The line moved again toward the stairs. Emil dropped his arms and slouched forward a step. Why was he even bothering to eat? It was over. He’d lasted seven months. He could not do it alone anymore. And God? God was just a story in a—

“The bee is a miracle,” he heard a man say in German, but in an odd, thick accent. “No bee, no flowers, no fruit, no beauty, no life.”

The line moved a foot. Emil went with it, lifting his head and turning to search for the source of the voice.

Out of the blizzard, a pale apparition appeared: a prisoner caked in snow led the pony and the death cart coated in hoar, with four bodies already aboard and two other prisoners helping from the back, driving the wheels and the weight through fifteen centimeters of snow.

The lead prisoner had his hood up as he tied the pony to a post about twenty meters from Emil and turned to the two others, saying, “Eat honey and you’ll live a long life. It’s a gift from God. Makes you strong. Makes you live long. We’ll eat first? Then the graveyard, yes?”

Emil squinted, shook his head in disbelief, but then, as if drawn by some magnetic force, he left his place in line and walked toward the men of the death detail as they made for the back of the meal queue.

Emil followed them, calling out, “Corporal?”

It was windy, howling. The three prisoners kept walking.

“Beekeeper,” Emil shouted. “Survivor of Stalingrad!”

Two of the men continued on. But the one who’d been leading the pony stopped, pulled back his hood, and turned to look at Emil with a puzzled and then amused expression, as if someone had whispered a joke in his ear that he was only now getting.

“Martel,” Corporal Gheorghe said, grinning at him. “I said I’d see you again, and there you stand!”

Gutengermendorf, Soviet-Occupied east Germany

Captain Kharkov shut off the flashlight, put it in his pocket, and strolled in Adeline’s direction, holding his vodka bottle in one hand while unbuttoning his long coat with the other.

“A perfect, perfect place,” the Russian said. “I’m surprised none of us thought of it when we tried to figure out what became of all the good women of Gutengermendorf on Saturday nights. But your tracks in the snow did not lie, and here we are.”

“No,” Adeline said. “Not with me.”

Kharkov smiled and kept coming. “Oh yes, with you. This I am allowed. You, fair Adeline, are a spoil of war, an older, more experienced spoil of war. And one I will enjoy greatly, because even if it is as cold as a witch’s tit in here, I know it will be so deliciously warm beneath your skirt. A treat for both of us on Christmas Eve.”

She said nothing but felt the fear and the shame already bubbling in her. He’d come to the end of the pew where she slept and saw the bedding laid out.

“You thought ahead,” he said, drinking the last of his vodka. “How lovely.”

The Soviet officer tossed the bottle into the next pew and started toward her, unbuckling his belt, long coat open.

“Don’t, or—”

“Or what?” he said, only to come up short, a meter from her, staring at the carving knife she held in her hand.

“Or I’ll cut you into pieces,” she said. “I’m good with a knife.”

Kharkov smiled. His eyes went half-lidded as he took a step back. “I’m sure you are. I saw you take care of that chicken. But I’m not a chicken, Adeline, and your knife doesn’t scare me.”

He reached inside his coat and came up with a pistol that he pointed at her. “So drop it, and let’s get down to pleasure, shall we?”

“I have a husband,” she said, not lowering the knife.

“I don’t care.”

“You have a wife, a baby.”

“Not tonight,” he said, smiling.

Adeline swallowed and said, “If you come any closer, I will kill you. So shoot me. Get it over with. I’d rather be dead than let you on top of me.”

That enraged Kharkov, who thumbed off the pistol’s safety. “You think I won’t?”

“Go ahead and shoot me,” she said again. “The town will hear the shot. They will investigate you for murder. You’ll be sent to the gallows, and your young wife will know you not only as a rapist, but a cold-blooded killer on Christmas Eve. And when you’re in your cell, waiting to die, you’ll be like Raskolnikov in Crime and Punishment. You read it. Of course you did. And you remember how the murder ate up his mind. Like a cancer before the gallows. Is that what you really want, Captain Kharkov?”

The Soviet officer glared at her, the pistol trembling in his hand, before aiming past her and shooting. She jerked, startled at the gunshot, and slashed the knife in front of her, sure that he was coming for her now.

But Kharkov had already left the pew and was storming away. Wrenching open the rear door, he snarled, “German bitch,” before slamming it behind him.

Adeline stared after him for a second before running to the door with the knife still in her hand and throwing the bar. Then she began to shake so hard, she had to stumble back to her pew and sit for fear she’d collapse. Tears came and the loneliness, followed by the certainty that a man like Kharkov would not let this stand. He would find a way to attack her or punish her.

It took a long time, until the candle was nearly spent, before she truly believed he would not return, and she was able to calm herself down enough to take the carving knife and slip it under her pillow. Then she took off her boots and put on her extra wool socks and her knit hat before blowing out the candle and snuggling into the blankets.

To get her mind off Kharkov, she tried to summon Emil’s image. Instead, she asked herself who she would be if another year passed and she was lying in this pew next Christmas Eve with no word from him. The lonely world that question suggested frightened her so much, she curled into a ball, and fell asleep praying that a year from now she would be in his arms.

Poltava, Ukraine

In the basement of city hall, Emil gulped down his soup and tore into the extra bread and boiled brisket, onions, beets, and cabbage they were given in a nod to the holiday. Every few moments, he’d lift his head to reassure himself that Corporal Gheorghe really was there, across the table, and eating just as voraciously.

Emil felt better than he had in weeks, and he realized it was just because the mad Romanian soldier was with him, not a friend really, not even an acquaintance, just a familiar face and odd voice in a cold, distant place on Christmas Eve.

When he’d slurped the hot soup and eaten half of his double rations, Emil said, “How did you get here?”

“The sun, the stars, the moon—”

“Right,” Emil said, cutting him off. “Just give me what happened here on earth.”

“But it always begins up there.”

“I’m sure it does, but start when we left you a hard day’s ride from the Romanian border.”

Corporal Gheorghe thought about that and then smiled. “You have a sister-in-law, I remember. Still sweet as honey?”

“Malia, that’s right. Tell me from there.”

“She married?”

“Not the last time I saw her.”

The corporal smiled, tapped his lips, and then explained that shortly after the Martels rode on to Romania, the Red armies that had pursued them suddenly halted to resupply just shy of the border. Romania’s leaders saw the writing on the wall and decided they were better off flipping their allegiance from Hitler to Stalin.

“I got orders to surrender to the Soviets and tell them we fight for Moscow now, not Berlin,” he said. “But when I walked up with a white flag on my gun, they arrested me, sent me to prison camp in Ukraine, but not this far east.”

“What happened?”

The Romanian grinned. “I escaped after four months, started home to become a beekeeper, walked ninety kilometers, and got caught. They sent me to a second camp. I escaped again.”

He tapped a finger on his left temple, just below his scar from Stalingrad. “That time I got smart and walked mostly at night. I almost made it to the Romanian border.”

“But caught again,” Emil said, shaking his head. “And they didn’t shoot you?”

He laughed. “Can you believe it? They said no more Ukraine for me, that I was going far east to work in the mines. But instead, they brought me here five days ago. It’s good, I think.”

“There’s nothing good about this place,” Emil said, then described the disease and mortality rate among the prisoners. “It’s a death trap. You’d be better off in the mines.”

“I heard that the first day when I raised my hand for burial detail.”

“For the double rations?”

“That, too,” he said, then leaned forward and whispered. “A secret? The burial detail is how I escaped the first two camps. Join the detail. We’ll escape together.”

Emil shook his head. “You’ll kill yourself touching those bodies.”

The Romanian tapped his temple again. “Not if they’re frozen, Martel.”

Emil thought about that. “Maybe. But why the burial detail? How do you escape?”

The corporal leaned forward even more. “Russian guards? They fear ghosts because there are too many dead in one place. They won’t go to where the bodies are actually dumped. In a snowstorm, we can run.”