After leaving Wahl’s house, Emil had so much to tell Adeline, he wanted to sprint home through the streets. His instinct and experience told him to slow down, to be just some refugee field hand overlooked or dismissed as unimportant by any and all authorities.
When he reached their building, however, Emil leaped up the stairs, pounded past the open doors of his parents’ apartment and Marie’s, where he could hear the twins crying, and on up the second flight of stairs and into their apartment where Adeline sat by herself at the kitchen table with her head down and her back to the door.
He shut the door behind him. “You won’t believe what happened today.”
Emil came around the front of her. She didn’t look up. He crouched beside her and said, “I heard freedom today, Adella. The voice of it, anyway.”
Adeline lifted her head and stared at him with bleary eyes that turned angry. “You’ve been drinking again. I can smell it.”
“One beer,” he said. “And you’ve been . . . crying?”
“Maybe I have. Aren’t I allowed?”
He threw his hands up in the air. “Of course, you’re allowed, but just listen a second. Where are the boys?”
She looked away, irritated. “Playing. I told them to be here before dark.”
“Okay,” he said. “We have a friend now. Sergeant Wahl.”
Her expression turned incredulous, then hostile. “You don’t know that. What if he is more than he seems? What if he is a member of the Gestapo, trying to expose you?”
Adeline was normally such a kind person Emil was taken aback by her tone. “He’s not.”
“How do you know?”
Emil swore her to tell no one, not her sister, or mother, or cousin, or acquaintance, and then described his second visit with Sergeant Wahl, his shortwave, and the news from the BBC German Service.
“Paris falling means Hitler is losing in the West,” Emil said excitedly. “The Soviets have taken Romania, are bombing Budapest, and are nearing Poland. Germany is being squeezed, Adeline. They’re losing.”
“Why do you believe a radio?” she said dismissively. “I thought we learned to ignore anything said on the radio by a government.”
“This was different,” he insisted. “This came from the West, from England, where people are free to tell the truth. Wahl says that at some point the Wehrmacht will retreat to Berlin, and when they finally surrender, we want to get to the Americans or the British as fast as possible, or we’ll be caught by the Soviets and . . .”
Adeline’s anger was gone, but now she seemed preoccupied.
“Don’t you see?” Emil said. “Please don’t ignore me. Wahl sees it, too.”
She pivoted her head to look at him blankly. “Sees what?”
“The West, Adella—freedom, what we want, the Allies—they’re coming at us! We need to be ready to go to them, or the Soviets will get us from behind, and we could all be going to Siberia or worse.”
Adeline blinked a few times, absorbing what he’d said before her hands fell to the table. “Okay. I surrender. When do we go on this suicide mission?”
“It’s not a suicide mission,” Emil said, smiling as he sat across from her and held her hands, which were cold despite the late-summer heat. “That is why Sergeant Wahl is so important to us. We will know when the time is exactly right to run, because he can listen to where the Allies are on the BBC German Service every night.”
Adeline shook her head as if clearing cobwebs. “Why would he do that?”
“Because he is going west, too,” Emil said. “He will help us if he can.”
“But why would he do that? Why even talk to you in the first place?”
“He said he just saw me working harder than anyone else and wanted to talk to me about it. There are some good people left in the world, Adeline. Even among the Germans.”
“I hope so,” she said. “When does your friend think we’ll go? Tomorrow? Next week? Before winter?”
“Wahl says the war could be over before Christmas, and we should plan on traveling as soon as the Allies get across the Rhine River, closing on Berlin.”
Adeline closed her eyes a moment and then opened them and sighed. “At least, I don’t have to think about it anytime soon.”
“You do need to think about it. You need to—”
“No, Emil, I don’t!” she shouted. “You need to think about it! I need to think about other things, thank you very much!”
Emil gaped at her. Adeline rarely raised her voice. His wife could be firm, but she almost never shouted.
“Why are you yelling at me?” he demanded.
Adeline tried to glare at him but looked lost and then burst into tears. “I don’t know. I shouldn’t . . . but I . . .”
He went over, and she stood up into his arms, sobbing. “I shouldn’t care, but I do. I care, Emil. I care. I care. I care.”
“What is going on? Care about what? Care about who?”
It took several moments for her to compose herself and step back from him, sniffling.
“I was cleaning this morning. I discovered something.”
Adeline went to the corner where the broom and dustpan stood. She set them aside before putting the toe of her shoe on the floorboard closest to the rear wall. The floorboard rose enough to allow her to lift it.
Reaching into the space between the floor joists, she came up with a thick, dog-eared book with a cracked and burnished dark leather cover. “It’s a Jewish Bible. I think,” she said, and then opened the book to show him writing that baffled him.
“What language is this?” he asked.
“Hebrew,” she said, tearing up again. “I saw one like this in Mrs. Kantor’s house back in Birsula. She called it a mikra, I think.”
Emil frowned. “But why are you crying?”
She wiped at her tears with the sleeve of her blouse. “I went to the well for water to wash clothes afterward, and I was talking to one of the Polish women who speaks German, and I told her what I’d found under the floorboards and . . .”
Adeline looked lost again. “She asked where we lived. I told her, and she said this whole building used to be Jewish. Then she said that every refugee apartment in Wielun used to belong to Jews. Every single one. And do you know what else she said they owned, the Jews?”
Emil was feeling shaken, though he sensed the answer. “What?”
Adeline lifted the fabric of the sleeve of her blouse as if it were thorny.
“Our clothes,” she said, tears streaming down her face. “She said they made all the Jews take off their clothes before they were killed, and we were given their clothes after they were boiled clean. The woman looked like she wanted to spit on me for it and then walked away.”
That hit Emil hard, made him recall multiple headlights cutting the twilight.
Adeline said, “Don’t you understand, Emil? We’re wearing the clothes of good people like Mrs. Kantor and Esther. Maybe the good people who lived right here. People who loved and had children and—”
She choked. “It makes us a part of it, doesn’t it? Their hatred? Their murdering? I feel so dirty and ashamed, Emil. I don’t know what to do.”
At that, Emil had to sit down. His head ached from Sergeant Wahl’s beer and now swirled with guilt and regret and hatred. He never asked to wear a dead man’s clothes. He never asked that the SS be in Dubossary when he’d had to fetch building supplies. He never asked Haussmann to single him out and . . .
“Emil!” Adeline shouted. “I need you to listen to me!”
“I am listening to you!” he thundered back before lowering his voice. “I hear you, Adeline. You are not part of what they’ve done. It makes my skin crawl that these are the clothes we’ve been given. If I could, I’d strip them off and buy others, but I can’t and neither can you.”
“What do we do? I mean, we’re living with ghosts all around us, Emil. We’re wearing their clothes and sleeping in their beds. How do we live with that?”
“We won’t for long. Until we can bu
y new clothes, we thank the ghosts for their clothes and their beds, and we go on. If things were reversed, we’d want them to do so. Life goes on, Adeline. They were gone before we got here. It’s not like we threw them out ourselves.”
They heard the boys laughing and shouting, their feet pounding up the staircase. Emil got a cloth, dipped it in the bucket, and handed it to Adeline. She washed the tears off her face before breaking into a smile and throwing her arms open to Walt and Will who burst into the flat, flushed and sweaty and happy as only young boys can be.
Adeline kept her focus on her family but tried not to ignore whose clothes she wore and whose bunk she lay down on at night. There were times in the weeks and months that followed, however, when she almost forgot, and the clothes seemed hers and not a ghost’s, and their apartment belonged more to the living than the dead.
Rese returned to their lives at the end of September. Praeger, the same medic who’d taken her to the hospital, brought her home. Johann was happy, whereas Karoline displayed little emotion when her daughter arrived in a wheelchair, blanket across her lap, glassy-eyed and much older in Adeline’s view. Rese seemed more resigned than happy to see her parents and the rest of the family, until the boys came around the corner. Then she got a devilish look on her face.
“Want to see my legs?” she said.
Walt didn’t seem to want to, but Will walked right up to Rese and said, “I do.”
Rese threw back the blanket to reveal she was wearing artificial legs. “Peggy,” she said, pointing to her left leg. “The right’s Hopper. They’re different lengths, so I need to keep track. Hopper’s the longer one.”
“Can you walk on Peggy and Hopper?” Walt asked, interested now.
“With crutches,” Praeger said. “She can even climb stairs.”
“She’ll have to,” Johann said.
“She’s ready,” the medic said, and then crouched by Rese’s side. “Time for me to go. I am on duty tonight.”
“Will you come back?” she asked, acting as if she feared his answer. “It’s a long way from Lodz.”
“It’s not that far, Rese,” Praeger said. “Besides, how could I stay away from your beauty and humor?”
Rese blushed before saying, “You’ll leave my medicine?”
“Right here,” he said, handing her a pouch. “Make it last. And here are your crutches. The wheelchair should go upstairs with her. She needs to be up on the new legs slowly at first, and every day she should practice.”
Praeger left then. Rese received a round of applause getting out of the wheelchair and climbing the stairs less with the crutches than the banister. Johann brought the wheelchair up, and she sat in it, sweat gushing off her forehead as she looked around.
“Who’d we piss off to get this place?” Rese asked.
In the month that followed, Adeline tried to visit with her mother and sister and Rese and Marie at least once a day.
Lydia seemed happier now that they were settled into their quarters, as depressing as they were. And Malia always seemed happier, or more amused anyway, when she was living with their mother. After the mule had kicked her, Lydia had held Malia for hours on end, telling her she was going to live and come back to her. Adeline had always understood their bond was special, and accepted it as best a daughter could.
Marie looked exhausted and grateful whenever Adeline knocked on her door and offered to help with the twins, who were nearly six months old now. Her cousin’s emotions swung whenever she talked about her missing husband, the surgeon.
“How do I even find him?” Marie fretted and cried one day. “How will he find me?”
Adeline remembered Mrs. Kantor’s advice and said, “You have to trust in God that you will be brought back together. Crazier stories have happened, Marie.”
“Tell me one.”
Adeline told her about Corporal Gheorghe and Stalingrad.
“You believed him?” Marie asked.
“I did. I do.”
Adeline never knew what kind of mood she’d face taking Rese for walks, either with her artificial legs and crutches or pushing her sister-in-law in the wheelchair so she could get air. There were days when Rese seemed content, smiling with glassy eyes when Adeline came for her, talking about a future when they were alone. But there were more days when Rese was fully in her misery, berating her mother and father and Emil and God for having saved her.
“I should be dead,” she’d say over and over again. “Why live like this? No one will ever want a no-legged woman. I’m useless, Adeline.”
“Not to me,” Adeline said. “You’re brave and alive because you are a fighter by nature like your brother. He gets knocked down by life and gets right back up. You’re the same way.”
“I’m not, and I hate my life, our life. Have we had one good day in our lives? Any of us?”
“I’ve had many wonderful days in my life.”
“Name one.”
“The day Walt was born. The day Will was born. The day I met Emil. The day I found a chicken for Mrs. Kantor. You will have days like these, Rese. I know from experience that the shadows can’t last forever. Eventually good fortune will come your way.”
Adeline tried not to think about Emil’s plan to run toward the war when it came close enough and let herself be consumed by her work and her family. But then, out of nowhere, she’d remember the ghosts in her clothes and the apartment, and that would start another cycle of guilt and despair. After a while, these circles of thought seemed to link up and become a figure eight in her mind: guilt of the past arching into anxiety about the future over and over again until she’d think about their food stocks and winter coming, and that would set off another figure eight of starvation memories twisting and spiraling into her singular abject fear of having to go hungry again, to starve again.
Luckily, Emil was able to skim enough fruit, vegetables, and grain from the harvest to supplement their food rations, which were getting smaller each and every week. Emil also went to Wahl’s house several times a week to listen to the shortwave and to look at the maps with the sergeant, keeping track of the Allies’ positions. They heard about the first V-2 rocket hitting London and the fear that Hitler’s superweapon would turn the tide. But then the Allies liberated Luxembourg and launched Operation Market Garden with paratroopers attempting to take the important bridges crossing the Rhine.
Over Wahl’s radio, they heard Hitler’s call for all men from age sixteen to sixty to join the Home Guard to fight the Allies to the last drop of German blood and about battles all along the “Siegfried Line,” the western wall of Nazi fortifications. On October 21, 1944, Emil rushed home to tell Adeline about the taking of Aachen, the first city in the Fatherland to fall.
Emil and Wahl thought for sure they would all be packing and leaving within days. But German resistance proved fierce. More than ten thousand Allied paratroopers died, and another six thousand were captured in Market Garden, and the Rhine did not fall, dashing all hope that the war would be over by Christmas.
During this time, Rese went through a series of wild mood swings where she was her normal caustic self, then sleepy and withdrawn, and then howling with laughter, followed by days where she was deeply bitter, lashing out at whichever closest family member was in range.
“Why did this happen to me?” she asked over and over again.
It wasn’t until the end of November, however, that she turned agitated, violent, and then brutally ill. It took Marie and her nursing skills to figure out that Rese, who’d been left to self-administer her medicines, had become addicted to painkillers. Now that her supplies had dwindled, she was going through withdrawal. Marie contacted Praeger, and he sent a new supply of pills to Marie so she could administer them to Rese and begin to wean her off the opiates.
In early December 1944, the north winds blew hard and came laden with snow. The icy gale found every crack and seam in the building, which whistled day and night. They used whatever they could find to stuff and chink the cracks and
huddled around their coal stoves for warmth. Emil fell ill with chills, a low-grade fever, and a cough that would not quit. By December 12, he was weak, hacking up mucus, and spiking fevers that had Adeline and the boys frightened because during them he would often scream out at terrors unseen and then cry and moan in inexplicable shame and regret. More than once, Adeline thought she heard Emil say he was doomed and there was nothing he could do about it.
Chapter Twenty-One
In the nightmares and hallucinations provoked by the soaring fevers, Emil traveled back in time and faced torments he had spent years avoiding, denying, and then crated away in the deepest recesses of his mind. But as the refugee lay sweating, twitching, and twisting in his bunk in Wielun, the screws and slats of those crates failed, and the events inside broke free.
September 15, 1941
Dubossary, Transnistria
On his way to buy roofing supplies for the house he was building for Adeline and the boys in Friedenstal, Emil had driven his horses into town by a back route, a two-track shortcut that brought him to the south end of Dubossary around three o’clock that afternoon. It began to rain almost as soon as he’d arrived at the lumberyard south of town, and he knew the shortcut would now be too muddy and slick for his horses to navigate while pulling a load in the rain and the dark. Leaving the lumberyard, Emil decided to take the northern route through Dubossary. It was a much longer way back to Friedenstal, but the roads would be better.
He had not been in Dubossary since before his father was taken to Siberia and his family was thrown off its land. As he rode through the town, he was surprised at how much he remembered and how much he did not. Near the town center, Emil saw a high barbed-wire fence he did not recall around several blocks of buildings and two SS sentries guarding a gate in the fence.
Beyond the town limits, all traffic slowed at a German checkpoint. When he reached the front of the line, he showed his papers to an SS soldier, who studied them.
“Are you from Dubossary?”
“Friedenstal,” Emil said. “It’s about thirty kilometers from here. A farming village.”
The Last Green Valley Page 22
