The Last Green Valley

by Mark Sullivan

  “Emil!”

  “Papa!”

  He spun around, and the dreams and spirits of hope that had lived in him for more than two years became real and human again. Adeline was jumping down from the first car with Walt and Will right behind her. They ran at each other and fell into each other’s arms.

  Emil held Adeline tight when both their legs wobbled and they sank to their knees, hugging and kissing each other. The boys came in to hold them, all of them shaking, sobbing, and bursting with a happiness so beautiful and pure, none of them would ever forget it.

  “We’ll never be apart again,” Emil said. “I promise you that.”

  “Never,” Adeline said.

  “Never,” Walt said.

  “Never ever,” Will said.

  They held on to each other as if they’d all arisen from the dead, barely hearing the conductor put their little wagon beside them. Finally, when the train began to pull out of the station, Adeline drew back her head from the crook of Emil’s shoulder, blinking away her tears and smiling in awe as she gazed up into his eyes and saw they were burning with brilliant love for her, just the way she’d dreamed it.

  Overwhelmed, she choked, “Our life is a miracle, Emil!”

  “One miracle after another,” Emil said, and kissed Adeline like it was the very first time.

  Chapter Thirty-Nine

  September 23, 1951

  Aboard the USS General R. M. Blatchford

  Fog had formed after sunset and turned the cloudy night as black as any Emil Martel could remember. Nearing midnight, it grew dank cold, the kind that gets in your bones, but he refused to leave the foredeck of the troop transport where he stood near the bow, peering west, eager for any sign of light.

  Earlier in the evening, there had been many other pilgrims on deck with Emil, all looking for that first glimmer of new life. But one by one they’d slipped off to their cabins, and now there remained only a handful still keeping watch.

  Adeline came up behind him and put her arms around his waist. “You don’t want to come to bed? They say we can’t get off until morning anyway, and my stomach is at it again.”

  “I want to see this,” he said. “I want you and the boys to see it, too.”

  “Okay,” she said, snuggling up against him. “Then I’ll wait with you and pray my dinner stays down for the first time since we got on this ship.”

  “That would be a gift.”

  “Wouldn’t it?”

  As far as the Martels were concerned, every day that had followed their escapes from Communism and their reunion in the West had been one more miracle, a gift from God for which they were deeply and constantly grateful. Emil and Adeline had not cared that they all lived for a short time in cramped quarters at the displaced persons camp. And they did not mind toiling out in the fields as hard as they had under Stalin while the boys attended school. The food was infinitely better, and they were together again, free to make something out of their second chance at life.

  Adeline told Emil everything that had happened to her and the boys after he was dragged away by the Polish militiamen. Emil gave her an edited version of events after he was taken. He described the long march to the train that took him to Poltava. He told her about living in the basement of the museum with two thousand other men and the diseases that had ravaged his fellow prisoners. He even told Adeline a bit about Corporal Gheorghe and how he’d come to Poltava and how they’d been on the death detail and planned to escape together, only to have the Romanian transferred to another prison camp with higher security. And he described in detail how he’d escaped and rode trains west.

  But Emil still felt he could not tell Adeline about the massacre in Dubossary and how he was able to confess to the Romanian corporal but not to her. He didn’t want to hurt Adeline or make her feel less about him in any way. He felt she’d been through too much already.

  During the summer of 1947, the Martels were moved to more-permanent housing in Lütgenholzen, south of Hanover and about two hundred and fifty-five kilometers west of Berlin, where Emil and Adeline continued to work in the fields while the world tried to find permanent homes for them and for the millions of other people displaced by World War II and its aftermath. Many refugees were going to South America, including Argentina. Others had their sights on Canada and the United States.

  The Martels wanted to go to North America, but they needed a sponsor, a relative or someone residing there and willing to give Emil a job and his family a place to live for a year while they got on their feet. They also needed to show that they were in good health. Adeline had never felt better as they settled into their new life. Walt and Will grew, put on weight, and made big strides academically in that first year. But Emil’s health was not good. He suffered abdominal pain and was often violently ill with vomiting and diarrhea. He turned jaundiced and weak.

  In the summer of 1948, Emil collapsed in the fields and was rushed to a hospital where doctors discovered eggs and larvae in his stool. Whether it was from the pig manure Emil had spread in the fields or from the garbage and rancid food he’d had to eat at times during his escape from the prison camp, the doctors determined he was infected with a tapeworm that had attacked his liver, leaving him near death. They rushed Emil into surgery and went in through his back, removing two ribs to get at his liver. When they reached it, the doctors were horrified to find a baseball-sized tapeworm surrounding one lobe.

  After they removed the parasite and left the wound open to drain, Emil hovered near death for days. Adeline and the boys kept vigil over him, but never once lost faith that he would survive.

  When Emil finally awoke, he was weak but happy to be alive. Within a day, however, he’d turned agitated and gloomy, not like his post-escape self at all.

  After a week, as he lay in bed, his torso wrapped in gauze, Adeline asked him what was bothering him. Somehow, Emil understood that he would never know peace unless he stopped hiding part of his past from her.

  “I will only speak about this once,” he said, “but you deserve to know. Do you remember when we first returned to Friedenstal, and I took the wagon and horses and went to Dubossary to get roofing supplies?”

  Adeline did remember and felt her stomach grow queasy. “What happened?”

  Over the course of a long afternoon while the boys were in school, Emil told her everything: how he’d been stopped leaving town by then captain Haussmann; how Haussmann had forced Emil and other ethnic Germans to go to a remote ravine where members of the SS were shooting Jews; and how he’d begged God not to make him participate; how Haussmann had handed him a Luger and told him to prove his loyalty to the Reich by shooting a Jewish teenager and two younger girls; how he’d refused at first; and how Haussmann had put a gun to his head; how he’d changed his mind so he could see his own family again; and how he was preparing to shoot, when he was stopped by Haussmann’s superior who invoked Himmler’s order that no one be forced to kill Jews; and how instead he’d spent the night burying the hundreds shot there.

  “But make no mistake, Adella,” Emil said. “I made the decision to kill them before I was stopped. I didn’t see God’s hand in Haussmann’s superior showing up until I was at my worst moment in Poltava and Corporal Gheorghe showed me that I had done the right thing, and even though I’d decided to shoot, I was prevented from doing it.”

  Adeline had listened in growing dread of what Emil might have done until he’d described the entire sequence of events. Hearing how the Romanian who’d survived Stalingrad had saved Emil’s mind and soul in the prison camp completely erased her fears.

  “Corporal Gheorghe was right,” she said, squeezing his hand. “You refused, Emil. You didn’t know about Himmler’s order, and yet you refused. That took staggering courage, my love. The kind of courage that most men lack. I’m . . . I’m proud of you, Emil, proud to be your wife.”

  Emil felt his eyes mist. “I’m proud to be your husband. I have never known anyone as courageous and loving and good as you.”
<
br />   “Stop.”

  “It’s true. We are all together because of your courage and your refusal to quit.”

  Adeline smiled and brushed away a tear. “Thank you.”

  They held hands for several minutes, just loving each other before Adeline said, “Do we know what happened to Haussmann?”

  Emil nodded. “I saw it in the newspaper. After we left the refugee camp outside Lodz, he was transferred to a combat unit. He survived the war, was arrested, and was going to be tried at Nuremberg as part of the Einsatzgruppen case. But he committed suicide in his jail cell before the trial began.”

  “Coward.”

  “Yes. But I don’t want to talk about Haussmann or that night in Dubossary ever again. Okay?”

  She nodded. “And thank you for telling me.”

  On the foredeck of the General R. M. Blatchford, Emil and Adeline heard a horn blare in the darkness and the fog. Within minutes, they heard a bell clanging.

  “We’re close,” Emil said. “We have to be.”

  “I’ll get the boys while my stomach’s still calm,” she said, kissed him, and walked away.

  Emil continued to peer off the bow, sure that he’d be seeing lights by now. But like everything the past three years, events were happening much more slowly than he wished.

  They’d finally found a sponsor the year before, one of Adeline’s long-lost uncles who owned a farm and needed help because his son was about to be drafted. In return for two years of Emil’s labor, the family would receive lodging, food, and a small stipend to use to get on its feet after the work obligation was fulfilled. With the sponsor in place, the Martels were moved north to yet another displaced persons camp where they studied English and their immigration application wound through the maddeningly slow process of verifying their identities and pasts.

  Finally, nine days before Emil would come to be searching for lights beyond the bow of the ship, and after living as refugees for more than seven years, the Martels went to Bremerhaven, boarded a transport that had brought US occupation troops to Europe, and finally set sail west. During the week-long voyage to America, Adeline was seasick almost every day. Still, she, Walt, and Will made deep, lasting friendships among the other ethnic Germans aboard. His family aside, Emil had kept largely to himself, spending every afternoon on the foredeck near the bow, watching the sunset and dreaming about their life to come.

  Emil did not see himself being a full-time farmer again. Not for long, anyway. As Corporal Gheorghe had noted, deep down he was a hammer, not a plow. Despite being imprisoned in Poltava, he’d actually enjoyed seeing buildings materialize right in front of his face, the magic of one man’s dream set down on paper and made real by a crew of men’s hard work and skill. He’d decided long ago that he believed at least part of what Corporal Gheorghe had taught him. Was the world, the universe, all one entity? Was God inside him? Was he inside God? Emil still struggled with those questions. But the Romanian was right about one thing: all it took to have a good life was a cheerful, grateful mood, a clearly envisioned, heartfelt dream, and the willingness to chase it with an unwavering belief in its eventual realization.

  Emil’s dream for years had not been to just survive in the West. He wanted to live and to thrive there, making fair money for a fair day’s work, giving his wife a safe, comfortable life in a home of their own, and providing his boys with the formal education he’d never had and the opportunity to go their own way when they were ready. More than that, secretly Emil desired a car. He’d fallen in love with automobiles while living in Germany and liked to imagine himself driving around wherever he wanted to go, as free as a man could be.

  On the deck of the troop transport, Adeline returned with the boys, about to be fourteen-year-old Walt and about to be twelve-year-old Will, both of whom were wrapped in blankets and grumpy at being awakened in the middle of the night.

  “I can’t see anything,” Will said.

  “I’m tired,” Walt said, yawning. “I want to—”

  “There!” Emil said, pointing out over the bow where a light had appeared, faint at first, but growing, and then another followed by dozens more as the fog swirled and lifted a little. People began to clap and cheer. Others went to find their families. As tugboats came to pilot the ship through the Verrazano Narrows, the foredeck became crowded with refugees cheering each glimpse of New York City through the ever-changing fog.

  The ship slowed on entering Upper New York Bay, came to a complete stop, and lowered anchors shortly after one a.m. The fog had lifted to thirty feet, and they could see lights on all the shores around them.

  Emil was about to say that this was as good as it was going to get for the night, when the breeze picked up and the fog swirled before a vent formed high in the sky to the northwest, revealing the lit torch and the hand of the statue.

  People began to gasp all around the Martels because the vent was growing with each passing moment, revealing the arm, the face, and then the crown of Liberty. Emil lost it then, grabbed Adeline and his boys, held them tight, and broke down sobbing.

  As everyone on the deck around them roared their delight or dissolved into tears at their own deliverance, Emil choked, “We did it! We made it!”

  “Your dream come true, Emil,” Adeline said, kissing him. “Right there in front of you.”

  By then, the fog had blown away to the east, revealing the lady in all her glory. Emil stared up at the statue in awe, shook his fist, and whispered, “Freedom. All a man could ever want.”

  “We still have to find Mama’s green valley,” Will said.

  “This is enough,” Adeline said, also unable to take her eyes off the statue. “I don’t need the valley.”

  “But we’re going there the day after tomorrow, aren’t we?” Walt asked.

  “We get on the train the day after tomorrow,” Emil said, and kissed Adeline. “Then we’ll have a three-day ride.”

  “To the beautiful green valley?” Will asked.

  “It has to be,” Walt said.

  Four nights later, when the train pulled into the depot in the tiny town of Baker, in far-eastern Montana, a freak, early-autumn storm was bombarding the area with snow. Adeline’s long-lost uncle was waiting with his Jeep. The little wagon had been left behind in Germany in favor of a single wooden crate of belongings that they lashed to the roof and drove off through the storm to the farm where they were to live and work for the next two years.

  The storm was howling when they reached the farm and were shown to a bunkhouse where they collapsed in exhaustion. When Emil awoke at dawn the next morning, the storm was over, the temperature was falling, and the sun was shining brilliantly on the bleakest, most barren, snow-blasted landscape he’d ever seen.

  “We’re in Siberia,” he muttered in disbelief. “What the hell have I done?”

  For the next month, as the boys started school in town and Emil learned the workings of the farm, he became convinced that he had made a gigantic mistake bringing his family to America, to Montana, and especially to Baker. That conviction grew as winter set in and the true cost of feeding and housing an extra four mouths became clearer to Adeline’s uncle and his wife, who complained often about the amount of food Will and Walt were consuming. Emil tried to work as hard as they would let him and told himself that they’d be off the farm within a year.

  By February 1952, however, his frustration deepened. Their sponsors had stopped paying Emil’s full wages, saying they had to keep some of the money back to make sure everyone was fed. Then their sponsors’ son was given a 4-F at boot camp and returned home. In early March, Adeline’s uncle told her they did not have enough work and food. She and her family had to leave the farm and make their own way. Adeline and Emil needed to find jobs, and fast.

  Rather than fight the situation, rather than be angry and bitter about the short hand he’d been dealt yet again, Emil drove straight into Baker and discovered that the town’s first hospital was being built. He found the foreman and spoke to him in broken
English, asking for work. The foreman told him the only job he had to offer was as a laborer and concrete mixer.

  “Concrete mixing? That I know how to do from building a hospital in the Russian prison camp I escaped from,” Emil said, smiling.

  “You escaped from a Russian prison camp?”

  “Yes. I know cement from this time.”

  “Then you’re hired.”

  Chapter Forty

  The Martels rented a small house in Baker within walking distance of Emil’s work site. Adeline found a job cleaning rooms at the only motel in town for fifty cents an hour. Walt officially changed his formal name from Waldemar to Walter and found work after school at the butcher shop and at the movie theater as a projectionist. Will changed his name from Wilhelm to William and called himself “Bill.” He bagged groceries at the local store and swept the theater floors.

  They pooled their money, saving until they could afford to buy a small lot across from the high school and pay to have a basement foundation dug and poured. Emil worked at the hospital site and other projects during the day and, with Bill, put down a subfloor on top of the foundation in the evenings. They also installed plumbing, electrical lines, and a woodstove in the basement.

  The Martels lived in the basement the entire winter of 1952–53, enduring minus-thirty-degree-Fahrenheit nights and big snowstorms. But it was their basement, and Emil and Adeline could not have been happier. And little miracles continued to unfold all around them.

  Walter happened to mention that the butcher often threw away the pigs’ heads and hocks because no one wanted them. Adeline couldn’t believe it and asked him to bring them home. She made headcheese, soup stock, and braised hocks in the basement that winter. Emil liked to joke that they ate so much free pork, he felt like they’d left Ukraine and ended up in hog heaven.