The Baker's Secret

by Stephen P. Kiernan

  Emma had her suspicions, but found them contradicted a few afternoons later when she spotted Monkey Boy, high in the special sycamore on the edge of the bluff by the sea. He was giggling like a three-year-old while his political self-expression arced out of the high branches in a long golden stream.

  Chapter 6

  Despite the Vs, Uncle Ezra’s execution caused Emma to weep daily in the arms of Philippe. While others tried to comfort or distract her, he attempted nothing of the kind.

  “Terrible,” he said as she bawled against his chest. “It is a crime.”

  Emma was a messy crier, nose running and eyes red, yet he seemed not to care. Philippe came to the house, asked Marcel if his daughter would like to take a walk, brought her somewhere private, put his arms around her. And she would gush.

  Philippe spoke softly, telling her it was a huge loss. Unlike her father, Mémé, and the Monsignor, not for one sentence did Philippe attempt to beguile her out of grief. “An enormous wrong has been done,” he said, tucking her head under his chin.

  Sometimes Emma slid her hands inside the back of his shirt, skin touching skin. Sometimes when she was done weeping, Emma lifted her face to be kissed.

  In another day, these touches may have flowered into intimacy. Infatuation might have grown into mature love. Instead, in October, the occupying army uprooted Philippe, ordering him to present himself for conscription. He would report in five days, then work in a factory making weapons that the mustached fanatic needed for his hordes.

  “You cannot go,” Emma said, clinging to his arm the night before he was to depart. “It will kill me.”

  “You know the accord as well as I do.” For once he was turned away from her, standing sideways. “Every three of us who work earn the liberation of one man in a camp. Plus I have been ordered.” He leaned closer to take a deep breath, inhaling the scent of her hair. “There is no choice.”

  Come next morning, Philippe stood in the chilly rail yard with others his age and older, brothers and uncles, fathers and cousins. Albin and David, the former bakery apprentices, milled around as if they were tourists needing directions. Even Émile, the aged village registrar, joined the crowd as ordered, and he a trembling twig of a man who had spent his lifetime sitting at a counter in the town offices where he stamped papers, filed birth notices, and certified that marriage licenses were filled out properly, dandruff flaking all the while from his thick white hair.

  The conscriptees’ faces were as stoical as stone. A soldier with a clipboard called names, mispronouncing them so horribly, under other circumstances it would have been comical. Regardless, people recognized which name was theirs. They left their suitcases and valises where instructed, and formed a silent line beside the huge black locomotive.

  The soldier with the clipboard studied Émile, grabbing one of his hands for inspection before waving him away as unsuitable. The old man tottered away without looking back.

  All that time Emma hid behind a pillar, trying not to weep in public, and failing. Before they parted the previous night, she had permitted Philippe all sorts of liberties, enough to stoke their imaginations and warm their memories till they could see one another again. When the train sounded its shrill whistle and strained away, she felt as though her heart were being ripped from her body.

  The locomotive left a cloud of diesel exhaust that offended her mouth for the rest of the day. It tasted of longing.

  There was no address to which she might write. Nor were there letters home. The village saw new posters, though, hung on seemingly every blank wall. daddy is well, the blond mother in one of them told her blond toddler. he makes good wages in the fatherland’s factories.

  Another, with an army marching in neat rows: abandoned citizens, trust in the protectors of justice and order.

  Still another contained an idea so offensive and perplexing, Emma did not understand—nor would her father, Marcel, consent to explain—with cartoons of bespectacled men, fat and effeminate and wearing the British flag for neckties, while all over them crawled rats with long noses and twisted whiskers on whose side was written the word “Jew.”

  The losses did not end with her teacher and her lover. A week after Philippe departed, four soldiers appeared in the barnyard, demanding to see Marcel. Emma called to her father, who emerged from the house drying his hands on a dish towel.

  “How may I be of assistance, gentlemen?” he asked.

  The lead soldier struck him backhanded, knocking him to the ground. Emma rushed forward but Marcel waved her away, and stood by his own power. Then, while he twisted the towel on itself, three of the soldiers ran into the barn, knocking and kicking things.

  Her father did not look injured, but Emma had never seen him nervous before. The last time she had seen his face wear that morning’s expression, he’d had a stomach illness that made him vomit for two days. Noises continued from inside the barn, and Emma had an inkling.

  As calm as a pond, she turned to the officer. “May I request your name please, sir?”

  “How dare you to ask?” he replied, gargling her language.

  “If your men spoil my dough for the Kommandant’s bread, he will surely ask me who was responsible.”

  The officer deliberated a moment, then yelled to his soldiers. He was interrupted, however, as two men burst out the barn’s side door, cantering into the field across the road.

  Emma knew those men, farmers from the outskirts of the village. Ordered to report for conscription, they had obviously disobeyed. Far from being reckless or rebellious, such a decision was understandable: in their absence the crops would wither, their families starve, their fields turn to weeds.

  The soldiers spilled out of the barn’s chicken-coop entry. The officer said a few words, after which one soldier dropped to a knee. Raising a rifle to his shoulder, he brought his cheek to the stock with the familiarity of a violinist tucking his instrument under his chin. The farmers gamboled and dodged, the distance shrinking between them and the field’s far hedgerow. Emma found herself unable to look away as the soldier became perfectly still. He breathed out, squeezed the trigger, and one of the farmers fell. Settling himself, he took another deep breath, released it, fired his gun, and the second man dropped.

  The officer said a word of praise to the marksman. The other two dragged Emma’s father away.

  By midafternoon, the Monsignor had come twice with his wheelbarrow, removing the farmers one at a time. The first funeral would take place the next morning after seven thirty Mass, the body wrapped and at the front and center of St. Agnes by the Sea, the second funeral identically and immediately following.

  That evening, two more soldiers pushed open the door of the house without knocking. They stood at attention under the lintel, guns ready. Emma sat on the couch holding Mémé, who rocked forward and backward and kept asking what day it was.

  “Tuesday,” Emma told her grandmother. “It’s Tuesday, Mémé.”

  “Yes, but what day is it today?”

  Captain Thalheim entered and wrinkled his nose as if the room had a smell. Emma recognized him, despite the helmet pulled low over his eyes.

  “There is no man in this house now,” he announced. “There should be a man here, for your safety and security.”

  Emma held Mémé and did not reply.

  Thalheim snapped at the soldiers. They began rummaging through the house, poking their rifles under cushions and into drawers.

  Mémé stood, inching toward the captain and wringing her hands. “What day is it? What day?”

  The soldiers barged past her without a word, pounding up the stairs with the captain following at a measured pace. A moment later they were back in the parlor.

  “I will take the room with the southern window,” the captain said in Emma’s language. “It has superior light.”

  “But that is where Mémé sleeps,” she told the floor.

  “It will do nicely.” He turned to his men. “Bring my things.”

  That night Mémé
slept on the couch, as confused as a fresh-shorn lamb, while Emma lay close on the rug. The next morning’s baking was marred by a banging from the house. Leaving her kneading board to peer out the barn door, Emma saw Thalheim on a chair, hammering a two-meter pole into a bracket against the house. From that pole, in red and white with a black icon that resembled a man running, hung the occupying army’s flag.

  Her stomach turned, and she stumbled back to work. She missed the stability of her father. She missed the patience of Philippe. There were no flags for these allegiances.

  Soon the captain began performing what he called inspections but she considered interruptions. He would sidle across the barnyard to smoke a cigarette, stand in the baking shed doorway, and complain. “Are the peoples of this village truly the dullest on earth? I’ve seen more of spirit in mules. And how can you be standing the heat of that oven? It is a vexation.”

  Emma did not answer, but not out of fear or respect. Through self-possession, she was denying him whatever it was he wanted. She considered silence an eloquent form of rebellion.

  Thalheim spoke her language like a mathematics textbook. But his eyes never stopped surveying the barn’s dusty interior, as if he expected to find a cannon hidden among the hay bales, a tank concealed in the chicken coop. Eventually he would tire of his own voice, climb on his motorcycle, and rattle away.

  With a soldier in the house, making extra loaves required twice the cleverness. Soon, however, Emma discovered that she could tell from the barn when he had wakened because he was both noisy and vain. He shaved each morning with as much care as if he were performing surgery. He kept his fingernails pared and curved, leaving the cuttings for Emma to clean. He thought nothing of standing at the mirror for full minutes, adjusting his helmet to the perfect angle. These doings gave her time to hide whatever needed hiding.

  Emma’s extra flour ration was snow white and fine, in contrast with the half-ground brown that ordinary folk had to accept. Bread became her clock, her rhythm, her means of survival. Like Scheherazade pleasing the Sultan with a new tale every night, each batch of loaves purchased Emma another day, another round of the village, two baguettes to share among the starving.

  Before the occupation Emma had worn her thick locks loose, graced by a green ribbon. Philippe had loved her hair, loved loosening that ribbon. One thing she admired about him was that he played no games about love. Her role was to remain coy, and safeguard the virtue of them both. Philippe trusted her with that power, because it allowed him to make no pretense of concealing his desire.

  The occupation, however, had taught Emma that wanting was dangerous. She had only to consider what had happened to Michelle. At one time she had been the village beauty, the person against whose allure adolescent Emma had most often compared herself, and always found herself wanting. Michelle had skin both smooth and radiant, hair so blond it shone white in summer. Her bosom matured early and generously, her lips were as full as fruit. As she grew up, first boys made fools of themselves around her, then teens did, then grown men. She became the village’s schoolmistress, expert in grammar, arithmetic, and deflecting the attentions of her students’ fathers.

  Then Michelle took up with a junior officer in the occupying army, one Lieutenant Planeg, handsome like a gelding with icy blue eyes. Sometimes after maneuvers he directed his truck to stop by the schoolhouse, children’s faces at the windows, soldiers in the truck razzing while he stole a kiss before driving on to the garrison. That summer, when the troops took Sundays to swim in the sea, Planeg’s motorcycle could dependably be found standing outside Michelle’s cottage at the top of the knoll.

  Now the villagers turned their backs on her in the rations line. Some spat on the ground as she passed. Only the priest would speak with her publicly. The working men, Philippe told Emma during an evening stroll, called her “concubine.” People worried about when school recommenced in the fall. Would parents allow their children to attend? For Emma, no comparison with Michelle would be necessary again.

  Most soldiers were far less gentlemanly than Planeg, Emma knew that, too. There were rumors that a trio of them had forced several women who had been foolish enough to walk alone at night. Whatever the gossip, the women’s bruises were genuine, though that could have been the result of interrogation, or as little as a passing soldier’s bad mood. If anyone was going to ask those women what had been done to them, it would not be Emma.

  Whatever the truth, rather than anticipating the loss of her maidenhood to Philippe, as Emma had imagined before the occupation, now she expected to die in the act. In wartime, beauty is a weakness. Be it by one soldier or many, sooner or later an attractive girl of twenty-two will be ground like straw.

  Therefore Emma braided her hair in knots, and no longer washed her face in the morning. Yet somehow hunger had made her all the more arresting. Mémé said as much, and so often that the girl determined never to look in a mirror. She wore her grandmother’s skirts like curtains around her waist, careful to offer nothing to a soldier’s suggestible imagination.

  How suggestible? Consider the Kommandant. Once he had tasted her bread and pronounced his love for it, not even straw would alter his devotion. And yet, despite her contempt for him, never had Emma wished to please a man more. As long as he and his officers feasted on pope’s noses, it enabled her to divert crumbs to her neighbors, thereby extending the string of life in that village one day longer. Thus she made the bread as fastidiously, as expertly, as possible. Emma had found a form of concubinage after all, mastering the art of satisfying a man while deceiving him.

  When she was found out—and Emma never doubted that eventually she would be found out—the only question was what her punishment would be.

  Chapter 7

  Everyone had jumped when Captain Thalheim pulled the trigger on Uncle Ezra, but pistol fire was not unfamiliar. Before the occupation, no one would dispute it, the best shot in Vergers—and the surrounding towns as well—had been Guillaume the veterinarian. First, he was about at all hours, finding the shortest distance between a farm where he’d been treating an animal and his home, where Marie and Fleur slept. The countryside had rough hedgerows, however: a maze of brambles, webs of branches and roots, a fierce natural fence that lengthened any journey and made visiting a sick cow, or a piglet that refused to nurse, no casual jaunt. Within these tangles, trees stood dark like a sultan’s guardians—huge, mute eunuchs.

  Clever villagers knew a few shortcuts, openings a farmer had cut for horse, wagon, or plow, just wide enough to give a person access to his own fields. Later Emma learned all of the openings, but until then Guillaume was the master, and it showed most in his marksmanship. He might cross a horse turnout at dusk and surprise a buck at his watering place, or skirt the edge of a wheat field at dawn and flush a covey of doves. Whether he was on foot or astride his dependable blue bicycle, out would come his swift pistol, the aim of his sure hand, the focus of his sharp eye, and the man would arrive home with breakfast or supper or a month’s good meat. He had no rival.

  Second, his gun was an instrument of mercy. A dog might be dragging its hindquarters, a horse limping on a fractured leg, a cow shaking its head over and over in the confusion of skull worms, and the farmer would send for Guillaume. Promptly he would arrive with his pistol and do the work of God.

  At the insistence of his wife, Marie, Guillaume had hired an apprentice: Étienne DuFour. He was a pale, sniveling weasel, weak in every way that the veterinarian was strong. DuFour’s job was to maintain the doctor’s apothecary, carry salves and bandages, and sometimes sit the night with laboring cows or colicky horses. People wondered why the veterinarian had hired such an insubstantial man, until one day Emma asked him directly.

  “Why are you wasting your breath and time on that fool?”

  Guillaume was angling a claw hook into a horse’s hoof, digging out a twisted nail. It was farrier’s work but the farrier was itinerant and would not arrive for a fortnight. Guillaume chuckled, resting the hook on his
thigh. “Marie believes I can help him,” he answered. “The man tries my patience. But she says I am capable of healing more than animals.”

  Then came a week the veterinarian spent away from town. He had offered no explanation, nor warned anyone, nor arranged for anyone to serve in his stead. People knew that his blue bicycle was gone, nothing more. Marie volunteered no information, and beautiful Fleur was too young to be asked.

  In the week’s middle, Neptune, one of Pierre’s immense draft horses, caught herself in a hedgerow. He had left the corral gate open in a moment of absentmindedness, and she wandered off into a tangle. Trying to turn in the narrow space under the hedges, she snagged her hoof in some roots, and in yanking on it had managed to wedge herself deeper.

  That would have been a surmountable problem, requiring a few minutes’ patience by Pierre as he sweet-talked in her ear and used a rope to work her powerful leg free. For all her size and power, Neptune was a compliant beast. But on that day a thunderstorm blew up from out to sea, swift across the fields till lightning struck close to the hedgerow, and the giant horse panicked. In the attempt to bolt, she managed to break her shin.

  When Neptune did not return during the storm, Pierre pulled on his oilskin and went searching. The rain had ended by the time he found her, standing sideways across the path. He knew what the injury was without touching her. He pressed his head to her flank, weeping for a minute, then calming, then ever so gently, as if he were helping a baby to be born, easing her injured hoof free. Much as he hated to abandon Neptune in her pain even for a moment, he strode off, faster than his old man’s balance truly allowed, till he found a boy at a neighbor’s farm, and with a penny for his labor, sent him to fetch Guillaume.

  DuFour arrived instead, nose running, shoes and pant legs wet from hurrying through drenched fields. In one hand he held an umbrella, half of its ribs inverted. In the other he carried a satchel of bandages and salves.