The Last Green Valley

by Mark Sullivan

  Adeline saw it was true and felt her own heart ripped open yet again that day. “A little miracle that never had a chance.”

  “Miracle,” Karoline snorted in disgust behind them. “More like a deadly sin, proof of lust before God and man. Mark my words. The Lord took her legs and that . . . sin in your hands because of her fornication.”

  Adeline, her sister, and cousin were so stunned by the venom in Rese’s mother’s voice that they turned to look at her swathed in shadows. So did many other people near her.

  Aware of them and not caring, Adeline said, “He’s your grandson, Karoline. If you’re going to say such things, you should look at him and say it. A quarter of his blood descends from you.”

  Her mother-in-law leaned forward into a slat of light, revealing one eye and a twitching cheek. “Throw that thing out the train door, or I will.”

  Looming over her suddenly, Johann stunned the crowded boxcar, roaring, “You’ll do no such thing! And I’ll hear no more from you, woman! Do you think I survived the mines and the miserable walk home to hear your constant and never-ending shit-stirring? Wanting this. Fearing that. Condemning that. Comparing this. Destroying that. Judging who is good and who is not. All with your acid tongue!”

  Karoline had shrunk against the forward wall of the boxcar, her voice meeker when she began. “Johann, I do not—”

  “Shut up, you evil, evil bitch!” he bellowed down at his wife. “Shut up, or so help me, God, I’ll throw you off this train myself and be rid of you for good!”

  There was a long, stunned, uncomfortable silence in which Adeline felt confirmed in every ill emotion she’d ever had toward Emil’s mother, but also aware that she should be preparing Rese’s son for burial at the next stop.

  Karoline said bitterly, “Maybe I’ll help you, Johann, do you a favor. Throw myself off this train before Rese wakes up. Be rid of me for good.”

  “There she goes again,” Malia whispered in Adeline’s ear. “Turning the tables. Playing the persecuted.”

  “Do it, then, and be quick about it,” Johann replied finally, leaving her side for Rese’s.

  Before full darkness fell over the countryside that blipped slowly past them, Adeline wrapped the baby in gauze Decker had left for them to redress Rese’s wounds. Marie’s sons, Rutger and Hans, began to stir and squawk in their basket.

  Marie asked her and Malia to clean Rese as best they could with the last of the water in a bucket while making sure to keep her bandages dry.

  “We don’t want gangrene,” she said as she sat and lifted the first of her boys to her breast.

  Adeline marveled at Marie’s stamina. Her cousin was shorter and lighter than Adeline, and yet she seemed so much bigger and certainly strong enough to produce milk for two babies at once.

  Malia hung a lit lantern in the doorway of the train, just out of the wind, and began wiping and daubing Rese’s lower body with a wet cloth. “Marie, tell us about your husband, the surgeon.”

  Adeline had corresponded with Marie several times a year, knew parts of the story, and wanted to spare her torment. “Malia, maybe there are better things to talk about,” she began.

  “It’s all right, Adella,” Marie said. “The Soviets tried to take Klaus when their army left Ukraine in July 1941, but he managed to hide long enough to be taken instead by the Wehrmacht a year after the Germans invaded.”

  Marie had been working for Dr. Klaus Werner for nearly two years by then, and he’d taught her enough that she had become useful to him in surgery.

  “I was in love with him, but he did not seem to notice,” Marie said, taking one boy off her left breast and putting the other baby on the right. “He was twelve years older than me. When the Germans discovered his surgical skills, they drafted him. I wanted to go with him but was told to go help on my family’s lands. Klaus said he would write to me and left.”

  Heartbroken and anxious, Marie waited for months to hear from the surgeon. Then two letters arrived at once in early December, both describing his life at a military hospital south of Stalingrad: the endless casualties, the long, hellish hours trying to save men torn apart by war, and the bleak conditions in which he lived.

  “At the end of the second letter, he said he missed me,” Marie said, glowing in the lantern light. “He said he missed my smile and the sound of my voice.”

  “You must have been so happy!” Malia said.

  “Joyous,” Marie said. “I didn’t hear from him again until he knocked at my door on March 24 last year. He’d been given a month’s leave from the front and immediately got down on one knee and asked me to marry him.”

  Malia clapped. “This is so romantic! You said yes!”

  “I said yes, and we married the very next day,” she said. “I could not have been happier. He had come back the Klaus I knew and loved, more tender than I could have imagined, along with another Klaus I did not recognize: a stranger, haunted by everything he’d survived, a doctor terrified of going back to the war.”

  She paused, cleared her throat, and went on. “But we experienced true love. That month together I’ll cherish forever. We made these beautiful little boys before he left.”

  The baby pulled off her breast and coughed. Marie lifted him to her shoulder and patted him on the back until he burped. Malia finished cleaning Rese and covered her, felt her brow for fever, while smiling and looking expectantly at Marie to finish the story.

  “Does he just love them?” Malia asked.

  Marie’s face fell. “I’ve heard from Klaus only once since he went back, last November, before the babies were born, before the Dnieper River fell and we needed to run.”

  “I’m sure he’s just behind us somewhere,” Malia said.

  Her cousin said nothing for a moment. But then her face rippled with fear and pain as she choked, “That’s what I’m afraid of. He’s behind me somewhere. Not with me and our sons. Maybe for good.”

  During an hour’s scheduled stop near the Czech town of Cervenik, Emil got a shovel from the engineers and, together with Johann and Adeline, went well off the track with a lantern. They dug a hole and placed the dead baby wrapped in gauze inside. They said a prayer and covered him up.

  “Thank you,” Johann said to Emil. “I am sorry your mother said those things. I’m sorrier I said those things.”

  “It’s okay, Papa,” Emil said, and patted him on the back. “It was a horrible day for everyone, even Mother.”

  His father sighed, nodded, and trudged toward the silhouette of the train.

  Adeline fell into Emil’s arms.

  “I still miss our little one,” she said.

  “We will always miss him,” he said. “He was our firstborn.”

  As they walked back up the slope toward the waiting train, Adeline recalled what caused Johann to explode in rage. It was literally the first time she’d ever seen Emil’s father angry.

  “I’ve seen your mother like that only one other time,” she said. “When she drank the cream to cut out my heart before the first Waldemar died. Cold. Heartless. Evil inside, like your father said.”

  “And she hasn’t said a word since he blasted her?”

  “Not a peep.”

  “Well, that has to be a first in her entire life,” he said, and laughed, which made Adeline laugh and then hug him.

  “I love that you can turn my spirits,” she said. “You’re a good husband, a good father, and a very good man, Emil Martel.”

  Adeline had hoped her husband would take her words as genuine praise, but Emil’s face clouded briefly before he managed to smile at her in the lantern light. “And you are the finest woman I have ever known. I’ll sit with Rese first if you want. Let you get some sleep.”

  Adeline studied him a long moment, thinking again that there were parts of Emil that were still a mystery to her and might always be so. They went up the short slope to the train where they met Sergeant Decker leaving the boxcar after giving Rese a full dose of morphine, enough to hold her through the night.r />
  “When will she wake up?”

  “I would think tomorrow,” Decker said, and left.

  They managed to lift Rese and the stretcher high enough to get their bedding from the wagons below. Emil carried it all to the roof of the boxcar where they found the boys curled up together sleeping, their safety ropes still tied around their waists.

  He helped Adeline to get the blankets over and around their sons before doing the same for her. “Don’t untie the rope unless the train is stopped,” he whispered. “I’ll wake you up when it’s your time to watch over her.”

  He moved toward the ladder with the lantern.

  “Emil,” she whispered sharp enough to turn him. “I love you. And thank you.”

  Her husband looked at her as if she were speaking another language, but then nodded. “I love you, too. And you are welcome. I guess.”

  Emil started down the ladder before she could reply. Eyes closed, she lay there, thinking about him before images and sounds of Rese began to appear in her mind: Rese vomiting on the way to the train station; Rese coming up out of the lake water, screaming with delight, so wild and free; Rese falling onto the tracks; Rese screaming when Decker cauterized her stumps.

  More and faster images flashed as she fought for sleep: Marie delivering Rese’s stillborn son and Adeline holding him, a miracle ended, so tiny and so sad and precious; she wanted to cry at how dizzy and beaten down she felt now atop the train, displaced, a refugee of war with no place to call home other than the one she’d conjured from a painting in a book.

  Was it only this morning we left Budapest? Adeline thought as she drifted to sleep. How can so much hope and tragedy be packed into one day?

  Emil woke her in the darkness before dawn as they passed through the Czech town of Puchov. The boys still slept. The train rolled at a walking pace.

  “How is she?” Adeline whispered as she got out from under her blankets.

  “A few nightmares, but she slept through it,” he said.

  “Your mother?”

  “You mean the Sphinx?”

  Even though she’d only just awoken, Adeline couldn’t help but laugh again at the idea of Karoline still not talking. She kissed his cheek after he got beneath the blankets and then climbed down the ladder. Johann was waiting to help her over to the open door of the boxcar.

  She thanked him and scooted by Marie and her twins sleeping on the floor and went to Rese’s side. Putting her hand on her sister-in-law’s head, she found it warm but not feverish. She used the lantern to inspect the bandages, which were just soaking through. In the first good light, she’d help her cousin change them.

  As Adeline hung the lantern back on its hook, she noticed Rese move, not with a jerk of pain, but a stirring, her shoulders shifting, her jaw going slack and then swallowing before her eyelids fluttered open. Rese’s eyes rolled as if she could not focus them. She swallowed, closed her eyes, and then opened them again, wobbling before they settled shakily on Adeline.

  “Where am I?” she rasped.

  Adeline took her young sister-in-law’s hand in her own and murmured, “You’re alive, Rese. You had a bad accident, but you’re alive.”

  She grimaced and said, “It hurts. Everywhere.”

  “Yes, there will be a man here to help with that soon.”

  Johann came behind Adeline, put his massive hand on his daughter’s shoulder with tears in his eyes. “Rese.”

  “Papa,” she said, and smiled as her eyes shut and her head lolled a bit.

  Rese took two big deep breaths before she suddenly stiffened and clenched Adeline’s hands. Her cheeks drew back, her lips thinned, and her eyes stretched wide.

  “I fell,” she said.

  “Yes,” Adeline said.

  “I landed by the tracks.”

  “On the tracks,” her father said.

  Rese seemed confused before looking toward the ceiling with an expression that fluttered between disbelief and total dread.

  “No,” she said at last. “Tell me it didn’t . . .” Then she smiled crazily at them. “No, I feel . . . feel them! You see?”

  With that, Rese struggled upright and looked down her skirt, seeing the bloody, round bandages about the stumps where her feet, ankles, and lower calves used to be. She gaped at them, wrenched her hand from Adeline’s, and reached for them.

  “They’re there! I feel them! They’re under the bandages! I feel them!”

  Karoline appeared at the foot of the stretcher, facing the doorway, unable to look at her daughter directly.

  “Mama?” Rese said. “I feel them.”

  Adeline feared her mother-in-law was going to launch into her damnation sermon from the night before. But instead, Karoline said coldly, “You’re feeling the ghosts of them, Rese,” she said. “My mother knew soldiers who lost their legs in the Great War, and they swore they could feel them years later.”

  Much went out of Rese, then. She blinked at her mother blankly and then at her bandaged stumps. She lifted the left leg, pain rippling through her, and then bent it at the knee. After doing the same with the right, she burst into tears.

  “Now Stephan will never come find me to marry me!” she sobbed, and threw herself backward on the stretcher. “Oh God, he’ll leave me with the baby! We will be left to beg in the streets of Germany, the freak girl from Russia with no feet and a child!”

  Rese went hysterical, inconsolable, tortured and racked with agonies Adeline could not begin to fathom until Marie appeared at her side. The sun had risen. The train was slowing.

  Marie took Rese’s hand. When Rese tried to pull it back, Marie held her firmly by the wrist and stroked her forearm, saying, “I have delivered many children, Rese, and have two of my own. See them there in the basket?”

  Rese’s tears slowed, and she opened her eyes to blearily look at the basket Adeline held tilted toward her so she could see the infants in the increasing light.

  “My sons are both my greatest blessing and my greatest curse,” Marie said. “God gives you children only when he thinks you are ready for the experience of holding your greatest blessing and your greatest curse in your arms at the same time.”

  Rese winced in pain and reached for her left leg with her left hand.

  “My legs hurt like fire. Both of them.”

  “The medic is coming now,” she said. “But do you understand what I’m saying, Rese? God decided that you were not ready to be a mother. I’m sorry.”

  “What?”

  Karoline said, “You lost the baby, Rese.”

  For a moment, it was as if Rese had not heard her mother and was transfixed on something above Marie. Then the skin on her forehead twitched, her eyes dulled, and she slowly drew her hand from Adeline’s cousin’s. Wrapping her head in her arms, she turned away and tried to draw up her legs, only to scream and twist in pain.

  Sergeant Decker appeared. Karoline said, “Thank God. Put her out of her misery. I don’t think I can take any more right now.”

  The medic nodded, introduced himself to Rese, and asked if he could examine her legs.

  “No!” Rese screamed. “No, you can’t!”

  “I’m going to give you a shot first to help with the pain, okay?”

  Rese didn’t reply. Decker retrieved his syringe and a vial of morphine and gave her a healthy dose. Within minutes, she’d stopped crying and had rolled over on her back, staring lazily at the ceiling while Decker cut off her bandages and examined the stumps, finding that the smaller arteries and veins had indeed clotted.

  “No sign of infection that I can see,” the medic said. “You are lucky to be alive, Rese.”

  She laughed softly. “I admit you got me feeling pretty good right now, but I know when this stuff wears off, I’ll rather be dead.”

  Chapter Seventeen

  The train crawled north through hilly and then mountainous terrain in dry, windy heat, past Zilina and Cadca before crossing the border at Bohumin into Poland around noon. Midafternoon, the train stopped in farml
and just east of the city of Lodz, which the Germans had renamed “Litzmannstadt.”

  Emil and Adeline were atop the boxcar with the boys when Major Haussmann exited the locomotive and strode along the train, shouting that everyone was to exit with their belongings. The mob spilled out and away from the train and crossed a county road.

  The sun and the wind were near infernal as they brought down Rese on the stretcher and then the Martels’ two little wagons and the last of their things. The boys were excited to be off the train after the twenty-seven-hour trip and began a game of tag despite the heat.

  Major Haussmann returned, said, “The girl will be taken to the military hospital along with the other wounded soldiers.”

  “I’ll go with her,” Karoline said.

  “No one goes with her. The rest of you are in quarantine. A fever spread through the train ahead of you, and we can’t take the chance of infecting the city.”

  A young, burly medic named Praeger arrived to help Decker take Rese to an ambulance. She had not spoken in hours, but he managed to get through to her by appealing to her slightly warped sense of humor.

  As Decker prepared another injection to carry Rese through the bumpy ride to the military hospital, Praeger squatted by her side and said, “My older sister lost her leg above the knee in a farming accident.”

  Rese showed no reaction.

  “She didn’t get over the loss of her leg until she started telling amputee jokes.”

  Rese scowled in disgust. “There’s nothing funny about this.”

  “No?” Praeger said. “What did the driver say to the one-legged man needing a ride?”

  She glared at him. “I have no idea.”

  “Hop in.”

  Rese shut her eyes and pursed her lips not to smile.

  “What do you call a one-legged woman?”

  She opened one eye skeptically. “What?”

  “Peg,” he said.

  Rese scrunched up her lips sourly, said, “What do you call a no-legged woman?”

  He smiled at her as Decker thumbed the plunger and said, “Beautiful.”

  Maybe it was the drugs hitting her or the sentiment, or the soft tone in his voice, or all three, but something in Rese unlocked and softened. She smiled weakly at Praeger before her head lolled, and he and Decker picked up the litter and took her away while Johann called to her with promises that he would come find her once he was allowed.