The Last Green Valley

by Mark Sullivan

  The driver grunted and put the car in gear. The overhead light went on.

  Lieutenant Gerhardt smiled. “You will answer my questions truthfully, yes? It will be bad for you otherwise.”

  It was only then that Adeline realized that Kommissariat 5 of the People’s Police meant she was talking with a secret police officer of some sort, like the one who’d taken away her father so long ago.

  “Yes?” Lieutenant Gerhardt said, her tone now colder.

  “Yes,” Adeline stammered. “If I can.”

  “Good. You cook for Colonel Vasiliev?”

  “Yes. And for several of his ranking officers.”

  “You often go to Berlin to the special commissary there at the colonel’s request?”

  Frowning, wondering why she was being asked that, Adeline said, “Yes. He gives me a list and the money. I go and come back. There is always a receipt.”

  “You admit you are a frequent visitor of the commissary on Colonel Vasiliev’s behalf. More frequent than almost any other customer. Did you know that?”

  Adeline shook her head. “No.”

  “It is true. The party keeps track. You see, your colonel is a glutton. He sees himself as better than the others who shop there, and he takes advantage of his position to fatten himself.”

  Adeline said nothing.

  Lieutenant Gerhardt smiled. “And you take advantage of your position as well, don’t you, Frau Martel?”

  She didn’t know what to say.

  “You always seem to forget something after you have paid for the colonel’s needs,” the secret police officer went on. “Then you buy what you want and give the sentry a bribe on your way out. Or you buy something for someone like Frau Schmidt or Frau Holtz and then bribe the sentry on your way out. Yes?”

  Adeline swallowed hard and then nodded. “Yes. I . . .”

  “You are a black marketeer, Frau Martel. That is a crime against the party and the state. You could be sent to prison like your husband and have your children made wards.”

  “No, please,” Adeline said, panic-stricken. “They were small things. Treats for my young sons. Some things Frau Schmidt needed. She’s old and—”

  “The party does not care about Frau Schmidt’s age or her needs,” Lieutenant Gerhardt said sharply. Then her face softened. “But it does care about you, Adeline. So you are going to stop your black-market activities, and you are going to tell me what Colonel Vasiliev buys on a weekly basis, or does out of the ordinary, or says when he is drunk and full of your food. Do you understand?”

  Adeline did understand. She’d grown up under Stalin. She knew how Communists turned neighbor against neighbor, worker against boss, husband against wife, sowing fear into the culture in a way that stifled all thought. And when they had enough on you, for crimes you did not even commit, you were sent away, never to return.

  “Do you understand?”

  “Yes,” Adeline said, bowing her head. “I understand.”

  “Good,” Lieutenant Gerhardt said. “Isn’t this where you live coming up ahead?”

  Adeline felt so disoriented, she had to look twice before nodding. “Yes, there, with the big gates and the barn.”

  The driver pulled over. Adeline reached for the door handle, only to feel the secret police officer’s hand like a claw on her shoulder.

  “Another question before you go,” Lieutenant Gerhardt said, and smiled in that knowing way Adeline had already learned to fear. “In Berlin, you put your name and Frau Schmidt’s address on a list with the International Red Cross.”

  How does she know that?

  “Yes,” Adeline said, nervous again. “The list is for refugees, families trying to find one another. I put Frau Schmidt’s address because I didn’t know how long I’d be at my present place.”

  The secret police officer said, “Why would you do such a thing?”

  “I put it there, hoping Emil might see it someday.”

  “In Berlin? When he is in the East?”

  “I . . .”

  For several long moments, Lieutenant Gerhardt said nothing.

  Feeling her throat close, Adeline quivered with emotion, forcing herself to look the woman right in the eye. “I want my husband back. Is that so wrong, Lieutenant?”

  “No, but if I were you, I’d stop thinking about him ever coming back. From what I understand, the prison camp where he was sent is riddled with disease. Men dying every day.”

  “Emil?” she said, hearing her voice shake.

  “I don’t know. All the party has been told is that there’s hardly anyone left alive there. I’m sorry, Frau Martel. But the sooner you deal with the fact that he’s dead or soon will be, the quicker you can get on with a new life. You can get out of the car now, Frau Martel, but we will meet next Friday after you leave work, yes?”

  Adeline felt dazed by the news of Emil’s fate—a prison camp riddled with disease . . . men dying every day . . . hardly any prisoners left. She nodded dully and opened the door. When she went inside, she did not answer Frau Holtz, who called from the kitchen, asking why she’d been gone so long. She just hung up her coat and scarf, took off her boots, and went into the bedroom.

  Closing the door behind her, she stood in the darkness, listening to the sounds of her sons sleeping. Emil’s sons sleeping. Adeline started to cry but steeled herself enough to undress and climb into bed. Walt stirred and rolled over beside her. She stared into the blackness, hearing Lieutenant Gerhardt’s soft, brutal voice.

  I’m sorry, Frau Martel. But the sooner you deal with the fact that he’s dead or soon will be, the quicker you can get on with a new life.

  Adeline wrapped the pillow over her head with both arms, bit into the fabric, and finally let herself scream.

  Chapter Thirty-Four

  March 10, 1946

  Two hours west of Poltava, Ukraine

  Emil was shivering so hard atop the coal car, he could not control it. His heavy wool clothes were now caked with wet snow, and he was exposed to the howling wind. What was he thinking when he climbed on this train? He might have escaped the prison camp, but he was going to die soon if he didn’t get to some kind of shelter.

  Emil had tried digging in the coal, figuring he could bury himself under it and leave an airhole to breathe through. But down a few centimeters, he hit a layer of ice frozen into the coal below. He tried kicking at it with his boot, only to succeed in knocking himself off balance and almost falling off the side of the train, which stopped often at crossings but overall moved much faster than the one he’d come east on. He believed he was close to seventy-five kilometers away from Poltava now, maybe more.

  The shivering got worse. His thoughts were becoming foggy. He knew he was minutes from freezing to death. Hearing brakes squeal and the train slow yet again, Emil began crawling until he reached the rear of the hopper car. He spent the moments before the train came to a full stop bending and unbending his fingers, trying to get blood into them, making them functional before he climbed down the ladder.

  Emil jumped off the low rung into deep snow. Slogging rearward, he grabbed a rung on the front ladder of the next hopper car and climbed up, only to find it as full of coal as the first one. The train was still stopped. But for how long?

  Longer than you can last in this cold, Emil.

  His fingers screamed, but he forced himself down the ladder and again slogged toward the rear of the train. It began to move.

  Barely able to see, he held out his hands, tried to anticipate the ladder. The one at the rear of the second hopper car slipped through his gloves, and the train began to pick up speed. He snagged the front ladder on the third hopper but couldn’t hold on.

  Knowing he was about to be left behind in the storm and the darkness to die, Emil put his hand on the side of the third car, waiting to feel it end before he reached higher and grabbed at the oncoming ladder of the fourth car with both aching hands. He caught an upper rung with his left and the side of the ladder with his right and was immediately d
ragged along as Corporal Gheorghe had been dragged in his dream. The Romanian had let go in the dream, and Emil had jumped after him into darkness.

  But not this time. With everything Emil had left in him, he held tight with his left hand and stabbed up his right, finding a higher rung. With two more brute strength moves upward, his boots found the ladder’s lowest rung.

  Coated with snow, battered by wind, gasping, sweating, he hung off the ladder like some giant white cocoon for almost a minute. When his teeth began to chatter, he climbed again. At the top of the ladder, Emil reached over the side of the car, feeling for coal. He felt nothing but wind, so he straddled the side of the coal car and reached down as far as he could with his right foot.

  Nothing. Was it empty? At least partially.

  Figuring he could at least get down out of the wind, Emil brought his left leg over, and dangled by his fingers a second before letting go. He fell three meters and hit heels first in snow on steel. The shock went up both his legs, buckling them. His upper body crashed so hard, the wind was knocked out of him, and for a few moments he thought he’d cracked ribs.

  When Emil finally managed to sit up, however, he realized he’d been right. Here, in the pitch darkness deep in the front right corner of an empty hopper car, he was well sheltered from the northwest wind. And the snow seemed to be lessening.

  Heartened by that, he struggled upright and cringed before spreading his legs wide and leaning his back into the corner, brushing at his clothes and trying to get as much of the wet, caked snow off him as possible. The first few chunks he put in his mouth and sucked out the moisture to quench his thirst. Then he unbuttoned the coat and lifted his shirts and sweater to expose his belly to the cold, hoping that some of the sweat on him would escape.

  Stay as dry as possible. Move to stay warm. Survive, he thought.

  When Emil believed he’d gotten most of the snow off his outer clothes, he began kicking the snow on the floor of the railcar away from his corner and soon created a knee-high arched wall of snow in front of him. Ducking down in the darkness, he felt as if the wall had cut even more wind. He lost track of time, building the wall to chest height.

  Brushing the snow off his clothes yet again, Emil winced at the sore ribs as he finally lowered himself to the floor of his little fortress and leaned back into the corner. The wind was almost completely gone now, and it was no longer snowing. He closed his eyes, telling himself he’d have to eat at some point. He had money from selling scrap wood to the cooks, more than one hundred rubles in a buttoned shirt pocket. Now he just needed a place to spend it.

  Vents began to form in the cloud cover. Through one, he saw the quarter moon, and for reasons he did not understand, he felt warmed seeing it and warmed further when the clouds fully parted and he was able to locate the North Star. I can navigate and walk at night if I have to.

  After taking off his coat to shake the remaining snow off it, Emil sat on the steel floor in the corner of the hopper car and dozed despite the constant aching cold beneath him. Then he felt and heard the brakes slowing the train yet again.

  This time lights appeared. They were pulling into some kind of station. Able to see now, he spotted another ladder, this one on the opposite interior wall of the hopper. He knew he should stay where he was, cover himself with snow, and hide behind the crude wall he’d built.

  But if he did not know where he was, how could he figure out where he was going? For all Emil knew, he might be on his way to Moscow or Leningrad. He buried that thought straightaway. Although the tracks they’d ridden had curved and meandered, the North Star did not lie. They’d been heading steadily west.

  But how far west?

  Unable to tamp down his curiosity, Emil climbed out of his snow fortress and sneaked across the car. He climbed to the top of the inner ladder, nervous because the lights were so bright. Part of him wanted to take a quick peek. But he figured that might create a flash of movement and attract attention. As slowly as he could, Emil raised his eyes just above the side of the hopper car and scanned left and right before slowly lowering his head.

  He was in a large rail yard with many freight cars on other tracks. There were men working on a loading dock well ahead of him. The men were so far away, Emil decided to take another look and saw a sign in Russian that he understood. He knew where he was now: Lubny. They’d gone through the same station heading east to the prison camp. A good nine hours had passed between that train leaving Lubny and arriving in Poltava. He had no watch but knew that nine hours had not passed since he’d escaped.

  Maybe four. Maybe five. In any case, Emil was heading west much, much faster than he ever could have hoped. And for the first time since he’d escaped, he allowed himself to think of Adeline, Walt, and Will.

  Where would he start to look for them? In Legnica? Back in Poland where he’d been taken? But he’d told Adeline to go as far west as she could, and he’d find her.

  He heard voices: men speaking in Russian. He eased his head up one more time and spotted two Soviet soldiers walking alongside his train by the coal car he’d escaped in, four ahead. One of them climbed the ladder of that car and looked around before descending.

  They came a car closer. The other soldier climbed up to look inside.

  “Nyet,” he said in a whiny voice. “Only coal.”

  “You heard what they said; he jumped on this train,” his partner said in a much deeper voice. “Unless he fell, he’s here.”

  Emil slowly lowered his head and climbed down the ladder. He stared at his boot prints in the snow on the bottom of the empty hopper and understood he’d blown his chance. If he’d stayed behind the wall of snow and buried himself, he might have made it.

  “Your turn,” he heard the whiny soldier say, followed by the sounds of boots squeaking in the snow and gloves scraping up the side of the hopper car just in front of Emil’s.

  He stood there on the floor of his own car, shaking his head at his sheer stupidity. He was going to be caught and sent back to Poltava. Or worse, like Corporal Gheorghe, he was going to be sent somewhere worse.

  “This one’s empty other than snow,” the one with the deep voice said.

  “I got this one,” the whiny soldier said.

  Emil closed his eyes. He’d escaped not only to find Adeline and the boys. With the number of men succumbing to disease around him, he’d escaped to live. But now I’ll be sent back to die.

  The train lurched forward a meter and stopped. The soldier on the ladder cursed. Emil was thrown off balance but stayed upright.

  “That hurt my shoulder,” the whiny soldier cried angrily before the train lurched and stopped again. “You go up it.”

  Their voices were close now, right on the other side of the hopper car wall. The soldier would climb up, look in, and see Emil directly below him. It would all be over. He’d fulfilled Corporal Gheorghe’s dream of escaping by train, but his own dream of going west and reuniting with his family was about to be snuffed out.

  “The hell with it,” the soldier with the deep voice said. “I’m not breaking an arm or a leg over some escaped POW. If he’s in any of these last cars, he’ll be dead by morning. Temperature’s supposed to dive, hit thirty below.”

  Emil’s heart felt like it was trying to smash its way out of his chest. He could hear their footsteps. They were walking away!

  The train lurched and began rolling again, picking up speed, and he was beyond Lubny, heading toward Kiev, the biggest city in Ukraine. Emil held on to the ladder and began doing slow squats, up and down. If the temperature really was going to plunge to negative thirty, he would have to move all night. The best way would be like this, stable, slow, and steady.

  As he fell into the rhythm of it, Emil began to think forward to Kiev. Darnitsa, the central station, would be heavily guarded by Soviet soldiers. They would search the cars, wouldn’t they? He decided he had to act as if they would search every car. At first, he considered getting off the train just east of Kiev. Then he thought, What w
ould Corporal Gheorghe do? And came up with a bolder plan.

  He laughed at the idea and then loved it and how giddy it made him. Closing his eyes, he could remember only one other time in his life when he’d felt like this: the night he and Adeline were married, a night his heart had bubbled with joy.

  Emil could suddenly see that night as if it were happening all over again. He saw himself kiss Adeline at the end of the ceremony. He saw himself dancing with her to accordion music, gazing into her loving eyes, his hands about her waist.

  Still holding that ladder in the hopper car, Emil realized he wasn’t that cold as long as he stayed in that memory. He kept his eyes shut, hearing the jaunty, upbeat accordion music in his mind as he let go of the ladder and began to dance.

  For hours on end, Emil danced and laughed with his imaginary Adeline, sometimes thrown off his feet and falling into the snow on the floor of the hopper car as the train rounded a tight bend. But he didn’t care. In his mind and in his heart, Adella was with him and they were celebrating and that was all that mattered.

  Even so, at dawn, he verged on delirious. He’d been awake more than a day by then, ten of those hours at hard labor shoveling lime and six of those hours dancing with the memory of his bride. And the Soviet soldiers had been right about the cold. He didn’t know if the temperature was thirty below, but his mitts kept sticking to the steel ladder, and the snow had turned crusted and crunchy. His feet ached. So did his lower back.

  At the first sign of light in the sky and with the train still moving, Emil shook off the daze and climbed the interior ladder of the hopper car. At the top, he looked around, seeing the all-too-familiar landscape of rural western Ukraine, with vast fields bordered by thin hedgerows and coated with snow as far as the eye could see. He was surprised that the land triggered a wave of nostalgia in him. A memory surfaced from childhood, shortly after his father pulled him out of school to work on the farm. He remembered being sad at leaving school, which he’d enjoyed, but also being thrilled to follow his father out into the fields with a long day of work before them.