Adeline’s hearing was starting to return when he climbed back onto the wagon. He lifted the reins gently and barely touched their tails to get them moving again. The cannon fire had stopped. It appeared that the Panzers had driven the Soviets back after leaving two of the four Red tanks burning hulks on the far hillside.
She felt a tug on her sleeve. Will was up on his knees behind her.
“Can you hear?” he asked.
“Getting better.”
“I hear,” Will said, smiled, shook his head like crazy, and waved his hands around his ears in a way that made her laugh.
His smile in reaction to her laugh lit her up even more, made her grateful for every breath. They’d been through a blizzard. They’d been through the middle of a tank battle. And they’d survived! All four of them. Banged, bruised, but nothing major broken.
Adeline wanted to laugh and sing and cry all at once. She didn’t know if she’d ever felt so . . . so alive! Walt got up beside his brother, looking confused as he pointed to his ears.
“Make it stop, Mama,” he said, wringing his mittens together and barely holding back tears. “Will that happen every day, Mama?”
She realized how upset her older boy was and shook her head while throwing open her arms to him. Walt hesitated and then went to her, and she held him tight. He’d seen so much in just the six hours since they’d left their home. It was a lot for a six-and-a-half-year-old boy, she thought, and held him closer. Then she felt Will hug her from behind, laying his cheek against the nape of her neck, and nothing else mattered.
Adeline beamed through tears that she blinked back to see Emil gazing over at them all, as happy as she’d ever seen him. Is that what it takes to feel like this? To come so close to death, you want to burst for joy because you feel so glad to be alive?
That joy did not leave her. Every single tree or abandoned shack or rock wall or windmill that they encountered sticking up out of the vast snow-coated landscape she admired in true wonder; they were all gifts that she would take with her and never forget.
To Emil’s surprise, they caught up to the back of the trek within an hour. The SS had called a halt during the worst of the storm, and the caravan was now rolling along in fits and starts, with fewer starts than fits. Adding to the mess were German reinforcements and supply trucks traveling the same routes, but moving against the westward-bound trek, headed east toward the ever-shifting battlefront right behind them.
“How far are we going today, Papa?” Walt asked.
“We don’t get to say.”
“Who does get to say?”
“Our . . . escorts,” Emil said, unable to hide his distaste. “The Nazis. The SS. For some reason, they were assigned to protect us on the way west. They will tell us when to move and when to stay.”
“Why can’t we move when we want?” Will asked.
“Because we are refugees of war now, people who left their lands behind. We have nothing, so we get to say nothing.”
Emil felt a helplessness he hadn’t felt in a long time. He had liked being fully in charge of his life in Friedenstal. He did not like being told what to do and never had, though he was not stupid or vocal about it in response.
He knew he was at the mercy of the Nazi escorts, with zero say in the direction of his near future. But it was best for his family. Of that he had no doubt. If they’d stayed behind, waited for the Russians, his family would have been torn apart. He would have been sent east to the camps and Adeline with him, leaving the boys orphans of the state.
Emil knew he had made the right move for their survival. But he still chafed at being at other men’s whims, especially when they were men he despised.
For the next five kilometers, they lost altitude, and the snow dwindled. With darkness approaching and the temperature turning bitter, they caught up to and passed Lydia’s wagon, with the boys yelling about their adventure in the storm and outrunning the tank battle, which frightened their grandmother and astonished their aunt Malia.
The trek slowed yet again. Word came from the SS that the Wehrmacht had halted all westward travel for the night so troop transports and lorries heading east could pass, bringing reinforcements and supplies to the front. Wagons began to pull off to camp.
Emil saw a wagon with a distinctive bonnet ahead, by a line of trees off to the side of the route. “Look who’s camped ahead. We’ll sleep there.”
He pulled their wagon in near a wagon with a cover cleverly woven of dried reeds.
A stooped, shuffling man who looked years past his age appeared, bearing a hatchet and a bundle of firewood, oblivious that they were near him. He dropped the wood near a smoldering fire in a ring of rocks by his wagon and seemed lost. As Emil often did upon seeing his father, he felt a certain sadness; Johann Martel had suffered mightily under Stalin.
“Opa!” the boys cried. “Grandfather!”
Will and Walt clambered out of the wagon and ran over by Emil’s father and the fire to get warm and tell him about the tank battle and how the horses had saved them.
Johann smiled at the boys, and with his thick hands patted their shoulders uncomfortably. Emil climbed down and started to see to his horses.
“You and your mother will cook supper?” he said to Adeline.
“And Malia,” Adeline said. “Should we build our own fire? Or ask to share?”
“I’ll ask.”
Emil tied Oden and Thor to a tree, then unbuckled them from their harnesses, gave them more oats, rubbed salve into their wounds, and apologized again for whipping them so.
