The Last Green Valley by Mark Sullivan (best manga ereader txt) 📕

forgotten ragged sweater and a ripped shirt hung from a nail on the back of the door.

“Well,” Adeline said, taking in the total bleakness of their new home, “I guess we can only go up from here.”

Emil tried to smile at her. But he had a growing conviction that this apartment and this building had been chosen for him and for his family by Major Haussmann to make them all suffer for what he’d done to the SS officer back in September 1941. And hadn’t he seen Nikolas enter a much nicer building? Of course he had. Nikolas was being rewarded while Emil and his family were being punished.

“No running water,” Adeline said when she went to the kitchen area.

“We’ll have to find the community well,” Emil said. “And latrine.”

“This helps,” Adeline said, reaching into the corner for a stubbly straw broom and dustpan. “Could you do that? Take the boys to find water? There are two buckets there in the corner. And before you go? Please open all the windows.”

She took the scarf off her head and tied it around her nose and mouth. Emil grinned. When his wife got to cleaning, she was a whirlwind. After getting the windows open for her, he took the pails and went downstairs, seeing into Marie’s and his parents’ apartments, which were also miserable and austere.

Outside, Johann shook his head the moment he saw Emil.

“The windows leak,” his father said. “The winter will be cold.”

“I’m going to ask for other quarters tomorrow,” Emil said.

“We’re going to find water,” Walt said. “Do you want to come, Opa?”

Johann thought about that. When Karoline started yelling about something inside, he nodded before fetching two tin buckets. In the street, they found a Pole who spoke enough German to direct them to a public well several blocks away.

By the time they’d gone there, waited in line, drawn their water, and returned to the third floor, Adeline had swept up most of the flies and rodent turds and dumped them out the window. She found lye bar soap beneath the stack of plates and pans in the sink. She and Emil used the sweater and torn shirt left behind as mops to scrub the floors and bunks with the soapy water.

Since the boys knew the way to the well, Emil gave them the job of resupplying the water. With the next two bucketsful, they washed the dishes, pots, and pans and then took inventory of the kitchen. Only then did they start to bring up the last of their belongings from the little wagon.

There was no fuel in their stove, but her mother’s range produced a flame. That night she baked the last of the Zwieback rolls in her mother’s apartment. They also made a soup from the dried foods and two bruised onions Adeline pilfered from the quarantine-camp kitchen before they left that morning.

They waited to eat until after the sun had gone down and with it the summer heat. In the lantern light, Adeline made them all join hands and give thanks to God for their deliverance from the Soviets and for the food and the roof over their heads.

She could tell that Emil didn’t share her gratitude. He seemed to be putting on a brave face, but she knew he was brooding about their living conditions.

After the boys had fallen asleep, she said, “This isn’t forever, my love.”

“I know,” he said, “but I didn’t expect to leave one bad life for a worse one.”

“We’ll make a better life for ourselves. You don’t expect it to just fall from the sky, do you? A better life?”

“I don’t expect anything to fall from the sky. I’m willing to work for it.”

“You work harder than anyone I know, Emil.”

“Except you,” he said, and took her in his arms. “My queen.”

Adeline laughed. “A queen with her king and princes in their grand new palace.”

“You forgot your green valley.”

“Never.”

They kissed and held each other for a long time. When they parted to get ready for bed, through the open windows, they saw lightning and heard thunder. They climbed into the lower bunk and held each other as the rain began to drum on the roof. Within minutes, Adeline could hear water dripping and spattering off the floor beside her.

“Nowhere to go but up,” Emil said, and held her tighter.

The days passed. The boys attended school, made friends, and were soon out in the streets, playing long into the evening. Adeline negotiated the German ration system and managed to put decent meals on the table. When Emil sought out the VoMi officers to ask that they be moved to other quarters, he was denied and told he was being ungrateful for having been saved from the Judeo-Bolsheviks.

Adeline was assigned to work in the town bakery. Emil was put to work in the few fields that had been plowed and planted. He hoed for hours in the heat without complaint, glad for the familiar feel of the farm tool in his hands and the satisfaction he got from a job done right. As a boy, before his family was thrown off its lands and later when the Nazis returned them, he had toiled like this, long and hard, day after day. He liked it. This kind of brute labor suited him. It felt honest.

As he worked his hoe, Emil did his best not to think of Major Haussmann but did not always succeed. He kept flashing back to the fear that had seized him when Haussmann shot the first time, just missing his head. That memory was enough to get his heart tripping in his chest and adrenaline erupting through his veins, clouding his recall of all that had happened, especially after Haussmann’s second shot.

What had the major said? Something about the clothes he’d been given and the place they were to live and how he should decide whether he wanted to be part of a Greater Germany. But he could not remember