Maybe four. Maybe five. In any case, Emil was heading west much, much faster than he ever could have hoped. And for the first time since he’d escaped, he allowed himself to think of Adeline, Walt, and Will.
Where would he start to look for them? In Legnica? Back in Poland where he’d been taken? But he’d told Adeline to go as far west as she could, and he’d find her.
He heard voices: men speaking in Russian. He eased his head up one more time and spotted two Soviet soldiers walking alongside his train by the coal car he’d escaped in, four ahead. One of them climbed the ladder of that car and looked around before descending.
They came a car closer. The other soldier climbed up to look inside.
“Nyet,” he said in a whiny voice. “Only coal.”
“You heard what they said; he jumped on this train,” his partner said in a much deeper voice. “Unless he fell, he’s here.”
Emil slowly lowered his head and climbed down the ladder. He stared at his boot prints in the snow on the bottom of the empty hopper and understood he’d blown his chance. If he’d stayed behind the wall of snow and buried himself, he might have made it.
“Your turn,” he heard the whiny soldier say, followed by the sounds of boots squeaking in the snow and gloves scraping up the side of the hopper car just in front of Emil’s.
He stood there on the floor of his own car, shaking his head at his sheer stupidity. He was going to be caught and sent back to Poltava. Or worse, like Corporal Gheorghe, he was going to be sent somewhere worse.
“This one’s empty other than snow,” the one with the deep voice said.
“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
