twenty-one months after the first child died.

  She twisted around on the bench and found her boys lying on the folded blankets, elbows up, chins in their palms. She smiled, leaned over, and kissed them both on the foreheads.

  “Why did you do that?” Walt asked.

  “Because you and your brother are the miracles your father and I and God made,” she said. “And because I la-la-la love you.”

  Will laughed, and so did Walt before he looked past her, and his face fell. “There are six tanks up on that hill in front of us, Mama,” he said.

  Adeline turned, put her hand to her brow, and made out the German Panzers sitting atop the rise, three on each side of the convoy. Their cannon barrels were all pointed up at an angle and aimed out over the caravan.

  Will said, “I’m keeping my fingers in my ears until we get past them.”

  Walt frowned and then put his fingers in his ears, too.

  Adeline said, “Putting our fingers in our ears is probably not a bad idea.”

  Her husband did not reply. Emil was now fixed on something closer than the tanks, ahead and to the right of the convoy. She could see a wagon pulled over off the track and a Wehrmacht vehicle parked beside it. Several men milled about outside.

  She glanced at Emil, who’d turned his attention to the other side of the route. But when they got closer, he was watching them again, intently now.

  Up the slope, the Panzers’ engines roared. The tanks began to roll, spread out in two rows, their tracks digging up mud and hurling it into the air behind them. Adeline stuck her fingers in her ears, her attention on the Panzers, which picked up speed, coming toward them.

  Oden and Thor began to shiver, tremble, and snort. They remembered.

  “You’re okay, boys,” Emil called in a soothing tone. “They’re just bigger horses.”

  Adeline had forgotten the wagon and the Wehrmacht vehicle until they were almost to them. She glanced at Emil who was staring intently at two of the men by the vehicle.

  One was a tall, lanky man in heavy wool civilian clothing; the other an SS officer. They stood in semiprofile, watching the oncoming tanks.

  Chapter Ten

  Nikolas and Sturmbannführer Haussmann turned their backs to the tanks coming to their right and the mud being thrown into the air behind them. Emil wanted to give Adeline the reins and climb into the back with his sons.

  But his wagon was fewer than twenty meters from the two men. There wasn’t even enough time for Emil to lower his head and look away, hoping they did not recognize him.

  The tanks veered off. Major Haussmann studied the wagon in front of the Martels and then Emil a moment before shifting his gaze to Adeline where it lingered before looking to the next wagon in the line. Nikolas barely scanned Adeline and the boys behind her before fixing on Emil and giving him a knowing smile and nod as they passed. The gesture felt oily, like honor among thieves, and turned Emil’s stomach.

  “Who was that man?” Adeline asked. “Why did he smile at you like that?”

  “I have no idea,” Emil said, wanting to look back.

  “He nodded to you.”

  “Did he? I thought he smiled. Probably just being friendly.”

  He glanced over at his wife, who was skeptical. “It didn’t feel friendly.”

  Walt and Will started moving behind Emil, which gave him the excuse to look over his shoulder and through the bonnet to the route unfolding behind them. Nikolas and Haussmann were staring after him.

  “They’re watching us,” said Adeline, who was also twisted around. “Who are they?”

  Emil glanced at his wife, shook his head. “I don’t know.”

  “The SS officer looked like the same one directing the caravan the second morning.”

  “Did he?”

  “Emil, you remember faces. You always do.”

  “I must not have given him much attention, Adella,” he said, looking back again. “Anyway, they’re out of sight now.”

  But neither Nikolas nor Haussmann were long out of Emil’s thoughts the rest of that day’s ride. They passed more Panzer tanks and crews to either side of the route and more soldiers digging in along the hillsides, and even more Romanian soldiers setting camps.

  The Martel clan stopped for the night near a creek running with cold, clear water. Along the banks, the boys easily found wood for a fire that their grandfather soon set ablaze. Emil dug another oven for Adeline in the creek bank. She made bread while her mother and sister brewed a soup of onions, potatoes, turnips, and strips of dried pork. Walt found another handful of wild-asparagus stalks that they also put into the pot.

  As the sun set, it threw fingers of dramatic reds and purples overhead.

  “That’s pretty,” Emil said. “The sky.”

  Adeline lo
oked up from her cutting board and started to smile before cocking her head, puzzled, and then saddened.

  “What’s the matter?” he asked.

  “I don’t know. I have seen beautiful fingers like that only one other time that I can remember,” she said, and hesitated, her eyes welling with tears.

  “One sunset looks like another to me,” said Rese. “When can we eat?”

  “You’re up?” Emil said.

  “I feel like I’ve slept for a week,” Rese said, and yawned.

  “You have slept for a week,” Adeline said, pushing her grief aside.

  “Which is why I’m hungry.”

  “I’ll get her a bowl,” said Karoline, who had marched over.

  “I’m fine, Mama,” Rese said. “I am more than able to carry a soup bowl.”

  “Here,” Malia said, handing Rese a steaming bowl. “The potatoes might still be a bit crunchy, but that should fill you up.”

  Adeline handed her a piece of bread. Rese smiled and thanked her. The boys were next, then the women, oldest to youngest, followed by the men. Emil waited until the very last to eat, but there was more than enough left to fill his belly that evening.

  As they ate, the sky faded into night. They fed the fire and turned up the lantern. The wind picked up, whistling through the tree branches and causing the fire to roar, crack, and spark so violently, a small volcano of glowing embers burst forth and floated high into the sky.

  On the other side of the blaze, in the shadows thrown by the wind-bellowed flames, Emil caught movement down in the creek bed. A man soon appeared, coming up the bank, carrying a rifle on his shoulder and a bottle in his hand. He walked toward the fire, revealing the olive-brown winter uniform of a Romanian army soldier. He was short, about five foot six, and in his midtwenties.

  “Good evening,” he said in German, smiling and looking at them all in this strange, lit-up way while raising the bottle. “I am Corporal Gheorghe of the Third Romanian Army. The moon and stars have brought me to you with honey wine. I was crossing the creek, feeling cold, and saw your fire. Can we trade? Wine for warmth?”