“Didn’t God?”
Emil frowned. “Didn’t God what?”
The death cart’s wheels began to bog in deeper snow, and the pony struggled. The Romanian didn’t reply as he went around the back of the cart to push.
Emil joined him, saying again, “Didn’t God what?”
“Hear you.”
“No, I wasn’t heard!” Emil said sharply. “If I was heard, do you think I’d be here?”
“I can’t answer that, but I can tell you that you were heard.”
“Ignored, then.”
“No, no,” the Romanian said as he strained to keep the death wagon moving. “You begged God not to make you a murderer. Then you showed courage telling that Nazi, no. You believed God’s word, Commandment Six. You said you would not kill.”
“But then I changed my—”
“Stop! When you said no, did you know Heinrich Himmler had a rule that no one would be killed if they refused to kill a Jew?”
Emil thought about that. “No.”
“And so, when you refused, you risked your life to do the right thing and accepted the consequences of saying no. From where I’m standing, I think you showed your true self to the Almighty One that night and you were rewarded for it.”
Emil couldn’t think that way. “I changed my mind. I was going to shoot them.”
“But you were stopped, yes?” the Romanian said as they neared the back of the clearing. “You did not have to kill because you did the right thing. Can’t you see the hand of God in that, Martel? Bringing that officer to stop you from murdering the three Jews? I am not a smart man, but I see the Universal Intelligence’s hand in that as plainly as I see this Christmas morning and you.”
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,
