Emil could see the snow settling in the forest, but the skies were so clear, he and Corporal Gheorghe would have been easily tracked and caught if they had made a run for it. With each day that passed, he felt a little more doubt creep into his thoughts and felt a deeper shade of darkness in his heart.
But Corporal Gheorghe remained steadfast. “A thaw and a trailing storm will come.”
In the middle of the month, the trailing storm came for Emil in his dreams. He saw himself and the Romanian leading the pony cart into the clearing as flakes quickened to steady snow. The wind turned blustery, threw a curtain of white between them and the Russian guards as they released the pony from the cart, climbed aboard, and galloped off. The snow was knee-deep, but they seemed to flow through it like spirits as they vanished into the forest and the night.
And then it was dawn, and snow was still falling, and the pony was sweating hard. They broke free of the trees, only to see a train stopped on the tracks. Men were ahead of the locomotive, moving a fallen tree off the rails.
The men boarded the train. Emil and Corporal Gheorghe took off in a low crouch toward the nearest hopper car. Emil reached the ladder first, remembered his maimed sister, and grasped each rung for dear life. The train heaved and began to move as he climbed.
“Martel!”
Emil looked down, saw the Romanian had only one hand on the ladder and was struggling to keep pace with the train. Emil stretched out his hand. But the corporal let go and fell. Emil dove after him into darkness.
At the sound of the triangle ringing, Emil bolted upright. Why hadn’t someone woken him earlier? He jumped up, put his heavy clothes on, checked for the hundred rubles he’d saved from an entire winter selling scrap wood to the cooks, and ran up the stairs and out into the bitter cold for formation. The pony cart was there, but it was empty.
Emil was surprised. It had been a good five weeks since they’d had a night where no prisoners died. One of the guards who usually accompanied the burial detail in the morning was standing there near the cart.
“None?” Emil said in Russian.
The guard shook his head, said, “Good for you, but find someone who wants to eat double rations to help you tonight and to make cement. The Romanian was transferred.”
Emil felt his stomach plunge. “Transferred? Where? Why?”
“He was sent south to a high-security camp on the Sea of Azov before he could try to escape from the burial detail. That’s how he escaped prison camps twice before. Did he tell you that?”
The guard was studying Emil closely now.
“No,” Emil said. “All he talked about was honey and becoming a beekeeper.”
The Russian arched one eyebrow. “Well, that’s one nice dream that’s not coming true. At least not where he’s going. Line up. You have food to eat and blocks to build.”
As he’d done every day since his arrival at Poltava, Emil tried to follow his father’s rules for survival. And with a nod to Corporal Gheorghe, he tried to feel grateful at the mess where he ate his double rations alone and tried to believe in his heart that he would escape.
But marching to the cement shop, Emil felt alone again. By midday, he was admitting that he missed the Romanian and the interesting angle he had on nearly everything in life.
Yes, he’d taken a hit to the head. But the injury seemed to have awakened the Romanian to a way of thinking Emil had never been exposed to before, a way of seeing the world as more than it was, a place where everything was connected and where dreams did come true, a place where imagination, faith, and effort collided with the spark of God’s grace to become whole and real and good.
For reasons he couldn’t explain, Emil felt flooded with warm emotions thinking this way. He teared up and almost cried. But not with grief or longing or pain. He was sitting there in the squalor of the concrete works amid the disease-ridden and hopeless destruction of Poltava, wanting to sob with joy because he realized Corporal Gheorghe had left him a different person, changed in ways he never expected, feeling blessed and humbled at how miraculous everything around him now seemed.
The drab wooden walls. The dwindling piles of gravel mix, slag, and lime. The mixing troughs. The building block molds. The hospital under construction outside. The terrible food. The museum basement. The ruins of Poltava. The dead men. The corporal. His own life. His love. His children. His wife. His destiny. His escape.
Emil told himself he had only to pick one path and follow it, trusting in his heart that it would lead him where he wanted to go. Every step west to freedom. Every step west to Adeline and the boys.
The sixteen days that followed Emil’s awakening to endless possibilities were as dry as the sixteen that had come before. And his fellow prisoners were back to dying at a rate of five to six a day. But Emil ignored it all. He went to work in the cement shop and toiled on the burial detail afterward, knowing that the trailing storm was coming because a trailing storm always comes.
He said it to himself over and over again while looking to the skies and at everything around him in a continual state of wonder. Even the dreaded museum basement, the coffin of so many men, had come from someone’s dreams, he realized. Emil continued to gather wood for money and to pray over the dead when
