“Doesn’t anyone who has ever lived on a farm?”

Emil hesitated, not knowing how best to respond. But there was something about the man that he already trusted.

He said, “I want to have a time when I am older when I have enough to live without worrying about food or staying warm, and then I want to go fishing. Every day if I want.”

“Fishing?” Wahl said, and smiled.

“I used to fish when I was a boy,” Emil said. “It was a way to get food when the Communists weren’t giving us any. But it was more than that. You never knew when the fish would come. There was . . . I don’t know . . . mystery in it.”

“I can see that,” Wahl said. “But that’s when you’re an old man. What about now? What’s next after you get out of this place?”

“I want to go west,” he said, and immediately regretted it.

Wahl cocked his head to one side. “How far west?”

Emil wanted to change the subject but could already tell he’d hooked the German sergeant through the lip, and he wasn’t shaking him free.

“As far as I can go,” he said finally. “Across the ocean.”

“Why? What do you think you’ll find there?”

Emil knew his tongue had been loosened by beer and that he was already late for supper and that he’d already spoken too much. But he gazed straight into Wahl’s eyes and said, “Freedom. Isn’t that all any man wants when it comes right down to it?”

Wahl showed no response at first, his eyes fixed on Emil for several beats before he nodded. “That is correct. And as someone who has taken an interest in you, Herr Martel, I advise you not to repeat that part of your plan to anyone until this war is over.”

Adeline was furious with Emil when he came home late, smelling of beer, and admitted to her that he’d told Wahl that he, a new immigrant to Hitler’s Greater Germany, dreamed of going west, looking for freedom, and a place to fish.

“Are you crazy?” she shouted. “They’ll throw us in a prison or worse!”

“We live in a prison,” he shouted back. “Look at this place!”

“It’s what we have,” Adeline said, turning colder. “And if you want better, you should be thinking of keeping us safe, not telling the Germans, ‘Thanks for the protection, but we want to go west to the Allies.’”

“I never said that,” Emil said. “But you’re right. It was foolish. I’ll stay clear of Wahl and won’t mention it again.”

Two afternoons later, however, on August 25, 1944, Emil exited the fields, heading for home, only to find the gimpy sergeant waiting for him again.

“Come have another beer, Martel,” Wahl said.

“Thank you, Sergeant, but I must—”

“Come. I have something to show you, something I think you’ll find interesting.”

Emil sighed and followed Wahl back to his house as the German told him of life on his own family farm and asked questions about Adeline and the boys. Even though Emil was consciously trying to keep his replies curt and vague, the sergeant had a way of making him want to talk openly.

In Wahl’s kitchen, the routine was the same as before: beer, sausage, cheese, and bread. But instead of putting the food on a plate on the table, he put it on a cutting board and told Emil to take the beer mugs and to follow him. Emil hesitated, feeling fear. Was this some kind of trap?

Wahl went down a short hallway off the kitchen to a closed door and opened it with a key before turning on a light. He smiled at Emil. “You’ll find this interesting.”

Emil swallowed and followed Wahl. He entered the room as the sergeant set down the cutting board with the food on top of a metal table. Other than two chairs and a padlocked travel locker, the rest of the room was empty.

Emil thought of stories he’d heard of men back home being lured to their doom by men posing as friends who urged them to speak freely. These same men were tortured before they were sent to Siberia. Were the Nazis the same? Was this what he was facing for talking to Wahl?

“Why are we in here?” Emil asked, hearing the tremor in his voice when Wahl turned his back on him and crouched before the locker.

Wahl worked the lock and did not reply. Emil began to sweat and took a slug of the beer. “Please, Sergeant. What is this about?”

“The way west,” the German said, and stood up, holding another box with steel ribbing. He undid the hasp and lifted the lid. “Have you ever listened to a shortwave?”

He removed a radio from the box and set it on the table near the food and beer.

Emil stared. “The SS said they were forbidden here. You won’t get shot for having that?”

Wahl laughed. “I would if I had not been a Wehrmacht radioman for many years before the bomb got me. And there are times my superiors here need to contact their superiors in Warsaw or Berlin. But for tonight, no transmission.”

Emil frowned. “What’s transmission?”

“We can’t talk over it,” he said, plugging the radio in. “But we can listen.”

Emil had never owned a shortwave, which had been forbidden under Stalin as well, so he watched with fascination as Wahl attached the radio to a speaker and then to a line that ran out the window to an antenna mounted on the roof. The sergeant threw a switch, and a red bulb glowed.

“What are we going to listen to?”

“What every man wants,” Wahl said.

Chapter Twenty

Woo-wooing noises and harsh static poured from the speaker. The sergeant twisted knobs, and voices soon sounded out of the electric hiss, speaking languages Emil did not understand, a babble that unsettled him, made him aware of how little he knew of the greater world.

After several tries, the sergeant tuned in to a German male voice broadcasting from Berlin that described Nazi victories in France, Belgium, and Hungary where the führer’s forces were heroically holding back Stalin’s southern armies. Wahl turned the dial on the radio again, stopping at a language Emil did not understand or recognize.

“London,” Wahl said, looking over at him. “BBC in English.”

The sergeant twisted the dial ever so slightly, saying, “Now BBC German Service. Listen how different the news is from Berlin’s version.”

The BBC announcer was female, spoke perfect German, and went straight to the point, describing the liberation of Paris and Charles de Gaulle leading troops down the Champs-élysées, as well as ongoing battles elsewhere in France and Italy, where despite fierce German resistance, the Allies were making significant advances. The broadcaster also talked about Romania’s recent surrender to the Soviets and the Red Army’s bombardment of Budapest, before shifting to news from the South Pacific.

Emil said, “It sounds like there is war everywhere.”

“No, it sounds like Germany is losing,” Wahl said, and held up his hands. “See, there, I said it: the Fatherland is losing, and the Allies are winning on almost every front. It’s only a matter of time before Hitler gets squeezed between Eisenhower and Stalin. It’s only a matter of time before Berlin falls. And you and I need to be ready for it.”

After leaving Wahl’s house, Emil had so much to tell Adeline, he wanted to sprint home through the streets. His instinct and experience told him to slow down, to be just some refugee field hand overlooked or dismissed as unimportant by any and all authorities.

When he reached their building, however, Emil leaped up the stairs, pounded past the open doors of his parents’ apartment and Marie’s, where he could hear the twins crying, and on up the second flight of stairs and into their apartment where Adeline sat by herself at the kitchen table with her head down and her back to the door.

He shut the door behind him. “You won’t believe what happened today.”

Emil came around the front of her. She didn’t look up. He crouched beside her and said, “I heard freedom today, Adella. The voice of it, anyway.”

Adeline lifted her head and stared at him with bleary eyes that turned angry. “You’ve been drinking again. I can smell it.”

“One beer,” he said. “And you’ve been . . . crying?”

“Maybe I have. Aren’t I allowed?”

He threw his hands up in the air. “Of course, you’re allowed, but just listen a second. Where are the boys?”

She looked away, irritated. “Playing. I told them to be here before dark.”

“Okay,” he said. “We have a friend now. Sergeant Wahl.”

Her expression turned incredulous, then hostile. “You don’t know that. What if he is more than he seems? What if he is a member of the Gestapo, trying to expose you?”

Adeline was normally such a kind person Emil was taken aback by her tone. “He’s not.”

“How do you know?”

Emil swore her to tell no one, not her sister, or mother, or cousin, or acquaintance, and then described his second visit with Sergeant Wahl, his shortwave, and the news from the BBC German Service.

“Paris falling means Hitler is losing in the West,” Emil said excitedly. “The Soviets have taken Romania, are bombing Budapest, and are nearing Poland. Germany is being squeezed, Adeline. They’re losing.”