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

Their father’s eyes misted as he gazed helplessly at his brain-injured older daughter.

“Yes, sweetheart, but that was when life made sense. Now there’s nothing but madness.”

They came at three o’clock the following morning with heavy fists and batons pounding on the front door, waking the entire family up. Lydia began to cry almost immediately, and so did her older daughter.

“What’s happening?” Adeline’s little brother said sleepily from the trundle bed below her.

“Shhhh,” she said. “I’ll go see.”

Adeline climbed down from the bed in the dark.

“Papa?” Adeline said when she’d reached the short upper hall and saw the silhouette of her father starting down the steep stairs with a lantern.

“Stay there, child,” he said softly, gazing back at her. “It’s okay.”

But she could not help herself and followed him, creeping two stairs to look down and to her right where her father stood before the door, trembling.

“Open up!” a voice called in Russian.

He bowed his head, set the lantern on the ledge, and drew back the bar. A baton came out of the night, striking her father low in the gut. He buckled, staggered backward, and fell.

Adeline screamed, “Papa!”

He doubled up, rolled over in agony. Two big men in dark long coats came in.

“I am Commissar Karpo of the OGPU,” said the third man behind them, smaller, older. “Comrade Losing, you are hereby charged with being a kulak.”

“You mean someone who knows what they’re doing?” he gasped.

One of the bigger men kicked him.

“No, comrade,” the commissar said. “I mean someone who steals from the people and from the state.”

“I’ve stolen nothing,” Adeline’s father said. “I gave you a good harvest.”

Commissar Karpo looked at his men. “Search it. Out back, too.”

“What are you looking for?”

“We’ll know when we find it.”

Lydia, Malia, and Wilhelm gathered behind Adeline on the staircase, terrified as they watched the secret policemen handcuff Karl and leave him sprawled on his side as two of the goons tore the lower house apart. Ten minutes into the search, one of them came back with a big sack of grain.

“Found it in a bin in the shed,” he said.

The commissar smiled. “And you say you steal nothing, Comrade Losing?”

“A man has a right to provide a little extra for his family in return for all his hard work.”

“Wherever did you get that idea?”

Lydia pushed by her children and went weeping down the stairs. “Please don’t kill him.”

“Kill him?” the commissar said, amused. “No, your husband will go to work now where he will learn to think better of his fellow man. In Siberia.”

They gave her father an hour to gather his warmest clothes. He was permitted to hug his wife and each of his children before they led him toward the door.

Lydia wept. “How long will he be gone?”

“That is not my decision,” Commissar Karpo said.

“What is to become of us?”

“What becomes of all kulaks,” he said, and turned away.

“I will come back!” Adeline’s father shouted as he was dragged off into the night. “I promise you all I will come back!”

Chapter Three

Late March 1944

Twenty-five kilometers east of the Transnistria-Moldova border

In the Martels’ wagon, trailing another wagon, and hundreds more ahead of them all mixed into the semicontrolled chaos of the retreating German armies, Adeline could remember her father disappearing into the darkness of that terrible night as if it happened yesterday.

I promise you all I will come back!

Nearly fifteen years of waiting had passed since that night. Adeline could still recall the raw loss on her mother’s face in the days and weeks after her husband vanished, a wound that had grown deeper with each passing year of not knowing, of trying to keep hope alive.

Adeline glanced over her shoulder, saw her boys dozing with blankets around their shoulders and across their laps. Despite the quickening wind, she got up to stand on the wagon bench beside Emil as the horses took them clip-clopping down the road. Looking back over the top of the canvas bonnet, she saw her older sister sitting next to her mother in their wagon, head up, swiveling, taking it all in, seeming fascinated by the newness of the landscape and the ever-changing convoy.

But not Adeline’s mother. Lydia was slumped behind the reins as if her shoulders bore a lead weight, staring at her ponies, lost in years of unanswered prayers. Lydia had never stopped believing Karl would return. When they were finally thrown out of their ancestral home in 1930, she had insisted on writing a letter to her husband, telling him where they had gone and why. She left it behind a loose stone in the foundation where he always used to secret his valuable things.

Recalling the years of hardship, toil, and loneliness her mother had endured after their father was taken and after they’d been turned into the streets, Adeline felt her heart ache with pity. And what about Wilhelm, her younger brother? She had no idea what had become of him after the Germans drafted him to fight three years ago. It was the same story with Emil’s older brother, Reinhold. Drafted into the Wehrmacht, taken from his family, Reinhold had been sent west to defend Paris and had not been heard from since.

Adeline looked past her mother’s wagon and saw six or seven others behind her, all driven by women, all with those same hunched-over shoulders and gritted expressions, all widows of Stalin. Her mother was not the only one leaving loved ones behind that day. Yes, this trek west under Nazi protection was a new beginning for Lydia and for all the other single women in the caravan. But it had to be the end of their hopes as well, an end to their dreams of ever seeing their husbands come home.

How do you live with that? Adeline wondered sadly. How do you survive?

“Adeline,” Emil said, tapping her leg, “get the boys ready. There’s a storm coming. We’re going to get hit hard.”

Adeline looked north and saw the