Emil would later tell her that he had to soak her in wet sheets while she spoke gibberish to people he could not see. She took more quinine, but it did not knock the disease back as quickly as it had before. On the fifth day, while in fever and suffering through a long, hard delivery, she gave birth to a son they named Waldemar.

He was small at birth, under two kilos, but even as sick as she was, she’d experienced the most intense joy of her life seeing her firstborn child, holding him to her breast and seeing him feed on her milk. He was everything she’d ever wanted or hoped for. When Emil had thrown his arms around the both of them, she’d felt more complete, and happier than she’d ever been.

But the malaria would not let her go. Adeline was symptom-free one day and feverish the next. As it does, malaria chipped away at her, wore her down. During another attack between Christmas and New Year’s, she became distrustful of ever feeling good again. Then her breast milk trickled to an intermittent seep.

Waldemar was struggling, barely getting enough to survive by the start of the second week of January 1936. Adeline’s fevers had stopped finally. She was eating and beginning to get her strength back. But she was barely able to give her baby a single feeding a day let alone the seven or eight he needed to thrive.

They’d taken the baby to the same doctor who’d given Adeline quinine, and he’d told them the baby needed milky fats immediately. He recommended they either find a wet nurse or get fresh cream from a dairy to feed to him until her strength and milk returned. But they could not find a wet nurse, and cream had so far been impossible to come by in Pervomaisk in the dead of winter.

“I’ll go out again,” Emil said.

“I’m going with you,” Adeline insisted.

Emil went to fetch his mother. Karoline had fallen on her hip before Christmas and was walking with a cane.

“He’s very weak,” Adeline told her.

“I can see that,” her mother-in-law said.

Adeline started to give Karoline instructions, but the older woman held up her hands. “I’ve raised a few of these myself already.”

Adeline and Emil went out into the streets and walked for hours that day, asking anyone and everyone how they might find cream for their sick child. Though there was a black market on such things, after nearly nineteen years under Communist rule, no one was able or felt confident enough to tell them.

Emil had to work that evening. Adeline walked with him to the brewery. Outside, she started to cry. “I can’t give him milk. That’s why he’s dying. This is because of me.”

Emil grabbed her, held her tight. “We’ll find out a way to—”

“Emil?” a man said.

They looked up to see a fellow worker of Emil’s from the brewery.

“I found your son some cream,” he said. “I left it with your mother at your apartment.”

Adeline’s spirits soared. She kissed Emil on the cheek and ran home while he went to work. She reached the modest apartment building where they lived, climbed to the third floor, and went into their flat.

“Where is it?” she said before shutting the door.

Her mother-in-law said, “Where’s what?”

“The bottle of cream,” Adeline said.

“Oh, what does that doctor know?” Karoline said. “I tried to give the baby a spoonful, and he spat it up as soon as it went down. Same thing the second and the third time. So I drank it.”

Adeline stared at her mother-in-law incredulously. “You drank it?”

“Not all of it,” Karoline sniffed, a little indignant. “And like I said, it wasn’t doing him a lick of good. And besides, I haven’t had real cream in five years, maybe more.”

Adeline shrieked. “You . . . you hateful witch, get out of my house! You just killed your own grandson!”

“I did nothing of the sort,” Karoline shouted. “Anyone with two eyes can see he’s so far gone because you can’t give him your milk! My sipping some cream has nothing to do with it!”

She slammed the door behind her.

In the end, eight-week-old Waldemar was too far gone. When Adeline gave him some of the remaining fresh cream, he did indeed throw it up and every spoonful after. Then he developed a cough that further weakened him. Two evenings later, Emil came home to find Adeline cradling the baby in her arms. He was swaddled and laboring for breath.

“He’s dying now,” she said. “He won’t open his eyes anymore.”

“No,” Emil rasped. “He’s not dying.”

“He is,” she said. “I can feel it. Can we hold him together?”

Sadness swallowed her husband whole before he came over beside her and they held their infant son between them, grieving for hours before he took his final breath and let it go in a slim, devastating wheeze that tore through the last bit of strength holding Adeline together. She began to choke, sob, to moan with a pain she’d never known, worse than giving birth to him, more primal, the agony of her heart cracking.

Emil stayed strong for her, held her through the worst of it. He sat by her for more than an hour, and never broke, never even uttered a word until she said, “We have to bury him. We need a little coffin.”

He hesitated, and then said, “I haven’t been paid yet this month. We don’t have the money to buy the lumber.”

Adeline gazed dully at him. “What?”

“We don’t.”

“Then?”

“I don’t know,” he said in total defeat. “I don’t.”

“We can’t just bury our baby in the dirt!”

“I know, but I—”

Adeline pushed her swaddled dead child into her husband’s arms. “Hold him. I . . . I can’t be in here right now. I just can’t.”

She got up on wobbly legs, took her coat and hat, and went out into the predawn. It was mid-January in north-central Ukraine. It should have been bitter and snow-clad. But the cold and the storms had not yet come. Everything around her was bleak and shadowed in brown and gray as she sat on the front steps of the building, looking southeast, trying to spot the first hint of light on the horizon.

But Adeline saw only darkness there, and her grief fought against her numbness.

She bowed her head and prayed.

“You must have taken him from me for a reason,” she said, trying not to blubber, but not succeeding. “I don’t know why . . . I don’t know why you let me get sick, why he had to die. But please don’t make me put my baby in the cold dirt like something you throw away. Please don’t make me do that to my blessed little boy.”

Unable to go on, Adeline sat there in the dark, tears streaming down her face, arms wrapped around her knees until she saw a rose-hued glow appear low in the sky to the east. Then she heard through an open window above her the tortured sound of her proud, stoic husband crying for the first time in their marriage.

That cored her out, put her in an otherworldly daze in which she faced the sky where fingers of that glowing rose color were growing, extending. Adeline was so battered by that point, she barely noticed the coming dawn as she questioned how much pain a woman could go through before her mind broke as badly as her heart.

From above her, she heard Emil hit something in their apartment and then curse God. Adeline put her face in her hands. She had heard what happens to couples when a child dies like this. She wondered if her marriage was over and felt worse than abandoned. She felt tossed aside, trash, nothing in the eyes of heaven.

A breeze began to blow. Chilled, Adeline lifted her head, wanting to pull her coat collar tighter around her neck. Though she remained in dark shadow, the rose fingers of dawn had become long and beautiful now, the tips almost over her head as the sun finally began to rise, throwing a weak crown of golden rays on the horizon.

She watched it grow stronger, thinking, How can something as beautiful as this happen on a morning as vicious as this?

The breeze gusted. Out of the corner of her eye, she caught something move on the stiffened wind, tumbling, twirling, and dancing in an odd stutter. It fluttered and lifted and then fell as the gust sighed, spiraling to a stop about a meter in front of her.

Adeline gaped in disbelief at the yellow-and-white twenty-ruble note, more than enough money for Emil to build Waldemar a coffin.

She started to sob all over again.

“Adella,” Emil said, shaking her shoulder softly. “Easy now.”

Adeline startled awake, looked around for a moment in total confusion before settling on Oden and Thor pulling the wagon and then back to Emil. “I was having a bad dream.”

“A nightmare,” he said. “You were all shook up.”

“You slept longer than I did, Mama,” Will said behind her.

“And me,” said the second Waldemar, born in October 1937, twenty-one months after the first child died.

She twisted around on the bench and found her boys lying on the folded blankets, elbows up, chins in their palms. She smiled, leaned over, and kissed them both on the foreheads.

“Why did you do that?” Walt asked.

“Because you and your brother are the miracles your father and I and God made,” she said. “And because I la-la-la love you.”