For two seconds, she lay there, panting with relief. Then she heard a voice, not in her head speaking words, but in her heart spurring emotion that she understood completely.
This is your chance, Adella! Take it!
In the most courageous act of her life, Adeline pushed herself upright off the firewood stack, got the boys to their feet, and said, “Let’s go see your papa.”
Adeline bent over and picked up the rail and the front end of the wagon once more. They dragged the wagon back into the alley before she stood straight and set her gaze west, beyond the fields, beyond the Soviet guardhouse to a distant line of trees, three, maybe four kilometers away. That had to be the other side of the border.
Her lower back began to burn again as they pushed the wagon across the dirt road onto the lane, which was flanked in places by low rock walls. When they were one hundred meters out from town, Adeline straightened enough to glance south toward the medieval tower and saw someone moving in its open window.
She swallowed hard and had to will herself not to scream at the boys to abandon the wagon and the last of their belongings and make an all-out sprint for the border. Having grown up in big open spaces like this, however, she knew a running horse got noticed whereas a drifting cow rarely drew attention. With that in mind, she kept them moving at a slow, steady, maddening, and backbreaking pace. Time dragged, but soon they were two hundred meters from town and then three and four. The farther they went down the lane, the more Adeline felt as if her arms were being yanked from their sockets. Her lower back was still barking at her, and she had to rest every hundred meters to tolerate the pain.
Five hundred meters west of town, as they came up out of that low spot the patrol had passed through, she stumbled and felt as if something sharp had been stuck between her shoulder blades. Adeline gasped, dropped the rail, and was almost overcome with an agony she recognized from her many long days bent over in crop fields. She hunched there, trembling.
“Mama!” Walt said. “Are you okay?”
Adeline couldn’t talk as she forced herself to straighten up and then rotate her shoulders back and her shoulder blades down. A few seconds later, she felt her spine shift with a crack. The pain lessened, and she stood there panting, wiping at the sweat pouring down her forehead and swallowing at the nausea in her throat.
“Mama?” Will said.
Before she could answer, Adeline heard a volley of gunshots from back where she’d last seen the patrol. Panic began to well in her. Are they shooting the people who tried to cross the border last night? What will they do to us? They wouldn’t shoot the boys, would they?
For a moment, she was frozen in place. Should we go on? Or turn back?
She thought she heard a woman scream before a second round of gunshots went off.
Walt said, “They’re not going to shoot us, are they, Mama?”
She saw how scared he was, and it shook her.
“No,” she said, aware of the squeak in her voice. “Here we go now.”
Adeline took two deep breaths and then squatted gingerly to pick up the rail. She raised the front end higher than she had before, pinning the rail across her lower thighs, not caring that the wagon’s balance was off as they walked out to eight hundred meters and then a full kilometer from town. The sun had risen higher now. The snow had begun to melt in earnest.
With every step, more of the two-story farmhouse that served as the Soviet guardhouse came into view off to the south-southwest. By the time they were less than five hundred meters from the guardhouse, she could see the stumps of what had been the forest that was supposed to shield them as they crossed the border. Some of the stumps had been turned up out of the ground. She could see their root systems blocking the lane beyond the driveway to the guardhouse.
Turn around, Adeline! a voice in her head cried. They’ll shoot you! They’ll shoot the boys!
But she knew that if they stopped now, they had no chance of being with Emil before sundown, maybe ever. Another voice, stronger and more powerful, began to speak to her.
No doubts now. Have faith, Adella. Walk right by that guardhouse the way Corporal Gheorghe walked through the Battle of Stalingrad and survived the Elbow of the Don.
An odd little smile began to form on her lips. To her surprise, the pain between her shoulder blades, in her lower back, shoulders, and hips eased as they walked nearer.
Then the frightened voice flared up when she realized the guardhouse was not one hundred and fifty meters south of the lane. It was much closer, no more than fifty meters to their left. On its ground floor, there were two large glass windows facing the driveway.
They’re going to spot you, Adeline. They’re going to shoot you before you find . . .
Adeline stopped to rest and to shake off the feeling of despair. She looked right at the windows from less than seventy-five meters, and, imagining the beekeeper, she smiled.
Have faith, Adeline thought over and over as they came abreast of the driveway and the upturned stumps blocking the lane. Still smiling, she glanced at the windows and saw two Soviet soldiers in the left one. They were in some kind of argument with a heavyset man wearing a homburg and a dark long coat. One of the soldiers looked their way. She smiled as she took her eyes off the window.
“We’ll go around, boys,” she said, trying to sound
