Two hours, Adeline thought, drying her hands. Two hours of my life for a few rubles and a kilo of peelings. Is it worth it?
She’d no sooner asked the question than she told herself to stop that line of thinking. Questioning your work and what you got in return for it could get you in trouble if you said it aloud under the rule of Joseph Stalin. Even thinking about it too much might let the words slip out by accident. And then where would she be?
Thrown to the wind and the wolves, as her father liked to say. That was where she’d be. Thrown to the wind and wolves in some far and frozen place.
Adeline put on her heavy wool coat, a gift from a dead aunt, telling herself, Not me. I am going someplace better in my life.
She got emotional at the thought of a better place. Somewhere she and her family could lead a better life than the unfair and cruel one they’d been given. She didn’t know much about this future life, but the simple idea of “better” made her smile and feel not as tired as she might have been.
Adeline wrapped her head in a wool scarf, picked up the lantern and her bags, and went to the kitchen door. She opened it and stepped out into a cold, dark night. Shivering, she locked the door, and then held up the lantern and set off west for the other side of town and home.
Hurry to it, she thought, and quickened her stride. That’s what Papa always says. If you want things, hurry to it. If you want things done, hurry to it.
She’d never known anyone who hurried to it more than her father. He was up before everyone and last to bed, and in constant motion every minute in between.
Adeline kept up a steady, hard pace through the deserted streets of a farming colony that dated back four and five generations to when Catherine the Great reigned. Even in the late 1700s, the farmlands of Ukraine were among the most bounteous on earth, with rich, black soil that could yield bumper crops if properly sown and tended.
The peasants living there at the time, however, were poor agriculturists, and so the empress began approving the immigration of thousands of German families. These ethnic Germans, or Volksdeutsche, were given land and made exempt from taxes for decades in return for their agricultural skills and yield. They came in waves, farmed and prospered in self-imposed exile across Ukraine, providing wheat for Mother Russia for more than a century.
The Volksdeutsche, especially the so-called “Black Sea Germans” who lived between Odessa and Kiev, never fully assimilated into the Russian culture. They built their homes and laid out towns and villages like Schoenfeld as replicas of the ones they’d left behind in Germany, erecting churches to perpetuate their Lutheran faith and schools to educate their children and keep their native tongue alive.
But multiple generations removed, the Black Sea Germans had become isolated from Germany and its culture, almost completely disconnected from their roots. All in all, however, life was very good for the Black Sea Germans and for the roughly one million other Volksdeutsche living across Ukraine until 1917. Before the Bolshevik Revolution, Schoenfeld had been a thriving colony of ethnic Black Sea Germans who regularly produced high-yield crops that helped feed themselves and Russia.
But no longer.
By that evening, as young Adeline hurried through town, most of the other old families had been banished from the colony, thrown out of their houses and off their lands, replaced by people from the city who did not know how to farm at all. That was the main reason the Soviets decided to allow Adeline’s family to remain in their ancestral home: her father was the only one left locally who understood how to bring in a big grain harvest. Without him, the idiots from the city would be doomed to one crop failure after another, and everyone around would starve.
But we’re safe, Adeline told herself halfway through town. Mama said so. They need Papa, so we’re safe for now. And we should have enough food for the winter.
Adeline stopped, lifting the lantern higher and peering at the form ahead of her, dark and lying still in the high dead grass. She took a cautious step, and then another. Reaching out with the lantern, she took a third step, and then froze.
The dog, a big mongrel, had been killed, its throat cut, and left to die in a halo of its own blood. The blood was wet, not yet frozen. It shimmered there in the lantern light, and that scared her even more. Someone had only just killed the animal.
Adeline raised the lantern and peered all around, seeing nothing but the pale skirt of light about her and shadows and darkness beyond. No movement. No sound but the beating of her heart in her ears and her own voice in her head.
Tell Papa!
She took off at a run, the lantern held out and to the side as she passed a horse barn that used to belong to her father’s friend on the long lane before the final turn and home.
She spotted the second dead dog moments later, a small terrier, throat slashed and cast in the ditch. Adeline knew the dog, a friendly yapper, and wanted to cry. She’d seen him only just that morning on her way to school.
They killed two!
Terrified now, she ran even faster and fought dark imaginations, all of them feeding into another until her mind was flooded and swirling with the murder of the two dogs. She finally made the gate to her home, a beautiful wooden house her great-grandfather had built almost a century before in a modest Bavarian style, with a sweeping shake-shingle roof, two gables, and red trim
