The Last Green Valley

by Mark Sullivan

  He thought of his father, mother, and sister and wondered if he’d ever see any of them again. Were they with Adeline? Or had they gone back to Friedenstal as his mother had wanted? Were they somewhere to the southwest of him a hundred kilometers? Even if they were, he decided, he was still going west. He was still fulfilling his dream.

  An hour later, with Emil crouching below the lip of the hopper car, the train pulled into a freight yard at the central rail station in Kiev. It was windy, brilliantly sunny, and bone-numbingly cold. Seeing men scattered about working in the yard and no soldiers, he heaved himself up and over the side of the hopper car and almost slid down the exterior ladder. He moved quickly away from the train, thankful for the brisk wind, which was swirling the snow, erasing his tracks. After getting behind other boxcars, he spotted a pickax almost buried in the drifting snow and grabbed it.

  Emil threw it over his shoulder and walked down the tracks toward the main station building. Another rail man exited a door at the top of a low flight of concrete stairs. He smiled, ran up them past the man, and caught the door. He stepped inside a long narrow hallway, let his eyes adjust to the dimness, and felt an unfamiliar yet welcome sensation brush across his face, hearing noises he hadn’t heard in more than a year. Once he could see, he started walking toward the source of the sensation and the noises: the considerable gap between the threshold and the bottoms of the swinging double doors at the far end of the hallway through which a steady stream of heat flowed and the bustle of a crowd echoed.

  Near the end of the hall, a door stood ajar on his left. He pushed it open and found an empty room with wire-mesh lockers, probably for the rail workers. He went in, seeing a lavatory with a deep sink and a mirror off the locker room. Emil pulled off his wool hat and moved to the mirror.

  For the first time in more than a year, he saw his own face and condition. It was a shocking reflection. Adeline would not have known him if he’d asked her to dance. He barely recognized himself.

  Emil had lost more than twenty-five kilos. His shabby, worn prison clothes hung off him like a scarecrow’s outfit. His hair and beard were bristly and cut unevenly. His cheeks were hollow. His teeth were yellowed. His facial bones stood out against his skin, which was scabby, drawn down, and filthy with grime. His eyes, sunken, dark, and hardened, troubled him most.

  Knowing he was taking a terrible chance, but also knowing he could not go into the central station in Kiev looking like someone who’d just dug himself out of a grave, Emil struggled from his coat, sweater, and shirts. With every breath, his ribs seemed to move like so many player-piano keys against the skin of his bruised, chaffed, and lesioned torso.

  He turned on the faucet and stuck his head and face under the ice-cold water. He scrubbed for a good ten minutes, dunking and dunking until his true features were revealed. There, he thought, looking in the mirror again. Adella and the boys would almost know me now.

  With that, he caught something come alive in his eyes, a glint where there had been none. It reminded Emil of the plan he had come up with the night before. He smiled, headed into the locker room, and went through the lockers, finding a faded blue workman’s coverall, a pair of work boots newer than his own, and a shirt and a wool peacoat far less filthy than his prison-issue jacket.

  As Emil dressed in the stolen clothes, he felt no remorse. He’d been unjustly thrown in a prison camp for a year, needed the clothes, and figured life could be unfair to someone else for a change. He threw his old clothes into an empty locker after he’d retrieved his rubles and put the wad of notes in the pocket of his pants beneath the coverall. Only then did he leave the room, surprised that no one had bothered him. Then again, according to the clock and the schedule he’d seen on the wall, the day shift had started less than an hour before.

  Emil left the pickax in the hallway and went through the doors out into the organized chaos of Kiev’s central train station. The crowd of voices babbling. The colors so brilliant after so many months of gray. The wondrous smells of fresh food cooking. The harried faces of people returning to their lives or boarding trains to start new ones. For a moment, it was all so overwhelming, Emil had to put his hand on a wall to keep from falling.

  Hunger pangs brought him back to his senses. He followed the irresistible smells into the ticketing-and-waiting area where he knew vendors would be selling food. He found at least ten of them, mostly women, and forced himself to look at everything they had before ordering black tea, two small rolls of bread, and a chunk of dried sausage. There were many other, richer, and sweeter items he would have much rather had as his first meal out of captivity, but Emil was nervous his gut would revolt if he did. He found a bench and ate his food sparingly. A soldier walked by, never giving him a second glance.

  Emil ended up spending three hours wandering around the train station, watching, listening until he knew when the next freight and passenger trains west were leaving. He had more than enough money left to buy his way to Poland but feared having to reveal his lack of documents to do so. In the end, he retrieved the pickax and went back out into the freight yard.

  It was still bitterly cold and windy. He found the freight train he was looking for and tried the sliding doors on several boxcars before finding one unlocked. He acted as if he were digging a hole with the pickax outside the car until the train started to move.

  Emil was climbing inside with the pickax, when he heard shouts. He got in, looked out, and saw workmen running at him. One was yelling, “Hey, that’s my coat!”

  “I left you mine!” Emil cried, shut the door, and threw his weight against it as the train picked up speed.

  Emil left that train at the very next stop. He could not chance that the workmen were calling ahead about a thief and stowaway. After dark, he caught the next freight train going west and got off at the next stop. It became a pattern and a way of survival for Emil over the next ten days.

  Not only could he find food, water, and warmth in the train stations and depots, they offered him the chance to listen to the rumors and the propaganda swirling through Ukrainian society in the aftermath of the Soviet reoccupation. Everything he heard convinced him that the new life under Stalin and the Communists was the same as the old one: based on fear, tyranny, and the destruction of anyone who had an original thought or dream.

  On the eleventh morning of his escape, March 20, 1946, the weather finally broke warm. On the eleventh evening of his escape, shortly after he’d crossed the Polish border and slipped out of a freight car in the town of Chelm, Emil was captured by local police.

  He’d prepared for this possibility as part of his plan and began acting a little odd like Corporal Gheorghe, speaking Russian, telling them he was a survivor of Stalingrad who’d been blown up in the first wave of attacks and then walked through the battle unscathed. He was just trying to go home to find his wife and sons where he left them in Legnica. The soldiers didn’t believe him and put Emil in a jail with others awaiting deportation back to the East.

  The rest of the men in the jail were miserable and angry. But Emil stayed remarkably calm, believing that this was just a detour on the road to his dream. He was going west. He was finding Adeline, Walt, and Will.

  The very next day, he was saved from deportation when guards asked him if he had ever worked on a farm. Still acting like a man who’d taken shrapnel to the head, Emil nodded and was put on a truck with twenty other men who’d escaped various prison camps. They were all taken to a new camp and put to work with other men planting row crops.

  Eight weeks later, in late May 1946, Emil heard that the baker in the camp kitchen needed help. Although he had chopped firewood for a bakery when he met Adeline, he had no experience at actually baking. Emil learned fast. For the next four weeks, he arose at three o’clock in the morning and went to the bakery to mix dough and heat the ovens. He ate fresh bread the entire time, gained weight, and made friends with the baker, who had worked for a time in Germany before the war.

  In late June, a rumor and
then a fact swept through the camp. The planting season was over and so was their usefulness. The work camp was about to close. The prisoners were to be put on trucks at dawn and then on trains headed east.

  If Emil was ever to go west, ever to find his family, it had to be now. He thought like the mad Romanian and came up with a relatively simple plan that he reluctantly shared with the baker, along with a request: that the baker exchange his Russian rubles for Polish zlotys so he could buy a train ticket home to his family.

  In the end, the baker agreed to his proposal with a shrug, a wink, and a nod. Emil broke his normal routine that night and did not return to his bunk after mixing and kneading the dough and then leaving it to rise. Instead, around five thirty the morning of June 29, 1946, he lay down on the warm floor of the bakery’s back room, behind the ovens, and “fell asleep.” He waited three full hours after the trucks and the other prisoners were gone before leaving the bakery with the baker yelling after him. A Polish guard came. The baker told him he’d found Emil sleeping in the back room when he was supposed to be on the truck with the others.

  Emil was taken before the camp’s commanding officer, where he again acted shell-shocked and said only that he’d fallen asleep and didn’t mean to miss the train. The camp commander had wanted to leave the rural area as quickly as possible and was furious at this snag in plans.

  When he was asked what to do with Emil, now that the camp was officially closed, the commander thought about it, and then said, “Take the brain-damaged idiot outside the gates; give him a swift kick in the ass; and let him go become someone else’s problem.”

  Emil Martel goes west and finds his wife and sons, he thought, hearing Corporal Gheorghe’s voice in his head as he hurried away from the prison gates, massaging his sore rump, and giving thanks to Jesus, God, the Divine, the Universal Intelligence, the Almighty One, the stars, the moon, and the planets over and over again until he was long out of sight.

  With the warmer weather and wanting to avoid all human contact, Emil slept in forests by day and walked mostly at night for almost three weeks, navigating by the stars to put as much distance as he could between himself and that last prison camp outside Chelm. He waited until the morning of July 19 to walk into the farming community of Pulawy, northwest of Lublin, Poland, and ask to buy a ticket to the last stop before the German border.

  The clerk gave him a strange look, but said, “That would be Rzepin.”

  “Rzepin, that’s the place,” Emil said. “My great-aunt lives there.”

  The clerk was skeptical but sold him the ticket. After buying food for the ride, Emil took a window seat, put his hat over his eyes, and slept as the train took him across the country. He had to change trains twice, once in Warsaw. His plan was to leave the third train at Rzepin, then cross the German border in the dark on foot.

  Twelve hours after he’d started, however, when the third train of his trip made an extended stop in the city of Poznan, Emil recognized possibility when he saw it. It was early evening, still a few hours from darkness, and he had grown hungry again. Emil left the train, entered the main station, and saw a large group of men, close to fifty of them, gaunt, shabbily dressed, and sitting cross-legged on the floor under the watch of three Soviet armed guards.

  He bought the usual staples of his bland diet and asked a clerk at the ticket counter who the men were and was told they were German prisoners of war going home. There had been some sort of agreement just reached that allowed for a prisoner swap. These men, all originally from western Germany, were going to be swapped for eastern German prisoners of war.

  Feeling breathless, and remembering again how the Romanian was always talking about the opportunities laid before you when you have a clear vision of where you want to go, Emil said, “You mean they are all going to west Germany?”

  “To Braunschweig in the British Zone. I assume that’s west.”

  Emil thanked her and moved to one side where he could eat and watch the German prisoners and the Soviet soldiers. The men sitting cross-legged on the floor all seemed relaxed, happy to be going home, even if it was as prisoners.

  And why not? Emil thought. They might be in prison in the West for a while longer, but when they’re out, they’ll be free men. You can’t say that about the men coming the other way.

  Then he remembered something else Corporal Gheorghe had told him about most people seeing the door of good fortune open, but then not acting, not walking through the door, not taking a chance, only to see the door slam in their face.

  You decide; then you act. You choose faith; then you walk through the door.

  Another, larger group of German prisoners came into the station with their fingers laced behind their heads at the same time the conductor entered from trackside to call for all passengers westbound. Emil made his decision and acted in faith, stuffing the rest of his food in the pockets of the jacket he carried.

  The original three Soviet soldiers ordered their prisoners to stand and lace their fingers behind their heads at the same time the bigger group tried to move past them to get better seats on the train. There was some bumping. Grumbling. Cursing. In the mild upheaval, Emil slipped in among the prisoners and laced his fingers behind his head.

  No one checked Emil’s documents before he boarded the train. If they had, he would have shown them his ticket to Rzepin and gotten off at the next stop. Instead, the train was waved through at the German border, picked up speed, and took Emil swiftly west.

  He modified his cover story on the ride, telling the men who asked that he was Corporal Emil Martel, an ethnic German who fought for the Wehrmacht. He’d survived Stalingrad and fought at the Dnieper River where he lost his documents before being captured and put in a prison in a place called Poltava.

  “But you are not German,” sniffed one of the men. “Why are you here with us?”

  Emil fixed him with a steady gaze, then smiled, and offered him some dried sausage. “No, I’m not German. But Reichsführer Himmler himself thought I had purer Aryan blood than most. Because of it, my family was protected by the SS and brought to Germany. They are waiting for me.”

  The man seemed slightly taken aback and accepted the meat. “Where?”

  “Braunschweig,” he said. “They’re in a camp near there for refugees.”

  “British Zone,” the man said, his suspicions dulling as he chewed some of the sausage. “That’s not far from where they’re taking us.”

  “I’ll just be happy knowing my family is near and safe until I am freed.”

  An hour and a half later, the train passed south of Berlin and Adeline and the boys. Emil would later figure out that he’d gone within eighty kilometers of them.

  The train finally stopped east of Wolfsburg. Emil and the other prisoners were ordered out onto the narrow platform while the three passenger cars they were riding in were transferred to another engine. It was sweltering hot by then, and the prisoners were irritable and restless when they were told to show their documents before getting back on the train.

  Emil went boldly near the front of the line, ready to bluff his way on. But he’d no sooner told the soldiers that his documents were lost at Stalingrad than he found himself ordered to stand over against the wall of the train depot. The car behind the locomotive was filled with prisoners before the soldiers checking documents moved on to the next car in line.

  Emil watched them carry the table forward and set it in front of the open door to the car before ordering the man next in line to present his papers. No one seemed to be watching him, so he strolled down the platform, jumped off the far end, and crossed the tracks in front of the locomotive, waving at the engineer.

  He hurried along the opposite side of the train to the third passenger car, which was empty. Crouching, he climbed inside, hurried down the aisle, and took the third seat before ducking down and waiting.

  He heard the table being moved into place outside the train car. When the first prisoner entered the car, Emil made a show of tying his s
hoe before sitting up. When he glanced at the man taking the seat beside him, he saw the prisoner he’d given sausage to earlier in the day. The man nodded at him and looked away.

  Sweating from the heat and the risk he’d just taken, Emil pulled his cap down and pretended he was sleeping until the train finally left, heading south. Less than thirty minutes later, the train veered west and slowed to a stop amid rolling farmland. Emil could see a stream running through a lush field and could not help thinking of Adeline’s green valley. Was he close at last? Was she already there?

  But then a Soviet soldier came through the car from behind Emil.

  “Get out your papers again!” he shouted. “Show me your papers! If you wish to cross into the British Zone, you must have your papers out and ready. Now!”

  Chapter Thirty-Five

  December 24, 1946

  Gutengermendorf, Soviet-Occupied east Germany

  Adeline awoke at five o’clock that Christmas Eve morning and eased out of bed, feeling as if her legs and arms were made of lead. Her head was pounding and groggy as she dressed in the dark, left the room, and got her coat and canvas shopping bag.

  She trudged out into the cold, heading to the station and the five-thirty train to Berlin. She wanted to be first in line when the officer’s commissary opened at seven. Then she could be back in time to prepare lunch and the evening meal for Colonel Vasiliev and his officers, and still make it home before dark to celebrate the holiday with the boys.

  Waiting alone on the platform, stamping her feet to stay warm, Adeline felt alternately irritable and deeply, deeply sad. At first, she tried to blame it on the terrible sleep she’d been getting lately. But after she got on the train and closed her eyes, the real reason for her depression wormed its way forward.

  The Christmas Eve before, after she’d held off Captain Kharkov with the butcher knife in the old church, she’d asked herself who she would be if another year passed and she found herself lying on a cold, hard pew with no word from Emil.