The Last Green Valley

by Mark Sullivan

  “Is this safe?” Lydia asked, holding the flimsy banister with both hands.

  “Let’s go up and down one at a time until we’re sure,” Emil said.

  “Do you feel that breeze?” Adeline asked. “It’s coming through the wall.”

  “Beggars can’t be choosers,” Karoline said as she went into her apartment.

  Adeline climbed another flight and opened the door to their flat, revealing a narrow room with three stools, a wooden table, and a kitchen at the far end. The sink was filled with dishes and the floor covered in dead flies and mouse and rat shit. So were the plates of black, unidentifiable food on the table and the globes of the flameless lanterns.

  “Looks like they left in a hurry,” she said. “Probably during the bombing.”

  “It stinks in here,” Will said.

  “It’s hot, too,” Walt said. “I don’t like this place.”

  “We don’t have a choice,” Adeline said. “We’ll do the best we can with what we’ve got. But it is hot in here. Go outside, watch our wagon, and stay together.”

  After the boys left, she and Emil found the source of the stench—two dead rats—in the narrow single bedroom, which boasted a small window, two wooden bunks, and no bedding. The walls were littered with penciled numbers, equations, and geometry proofs she recognized from her school days. A forgotten ragged sweater and a ripped shirt hung from a nail on the back of the door.

  “Well,” Adeline said, taking in the total bleakness of their new home, “I guess we can only go up from here.”

  Emil tried to smile at her. But he had a growing conviction that this apartment and this building had been chosen for him and for his family by Major Haussmann to make them all suffer for what he’d done to the SS officer back in September 1941. And hadn’t he seen Nikolas enter a much nicer building? Of course he had. Nikolas was being rewarded while Emil and his family were being punished.

  “No running water,” Adeline said when she went to the kitchen area.

  “We’ll have to find the community well,” Emil said. “And latrine.”

  “This helps,” Adeline said, reaching into the corner for a stubbly straw broom and dustpan. “Could you do that? Take the boys to find water? There are two buckets there in the corner. And before you go? Please open all the windows.”

  She took the scarf off her head and tied it around her nose and mouth. Emil grinned. When his wife got to cleaning, she was a whirlwind. After getting the windows open for her, he took the pails and went downstairs, seeing into Marie’s and his parents’ apartments, which were also miserable and austere.

  Outside, Johann shook his head the moment he saw Emil.

  “The windows leak,” his father said. “The winter will be cold.”

  “I’m going to ask for other quarters tomorrow,” Emil said.

  “We’re going to find water,” Walt said. “Do you want to come, Opa?”

  Johann thought about that. When Karoline started yelling about something inside, he nodded before fetching two tin buckets. In the street, they found a Pole who spoke enough German to direct them to a public well several blocks away.

  By the time they’d gone there, waited in line, drawn their water, and returned to the third floor, Adeline had swept up most of the flies and rodent turds and dumped them out the window. She found lye bar soap beneath the stack of plates and pans in the sink. She and Emil used the sweater and torn shirt left behind as mops to scrub the floors and bunks with the soapy water.

  Since the boys knew the way to the well, Emil gave them the job of resupplying the water. With the next two bucketsful, they washed the dishes, pots, and pans and then took inventory of the kitchen. Only then did they start to bring up the last of their belongings from the little wagon.

  There was no fuel in their stove, but her mother’s range produced a flame. That night she baked the last of the Zwieback rolls in her mother’s apartment. They also made a soup from the dried foods and two bruised onions Adeline pilfered from the quarantine-camp kitchen before they left that morning.

  They waited to eat until after the sun had gone down and with it the summer heat. In the lantern light, Adeline made them all join hands and give thanks to God for their deliverance from the Soviets and for the food and the roof over their heads.

  She could tell that Emil didn’t share her gratitude. He seemed to be putting on a brave face, but she knew he was brooding about their living conditions.

  After the boys had fallen asleep, she said, “This isn’t forever, my love.”

  “I know,” he said, “but I didn’t expect to leave one bad life for a worse one.”

  “We’ll make a better life for ourselves. You don’t expect it to just fall from the sky, do you? A better life?”

  “I don’t expect anything to fall from the sky. I’m willing to work for it.”

  “You work harder than anyone I know, Emil.”

  “Except you,” he said, and took her in his arms. “My queen.”

  Adeline laughed. “A queen with her king and princes in their grand new palace.”

  “You forgot your green valley.”

  “Never.”

  They kissed and held each other for a long time. When they parted to get ready for bed, through the open windows, they saw lightning and heard thunder. They climbed into the lower bunk and held each other as the rain began to drum on the roof. Within minutes, Adeline could hear water dripping and spattering off the floor beside her.

  “Nowhere to go but up,” Emil said, and held her tighter.

  The days passed. The boys attended school, made friends, and were soon out in the streets, playing long into the evening. Adeline negotiated the German ration system and managed to put decent meals on the table. When Emil sought out the VoMi officers to ask that they be moved to other quarters, he was denied and told he was being ungrateful for having been saved from the Judeo-Bolsheviks.

  Adeline was assigned to work in the town bakery. Emil was put to work in the few fields that had been plowed and planted. He hoed for hours in the heat without complaint, glad for the familiar feel of the farm tool in his hands and the satisfaction he got from a job done right. As a boy, before his family was thrown off its lands and later when the Nazis returned them, he had toiled like this, long and hard, day after day. He liked it. This kind of brute labor suited him. It felt honest.

  As he worked his hoe, Emil did his best not to think of Major Haussmann but did not always succeed. He kept flashing back to the fear that had seized him when Haussmann shot the first time, just missing his head. That memory was enough to get his heart tripping in his chest and adrenaline erupting through his veins, clouding his recall of all that had happened, especially after Haussmann’s second shot.

  What had the major said? Something about the clothes he’d been given and the place they were to live and how he should decide whether he wanted to be part of a Greater Germany. But he could not remember the exact way Haussmann had said it.

  Did it matter? With each passing day, he cared less. Haussmann may have put them in a hellhole, but he was gone from their lives. In the meantime, Emil returned to old habits formed back in Ukraine under Stalin. He did everything he could not to attract undue attention. He did his job. He went home. He spent time with his family. He looked at the night sky and dreamed of the West, not as some fictional green paradise in Adeline’s imagination, but as a place where he’d be left alone by governments to forge a new life through his own best efforts.

  As July turned to August and September 1944 approached, however, someone noticed how hard and how diligently Emil was working in the fields. His name was Claude Wahl, a florid-faced Wehrmacht sergeant who’d been wounded near Minsk in July 1941. Soviet bomb shrapnel had broken Wahl’s pelvis, giving him an awkward gait and rending him unfit for combat. He had been assigned to VoMi to work with the new ethnic German immigrants and to oversee the farms in the area surrounding the Wielun refugee camp.

  Like Emil, Wahl was in his early thirties and
had been raised on a farm. He also had a similar work ethic. One day as Emil was leaving the fields, Wahl approached him, talked to him, and then invited him for a beer at his home. Emil felt uncomfortable about the idea and tried to decline, but Wahl insisted.

  “Why?” Emil asked.

  “Because you are the hardest-working man in my fields, and I want to know how to get other men to work like you do.”

  Wahl lived on the same street as Nikolas in a nice house with running water and electricity, a far cry from the Martels’ living arrangements. The disparity was so pronounced, it turned Emil resentful for his family’s lot, and he wanted to leave almost immediately. Wahl would not hear of it, pouring pale beer from a jug into glass mugs.

  After his long day in the field, the beer slid clean and cool down Emil’s throat, and his opinion of Wahl improved slightly.

  “I used to work in a brewery, and this is very good,” he said. “Where is it made?”

  Wahl beamed. “My father makes beer in the winter on our farm near Stuttgart. This is his hefeweizen beer. Made with wheat just for summer.”

  “Excellent,” Emil said, and when Wahl got out a length of dried sausage and cheese and bread, he found that he liked his boss even more.

  “So,” Wahl said after Emil had taken slices of each that he washed down with more beer, “what does make a man work as hard as you?”

  Emil didn’t know how to respond to that. Hard work was all he’d ever known.

  “First thing you think of,” Wahl said, and grinned. “That’s the answer. First thing.”

  “Starvation,” Emil said.

  The German’s grin faded. “You have been starved?”

  Emil nodded. “Twice. By Stalin.”

  Wahl was pensive for a moment. “And how does starving make you work hard?”

  “When you can remember not having eaten in days and having no hope of eating tomorrow . . . when you can remember that feeling, you just work harder to make sure you never feel it again. After a while, it’s just what you do.”

  Wahl thought about that and then smiled. “Well, I don’t think I’m going to starve someone to get them to work harder someday down the road.”

  “Thank you for that,” Emil said, and raised the beer toward him.

  The German studied him. “Are you just surviving, or do you have a plan in life, Emil?”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “A plan. The life you lie awake at night and think about.”

  “I think about how I can protect my wife and family and what we are going to eat tomorrow and when we will sleep somewhere else.”

  “That’s surviving.”

  “Then I am surviving, and that is a good thing.”

  “It is, but let me ask you: What do you think about when you stare at the stars?”

  Emil stared at Wahl suspiciously. “How did you know I stare at the stars?”

  “Doesn’t anyone who has ever lived on a farm?”

  Emil hesitated, not knowing how best to respond. But there was something about the man that he already trusted.

  He said, “I want to have a time when I am older when I have enough to live without worrying about food or staying warm, and then I want to go fishing. Every day if I want.”

  “Fishing?” Wahl said, and smiled.

  “I used to fish when I was a boy,” Emil said. “It was a way to get food when the Communists weren’t giving us any. But it was more than that. You never knew when the fish would come. There was . . . I don’t know . . . mystery in it.”

  “I can see that,” Wahl said. “But that’s when you’re an old man. What about now? What’s next after you get out of this place?”

  “I want to go west,” he said, and immediately regretted it.

  Wahl cocked his head to one side. “How far west?”

  Emil wanted to change the subject but could already tell he’d hooked the German sergeant through the lip, and he wasn’t shaking him free.

  “As far as I can go,” he said finally. “Across the ocean.”

  “Why? What do you think you’ll find there?”

  Emil knew his tongue had been loosened by beer and that he was already late for supper and that he’d already spoken too much. But he gazed straight into Wahl’s eyes and said, “Freedom. Isn’t that all any man wants when it comes right down to it?”

  Wahl showed no response at first, his eyes fixed on Emil for several beats before he nodded. “That is correct. And as someone who has taken an interest in you, Herr Martel, I advise you not to repeat that part of your plan to anyone until this war is over.”

  Adeline was furious with Emil when he came home late, smelling of beer, and admitted to her that he’d told Wahl that he, a new immigrant to Hitler’s Greater Germany, dreamed of going west, looking for freedom, and a place to fish.

  “Are you crazy?” she shouted. “They’ll throw us in a prison or worse!”

  “We live in a prison,” he shouted back. “Look at this place!”

  “It’s what we have,” Adeline said, turning colder. “And if you want better, you should be thinking of keeping us safe, not telling the Germans, ‘Thanks for the protection, but we want to go west to the Allies.’”

  “I never said that,” Emil said. “But you’re right. It was foolish. I’ll stay clear of Wahl and won’t mention it again.”

  Two afternoons later, however, on August 25, 1944, Emil exited the fields, heading for home, only to find the gimpy sergeant waiting for him again.

  “Come have another beer, Martel,” Wahl said.

  “Thank you, Sergeant, but I must—”

  “Come. I have something to show you, something I think you’ll find interesting.”

  Emil sighed and followed Wahl back to his house as the German told him of life on his own family farm and asked questions about Adeline and the boys. Even though Emil was consciously trying to keep his replies curt and vague, the sergeant had a way of making him want to talk openly.

  In Wahl’s kitchen, the routine was the same as before: beer, sausage, cheese, and bread. But instead of putting the food on a plate on the table, he put it on a cutting board and told Emil to take the beer mugs and to follow him. Emil hesitated, feeling fear. Was this some kind of trap?

  Wahl went down a short hallway off the kitchen to a closed door and opened it with a key before turning on a light. He smiled at Emil. “You’ll find this interesting.”

  Emil swallowed and followed Wahl. He entered the room as the sergeant set down the cutting board with the food on top of a metal table. Other than two chairs and a padlocked travel locker, the rest of the room was empty.

  Emil thought of stories he’d heard of men back home being lured to their doom by men posing as friends who urged them to speak freely. These same men were tortured before they were sent to Siberia. Were the Nazis the same? Was this what he was facing for talking to Wahl?

  “Why are we in here?” Emil asked, hearing the tremor in his voice when Wahl turned his back on him and crouched before the locker.

  Wahl worked the lock and did not reply. Emil began to sweat and took a slug of the beer. “Please, Sergeant. What is this about?”

  “The way west,” the German said, and stood up, holding another box with steel ribbing. He undid the hasp and lifted the lid. “Have you ever listened to a shortwave?”

  He removed a radio from the box and set it on the table near the food and beer.

  Emil stared. “The SS said they were forbidden here. You won’t get shot for having that?”

  Wahl laughed. “I would if I had not been a Wehrmacht radioman for many years before the bomb got me. And there are times my superiors here need to contact their superiors in Warsaw or Berlin. But for tonight, no transmission.”

  Emil frowned. “What’s transmission?”

  “We can’t talk over it,” he said, plugging the radio in. “But we can listen.”

  Emil had never owned a shortwave, which had been forbidden under Stalin as well, so he watched with fascina
tion as Wahl attached the radio to a speaker and then to a line that ran out the window to an antenna mounted on the roof. The sergeant threw a switch, and a red bulb glowed.

  “What are we going to listen to?”

  “What every man wants,” Wahl said.

  Chapter Twenty

  Woo-wooing noises and harsh static poured from the speaker. The sergeant twisted knobs, and voices soon sounded out of the electric hiss, speaking languages Emil did not understand, a babble that unsettled him, made him aware of how little he knew of the greater world.

  After several tries, the sergeant tuned in to a German male voice broadcasting from Berlin that described Nazi victories in France, Belgium, and Hungary where the führer’s forces were heroically holding back Stalin’s southern armies. Wahl turned the dial on the radio again, stopping at a language Emil did not understand or recognize.

  “London,” Wahl said, looking over at him. “BBC in English.”

  The sergeant twisted the dial ever so slightly, saying, “Now BBC German Service. Listen how different the news is from Berlin’s version.”

  The BBC announcer was female, spoke perfect German, and went straight to the point, describing the liberation of Paris and Charles de Gaulle leading troops down the Champs-Élysées, as well as ongoing battles elsewhere in France and Italy, where despite fierce German resistance, the Allies were making significant advances. The broadcaster also talked about Romania’s recent surrender to the Soviets and the Red Army’s bombardment of Budapest, before shifting to news from the South Pacific.

  Emil said, “It sounds like there is war everywhere.”

  “No, it sounds like Germany is losing,” Wahl said, and held up his hands. “See, there, I said it: the Fatherland is losing, and the Allies are winning on almost every front. It’s only a matter of time before Hitler gets squeezed between Eisenhower and Stalin. It’s only a matter of time before Berlin falls. And you and I need to be ready for it.”