“I got this one,” the whiny soldier said.

Emil closed his eyes. He’d escaped not only to find Adeline and the boys. With the number of men succumbing to disease around him, he’d escaped to live. But now I’ll be sent back to die.

The train lurched forward a meter and stopped. The soldier on the ladder cursed. Emil was thrown off balance but stayed upright.

“That hurt my shoulder,” the whiny soldier cried angrily before the train lurched and stopped again. “You go up it.”

Their voices were close now, right on the other side of the hopper car wall. The soldier would climb up, look in, and see Emil directly below him. It would all be over. He’d fulfilled Corporal Gheorghe’s dream of escaping by train, but his own dream of going west and reuniting with his family was about to be snuffed out.

“The hell with it,” the soldier with the deep voice said. “I’m not breaking an arm or a leg over some escaped POW. If he’s in any of these last cars, he’ll be dead by morning. Temperature’s supposed to dive, hit thirty below.”

Emil’s heart felt like it was trying to smash its way out of his chest. He could hear their footsteps. They were walking away!

The train lurched and began rolling again, picking up speed, and he was beyond Lubny, heading toward Kiev, the biggest city in Ukraine. Emil held on to the ladder and began doing slow squats, up and down. If the temperature really was going to plunge to negative thirty, he would have to move all night. The best way would be like this, stable, slow, and steady.

As he fell into the rhythm of it, Emil began to think forward to Kiev. Darnitsa, the central station, would be heavily guarded by Soviet soldiers. They would search the cars, wouldn’t they? He decided he had to act as if they would search every car. At first, he considered getting off the train just east of Kiev. Then he thought, What would Corporal Gheorghe do? And came up with a bolder plan.

He laughed at the idea and then loved it and how giddy it made him. Closing his eyes, he could remember only one other time in his life when he’d felt like this: the night he and Adeline were married, a night his heart had bubbled with joy.

Emil could suddenly see that night as if it were happening all over again. He saw himself kiss Adeline at the end of the ceremony. He saw himself dancing with her to accordion music, gazing into her loving eyes, his hands about her waist.

Still holding that ladder in the hopper car, Emil realized he wasn’t that cold as long as he stayed in that memory. He kept his eyes shut, hearing the jaunty, upbeat accordion music in his mind as he let go of the ladder and began to dance.

For hours on end, Emil danced and laughed with his imaginary Adeline, sometimes thrown off his feet and falling into the snow on the floor of the hopper car as the train rounded a tight bend. But he didn’t care. In his mind and in his heart, Adella was with him and they were celebrating and that was all that mattered.

Even so, at dawn, he verged on delirious. He’d been awake more than a day by then, ten of those hours at hard labor shoveling lime and six of those hours dancing with the memory of his bride. And the Soviet soldiers had been right about the cold. He didn’t know if the temperature was thirty below, but his mitts kept sticking to the steel ladder, and the snow had turned crusted and crunchy. His feet ached. So did his lower back.

At the first sign of light in the sky and with the train still moving, Emil shook off the daze and climbed the interior ladder of the hopper car. At the top, he looked around, seeing the all-too-familiar landscape of rural western Ukraine, with vast fields bordered by thin hedgerows and coated with snow as far as the eye could see. He was surprised that the land triggered a wave of nostalgia in him. A memory surfaced from childhood, shortly after his father pulled him out of school to work on the farm. He remembered being sad at leaving school, which he’d enjoyed, but also being thrilled to follow his father out into the fields with a long day of work before them.

He thought of his father, mother, and sister and wondered if he’d ever see any of them again. Were they with Adeline? Or had they gone back to Friedenstal as his mother had wanted? Were they somewhere to the southwest of him a hundred kilometers? Even if they were, he decided, he was still going west. He was still fulfilling his dream.

An hour later, with Emil crouching below the lip of the hopper car, the train pulled into a freight yard at the central rail station in Kiev. It was windy, brilliantly sunny, and bone-numbingly cold. Seeing men scattered about working in the yard and no soldiers, he heaved himself up and over the side of the hopper car and almost slid down the exterior ladder. He moved quickly away from the train, thankful for the brisk wind, which was swirling the snow, erasing his tracks. After getting behind other boxcars, he spotted a pickax almost buried in the drifting snow and grabbed it.

Emil threw it over his shoulder and walked down the tracks toward the main station building. Another rail man exited a door at the top of a low flight of concrete stairs. He smiled, ran up them past the man, and caught the door. He stepped inside a long narrow hallway, let his eyes adjust to the dimness, and felt an unfamiliar yet welcome sensation brush across his face, hearing noises he hadn’t heard in more than a year. Once he could see, he started walking toward the source of the sensation and the noises: the considerable gap between the threshold and the bottoms of the swinging double doors at the far end of the hallway through which a steady stream of heat flowed and the bustle of a crowd echoed.

Near the end of the hall, a door stood ajar on his left. He pushed it open and found an empty room with wire-mesh lockers, probably for the rail workers. He went in, seeing a lavatory with a deep sink and a mirror off the locker room. Emil pulled off his wool hat and moved to the mirror.

For the first time in more than a year, he saw his own face and condition. It was a shocking reflection. Adeline would not have known him if he’d asked her to dance. He barely recognized himself.

Emil had lost more than twenty-five kilos. His shabby, worn prison clothes hung off him like a scarecrow’s outfit. His hair and beard were bristly and cut unevenly. His cheeks were hollow. His teeth were yellowed. His facial bones stood out against his skin, which was scabby, drawn down, and filthy with grime. His eyes, sunken, dark, and hardened, troubled him most.

Knowing he was taking a terrible chance, but also knowing he could not go into the central station in Kiev looking like someone who’d just dug himself out of a grave, Emil struggled from his coat, sweater, and shirts. With every breath, his ribs seemed to move like so many player-piano keys against the skin of his bruised, chaffed, and lesioned torso.

He turned on the faucet and stuck his head and face under the ice-cold water. He scrubbed for a good ten minutes, dunking and dunking until his true features were revealed. There, he thought, looking in the mirror again. Adella and the boys would almost know me now.

With that, he caught something come alive in his eyes, a glint where there had been none. It reminded Emil of the plan he had come up with the night before. He smiled, headed into the locker room, and went through the lockers, finding a faded blue workman’s coverall, a pair of work boots newer than his own, and a shirt and a wool peacoat far less filthy than his prison-issue jacket.

As Emil dressed in the stolen clothes, he felt no remorse. He’d been unjustly thrown in a prison camp for a year, needed the clothes, and figured life could be unfair to someone else for a change. He threw his old clothes into an empty locker after he’d retrieved his rubles and put the wad of notes in the pocket of his pants beneath the coverall. Only then did he leave the room, surprised that no one had bothered him. Then again, according to the clock and the schedule he’d seen on the wall, the day shift had started less than an hour before.