Emil stared at the snow ahead of them, trying to filter what the corporal had just told him.

For more than four years he had blamed, then denied God for making him decide to kill those Jews. But now, he could see the work of a greater power in all of it. He didn’t have to kill that night because he had refused to do the wrong thing in the first place. Emil’s heart pounded. I was heard. I was. Emil felt breathless as he looked over at Corporal Gheorghe, thinking of him no longer as some head-injured madman, but as a strange and divine messenger of salvation.

“You believe that?” Emil said finally.

Nodding, the Romanian said, “I think the Almighty One spared you after refusing to kill the three Jews. See? You were a hero to God. And to your wife and sons and to your sister-in-law, sweet as honey.”

Emil blinked. A hero? He shook his head.

“A hero doesn’t give up, and I gave up yesterday,” Emil said. “I was weak. Lost. I reached my limit. I said I could not go it alone anymore.”

He smiled. “See? You have a hero’s heart, but you are a man. You have limits. Even you can’t go alone, can’t do everything by yourself. What did you do when you gave up yesterday?”

Emil thought back. “I had this terrible weight in my chest, and I prayed for it to go.”

“Yes. You showed faith, prayed. Asked for help with your burden. It’s good. Now, ask the Divine to walk by your side. You will never be weak or lost again. With the Almighty as an ally, even a crazy beekeeper with a dent in his head can survive the Battle of Stalingrad!”

The pony stopped with a snort, and the cart came to rest in the axle-deep snow.

“Far enough,” the Romanian said, and went around his side of the cart. Emil did the same. It was only then that Emil saw all the wolf tracks and crow feathers and the odd bone or two sticking up out of the snow about three meters in front of the pony, whose flanks twitched and shivered.

“We just dump them here?” Emil said.

“They’ll never know. We turn the cart around, we push, they fall, we leave.”

They led the pony in a tight circle and then released the lever that held the bed of the cart down and pushed up on the end closest to the pony. The stack of eight bodies slid off into the deep snow. Nikolas’s corpse landed faceup.

“We should go now,” Gheorghe said. “That way, the guards won’t be suspicious.”

Emil barely heard the Romanian. Seeing his past in a completely different light now and no longer imprisoned by that night in Dubossary, he walked over by Nikolas’s corpse and the bodies of prisoners he did not know. On Christmas morning 1945, after more than fifty months of denying God, Emil began to pray, asking the Almighty to walk by his side and to accept the departed souls of the corpses he was about to turn over to the birds, the wolves, and the wind.

Chapter Thirty-One

January 25, 1946

Berlin, Soviet-Occupied east Germany

Adeline climbed down off the crowded train with two large, empty canvas bags and the purse Frau Schmidt had given her as a parting gift. She walked outside the station where teams of men under Soviet guard were working to patch bomb holes and erect new ironwork. Outside, she was shocked. The last time she was in Berlin, the summer before, she and the boys had to weave in and around the destruction, which seemed everywhere. Now, but for the skiff of snow, the streets were mostly clear, and traffic was flowing.

She got out a notebook in her purse and checked an address. She asked a police officer how to get there and was relieved to find it was only twelve blocks away.

Walking into a raw north wind through Berlin on that dank, cold day, Adeline thought to herself once again that it really was remarkable what a month could do to your life. The day after Christmas, Frau Schmidt had helped her go to the local committee in the village to seek a lodging reassignment.

When the clerk asked why, Frau Schmidt said, “To keep from being raped.”

The clerk, a woman, had immediately softened. “I’ll see what I can do for her.”

“She’s a wonderful cook, too. It’s a crime having her as a field hand.”

The clerk knitted her brows, then tapped her lips. “How good a cook?”

Frau Schmidt said, “She can make a stringy old hen taste like a spring chicken. She makes wonderful noodles and apple cake.”

The woman said, “Let the poor thing speak for herself. Do you speak Russian? Know any Russian dishes?”

Adeline smiled and nodded. “I speak fluent Russian and know many Russian dishes from a kitchen I used to work in back in Ukraine.”

The clerk sent her immediately to a large home at the edge of town, the billet of the ranking Soviet officers in the area, including a Colonel Vasiliev, who was in his sixties, corpulent, and curt. But he loved the pork chop and spicy applesauce dish Adeline prepared for him for lunch, and hired her on the spot.

When Adeline happily hurried back to the clerk’s office for a housing reassignment, the colonel had already called ahead. It was done. She could move the very next morning to new quarters in a room in a house on the village’s main street, not far from the school.

Reaching the address in Berlin that Colonel Vasiliev had given her, Adeline remembered how relieved she’d been when she reached the Schmidts’ house that day and found Captain Kharkov and the other officers had not returned. Frau Schmidt had been upset that Adeline was packing already but pleased at the change in her fortune.

Adeline told the boys only that she’d gotten a job cooking and they had to move into the village, closer to their friends from school, which they liked. They had so little to their name, it did not take more than an hour for her to get their things into the little wagon, which Herr Schmidt helped load into his larger wagon.

“Can we come back to sled?” Will asked.

The old farmer smiled and patted him on the head. “Anytime you want.”

“You’re always welcome, Will, and you, too, Walt,” said Frau Schmidt, who insisted on riding into the village with them so she could see how they’d be living.

They set off in the last twenty minutes of good light as fat snowflakes filled the frigid air. Halfway to town, Adeline saw Captain Kharkov and the other two Soviet officers walking up the road toward them.

When Kharkov spotted Adeline, Will, and Walt and their little wagon, he stood in the road blocking the way. Herr Schmidt reined his horse to a stop.

“What is this?” Kharkov barked. “What is happening here?”

“They have been given new quarters in the village,” Herr Schmidt said.

“I was never apprised of this!”

“Orders of Colonel Vasiliev,” Frau Schmidt said. “She cooks for him now.”

In Berlin weeks later, Adeline grinned, recalling the fury in Kharkov’s face as he stood aside and glared at her.

I beat him twice in three days, she thought proudly, before walking up to a Soviet soldier standing before the door that matched the address she sought. Adeline showed him her papers and the official letter from Colonel Vasiliev granting her entry.

The Russian guard, who could not have been older than nineteen, nodded and handed them back to her, saying, “Buy me a little chocolate in there, yes? The food we get is dung.”

“No promises,” Adeline said.

He sighed and opened the door into a commissary for ranking Soviet officers. She entered, and the door closed behind her. Adeline took a look around and felt as if her breath had been stolen.

The room was long and wide, with a low ceiling, and shelf after shelf after shelf bulging with food. And not just the staples. There were freshly butchered meats, beef and pork, and fowl; and herring and other fish chilling on ice; and cheese and honey; and twenty different kinds of vodka and four cigarette brands. They even had the specific beluga caviar the colonel had placed at the top of her shopping list.

After a lifetime of want and lack even in the best of moments, Adeline found that being there in the officers’ commissary, amid the dizzying array of delicacies and endless choices, was almost overwhelming. She’d known that people high up in the Communist system lived differently than the ordinary people they claimed to support. She just had not understood how well they lived while others like her had suffered for decades.

Adeline did the numbers in her head as she shopped. Near the end of her list, she realized the colonel had given her more than enough cash to cover the purchases. And she had a little money of her own. She paid for Colonel Vasiliev’s list of groceries and acted as if she were going to leave, then made a show of staring at the list and groaning.