The Last Green Valley

by Mark Sullivan

  “Save her,” Karoline sobbed again, and then looked up at the blistering sky. “Take me, but save her, God. She’s all we have left.”

  Adeline came down beside Emil. “What can I do?”

  “We’ve stopped the bleeding,” Major Haussmann said, putting his bloody fingers on Rese’s neck. “But she needs morphine, blood, and a surgeon.”

  Ernst Decker, a medic and SS sergeant in his late twenties, raced from the rear of the train, carrying a pack while two soldiers followed with a stretcher. Sergeant Decker did not blanch at seeing the state of Rese’s legs, but instead calmly asked Emil to move aside, and took her vitals, saying, “How long have the tourniquets been in place?”

  “A minute,” Haussmann said. “No more.”

  “I need her in a more stable place,” he said. “Not out in the sun like this.”

  “We’ll put more people on top and make room for her in the car,” Emil said, and glanced warily at Haussmann who’d gone stony. “I am sorry, Major. She’s my sister.”

  Haussmann seemed to be studying him again. Had he recognized Emil just then? Emil didn’t care at that point and returned the stare until the major nodded.

  “Do it. Get your sister inside by the door where there is air.”

  Sergeant Decker got out a glass-and-steel syringe and gave Rese a small shot of morphine, enough to keep her sedated during the transfer. In moments it was done: she was on the stretcher, and hands in the boxcar were lifting her inside and placing her litter across the Martels’ wagons where Decker went to work.

  Emil was going to climb into the boxcar to help the medic, when he saw Walt standing forward of the coupling and looking down between it and the coal car. He walked to his older son, who peered up at his father in bewilderment.

  “They don’t look much different except right at the top where the wheels crushed them. Below that, they’re the same as they were when Aunt Rese still had them.”

  Emil looked and saw it was true. The wheels, the weight of the coal, and the rail beneath had all served to cut the legs relatively cleanly.

  “What do we do with them, Papa?” Walt said. “Do we just leave them there?”

  Emil hated to do it but nodded. “In this heat, they are already gathering disease. They’ll be gone in hours once we’re gone, probably to buzzards and crows.”

  He could see his older son was upset by that idea, but Walt finally nodded, walked around Emil, and started up the ladder. Adeline appeared in the open door to the boxcar, saying, “Emil, the medic needs you, and your mother’s having a fit.”

  “Go up on top with Walt,” he said as he climbed in. “I’m predicting a meltdown up there pretty soon. He saw Rese’s legs.”

  Adeline closed her eyes and nodded.

  Inside the crowded boxcar, the heat was stifling, and his mother was wailing. Emil went to her and told her not to make things worse than they were. “This isn’t about you. This is about Rese and keeping her alive.”

  “I have to do something!” Karoline said. “My God, I can’t stand this!”

  Emil did not reply for a pause, and then said, “If you still believe in God, Mother, I guess you should pray.”

  He went to Rese’s side, however, confirming his own disbelief in God or in any higher force. No decent spirit would allow such a tragic thing to happen to a wild but innocent creature like his sister. No fair universe would put her on a stretcher near the door of a packed and stifling boxcar in northern Hungary with an SS medic putting an IV line into her arm while her lower legs, feet, and shoes lay below on the tracks.

  “Do you know her blood type?” Decker asked.

  “Type O negative,” Emil said. “I am O negative, too. The Communists tested us all. We were required to know.”

  “You’re a universal donor. I need you to be by her side and slightly higher for the transfusion.”

  Emil looked past his father and saw several wooden crates stacked there. He went to the owner, a woman with two small children, and asked her if he could use them for his sister. She agreed as long as he would return them so she would not lose her space.

  Once Emil had two crates moved and stacked, and he was sitting on them, slightly above his sister, Decker moved quickly, efficiently, like the veteran battlefield medic he was, and soon had blood traveling from Emil’s left arm into Rese’s right. Haussmann appeared at the door to the boxcar and said, “How long until you have her stabilized?”

  “Forty minutes?”

  “You have ten,” the major snapped. “Be creative.”

  The sergeant looked ready to argue, but then said, “Very well, Major.”

  Decker told Emil to stay where he was and that he’d be back in a few moments.

  “Don’t you have to loosen the tourniquets at some point?” Emil asked.

  “If I do this right, we should be able to remove them for good in about ten minutes,” he said, and got down from the train. He walked forward and climbed up into the locomotive where Emil could not see him any longer.

  Emil looked over at Rese’s face, battered, swollen, and filthy from the fall. The siblings were separated by a lifetime; he was more than a decade older, a father to his boys much more than he was a brother to her. It made him feel guilty that he’d often been short with Rese, especially the past few years when her emotions had reeled between hurricane and dust storm, all of it compounded by this trip, her near-constant illness, and now this.

  He saw Decker climbing back down the ladder of the engine, wearing one glove that held a smoking tin bucket with a wooden handle that stuck out of it. The medic jogged back, put the smoking bucket on the floor of the boxcar, and climbed in. The smell of the smoke was harsh and acrid. People began to cough and hack. Emil looked into the bucket and saw the iron tip of the poker buried in glowing red, smoking coals from the locomotive’s firebox.

  “What are you going to do with that thing?” Karoline demanded. “You’re not burning her with that thing! She’s been through enough—”

  Decker turned his back on her, saying, “She’s going through a little more to save her life.”

  He looked at Emil, took Rese’s blood pressure. “Better,” he said. “Who else in your family is type O negative?”

  “I am,” said Johann, who’d been largely quiet, watching it all unfold from the sweltering shadows. “Her father.”

  “You’ll be next,” he said, and removed the transfusion line from Emil’s arm.

  When Emil stood, he felt light-headed, but managed to move aside while Decker replaced the needle assembly of the transfusion line and Johann took a seat by his beloved daughter. It was only then, as the medic worked the needle into his arm, that Emil saw Johann shed tears.

  Decker saw it, too. “She’s going to live because of you and your son, Herr Martel, and because of what I’m about to do. I promise you that.”

  Johann nodded. “Do it. Some things are worth the pain.”

  A tired, pretty woman in her late twenties who looked vaguely familiar to Emil appeared at the side door, holding a basket with two infants sleeping in it. She looked in at the makeshift operating table and then up when Adeline called down from the roof, “Marie? Is that you?”

  “Adeline?” the woman said, surprised. “I didn’t know you were on this train. I came because I heard about the accident and wanted to see if I could help.”

  “I’ll come right down and take the twins,” Adeline said.

  While Decker cleaned the wounds and prepared them for what was to come, Adeline climbed down. “Emil, you remember my cousin Marie from Birsula? She worked in a hospital there.”

  “With the surgeons,” Marie said.

  “Get up here, then,” Decker said. “I can use the help.” The medic looked over at Emil. “I’ll need you to hold her down. I don’t have any ether, and even with the additional morphine I’m going to give her, she may buck some.”

  “You’re going to torture her!” Karoline said, and turned away, weeping again.

  Marie gazed a
t the scene. “No time to flap and suture?”

  “No.”

  Outside, Major Haussmann hurried up. “You have four minutes. We are on a schedule from Berlin now. Himmler himself.”

  The sergeant nodded. Marie gave Rese another injection. Decker put gloves on to pick up the poker from the still-smoking bucket. The tip of it glowed ripe-pumpkin orange.

  “Hold her now,” the medic commanded.

  Emil pinned his sister’s right thigh to the blanket below her. Marie took her left. Decker went to the right stump, peered closely at it, and then touched the tip of the red-hot iron to the first of the three severed arteries that had been spurting and misting Rese’s blood away. There was a hissing noise and a smell like meat searing before Rese jerked, arched, and screamed from some depth of consciousness not deadened by shock or opiate. She twisted her hips hard and bucked, almost got out from under Emil and Marie’s grasp.

  “Hold her!” Decker shouted. “Don’t let her tear out that transfusion line!”

  In a panic, Emil threw his entire weight onto his sister’s right pelvis and thigh, and Adeline’s cousin did the same. Johann took Rese’s arms. Together they pinned her down as Decker went about his brutal business, cauterizing two more major blood vessels in the right leg before turning to the left. By the time he finished, Emil was sickened to tears by Rese’s wailing, which by the sixth searing touch of the glowing iron had died to whimpering and delirium.

  Sergeant Decker handed the fire bucket and the poker down to Major Haussmann, saying, “We’ll disinfect and bandage her. The smaller arteries and veins will naturally produce a clot. Barring infection, she’ll live for a surgeon in Poland to do a better job.”

  “Well done, Sergeant,” Haussmann said. “Heil Hitler!”

  Decker and Marie applied hydrogen peroxide and iodine salve generously over the wounds and especially over the open bone cavities. When they were dry, he released the tourniquets around each leg and watched the wounds. Seeing little seepage, he doused the stumps with sulfa powder, applied layers of pads that he had Marie hold in place, and then wrapped them with roll after roll of tan gauze until they looked like large mittens where her lower legs used to be.

  There was a sharp whistle. The train lurched yet again and rolled on.

  Marie spun around, went to the open side door, and called up, “Adeline?”

  “We’ve got the twins up here,” Adeline called back.

  Emil did not have it in himself to think about leaving Rese’s legs on the tracks where she’d lost them. As they gathered speed and the lake and the town of Tata were swallowed by spring forests and green meadows, he watched Decker remove the transfusion line from his father, now feeling more anger than pity for Rese’s plight.

  If she had not gone down to swim. If she had listened for once in her life, she’d . . . she’d be . . . He wanted to say . . . whole, but instead thought . . . not my sister. Rese had been her own person from her first word as a little girl. Most kids said Mama or Dada. Emil’s little sister said, “No.” And she’d remained a contrary soul ever since.

  A half hour passed and then an hour. The heat and the merciless sun of midafternoon blistered on as they rolled slowly toward Bratislava. Rese’s blood pressure stayed steady, and the wounds had been redressed. Clotting had begun. Emil was feeling sure that the worst of Rese’s crisis had passed when Marie said, “I need to feed my boys at the next stop.”

  “And I have sick men in the rear cars to attend,” Sergeant Decker said.

  “I’ll sit with her,” Emil said, right before his sister moaned and arched. A convulsion shuddered through her body, which stiffened and then collapsed.

  Decker and Marie rushed to her side.

  “What happened?” Karoline asked. “What’s happening to her?”

  The medic had his stethoscope out, listening to her heart while Adeline’s cousin put her hands upon Rese to soothe her.

  “Heart rate’s up, but it’s settling again,” Decker said to Emil. “That seizure could have been a lot of things caused by the body’s natural way of dealing with shock.”

  Decker was packing his gear ten minutes later when the train whistle blew and they slowed to a stop for a train to cross ahead of them. Marie had not moved from Rese’s side, hands on her thigh and stomach, watching for signs of another convulsion.

  It came when the train had come to a full stop, a shorter fit than the first, but no less shuddering. Emil’s sister arched and bent with an internal convulsion and then collapsed again.

  Rese panted and moaned.

  “What’s happening to her?” Karoline cried.

  “I don’t know,” Decker said.

  “I do,” Marie said, reaching up Rese’s skirt. “She’s in labor.”

  “Labor?” Emil said. “Rese? No.”

  “She’s broken her water,” Marie said, then looked at his mother. “How far along is she, Frau Martel?”

  Karoline said nothing for a moment, then looked around, anxious and disgusted that there was no way out of facing reality. “Three, maybe three and a half months,” she said, sounding crushed. “She only told me the night before we started out on this insane trek.”

  “Well, she’s losing her baby along with her legs,” Marie said, then looked at Emil as Decker climbed down from the boxcar with promises to return. “I’ll stay with her. But can you go get Adeline and Malia to come down and help me here? I need to feed and tend to my babies before your poor sister gets any worse.”

  Emil climbed up on the roof. He helped Adeline and Malia lower the basket holding Marie’s twins, then watched until his wife and sister-in-law were safely down the ladder before admitting that he was utterly exhausted, worse than after his longest days in the fields or in the brewery, beyond bone-tired. Having expended every bit of energy and love on his sister, he was drained of everything but the need for sleep.

  He sat down between his sons, legs under the rails, feet dangling as Rese’s had been only hours before. He hugged Will and Walt, and then, as the train began to roll north again, lay back, put his cap across his face, and fell into a hypnotic, buzzing sleep where he remained aware of certain real noises around him—the talk of his sons, the chop and squeal of the train wheels, and the low thudding chug of the locomotive—even as the awfulness of the accident replayed over and over.

  There is no God, his inner voice said. No force for good would take her legs like that. Our pleas are not heard by some invisible force in the sky. We are alone. We fight for survival every day. We can count on no one but ourselves.

  When Emil awoke, they were rolling north of Bratislava, heading toward Trnava. The sun was lower, partially blocked by bands of thunderclouds in the west. They were passing through old vineyards with swollen buds about to flower, and then into lush, rolling green country with small farms in the dells and snowcapped mountains beyond.

  He yawned and sat up, seeing hobbled horses grazing in a field and feeling a pang for Oden and Thor. What was their fate? What were they doing for the Nazis?

  “This is a nice green valley,” Will said, “but it’s not ours.”

  Emil shook off his grogginess and was about to tell his younger son not to believe in such nonsense, that whatever color the land around their new home turned out to be, there was no doubt that it would be harsh and cruel and laced with suffering at some level. He was about to tell Will that these facts were unavoidable in life and that he did not believe there was a place on earth where a true paradise like Adeline’s existed.

  Instead, Emil said, “No, it isn’t. We’re going to a place called Lodz, Poland.”

  “What’s it like, Papa?” Will said. “Lodz?”

  “I don’t know,” he said. “We’ll all find out together.”

  They fell into silence, and Emil was hoping the train would stop again so he could go down and check on his sister’s condition, when Walt said, “Papa, why did that have to happen to Aunt Rese?”

  He sighed and hugged his older son again. “I don’t kn
ow. Life can be cruel at times.”

  Walt was quiet for several moments before saying, “At first, I didn’t like that we left her legs and feet and her shoes like that.”

  “I didn’t, either,” Emil said. “I still don’t.”

  “But then I remembered you said birds would probably find them, and I felt better because her legs would get to fly like a bird.”

  Emil looked down at Walt, smiling at the way he seemed to see the world, from a slightly off but always interesting angle.

  “You want to fly someday?” Emil asked.

  Walt grinned. “Maybe. Why not?”

  “That’s right,” Emil said. “Why not?”

  “I’m going to build things,” Will boasted.

  “Like what?” Emil said, interested because he, too, liked to build things.

  His younger son pointed at a grand old villa on a hillside. “Like that.”

  “No, you won’t,” Walt said. “That’s too big.”

  “It’s not too big,” Will said. “Right, Papa?”

  The villa did look huge, bigger than anything Emil had ever built or been a part of building. Maybe it was seeing Rese’s life changed for the worse in a heartbeat; maybe he just wanted to spare his son the despair of never having a dream at all, but something in him told him not to discourage Will’s vision of life, whatever it was.

  “Why not?” Emil said.

  Chapter Sixteen

  Rese Martel lost her baby as the sun set over eastern Czechoslovakia that hot day in May 1944. Marie guided and helped Adeline and her sister through the entire ordeal. Karoline refused to participate and sat as quiet as Johann, who stood beside her while their unconscious daughter labored to deliver a stillborn son.

  Marie clamped and cut the umbilical cord and handed him to Adeline. Curled fetal, Rese’s son, slick with fluid and blood, fit in the palm of her hand. Malia came over, looked at him, and after a moment began to cry.

  “The poor thing died sucking his thumb,” she said, her hand going to her lips.