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 bruised clouds coming fast. She woke the boys and helped them into their patched woolen overalls, jackets, and hats, before pulling wool leggings up under her smock and dress and putting on a heavy wool sweater under her coat. She took the reins from Emil to let him change. He’d donned the last of his woolens when Adeline felt the first snowflake hit her cheek.

He retook the reins as the snow flurries became big flakes that began to stick and plaster the horses’ flanks and withers. He told Adeline to get under the bonnet and the tarp with the boys.

A kilometer farther on, the snow became driving sheets of white spiraling out of the northwest and hitting them sideways. The horses turned their heads away from the wind, which made reining them and keeping the wagon on the road difficult in the increasingly treacherous conditions. The snow came slanting in even harder, stinging Emil’s eyes and cheeks. With every gust, the wagon creaked and groaned, and the bonnet stretched and squealed across the bowed wood frame.

Emil looked back at his family. “I want all of you on the right side against the wind, so we won’t tip over. And check the knots holding the cover to the frame, Adella.”

While Adeline got the boys shifted over to the right side and checked the knots, Emil wrapped his scarf around his neck, mouth, and nose and pulled his cap down low over his eyes. But the snow now rode on a shuddering gale. It pounded him, found the collar of his coat, and crawled down his back. It stung his knuckles through his mittens and gnawed at the exposed right side of his face until his skin was raw and then numb.

The horses plodded on with their heads held left and low, leaving their right shoulders and flanks exposed to the wind that grew more frigid and gustier by the moment. Realizing his horses were at risk, he pulled off to the side of the track and gestured to his mother-in-law to do the same. Other wagons ground past him.

Adeline and the boys were huddled on the wagon’s right side beneath the blankets. She had her back to the side of the wagon, which was now shaking violently. She looked at him in alarm. “Will it hold, Emil?”

“I don’t know,” he admitted, rummaging in a box before coming up with leather blinders for both horses.

He threw his forearm across his eyes, then fought his way back to Oden and Thor. He buckled the blinders to their hackamores, shielding their eyes from some of the brutal sidewinds. Then he went back to Lydia’s wagon, got her ponies’ blinders, and put them on. Looking back along the track, he saw a gap in the line of the convoy.

Emil jumped back aboard his wagon, grabbed the reins, and snapped them across the horses’ rumps. The wagon slid sideways for a few meters in the snow, then straightened and began to roll forward. The blinders seemed to be helping. Both horses had their heads more upright and their ears forward and alert. Emil saw their earlier cue, and ducked his own head low and left, absorbing the brunt of the weather across his right shoulder and side.

He kept sneaking quick looks toward the snowed-in track, catching glimpses of the wagon in front of him a good thirty meters, and little else beyond or to the sides. Everything had gone white and billowing. Emil sensed they were moving across wide-open farm country with little to block or slow the winds. In the woods or where the land was broken, he was sure they would have stopped the trek, told everyone to take cover in a creek bottom or a ravine.

A huge gust howled toward them, smashed the Martels’ wagon broadside. They went up on two wheels and slammed back down. The boys and Adeline screamed.

Thor and Oden felt the jolt, heard the screams, and dug in with their hooves, taking short, choppy strides fast enough that the wagon’s rear end swung in the snow, almost throwing Emil off and causing him to drop the reins. Thor and Oden ducked their heads away from the oncoming gale and snow, and before Emil could stop them, they had gone right, off the track, and were gaining speed across bouncy terrain.

The snow and wind were blinding as Emil reached forward again and once more tried to grab the reins lying over Oden’s rump. But they’d iced up and slipped through his mitts. He thought about the brake on the left front wheel but feared flipping or breaking an axle in this uneven ground. His horses were spooked, disoriented, and at a canter now, quartering to the storm as they went, throwing wet snow and mud behind them. The wagon pitched, bucked, and slid as the blizzard pounded them.

“Stop them!” Adeline shouted. “We’ll crash!”

Emil took off his left mitt and leaned and reached as far as he could, snagging the reins with two fingers. He soon had them wrapped three times around his right wrist before grabbing forward on the reins with his bare left hand, bracing his feet, and driving himself backward against the weight of his runaway horses.

He yanked at the bits in their mouths, forcing their heads lower and lower, until they finally slowed and stopped. Their sides heaved and quivered with exertion and fear. They blew hard through their noses and coughed, stamped their feet, and again turned their heads from the storm.

“I want to go home!” Walt said.

Emil ignored him, tied off the reins, turned his back on the weather, and climbed up on the bench to look behind him. All he could see was white and swirling. No trees. No hedgerows. No other wagons. No track. Nothing but the storm.

“Emil!” Adeline shouted. “Which way do we go?”

He thought about all the bucking and sliding they’d done, the mud and snow clods the horses had kicked up, and said, “We’ll follow our tracks back.”

It worked for the first few minutes. He was able to see where they’d come from but understood how fast the snow was falling and how quickly the wind was covering their tracks. He wanted to urge his horses to go faster, but he was having trouble seeing.