“I was ordered to keep you here until it’s done,” she snapped. “Someone else will take care of the bodies today.”

The guard said it all with such finality that Emil turned around, knowing he was defeated, at least for that day. In the past, he would have been enraged at his misfortune, one more example of his brutal, sorry, unlucky life. But he didn’t allow anger to consume him. He just went back to work, knowing that if he did not escape today, he would escape tomorrow. He felt it in his heart and with every fiber of his being.

Darkness fell. The wind swirled snow. Another train rolled into the rail yard on tracks beyond the covered spur line and the loading dock where Emil was shoveling lime into wheelbarrows and then truck beds. Determined to finish so he would not have to return in the morning, he had not taken a break since talking to the female guard more than an hour before.

Emil walked up to her now and said, “Permission to piss.”

Before she could reply, there was a startling clang!

One of the dump trucks leaving the docks had slid on ice and hit another one trying to enter. The guard trotted that way.

Emil called after her. “Permission to piss!”

“Granted!” she yelled, and began to run toward the two drivers, who were out of their cabs, and looking ready to fight.

Emil climbed down off the loading dock onto the coupling between two of the freight cars and jumped off the other side of the spur line, landing in snow about twenty meters from the other train, which had stopped. He started to unbutton his fly, when a strange sensation came over him, sent prickles up his back.

And then Emil knew why. The other train. If he was right, if he’d kept his bearings, the train right in front of him was headed west.

He had a split second of indecision before he remembered how Corporal Gheorghe said that dreams almost always come true in ways you don’t expect, that the Universal Intelligence almost always has a better plan in store for your visions. He’d imagined the pony and a crazy ride and having to stop the train by downing a tree. This way was simpler. This way was easier.

Emil remembered telling Adeline that he’d know the way to freedom when he saw it, and now, freedom was right there in front of him for the taking.

The westbound train started moving, the wheels screeching and drowning out the shouts coming from the Russian guard and the two drivers back by the loading dock. Feeling himself explode with happiness, Emil sprinted to the train, grabbing onto and clambering up the nearest ladder.

The train car had no roof. It was a hopper car and nearly filled with snow-covered coal. As the train gathered speed toward a lighted section of the rail yard, Emil threw himself into the hopper and lay flat on the coal, facedown, telling himself over and over to have faith, to believe it was done, that he was already gone.

He felt the train pick up speed, heard voices, but no shouting. And then everything went dark and stormy around him, and all he could hear was the clacking of rails and the whistling and moaning of wind. Emil got up on his knees finally and saw the lights of Poltava fading through the curtain of falling snow behind him.

After two hundred and ninety-five days in purgatory, after watching nearly one thousand eight hundred of his fellow prisoners die around him, and after transporting and praying over many of their bodies, Emil rocked back his head and threw his arms and hands wide to the snowing skies, knowing for certain that through a man’s unrelenting heart and God’s mysterious grace, dreams really can come true.

Chapter Thirty-Three

March 9, 1946

Gutengermendorf, Soviet-Occupied Germany

Some seventeen hundred kilometers away, Adeline tucked the boys into bed, kissed both on their foreheads, and quietly left their bedroom, knowing they’d both be asleep in moments. She went to the kitchen where Katrina Holtz was drinking tea.

“Are they still here?” Adeline asked the middle-aged owner of the house.

“Been and gone, disappointed as usual,” Frau Holtz said, and laughed.

“Should I go tell Erica to come up?”

“No, she says she rather enjoys it down there. Gives her time to read.”

While the two young Soviet soldiers billeted across the hall from Adeline had shown no interest in her, Frau Holtz’s seventeen-year-old orphaned niece, Erica, had definitely attracted their attention. Six nights a week, Erica was around and pleasant with the Russians, but in no way led them on. On Saturday evenings, however, her aunt put her in the basement in a space hidden by a tall, wide set of shelves jammed with jars and books and tools.

Adeline no longer felt threatened enough to spend her Saturday nights in the old church. Working for Colonel Vasiliev had seen to that, giving her an invisible but strong and clearly understood shield of protection. As long as she applied her cooking skills and kept the colonel fat and happy, she believed she’d be safe. And Vasiliev had given her free rein to go into Berlin to shop at the Soviet officers’ commissary, where she often purchased items for herself, the boys, and for Frau Holtz and Frau Schmidt.

She rarely went up to the Schmidts’ farm anymore, however; Captain Kharkov was still living there, and she preferred to avoid him. But Adeline ran into Frau Schmidt in the village every so often and had learned she needed baking chocolate for her husband’s upcoming birthday.

“I’m going to make a surprise delivery to Frau Schmidt,” Adeline said to her landlord. “I promise I won’t be long.”

“You’re sure?” Frau Holtz said. “It’s Saturday night.”

“I’ll go the back way across the fields. No one will see me, and I’m sure the Soviet officers who live with her have already gone into Berlin for a night of carousing.”

She could see her landlord disapproved but left the kitchen, put on her boots and her coat with a block of baking chocolate in the pocket before wrapping her warm scarf about her neck and head. Stepping outside the front door of Frau Holtz’s low, mustard-colored house, Adeline took a deep breath of chill air, pulled on her mittens, and waited for her eyes to adjust. She turned left, went through the big swinging gates, and padded in five centimeters of new snow past the big brick barn where she’d stowed their little wagon.

Raising the latch on the smaller, rear gate, she went out under the bare limbs of the elm trees and out into the field. The quarter moon overhead reflected off the snow, giving her just enough light to start toward the knoll and the Schmidts’ farm. She was less than halfway across the field when she had her first thought of Emil that day.

Adeline halted in her tracks because she realized she had not woken up early and gone outside to look east for the dawn. When had she stopped doing that? Yesterday? The day before?

Feeling hollow, Adeline understood it had been more than a week since she’d gotten up to pray and to look at the few pictures she had of Emil. The weather had been horrible last week. That was true. But it had been clear since. She had no excuse. And she’d forgotten to pray with the boys before bed!

She bowed her head, closed her eyes, and tried to see Emil’s smiling face. She could remember him the day they’d met quite clearly, such a young, tough, and shy man who’d already survived so much. She could remember how he loved to laugh and sing and dance when he had a little beer or homemade wine in him. But the only other clear memory she could summon was his anguished face as the Polish militiamen dragged him away.

Go west, Adeline! Go as far west as you can, and I promise I’ll find you!

Out there in the cut and snowed-over sunflower field, Emil’s words echoed in Adeline’s head as she opened her eyes and started walking again, trying to calculate how long it had been since he’d been taken from her. When she figured out it was almost a year to the day, she stopped again, her mitten traveling to her mouth, trying to stop the sobs of loneliness and unknowing that erupted from her. Is he alive? Where is he? In Siberia? In one of those mines?

The thought of her beloved Emil enslaved, working in a cramped, hot tunnel below a frozen wasteland, almost took Adeline to her knees. But then a gust of wind blew a mist of snow in her face, shocking her and making her realize she was cold. Shivering cold.

Adeline tried to run to heat up her body, but the snow was too deep in places, and a ring of questions began to form and repeat in her head: Was Emil alive? Would she ever see him again? If he lived and somehow found her, would she even know him when she saw him? Would the boys? A year or two, of course. But ten years? A decade of not knowing?

When she finally crested the knoll and was walking past the Schmidts’ barn, she was trying to tell herself that she could last ten years if Emil could. But what if Emil can’t last? At what point do I give up?